Paris Without End by Jed Perl

Author:Jed Perl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Pablo Picasso. Picasso at his villa "La Californie" Cannes, 1961. Photograph by Edward Quinn © edwardquinn.com

PICASSO

A Grand Finale

Picasso lived in La Californie, his villa in the hills above Cannes, from 1955 to 1961, from the ages of seventy-four to eighty. Those were his buffoonish years; he was cashing in on the immense capital he’d built up as a living legend for going on half a century. The American photographer David Douglas Duncan, arriving to deliver a gift, was pressed to stay and snap the Maestro decorating ceramic plates, dressing up as a clown and a matador, and entertaining the actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. Out of Duncan’s visit came, in 1958, The Private World of Pablo Picasso, a picture book meant for adults but better suited to art-infatuated ten-year-olds. Also from the fifties is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Mystery of Picasso. (In the spring of 1986 this movie made something of a hit with New York’s downtown crowd—the children of the postwar boom—when it was revived at the Film Forum.) In Clouzot’s movie the bare-chested Maestro sits behind sheets of clear plastic, and the camera follows the creation of Picassos blow by blow. Most of what Picasso does on screen is pretty thin—over-decorated line drawing. But who can resist the footage of the old Spaniard asking the cameraman who’s filming the emerging drawing to stop for a moment while Picasso mixes more ink? The practicality of that interval of paint-­mixing brings the somewhat artsy, overheated design of Clouzot’s movie, with its filming-of-a-film conceit, to life. For a moment Picasso’s guard is down—he’s just working at the trade—and we’re there with him, the Titan of Our Time. But then he goes back to being “creative,” and we get lost amid the pretentious clang-clang of the Georges Auric score. It seemed by the end of the fifties that Picasso was going to end his days as a self-consciously crazy old coot, wowing whatever part of the international art establishment still cared to watch.

John Richardson, a friend of the artist, believes that the key to Picasso’s newfound concentration in the sixties and right up to his death on April 8, 1973, was the ministrations of Jacqueline Roque, whom he took up with in 1954 and married seven years later. (In Duncan’s 1958 book Jacqueline is a quiet presence in the background.) In 1961 they departed the Côte d’Azur for a beautiful and isolated villa somewhat inland, near Mougins. Richardson proposes (in a 1984 essay in the New York Review of Books) that the name of the house—Nôtre-Dame-de-Vie, after a neighboring pilgrimage chapel—ought really to be bestowed on Jacqueline, who managed to keep at bay the old man’s terror of death and focus him back onto his art. The beauty of Richardson’s homage to Jacqueline—to her “solicitude and patience that sustained the artist in the face of declining health and death,” and to “her vulnerability”—is now, a few years after Richardson wrote these lines, overlaid with the tragedy of her own suicide, at Mougins, in the fall of 1986.

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