From Cocteau’s diary. Lines written in Vallauris while he
was staying with Picasso. Picasso was working mostly with ceramics at this
time, after having finished La Guerre et
La Paix, and Cocteau made plates of his own in the studio. He would also go on to start the plans for The Birth of Pegasus. This time is split by a press tour through
Italy, (with the usual grievances of mediocre journalists,
superficial admirers, and the exhausting demands of the press). Cocteau then leaves for the 1953 Cannes
Film Festival, in which he serves as president of the jury. He admires
Clouzot’s Wages of Fear and Disney’s Peter Pan, though is mostly reluctant
about his responsibilities as president. This excerpt begins about two months earlier, on the first day of his stay with Picasso.
24 Feb 1953
Lunched in Vallauris. Picasso was at the studio where I
later went to meet him with Françoise. Picasso opens a locked door, we enter,
and there’s Guerre et Paix (War and
Peace). My first impression is the nave of a church, and that walking in one should take off one's hat. I, anyway, take off mine. It’s the work of youth,
of incredible violence. Equilibrium between zeal and calm. A marriage between Le Bain turc* and L’entrée des croises a Constantinople**. No form is realist but
everything is true, internally true, which is all that counts. And, leaving the
room, reality seems pallid, grey, ugly, dead, extinguished.
The huge
piece, to be shown in Rome with a hundred other canvases†, will, rightly, end
up in the Vallauris chapel‡. The pictures [18 panels of hardboard making up
two 9-board pictures] will be curved so that they meet at the top of the chapel
(the curve beginning from very low). From right to left: the first panel
shows War in his chariot, or carriage, or horse-drawn coach, carrying on his
back a sort of basket made of black lace, full of skulls. The figure holds in
his left hand a disc covered with microbes and surrounded by flying microbes.
His brandishes with his right hand a bleeding glaive. The horses of War trample a large,
flaming book (the library of Alexandria). Above the horse, dark warriors’ silhouettes
shake the shadows of their armour. Facing the horses stands an immense nude
figure (Peace), holding a lance and a shield on which one can make out the face
of a woman, on which Picasso has drawn a dove with its wings open. On the left
picture, a family, all nude, is gathered on the grass. A woman breastfeeds her
baby while reading. One man is blowing on a pot of soup. Another is engaged in
some mysterious study. To their left, a child drives a plough pulled by a
white-winged horse. Then, dancing women. A faun plays the flute, his legs crossed
over a shell. A kind of swimming or flying child with an owl on his head forms
the centre of balance of a set of three scales, at the ends of which are
suspended a cage of fish, a bowl of birds, and an hourglass.
The whole thing is
painted freely, thickly, with large strokes. One is offered implicitly the
drafts and redrafts. Picasso has left a trail. He says, “One doesn’t advise
someone unhappy to wipe his tears.”
He explains to me
what he’s done, undone and redone. He says, “It’s always the thieving magpie
and the prodigal child – fable.” After lunch at La Galloise I return to the
studio and Picasso, having shown me the canvases of Françoise and the kids, takes me to the Ramiés’ pottery
studio.
He tells me a story of
great importance to him, and says, “You should make something with it.” He’d
just painted a face on a plate and noted its resemblance to Huguette, the wife
of one of the potters. The face had a beard. “Alright,” he said. “Since it’s
Huguette, let’s take out the beard.” He does this and the face no longer looks
like Huguette. He puts the beard back and Huguette reappears. I’ll add that
this young woman is pregnant.
He shows me one of
his innovations in pottery, which consists of sketching on the clay with
coloured crayons. Then, he arranges them in the kiln after a “travail de liquide”
(any potters out there who know what this is?). The pastel or crayon settles
and, to the eye, still appears as pastel and crayon.
I’m back to see Françoise
at the house. Excellent canvasses by Françoise. Little girls dancing madly, monsters
before groups of male and female musicians.
Picasso over dinner:
“I joined the communist party because I thought I’d find a family. In effect, I
found a family, with all the bullshit that that means. The son who wants to
become a lawyer, the one who wants to win the Prix de Rome. Never join such a
family.”
“There’s also,” adds
Françoise, “the fact that the communists only respect people outside the Party.”
I ask Picasso what
the communists think of Guerre et Paix.
“They approve. It’s up to me to put them in line.”
Picasso gives me a tablemat
which he decorated at the studio. Madame Ramié gives me a large plate. The head
of a ram in relief, very beautiful.
I say to Picasso:
“Youth lacks heroism. It’s funny that no young person has managed to kill you.”
He responds: “I’ve taken precautions.”
That’s understandable,
since any painter next to his Guerre et
Paix (and I mean any painter of professed boldness) seems weak, ridiculous.
Picasso: “I don’t
know what I’m going to do or what I am doing. And if in the evening I want to
discuss what I’ve done with Françoise, nothing comes to mind. Painting is the work of the blind.”
