Dietrich / PicassoTourism

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Dedicated to Picasso Tourism

https://www.edwardquinn.com/photos/highlights/?photo_id=17288
(Picture: Edward Quinn; edwardquinn.com; please add it into your basket there)

(1.-9.12.2022) Writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who visited Pablo Picasso in 1963 in the South of France, claims, in his brief account dedicated to that visit, to have seen illustrations to Dostoevsy by Picasso (Yevtushenko, p. 256). And it even seems that Picasso toasted on the spirit of Nastasya Filippovna (see the novel The Idiot), who, in one scene of that novel, throws a large amount of money into the fire. Be it as it may. But we do not have illustrations to Dostoevsky by Picasso. Did this visit take place at all? It did. A photograph might serve as a proof. But Picasso did not provide illustrations to Russian writers, even if he provided a drawing of Tolstoy (after another picture) to a book (and perhaps Picasso tourism might even be comparable to Tolstoy tourism).
The episode, however, might prove the inspirational value of Picasso tourism, the sum of all the visitors and visits to Picsso as well as the writing in the wake of such visits, and also the creative writing during, let’s say, the 1950s and 1960s, when the artist enjoyed, but also endured, a fabulous, colossal fame. One might even say that Picasso not only owned a villa, but an estate, no, an actual state, with his own foreign policy, economic relations to other ›estates‹, with his own (rather hidden) bureaucracy, gatekeepers, public-relations-machine and so own. He even did have his own currency – his art – since he knew, and also seems to have told Yevtushenko, that his signature, even under a bad drawing was worth »at least 10 000 dollars«. Thus we are inclined to study the glory (but also the misery) of Picasso tourism, an undertaking that might teach us also a lot about how Picasso was seen, perceived, and how he saw and perceived others, because one of the reasons that Picasso might have allowed that amount of tourism that he also had to endure, perhaps it was even the main reason, was, that he could see, observe and study people. From all nations, continents, spaces of the earth. And they brought also gifts (of which he may have liked the Black coral – see Coral, Black – best).

[preliminary note: since this is also meant to be an entry to my (imaginary) Dictionnaire amoureux villa La Californie I am focussing here mainly on visitors and visits to Picasso’s villa at Cannes]

Selected Literature:
Hélène Parmelin, Bei Picasso, Berlin 1962 [1959]; Voyage en Picasso, Paris 1980;
Lothar Lang (ed.), Das Genie lässt bitten. Erinnerungen an Picasso, Lipsia 1987;
Jewgeni Jewtuschenko, Der Wolfspass. Abenteuer eines Dichterlebens, Munich 2002 [1998];
[John Richardson], Sir John Richardson im Gespräch mit Cornelius Tittel, in: Blau. Ein Kunstmagazin, No. 8, February 2016, p. 50-54;
Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso. The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose, London 2006;
Simone Signoret, Ungeteilte Erinnerungen, Munich 1979 [1976];
Georges Tabaraud, Mes années Picasso, Paris 2002;
Jean Cocteau, Le passé défini [V]. Journal 1956-1957, Paris 2006;
Markus Müller (ed.), Pablo Picasso und Jacqueline. Vorletzte Gedanken, Bielefeld 2005 [exhibition catalogue]

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Begging for Bananas:

There is a photo of Pablo and Jacqueline Picasso, dated around 1970, with the two of them behind a gate, but sticking their hands out as if begging for bananas. Which means: as if being zoo animals, constantly being stared at, but, with a certain sense of humour, also having accepted to be stared at, and, occasionally, showing inclined – here for a photographer’s lens – to stare back. A review of Picasso tourism has to begin with this one picture (reproduced in Markus Müller (ed.), p. 81), to set the tone (the source of the picture does not seem to be available or known).

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Caravan, the:

At some point all Picasso biographers have to face the task: to deal with the caravan of people wanting to see Picasso. You may start with enlisting the visitors, or with enlisting the friends. In Hélène Parmelin (p. 71f.), an important inside source – she starts with the visitors –, the enlisting of friends turns into enlisting some more visitors again. And not without logic, since many visitors were brought by actual friends (of friends). Endless visitors meant also: endless lists of gifts, brought by the visitors, and some biographers just sort out the most pictoresque ones (Richardson mentions a boomerang; but also toilet paper with images of banknotes printed on it – which Picasso seems to have much liked).

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Colosseum, the:

A panettone is, as Picasso explained to Brassaï, in 1960, an Italian bread with raisins (below a fresh one). About two years ago, he went on to explain, one had eaten a piece of it, to forget it then. It was now hollowed, due to the mice living in villa La Californie, that is, living on it, eating a sort of labyrinthine structure into the panettone, which now, two years later, had turned to be as hard as stone. Still Picasso, who found it as beautiful as the rock of Les Baux, had, as he told Brassaï, decided to keep it and not to throw it away (Lothar Lang (ed.), p. 116). – It was John Richardson, then an eye witness, later one of Picasso’s biographers, who thought that this particular panettone looked like a model of the colosseum (Sir John Richardson, p. 51).

