Art-o-Gram: Picasso – The Artist, Life and Love – Scene 4

Picasso's life and his loves – especially regarding Picasso's relationship with women – is an endless topic on which serious art historians and agitated feminists, outraged petit bourgeois and imaginative cookbook authors, confused social scientists and envious tabloid journalists have expressed themselves exhaustively from virtually every conceivable point of view.

The artist's lifestyle and relationships with women have already been thoroughly dissected, and it's probably not that important who shared which bed with whom, why, and when. Nevertheless, a comprehensive view of Picasso cannot entirely avoid taking a look at his lifestyle and his love life —both are pieces of the puzzle of "Picasso the person ," and both influenced his art.

Therefore, what follows is a sketch in 7 scenes about the private side of the artist – an intensely lived life.

Scene 4: The not-so-safe “harbor of marriage”

1917 – 1927 (1935, 1955): Olga Stepanovna Khokhlova and the Giantesses in Dissolution

Eva Gouel, who was only 30 years old, from tuberculosis had deeply shaken Picasso; he had unsuccessfully sought solace with other women and had since been searching for a permanent companion.

As early as May 1916, Picasso been invited by Jean Cocteau to design and decorate the ballet Parade. “Parade – Ballet réaliste” was to be a one-act ballet, based on a theme by Cocteau and with music by Erik Satie, composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Picasso agreed to participate in August 1916, designing the stage set, costumes, and curtain. In February 1917, he traveled to Rome to join Cocteau and the Ballets Russes company led by Diaghilev and Stravinsky, and to prepare for the performance.

During this preparation, Picasso extensively with Sergei Diaghilev and thus also got to know the ballerinas of the "Ballet Russes" , including the Ukrainian Olga Khokhlova .

love of precision in reporting is fully evident here as a prima ballerina of the "Ballet Russes" and once as a "third-rate but beautiful chorus dancer of the ensemble" (Spiegel 52/1956, www.spiegel.de/ ).

Believe whomever you like, what is certain is that Picasso and Olga fell in love. Olga Khokhlova left the ballet company (perhaps not too reluctantly after the scandal at the premiere, which will be described shortly) and lived with Picasso first in Spain and then in Paris.

A world premiere with a violent opening and a sarcastic aftermath

As just mentioned, the ballet caused a major scandal at its premiere on May 18, 1917: The audience, accustomed to more classical fare from the Parisian “Théâtre du Châtelet”, was presented with “Parade”, an artistic work that was very unusual for the time, but this was not the main reason why the irritation turned into a tumult with loud expressions of rejection.

Rather, the French public was traumatized by the gradually emerging news about the “Hell of Verdun” : On February 21, 1916, German troops attacked the French fortress of Verdun; the “Battle of Verdun” ended on December 19, 1916, without decisive results for the war, but with six-figure losses on both sides.

Verdun had united the nation and brought an abrupt end to all liberalism; everything “non-French” was attributed to the enemy; new art, with significant contributions from Russians (Sergei Diaghilev and his ballet, Léonide Massine) and a Spaniard (Picasso), overwhelmed the public; even the French artists involved in the performance, Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, were closer to the avant-garde artists of Montmartre than to the nation's guards; the two Cubist Parisian galleries were run by Germans, all enemies; the Cubist ballet was classified as treason.

Cocteau described it in roughly this sense in his 1953 “De marche d'un Poete” (“The Life of a Poet”): The reason for the intensity of the scandal was that the “Battle of Parade” had coincided with the bloody Battle of Verdun.

The premiere also had a – from today's perspective rather amusing – legal aftermath: A bad review of Parade by music critic Jean Poueigh was answered by composer Satie with a postcard bearing the following text: “Monsieur et cher ami – vous êtes un cul, un cul sans musique! Signé Erik Satie” (“My lord and dear friend – you are an ass, an ass without music! Signed Erik Satie ”).

Poueigh sued the composer, the police arrested Satie during the court hearing because he repeatedly “Cul!” (“Ass!”), the verdict gave him eight days in prison, which were waived after intervention by high-ranking friends on the condition that he do not commit any further offenses for five years.

