The Allure of Chanel

PICASSO

WHEN PICASSO LIVED IN MONTROUGE, during the last war, some burglars broke into his home; they only took clothes and didn’t bother about his paintings. Today clothes cost much more than they did in 1915, but Picasso’s canvases have increased far more than clothing material. No burglar would make the same mistake again. ‘Il y a les toiles de maîtres et les mètres de toile’, as Labiche puts it.7

I don’t know whether he is a genius; it’s hard to say whether someone you see a lot is a genius; but I am certain that he is somewhere on that invisible chain which links geniuses to one another over the centuries.

Years, decades have passed and Picasso is still alive, very much alive. The wave on which he rode has not receded. He is neither forgotten, nor has he become an idol, which is equally serious. He has retained his intelligence, his acrobat’s reflexes, his Basque suppleness, for he is Basque through his father, the drawing teacher.

I have maintained a strong friendship with him. I think it is reciprocated. We have not changed, in spite of upheavals. Twenty years ago, everything was delightful, for many reasons, but mainly because not everything was in the public domain, because the burglars of Montrouge did not know who Picasso was, because politics did not poison art.

I get on very well with strong personalities. With great artists, I am very respectful and very free at the same time; I am their conscience. If they disappear into the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, I tell them. I retain my critical faculties. If I find myself choking with admiration, then it means they are not truly great artists.

“I protected you from Picasso,” Misia said.

I had no need of being protected from anyone except from Misia. For where Misia has once loved, the grass doesn’t grow any more. Picasso set himself the huge task of making a clean sweep of everything, but I wasn’t on the path of his vacuum cleaner. I liked the man. In reality it was his painting that I liked, even though I didn’t understand anything about it. I was convinced and I enjoy being so. Picasso, for me, is like a logarithms table.

He destroyed, but then he constructed. He arrived in Paris in 1900, when I was a child, already able to draw like Ingres, whatever Sert said. I am almost old and Picasso is still working; he has become the radioactive principle of painting. Our meeting could only have happened in Paris (people don’t live in the Auvergne, and you don’t spend your life in Malaga, or in Barcelona).

When I knew him, he had returned from Rome with Satie and Cocteau. It was Parade; his famous cardboard cut-out ‘managers’ were shuffling rhythmically across the stage of the Châtelet. He was emerging from cubism and gummed papers. I was later involved with the revolutions that periodically shook the rue de La Boétie. I witnessed the success of his designs and the public acclaim, one after the other, of Le Tricorne and Pulcinella.

I would often climb up to his alchemist’s den. I saw Apollinaire make his appearance and pass him by, the gatherings in rue Huyghens and rue Ravignan, both at first hand or from what Reverdy or Max Jacob told me. I saw him stop being the exclusive property of Manolo and Paysan, of Grenwitz and Baron Mollet, to become the equal of Stalin and Roosevelt. I saw Ambroise Vollard and Rosenberg hovering around the treasure-house that produced treasures. I saw Cocteau on his path of seduction, Dada flirting, the surrealists showering praise on him. I saw the Modiglianis and the Juan Gris come and go, and Picasso remain. Apollinaire said of him that his inner rhythm had the monotony of Arab rhythm. The centuries pass, the civilisations crumble, Allah remains great and Picasso is his prophet. He is also a demon. He will come back to disturb generations of young painters at the séance tables. When he goes to the Louvre, his guitars will frighten people, and at night, the duty watchman and his statues will set off in the darkness, despite the patrols, to walk around the Egyptian gallery.

7 Eugène Labiche (1815–1888). French playwright who observed in minute detail the foibles and fashions of Second Empire society. The pun on the words maîtres and mètres is untranslatable. [Tr]