A Life of Picasso, Volume II by John Richardson

Author:John Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448112524
Publisher: Random House

Marevna. Parade, rue de la Gaïeté, Paris: Modigliani, Soutine, Rivera, Marevna, Voloshin, Ehrenburg, Picasso, Max Jacob. c. 1916. Drawing. Mme Marika Rivera, London.

The resentment that his painting evoked in the breasts of minor artists kept Picasso away from La Ruche. However, the friendlier “bees” would buzz around him whenever he entered one of the Montparnasse cafés: an instant cynosure, as he looked challengingly about him, opening his blazing black eyes so wide that the white showed around the pupils. The more plagiaristic painters would resort to charges of plagiarism; they would claim they had to hide their work from Picasso for fear that he would steal their petites sensations. They had little enough to steal. Occasionally, it is true, Picasso would lift something from a lesser painter, but he would always recycle it to greater effect. Picasso’s experimental use of Férat’s glass-painting is a case in point; likewise his adoption of Diego Rivera’s formula for painting foliage (see here).

In Montmartre, life had revolved around the circus; in Montparnasse, it revolved around the boxing ring. Pugilists took over from acrobats and clowns as Picasso’s and Braque’s favorite performers and, at a level of boyish fantasy, role models. A few doors from Picasso’s studio on the boulevard Raspail was the Cercle Américain, where amateurs as well as professionals would train and spar in front of an audience in which femmes du monde and homosexuals, painters and poets, tended to outnumber the bullyboys and other more traditional fans. Picasso had a long-standing passion for the sport, as Fernande’s memoirs confirm: “He enjoyed going to fights and used to follow them keenly…. Physical strength staggered him and … the beauty of a fight affected him like a work of art.”20 In April, 1911, Fernande wrote to Gertrude Stein (who had once taken boxing lessons), asking whether she had gone to see the match between her black compatriots Sam MacVea—“the colored Globe Trotter”—and Sam Langford. “Pablo went.”21 He knew both the boxers: “I didn’t see you at our friend Sam Langford’s,” he wrote Roché on April 7, probably in reference to the fight.22 This connection inspired three 1911 drawings of a boxing match23 and a 1912 painting entitled The Negro Boxer (the only reference to boxing is a patch of short, frizzy hair and the word “onces [sic]”: a reference to the weight of the boxing gloves). While he was at Sorgues in July, 1912, Picasso wrote Kahnweiler that he had seen the film of a boxing match (probably the one in which the American Frank Claus had defeated the French champion, Carpentier, a few weeks earlier).24 If Picasso failed to do justice to a subject which meant so much to him and whose tensions and rhythms might seem to lend themselves to cubist notation, it is because he would prefer stasis to movement. The gimmicky simulation of speed could be left to the futurists.

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