Dusk and Dawn at La Californie

(12.4.2022) It is often said that Picasso’s villa at Cannes, the legendary villa called La Californie, was ›ugly‹. In some cases this must be probably understood as ›(too) bourgeois‹. According to one biographer (Roland Penrose) Picasso had seen the villa at dusk. Penrose is even claiming that it had become immediately clear to Picasso that this house would fit his purposes (p. 364; German edition of 1961). The decision to buy this house, in brief, was made allegedly at dusk. In the blue hour.

It is interesting that Picasso may have made this decision at dusk, when things, houses appear in a changing light, perhaps inspiring future changes. And all writers, all first-hand-witnesses agree that in the years to come – the house was bought in 1955 – Picasso managed to ›picassoize‹ the house, to ironize, as one might say, the bourgeois uglyness, by having a creative mess overgrow the villa’s inner architecture, resulting in what witnesses identified in the end as a sort of Ali Baba cave of treasures. One has not to take everything Picasso said (to biographers) very literally. Other biographers claim that actually Jacqueline had found the house (which leaves room to say: with him), which might not be the full truth either. But a blue hour, as we know, always makes a good story.

La Californie was inhabited not only by pidgeons and dogs, not only by mice and a parrot from Gabon, but also by bats. We know that because there was one ›Marcel Proust‹ of La Californie. And this ›Marcel Proust‹ was the writer/journalist Hélène Parmelin, who was actually a fixture (as Patrick O'Brian has it, another biographer; p. 557, German edition), because Parmelin and her husband Éduard Pignon (a painter) had built a friendship with Picasso and Jacqueline Roque, a friendship that lasted, not without turmoil and conflict, until Picasso’s death.
In a remarkable and memorable text called ›The King of La Californie‹ (published originally in 1959 in Picasso sur la place) Parmelin managed to transmit something of the experience many visitors of La Californie as inhabited by Picasso indeed must have had: an experience of – at the same time – inspiration and exhaustion. Due to an overdose of sensual excitements, and, if the encounter encompassed an actual conversation with Picasso, often a feeling of being ›consumed‹ by him. Due to him being also demanding of news, stories, informations and – perhaps – personalities (that he could made use of, in a metaphorical sense, to reach his artistic purposes).

The roughly 50-pages long text by Parmelin has her – mentally – moving around the house, and one evening also moving up to the room with the bats. It smelled awful up there, while on ground level it must have smelled rather of creativity and wealth (by which biographer O'Brian referred to the smell of oil paint and terpentine).
Picasso was working, as was his habit, into the evening, into the night. And in some sense the house was waiting for him to stop, so that one could eat. At that time (it is probably the summer of 1956, but Parmelin also synthesizes her impressions; some ingredients might be 1957), Picasso worked still at ground level, while, later, in 1957, he was to move up to the second floor. So Parmelin moved around as the observer, noting (from the balcony above) that there was some artificial light, while the evening was setting, melting with the natural changing light of dusk, and coming from where Picasso was still busy. One had transferred, from the film studios at Nice, some spotlights that also can be seen on many photographs coming from La Californie. And so we find a classic blue hour setting here: such setting usually encompasses, here as in many other examples, something happening or evolving in the evening, with natural and artificial light combining, with artificial light, here cinematic spotlights, suddenly coming in. And here the atmosphere is also filled with expectation. Not necessarily referring solely to what Picasso might have had produced. But also referring to the kind of mood he might be in (well-humoured or tyrannical?) when coming out, having stopped or interrupted his working.
And there were two types of artificial light that were coming in as well: the light of the American fleet, especially from the aircraft carrier, the USS Lake Champlain, in the bay of Cannes (see picture below, dating from 1957), and from the Son-et-lumière-spectacle held at one of the small islands in the bay of Cannes. So La Californie was watching, observing; and perhaps one aircraft carrier was observing back.
Everyone was hungry, but as Picasso finally appeared, no-one had prepared a dinner. As a result one voted for pasta (for the whole scene see: Parmelin, Bei Picasso, p. 107f.).

La Californie was also inhabited by a goat named Esmeralda (she moved in late in 1956, on occasion, respectively probably shortly after Picasso’s 75th birthday in October; and it was also Jacqueline who had managed to find her), and due to the noises of the goat, Parmelin occasionally woke up earlier than she wanted and needed at La Californie. But she managed to turn such disadvantage into a perk: due to her, repeatedly, being able to watch also the sun rising at La Californie, above the bay of Cannes with the American fleet. The goat, in brief, helped her also to experience the blue hour at dawn. And who would not thank her for that. Also the goat, as one might say, helped her to become the ›Marcel Proust‹ of La Californie.

(Picture: Olivier Cleynen)

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