Miles J. Unger - Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World

Detail from Les Demoiselles dAvignon. The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

To my brothers, Brooke and Paul

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Copyright 2018 by Miles J. Unger

All artwork by Pablo Picasso 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design by Lauren Peters-Collaer

Jacket photograph Rmn-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY; 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists rights Society (ARS), New York; Permission Granted from Muse National Picasso-Paris

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Unger, Miles, author.

Title: Picasso and the painting that shocked the world / Miles J. Unger.

Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017022812 | ISBN 9781476794211 | ISBN 1476794219

Subjects: LCSH: Picasso, Pablo, 18811973Criticism and interpretation. | Picasso, Pablo, 18811973. Demoiselles dAvignon.

Classification: LCC ND553.P5 U56 2018 | DDC 759.4dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022812

ISBN 978-1-4767-9421-1978-1-5011-9173-2

ISBN 978-1-4767-9423-5 (ebook)

We will all return to the Bateau-Lavoir. We were never truly happy except there.

PICASSO TO ANDR SALMON, 1945

P ablo Picasso stood on the threshold of his apartment bundled against the autumn chill, his hat pulled low about his ears, a brown knit scarf tossed carelessly across his shoulders. A shapeless coat engulfed his stocky frame. Shabbily dressed, not so much anonymous as invisible beneath the layers, he hardly looked the part of the worlds most famous artist.

There was something incongruous in the scene, something about the man and the place that didnt quite match. If the elegant addressa seventeenth-century apartment building on the rue des Grands-Augustins, in the genteel Left Bank neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prsproclaimed his worldly success, his rumpled outfit suggested an indifference to the trappings that came with it. With his stained pants, worn at the cuff, and felt cap whose folds had long since given up the struggle for form, Picasso showed the same disregard for convention he had as a struggling painter living from hand to mouth in a squalid Montmartre tenement. It was a quirk of his personality that his first wife had tried hard to correct. She often complained that no matter how much money he made, he insisted on dressing like a bum. In fact, the wealthier he became, the more determined he was that money would not define him. One has to be able to afford luxury, he once explained to the writer Jean Cocteau, in order to be able to scorn it.

Picasso in the rue des Grands-Augustins. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

In any case it was not his wife he was waiting for this Tuesday afternoon in the fall of 1945. Olga had long since fallen by the wayside, a casualty of her unsuccessful battle to groom him for a life in high society. For a time hed submitted to her strict regime, attending costume balls hosted by the decadent Count tienne de Beaumont, posing pipe in hand for the photographers, and generally playing the part of a debonair man-about-town. But he eventually tired of the cocktail parties and elegant soirees, reverting to the haphazard ways hed enjoyed before the smart set claimed him as one of their own. The Hungarian photographer Brassa, who met Picasso in 1932, was on hand to observe the process: Those who thought that he had put his youth behind once and for all, forgotten the laughter and the farces of the early years, voluntarily abandoned his liberty and his pleasure in being with his friends, and allowed himself to be duped by the pursuit of status, found that they were mistaken. La vie de bohme regained the upper hand. In truth, it had always been an unequal battle: while Olga tried to make him into a gentleman, he took revenge in his art by putting the former ballerina through a set of pictorial transformations, each more grotesque than the last.

Rather than Olgaor the voluptuous Marie-Thrse Walter or the brooding Dora Maar, former mistresses who were both still part of Picassos extended haremthe woman he was expecting this afternoon was his latest conquest, the twenty-four-year-old, auburn-haired Franoise Gilot.

Perhaps conquest is not quite right. For once, it seemed, this relentless seducer had met his match. Its true that after a strenuous campaign Franoise had agreed to share his bed, but his attempts to possess her body and soul had been frustrated by her infuriating streak of independence. Her ability to parry his advances only increased his determination to have her, but her inscrutable ways drove him to distraction. Brassa testified to the raw state of his nerves. With Franoise, this usually self-confident man (particularly when it came to the war between the sexes) was reduced to a gelatinous state. When I see Picasso, looking a little upset, shy as a college boy in love for the first time, Brassa recalled, he gestures slightly toward Franoise, and says, Isnt she pretty. Dont you think that she is beautiful?