Picasso and the Chess Player by Witham Larry;

Author:Witham, Larry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

AS SPAIN WAS falling to Franco, and Hitler was on the march, Picasso continued his routine of living in Paris, where he had two residences, and spending summers in the Riviera. One summer, he stayed in Man Ray’s apartment. That was 1939, a time when he produced his most fascinating painting of this tense period, Night Fishing at Antibes, Antibes being one of the resort towns on the Riviera. Picasso was fascinated by how at night the fishermen used bright lights to draw fish, both hooking and spearing them. He used this nocturnal drama to suggest something about how the war-torn world was looking to him—kaleidoscopic with dark and light, life and death. As another symbol of the time, he’d collected a bleached cow skull from the beach. It would come in handy: he did a variety of skull paintings during the war.

Around him, Picasso’s poet friends were at war with each other. After Breton’s three-month trip to Mexico as part of a French “cultural mission,” he returned in late 1938 as a fiery Trotsky partisan, attacking the Soviet obeisance of Éluard and Aragon. “Picasso is right in the middle,” said Éluard, who otherwise was speaking well of the Soviets to Picasso.44 Then came a crushing blow to the Left: in 1939, Stalin revealed his non-aggression treaty with Hitler, as the two dictators divided up Poland as war spoils. It was a nightmare for the Marxist Surrealists. For a good while, a cold silence fell across their once vibrant opinions.

Imagining the worst, Picasso tried to consolidate the location of his mistresses and tried to keep his mind on his work. For many of the artists in Paris, the city of Royan, a beach town on the Atlantic coast halfway down the French coastline, was eyed as a haven from the growing hostilities. So Picasso took Marie-Thérèse and Maya there, put them in a hotel, and made Sabartés overseer. Over the next few months, he moved Marie-Thérèse and Maya to a villa in Royan. He and Dora took the hotel, and he also rented a full studio on the third floor of an oceanfront house. The spectacular view showed up in some of his paintings. Still, Picasso had to spend most of his time in Paris. “I am working; I am painting; and I’m fed up,” he wrote Sabartés. “I would like to be at Royan; but everything takes too long.”45

Eventually, Picasso made his way to Royan. He was there in September 1939 when France declared war on Germany. Suddenly, the nightmare of requisition came back to him from the First World War. He and Dora took the next train to Paris. He checked on his artworks in Paris bank vaults. He also made sure his papers were in order. Much of Picasso’s highly valued art was safely on tour or in galleries in allied nations. Some of it, though, was in territories besieged by the axis powers, its fate uncertain.

After this first Paris sortie, Picasso and Dora returned to Royan, though he would go back on more errands.

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