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Coral, Black:

One of the most remarkable presents Picasso ever got from his visitors was perhaps a piece of Black coral. This had been given to him by Simone Cousteau, the wife of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. A tradition that seems to go back to Jacqueline has it that Picasso kept this piece of Black coral in his hand when he died.

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Effect (Picasso Syndrome):

Some visitors to Picasso experienced something comparable, perhaps, to the Stendhal-syndrome: a certain fatigue, due to too many, and also conflicting visual stimulations at once. The effect is beautifully described by Brassaï (p. 108f.), who said that he was, although an old acquaintance of Picasso, ›helpless as a fish on dry land‹. Brassaï had seen much, but said also that he never had been as ›brutally been assaulted‹ as in villa La Californie at Cannes.

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Gatekeeping/Letting Down the Drawridge:

At times, as also Brassaï reported (p. 106f.), it was remarkably easy to meet Picasso, who had – figuratively speaking – let down the drawbridge (by ordering that the gate was not even locked), but also a whole sociology of gatekeepers did exist. And while often contemporaries tended to see Jacqueline as the one who was guilty of not letting visitors in, of preventing important visits, it seems that it was rather Picasso – with his moods – played with the whole gatekeeping system (according to his moods).

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Hugo, Victor:

Did Pablo Picasso enjoy a fame beyond measure, or did he actually have a measure – to measure his own fame? Answer: Picasso compared his own fame to that of writer Victor Hugo (see Cocteau, p. 558; 20.5.1957). Which means that there was a measure: the fame Vicor Hugo once had enjoyed, a fame that, perhaps, has sunken into oblivion for us, since we, again, might have other measures, although, especially in France perhaps, the standing of Vicor Hugo might be still very solid, as a cultural hero.

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Meeting Picasso (as a TV game show prize):

Two Swedish girls were sent away, Richardson does report (p. 51), although they had won the first prize in a Swedish TV-show named something like ›We make your dreams come true‹. But since, obviously, Picasso did not agree to be the first prize in a TV-show, the two girls were sent away. Nothing is known as to the destiny of that TV-show after the event, but one should not assume, due to that example that Picasso could not be wholeheartedly generous. He was, at times, for example, when sending a drawing to a boy who had sent a letter, reporting that the Christmas present for Maman had, somehow, been messed up, asking Picasso for help. Which he did obviously offer on that occasion.

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Musicians:

Pablo Picasso, as is interesting to know, was not a very musical person. And while painting, he did actually not listen to music either. An offer by another visitor, pianist Sviatoslav Richter in 1964 (see Tabaraud, p. 198-203; Parmelin, Voyage, p. 65f.) – to play for him, whatever he wanted – Picasso turned down (›surtout pas!‹), and this to the chagrin of Jacqueline, who did like to listen to classical music, and would have liked very much to listen to that sensitive titan of the piano playing (Richter, on that occasion, did also confess, by the way, that he did paint a little for himself).

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Politicians:

Notable is the visit former US-president Harry Truman paid to Picasso in 1958 (as OPP has it; see also Tabaraud, p. 203-207), because the two men did dislike each other so intensely. On the one hand the man who had decided the two atom bombs to be dropped on Japan, on the other hand the painter of, for example, an allegory of War and Peace, who was actively supporting the peace movement (which was supported, as Cold War scholars have it, in secrecy by the Soviet Union, at least to a large degree). Notable is also that Truman called Picasso, expressing obviously his dislike, a ›communist caricaturist‹, after having met him.

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Secret Visitors (secret negociations):

Late Picasso-biographer John Richardson made much of the fact that Picasso seems to have welcomed emissaries of the Franco-regime in 1956. I’ll come back to that in my book, but it has to be said here, that it seems far from being established that Picasso was destined to make any concessions to Franco, since everything can also be interpreted as Picasso playing with (as well as observing) emissaries of the Franco-regime.

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Security:

In 1955 Picasso agreed with communist politician Laurent Casanova (as Roland Penrose transmitted) that his, Picasso’s conversations on the phone, were probably wiretapped and being recorded. Penrose also transmitted that Picasso had been told by a Préfet how to prevent it from working (Cowling, p. 135).

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Signoret, Simone:

Actress Simone Signoret, who had a very good eye, was the one to transmit that Pablo Picasso was able to imitate his visitors very well (Signoret, p. 133), the ›grandes dames‹ as well as the ›comrades‹: »He was funny and cruel, not malicious, cruel, but just.«

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Staying At Home (always):

It was Jacqueline who, charmingly, once told a photographer who had asked when was the best time to come by for a visit: ›we’re always at home‹. Which was not the full truth, but Picasso, indeed, travelled little in later years, staying much at home (while it was Jacqueline’s role, among other things, to care for the artistic materials, canvases and the like, which she purchased at Cannes).

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Throwing People Out:

After Picasso had made clear that he never wanted to see his friend again, Jacqueline walked him out: this happened to Douglas Cooper in the late sixties, after Cooper had tried to convice Picasso that he should adopt and thus legalize the two children he had with Françoise Gilot, to make them legal heirs. Walking out means here that Cooper had to walk down a long stair. And it seems that on every step he broke down, cried, and begged Jacqueline to let him in again. But she told him that he had done something really stupid, and that it was over (Sir John Richardson, p. 53f.).

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