However, he rejected the advice of these friends to write a letter of apology to the critic – instead, he ended his “period of good conduct” quite quickly with a “eulogy to the critics” publicly delivered at a concert opening in April 1918, in which he stated, among other things:

“Last year I gave several lectures on intelligence and musicality in animals. Today I will speak about intelligence and musicality in critics. It is almost the same topic, with modifications, of course.”

The entire speech in French can be read at incipit.fr/tag/erik-satie ; a German translation does not appear to be available.

Finally, marriage, but the marriage is finally

Picasso had already expressed or considered marriage intentions or made marriage proposals to his wives before Olga; now he finally wanted to find peace from women in marriage.

On July 12, 1918, Pablo Picasso and Olga Khokhlova were married in Paris; first, the civil ceremony took place in the town hall of the 7th arrondissement, followed by a magnificent church wedding in the Russian Orthodox Cathedral on Rue Daru.

“Painter-poet” and best man Max Jacob was Picasso’s only friend who knew the meaning of the Orthodox rite of the three rounds around the altar that the bride and groom made while the best men held golden crowns over their heads: Whoever was the first to put their foot back on the altar carpet would take the dominant position in the marriage – and the superstitious Max watched anxiously as Olga Khokhlova did exactly that.

He was right about his bad premonitions:

Picasso's wife Olga was a person with a great interest in "appearances in society"; they had moved to Rue La Boetie, an area with antique shops and elegant art dealerships; Olga ran the household and her obsession with order quickly left Picasso with only one room to work in.

Picasso had preferred to live in Montmartre; parties and dinners in fashionable restaurants were as tiresome to him as Olga's tidiness; when Olga became pregnant in the summer of 1920 and the slim and fit ballet dancer struggled with the changes in her body, he quickly grew tired of the whole woman.

Olga insisted that Picasso only paint naturalistic portraits of her, in which her face was clearly recognizable. Initially, Picasso complied with this instruction, and at first, Olga did indeed look elegant and refined on canvas, as in the 1917 "Portrait of Olga in the Armchair"

That changed quickly – when Olga wanted to be portrayed wearing a mantilla, he simply threw a bedspread over her hair and, even in this painting “Olga in a Mantilla”, , (probably unconsciously) brought Olga’s stubborn nature and her harshness to the canvas behind the pinched smile.

In “Deux femmes nues assises” (“Two naked seated women”) from 1920, Olga becomes a giantess; as the pregnancy progressed, the giantesses became ever larger and more sinister, even inhuman; psychologists would probably call it the father's fear of the feminine, all-consuming primal force.

In between, Olga Picasso becomes a competent and focused mother in “Olga” , 1923, but completely unapproachable to her husband, until she slowly began to dissolve more and more, from “Head of a Woman (Olga Picasso)” , 1930/31, through Woman with Hat (Olga), 1935, to “Head of a Woman (Olga Picasso).

If – according to Gertrude Stein – Picasso's cubist paintings initially seemed to want to burst their frames, Picasso was now obviously in the process of bursting the golden frame that his wife Olga had built around him.

Their son Paolo was born in 1925. From 1927 onwards, he had an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter , and when she gave birth to their daughter Maya in 1935, he officially left his wife. She wanted a divorce, but Picasso refused (he would have had to share his entire fortune with Olga according to their prenuptial agreement). They remained married until Olga Picasso's death in 1955.

Links to the mentioned images:

• “Portrait of Olga in the Armchair”, 1917
• Woman with Hat (Olga), 1935
• Head of a Woman (Olga Picasso), 1935

Fittingly for his marriage – or his liberation from it – here is a quote from Picasso :

Behind every great man there has always been a loving woman, and there is much truth in the saying that a man cannot be greater than the woman he loves allows him to be.”

You can follow Picasso's continued search for such a woman in the following sections of this article. For more on the parts of Picasso's life that didn't revolve around women, see the articles "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – A Long Life for Art", "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – Born an Artist" , "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – An Artist and Three Wars" , "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – Famous Art and Its Secret", "Art-o-Gram: Picasso – A Guarantee for Top Rankings" , and "Art-o-Gram: Picasso Today".

Lina Sahne

Passionate author with a keen interest in art

www.kunstplaza.de