About Chagall,
working in pottery: “I give him all my secrets and he thinks I’m trying to
sabotage him. If I sold them to him, he’d believe me.”
About Stravinsky
(regarding our feud): “He’ll never get that it’s not the same between him and
you as between you and me.”
On Oedipus Rex††: “You’re the reason for
the scandal, not Stravinsky. He’s able to make more and more beauty, but no
longer to make scandals.”
We’re preparing a
colour book which will show the whole of Guerre
et Paix, including the smallest details. [Fernand] Mourlot is in Vallauris.
There’s nothing that Picasso invents which doesn’t immediately become
“historic.”
There are only
children (exhibition at Muratore’s gallery in Nice) who obtain such power and
such freedom. That Picasso should form the bridge between this childish power
and the calculations and science of painting is a true miracle.
Guerre et Paix is, once again, a mighty insult to habit. Above
all to Rome’s. Hence his delight to have it shown there.
I say to Picasso,
“You’re winged horse resembles the horse in Greco’s Cardinal Tavera (currently in the Hospital de Tavera in Toledo).”
Picasso: “There’s no
queen bee, rather there’s one chosen randomly and the others feed it until it
becomes larger and more important than them.”
He must be right. By
chance for Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth is a queen, but it was random. The
Japanese men I met yesterday told me that Kikugoro [a famous actor of Kabuki in
Tokyo, whom Cocteau met in 1936] is dead (he was Kikugoro IV). Kikoguro V isn’t
his son. If the actor esteems his son unable to succeed him, he adopts a young
actor who deserves to.
(…)
Yesterday, Picasso
spoke of opium. “Besides the wheel, it’s all that man’s discovered.” He regrets
that people can’t smoke freely and asks me if I still smoke habitually. I say
no, and that I regret it as much as he does. “Opium,” he adds, “provokes goodness.
The proof is that no smoker is greedy about his privilege. He wants everyone to
smoke.” It’s impossible to be less “in line” than Picasso. Really, he’s a
member of the communist party without being a communist. We’re too far from the
communists who would kill their fathers and mothers in the name of the cause.
Let’s not forget to
mention that the “Picassian” creation is of a diabolical order. The devil
cannot create, only destroy. One could say that Picasso’s creation is a
destruction. Perhaps, but there can never be creation without destruction, the
destruction of that which it is. That Picasso disturbs other painters, crushes
them, that this raptor devours them, is precisely it. If they dream of his
death, they’re wrong to. His works will be more active than the man. Though his
death would be a catastrophe. Such genius cannot be reproduced.
(…)
Picasso. He’s
established like dogma that anything seeming “well made” betrays a certain will
to aesthetics, a lack of elegance of the spirit. He thus scribbles a face on a
crowd of well made faces. This “badly made,” which for him is right and which
comes after a thousand investigations, deceives the youth who have no inkling
of the rhythm of his work. In this way, he “misplaces” the scribbles and
discredits, in advance, those able to contradict him, and whom we take for
aesthetes. He’s a belligerent warrior, skilled in every ruse, knowing every parry,
agile as a matador. Matisse can’t say five words without mentioning his name.
He’s the idol and the nightmare of painters. Unique situation. Furthermore, the
money committed to him staves off his ruin. He is sovereign, against painters,
politics, and all.
************
On the 12th
of March, Louis Aragon published an edition of Les Lettres Françaises in homage to the recently deceased Stalin,
including a portrait by Picasso, which met
heavy criticism. Cocteau documents this, and explains that Picasso – who in the
diary only speaks favourably of Stalin – was rushed by Aragon to finish the
portrait, leading him to sketch out what he did within five minutes.
Aside from pockets of critics complaining of a painter exploiting his celebrity, every sector of communist France had its ideas on how it would have praised
Stalin in a different light than Aragon had. The magazine was pressured to publish
in its next edition a spread with letters from the backlash, from which Cocteau
paraphrases the general sentiment: “It was necessary to show the genius, the
goodness, the paternal kindness, the humour, the nobility, etc., of our Stalin.”
Cocteau himself jots down a few reflections on communism throughout all volumes of his journals, but
especially around this time, stimulated by his stay with Picasso and Stalin’s
recent death. The tone is consistent with his scepticism of any institution not
immediately artistic. Reflecting on Picasso’s place in the controversy around
the Lettres Françaises edition, he
notes, “When my play Bacchus was
attacked by the church, it was the communists who came to my defence. Now that
Picasso’s sketch is being attacked by the communists, it’s the church which comes
to his defence.”
Below is the front page
of the 12th March 1953 Lettres
Françaises, with Picasso’s sketch.
* Ingres, 1862.
** Delacroix, 1840.
† Part of a retrospective of his “political” works
(including Guernica, le Charnier, and Massacre en Corée), which toured Italy.
‡ Currently the National Picasso Museum, where one can find Guerre et Paix.
†† Opera by Stravinsky with a libretto by Jean Cocteau.
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