William Fifield put on his deerstalking cap and went off in search of the black-winged redbird Pablo Picasso. He turned up some clues out of which every man may reconstruct his own oiseau.

 

GEORGES RAMlÉ

He came here in 1946 simply as a visitor. He asked to fashion a few pottery pieces and leave them with me for baking.

 

FIFIELD

Was Vallauris pottery still in the old-fashioned moustache-cup tradition?

 

RAMIÉ

The war had broken things up. We were experimenting. I think Picasso sensed this and saw further into the possibilities of innovation than the rest of us.

 

FIFIELD

What happened?

 

RAMIÉ

He went away. Silence for a year. In 1947 he came back and when he had looked at his pieces left here he seemed to see them—as though in them were the discoveries his hands had arrived at almost by accident—but guided accident if unconscious—and he sat down right then and commenced.

 

FIFIELD

You mean literally made pieces then and there?

 

RAMIÉ

In back—there. By the wheel. He became a Vallauris potter at once, made thousands of pieces now in the museums of the whole world, still goes on with it but sends in models from Mougins now, worked harder than any laborer—a real artisan. You got the impression his hands had printed what to do—in those ’46 pieces— and he had to wait a year to see.

 

FIFIELD

You’d say it all commences with the hands?

 

RAMIÉ

Bien entendu! You have only to watch him.

 

FIFIELD

A little like Nijinsky dancing? I mean, something that can’t go wrong?

 

RAMIÉ

He is an empiricist. That is why he has no school—though there are some imitators here in the town—goes from one thing to the next, creating while the theorists are arguing the sex of angels. It’s a constant evasion of theory towards some eventual syntax entirely unforeseen.

 

FIFIELD

I’d like to get this straight from the toro’s mouth, not to be disrespectful. I know him a little—have gone to bullfights with him—only— I’ve got something else in mind too.

 

RAMIÉ

Toro. Bull. He has that in him. Not in sense of angry charge—that is his myth. But something solid and terrestrial and close to nature in him. I know what you mean by “only” —no, he sees nobody now. Impossible to see him.

 

FIFIELD

You agree his art is like dancing?

 

RAMIÉ

Like talking. You don’t reflect in the doing.

 

FIFIELD

It’s right you don’t reflect in talking as you talk.

 

RAMIÉ

You see him feeling the form. It’s art in motion.

(Georges RAMIÉ, master potter, Vallauris, a large man in shirt sleeves like a Fernand Leger—in town they say: “He loves to amuse himself better than work”—surroundings of the Picasso copies, 25 to maximum of 300 after the originals twenty to eighty dollars, the originals from $2,000, owls, impudent fauns, bullfighting, the dance, all the iconography of Picasso.)

(There were 20 potters in Vallauris when Picasso came in 1946-7. Today 150. Some are real creators, wholly apart from Picasso. One is Kostanda. Mme. Kostanda mère was a potter. Husband a White Army officer—came Lenin, fled Russia. “We were starving here, Vallauris a desert. And think that two thousand years ago the pagans made pottery here half naked and happy! A small revival just before the war owing to Socialist fares on the French RR. and the people for the first time came to the Riviera—bought souvenirs. But the real revival came with Picasso.” Her son the potter now, unique creator in grès at Vallauris, styles himself potier-créateur.

 

KOSTANDA

Yes, it is true we are now all nearly rich. But look at that stuff across the street.

 

FIFIELD

You can’t have the tourists’ money without their effluvium. The last time I was here it was Picasso’s eightieth birthday. You couldn’t get through the streets.

 

KOSTANDA

We had to bring everything inside to keep it from being smashed or stolen.

 

FIFIELD

What struck me was—hardly anybody of the thousands and thousands liked Picasso’s work. I overheard them groaning about it in the chapel of Guerre et Paix—if their language wasn’t French and they thought they wouldn’t be understood. If anybody looked or listened they admired it. When they ran the retrospective Picasso films your Eden movie house up on the square was packed while the Verdet film “Clay And Flame Of Vallauris”... played. Vallauris people— because I’d hear cried out: ‘C’est Gustave! c’est Maxim là!, Or— C’est Picasso’ All in the same tone. Then Clouzot’s film on Picasso’s art came on the screen—and within a few minutes half the audience had walked out. I got two things from it: he must have been a good artisan and townsman here; and most of the plain people gave a very small damn about his art.

 

KOSTANDA

Radio Télévision Française interviewed crowds in the street. Practically everyone said defensively—“Well, we like his early things.”

FIFIELD

They were the rose and blue periods. He was twenty-five when that ended. Fame is a peculiar tiling because this town was jammed with those who came from everywhere for Picasso and only an infinite minority liking his art. I came on one proud old Frenchman a mile away up above Cannes. He said: “I wouldn’t go as far as Vallauris for him. These painters amuse themselves. It’s the decadence of art.” It makes me think celebrity may be some kind of universalized telepathy unisolated yet. Akin to the peasant crusades of the Middle Ages.

