Christmas, 1931. Picasso, at 50, is boxed into a terrible marriage,
everything fraying through the day’s festivities. To get away from his wife,
Olga, he leaves their grand Paris apartment and goes upstairs to the studio
above. Here, in the space of one evening, he finishes a vicious little picture of a woman
stabbing her sexual rival through the breast, then starts on a much larger
canvas.
The new painting shows a curvaceous
girl in an armchair. Her arms are lilac – telltale colour, if only Olga had
eyes to see it – and her body softly voluptuous. Her head takes the shape of a
heart. Picasso cannot paint her face, for that would give him away; instead she
has a flurry of brushmarks that blur the special palette he so often, and so
ostentatiously, uses for this sitter. She is Marie-Thérèse Walter, 22 years of age, the
artist’s secret lover.
To say that life and art are
never far apart would be true, but an understatement for Picasso. “The work one
does,” he wrote, “is a way of keeping a diary.” And the object of this riveting exhibition is to open
that diary for the year 1932, following the artist with such dramatic intensity
that you can see what he painted by the week, the day, and even before and
after making love with Marie-Thérèse – the impulses of mind and body streaming
straight into the art.
Picasso met Marie-Thérèse by
chance outside the Galeries Lafayette in 1927; she was 17, he was 45.
Photographs show her as short, sturdy and tanned, extremely athletic and
addicted to the beach; surely a kind of female counterpart. Marie-Thérèse did
not know who he was, but her bourgeois mother did, for Picasso was
world-famous, a chauffeur-driven celebrity with a Russian ballerina wife, about
to buy a Normandy mansion with a tower for painting and a barn for sculpture.
Anyone visiting this show will be amazed that Olga Khokhlova could have seen
exactly what we see – over 100 major works from 1932 – and failed to deduce the
threat of a rival.
Marie-Thérèse is the central
presence here, first to last. The opening portrait is sensational – an
odalisque in lavender, blue and gold, head thrown luxuriously back in an
armchair. You will recognise her palette all the way through the show, along
with her oval eyes, classical nose and radiant crop of blonde hair. Here she is
in postcoital bliss, reclining, sleeping, stretching, dreaming, nearly always
pictured as if seen in, or from, bed.
In January, she appears by
silvery moonlight; in August, nude beneath a scorching cobalt
sky. She becomes the yellow triangles of her swimming costume,
balances a ball seal-like on the beach, curls up like a cat. Picasso sculpts
her as a massive head, bulbous and yet somehow
beautiful with her ancient Greek profile. The bust reappears in a painting,
poised on a classical column in remembered white light, or bursts into the
present as a living painting alongside her fascinated maker.
The titles give nothing away – Sleeping
Woman, Bather, Nude, always anonymous.
Marie-Thérèse was installed in an apartment directly opposite the Picassos by
now. But perhaps Olga wasn’t looking; she was, after all raising their son,
Paulo, and running a hectic social salon. Life goes torrentially forwards, as
indicated in judiciously selected photographs, newspapers, films and letters
throughout this show.
In February, a Picasso sells for a record-breaking 56,000
francs. In March, editors begin the first catalogue raisonné. He’s in Zurich
for a solo show; he’s bulk-buying canvases for a flat-out summer; he’s sleeping
with Marie-Thérèse while Olga is away.
Even if one did not know the affair
was clandestine, the paintings might show it. For of course, they are nothing
like conventional portraits, where the subject sits before the painter.
Marie-Thérèse is often recollected as a hazy purple memory, or her limbs and
hands are isolated, then ecstatically reassembled so that one can scarcely make
out the figure. In one painting the nose appears priapic, the hands vulval. In
another, a sweeping oval of back and hips holds the face and breasts like lush
fruit in a dish.
Not
the least virtue of this tremendous exhibition is that it emphasises the
irreducible strangeness of Picasso. For all the miscegenation of forms, the
apparent dissonance of colours – crimson, pistachio, mauve – these paintings are
often erotic, even tender. Their beauty is counterintuitive. One begets another
in sequence. It feels as if the paintings are talking to each other across the
studio, and nowhere more than the majestic group of nudes painted across six
momentous days in March, reunited here for the first time since 1932.
Marie-Thérèse
lies sleeping below her own classical bust, a theatrical curtain pinned up
behind her. Now the leaves of a fig tree look down upon her, as if swooning
over her body. And here she is again, a rhythm of undulations multiplied in the glimmering mirror behind,
like Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. The atmosphere runs from midnight to bright day,
across the seasons and centuries from some ancient grove to modern-day Paris.
She dreams; he conjures the myths.
These
paintings appeared in Picasso’s first retrospective in June 1932. Two thousand
Parisians attended the opening in evening gowns and tails; photographs show
that they weren’t inured to the shock. And it seems that Olga finally realised
what was going on, although she did not leave Picasso until Marie-Thérèse became
pregnant in 1935. Picasso was absent; he went to the movies instead.
The retrospective is brilliantly
condensed in a few works at Tate Modern, giving a full sense of his career so
far, from the sorrowful Girl in a Chemise and Blue Period
self-portraits to a neoclassical Olga in all her glacial
rigidity. Picasso redefines the portrait for each woman. Olga does not appear
again, except perhaps in a frightening painting of a black-haired woman, her
face a violent black palette, features unrecognisable. Olga was undergoing psychiatric treatment.
What did Picasso really feel for
either woman? “Love is the only thing,” he once said, but with a hasty
qualification, à la Prince Charles, “whatever that means.”
His is not an open-hearted art; and there is a fine line between beauty and
horror. Marie-Thérèse may be his glorious shining moon, but she can also
dwindle to a stick figure scuttling along a beach.
Picasso was so prolific this show
could have run to several hundred images. But discerning selection means you
are never overwhelmed.
A room of black-and-white canvases shows him working
with paint as if it were charcoal, drawing then freely erasing, the blackened
results presaging abstract expressionism. Another gallery presents Titianesque
goddesses reclining to the music of young Grecian flautists – he was always
competing with the old masters – and 14 inky crucifixions based on
Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. There’s no profundity
here, only ramification; Picasso is merely investigating that spiritual
masterpiece as a way of practising his own graphic notations.
That he worked quite so
intensively in series, image breeding image, is a physical revelation at Tate Modern.
Every work is charged with
sensational force and desire, the brush moving around his lover’s body like a
tongue or hand. Life alters towards the end of the year. Fascism is stirring in
Europe, Marie-Thérèse becomes dangerously ill after swimming in a contaminated
river. The final works show men desperately trying to rescue drowning women.
But still there is a sense of metamorphosis, of episode and emotion becoming
myth. Picasso is about to enter the worst period of his life, shifting
faithlessly between two women. But Marie-Thérèse never abandons him. Like the
classical bust he astutely makes of her, she remains heroic and enduring.
Source: Guardian