A Life of Picasso by John Richardson

Author:John Richardson [Richardson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780307496492
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-11-08T13:00:00+00:00

Above: Picabia, Olga, Picasso, and Germaine Everling at Château de Mai, 1925. Photograph by Poupard-Lieussou. Left: Picabia. Mardi Gras (The Kiss), 1925. Ripolin on canvas, 92×73 cm. Private collection.

Picabia had painted his Kiss28 a few months earlier than Picasso. It is one of a series of works, dubbed “Monster paintings” by Duchamp, that were inspired by the Mi-Carême Bacchanalia at Nice. “I am doing a lot of work [Picabia wrote his friend, Pierre de Massot in March] in a whirlwind of baccarat, a whirlwind of legs, a whirlwind of jazz. I am doing mid-Lenten paintings [i.e. Carnival ones] of lovers, confetti paintings in which the sheen of cheap silk is duplicated by Ripolin.”29 Fifty years before the advent of pop, Picabia has used the energy and tawdriness of the Carnival scene—tarnished finery, caked makeup, candy floss hair—to administer a succession of painful shocks to conventional art lovers. In La Lecture, another of his Monster paintings (later owned by Tzara),30 Picabia used large mouths slathered in Ripolin lipstick in place of the woman’s eyes and matching vaginas in place of earrings. These relocations left an all too evident mark on Picasso’s Kiss, as well as on some of the other genital faces of his it would spawn.

According to Gabrielle, Picabia thought that he had gone too far in these Monster paintings. Much as he loved to shock, he may have feared that modernists would look askance at a style and technique so perfectly attuned to the sleazy underbelly of the Riviera. Gabrielle blamed her former husband’s “disapproving entourage”—a euphemism for her successor, Germaine Everling—for persuading him to stash these paintings away. “He was going to destroy them,” Gabrielle said, “but I begged him to do nothing of the sort since they manifested some of the most astonishing aspects of his personality.”31 Picasso likewise hid his Kiss away from prying eyes.32 Dreading as he did accusations of plagiarism—usually from the very people who had plagiarized him—he would not have wanted to reveal his indebtedness to Picabia. We should also allow for the residual streak of bourgeois propriety that Olga had evoked in her husband’s persona. He would have wanted to spare his wife and child and Spanish family the embarrassment of this wonderfully visceral image.

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