 

KOSTANDA

Picasso is nearly totally inaccessible. He’s always seen artisans, if he won’t see anybody else, but now he won’t even see them. He doesn’t see Ramié. We’re getting out the “Book of Vallauris” and Picasso’s working on the lithography, but he won’t see the printer and communicates by post. Not to see a printer—a workman—that’s never happened before.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

PORTANIER

Why should he see people? Besides, he’s past eighty.

FIFIELD

Are you influenced by Picasso of Antibes?

PORTANIER

If you like.

FIFIELD

I am very hesitant to attempt to sum Picasso up because I think that would be peculiarly likely to falsify him. If I am to be true to him I have to work out some principle of eliminating selectivity, as he has. Probably most of us work out some sort of theory almost as a sales approach to life, and conform ourselves to it—then call it our “belief”. Picasso flees static formulation—which if I am not mistaken he calls “beauty”. You’re really more a painter than potter, using pottery as a vehicle because of (Picasso-created) demand. What do you think of his “Guerre et Paix” mural in the chapel here?

PORTANIER

Badly painted and a work of genius.

 

FIFIELD

I don’t grasp that.

 

PORTANIER

 

Picasso is a bad painter in the sense that he has no feel for colors but he is a genius of form. The chapel is bad but great.

FIFIELD 

Why great?

PORTANIER

It moves you.

 

FIFIELD

Not me. It repels me. I have gone in twelve times. Tried. But it’s like the Clouzot film—you see Picasso reach something, and then he deforms it.

 

PORTANIER

It’s the rejection of beauty.

 

FIFIELD

That seems mad in an artist.

 

PORTANIER

Listen. When you try to learn the piano you employ a lot of effort—but a concert pianist has achieved a second nature where he lives within such skills. Picasso could design kilometers of “beauty”.

(Chemin des Potiers, Vallauris, great vases on bellies of which airy, gay, ribald “Picasso of Grimaldi Museum”— Portanier’s pen-like brush having everything of Picasso’s, save the originality—lean, soft-spoken young man in blue jeans and sandals, fine-threaded brown hair round as if cut with a bowl, naive blue eyes, but startlingly harsh with his child; gypsy-camp atmosphere. I am beginning to suspect every man has his own Picasso, showing me “Picasso” shows me himself, I resolve if I ever set these interrogations down I must set down too something of the recording instruments. “Maybe you don’t get the object but you get the observers. Maybe, in fact, Pablo Picasso would be but one of these.”)

FIFIELD

Lucien, is he really Andalusian? You know his mother—the Picasso, that is—Maria Picasso—was of Italian origin. His first Toulouse-Lautrec things, around 1900, when he’d just come to Paris, bear the Ruiz Picasso signature, but he soon dropped the Ruiz—well, Jose Ruiz (Blasco) was certainly professor at the Escuela de Artes Ojicios in Malaga, in Andalusia, when Pablo was born. But by the time his son was twenty and had left for Paris Ruiz had taught art also in Galicia, Madrid and Barcelona. Now was Ruiz Andalusian or merely posted in Andalusia? If Picasso had been born ten years later would he have been Galician? The great “Galician” painter? That is a very different kind of human. A very strange thing is that everybody talks and writes of Picasso and I have been utterly unable to find out if he is Andalusian, for example. Do you know?

CLERGUE

No.

 

FIFIELD

Nobody talks of the Italian strain. Now, if you want to comprehend a genius it would seem to my innocent mind the first thing you’d want to know would be his stock. It seems to me Picasso criticism is peculiarly legless.

 

CLERGUE

Ask Cooper. Picasso’s like an Andalusian, anyhow.

 

FIFIELD

Yes—he’s like some of those little watertight old men you see in Spain. And an Italian writer has likened him to a retired sea captain—Genoese, Greek or Spanish—with the keen eyes from looking out into long distances.

 

CLERGUE

He’s very generous.

 

FIFIELD

That—with his disorderedness—could be taken for Andalusian.

 

CLERGUE

When subalterns (picadors or banderilleros, not so much the rich matadors) are injured in the bullfights here in France he goes to their aid—sends money.

 

FIFIELD

Not wishing to be cynical but in the spirit of honest inquiry that could be said in the case of Picasso to “cost him nothing.”

CLERGUE

An old banderillero was hurt at Nîmes. Pablo made the journey all the way from Cannes to visit him.

 

FIFIELD

Well, he’s been generous with you. Illustrated your volumes of photographs gratis, sent you to America for your exposition of photos at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. You knocked on his door with no other introduction than your work a few years ago—and he simply took you in.

You’ve described it often for me, Lucien—opened up his arms wide to you—then when Mme. RAMIÉ, who was present, asked him what she was to do in Paris where she’d be next day, completely forgot about himself and said—just one thing, make people look at this boy’s photographs. You said once you had told him you were afraid people wouldn’t buy your photographs because they didn’t like them—a morbid cast, in your case—Picasso answered pretty autobiographically that it made no difference if they liked them or not but that they’d buy them as soon as they got used to them. It remains true that your early photographs were directly based on the Picasso art of the harlequin period.

 

CLERGUE

Yes, he wants to be admired. Yes, he likes to form a coterie. Perhaps if the photos had been from other sources—On the other hand, he has a real affection for workers: for those who work, who make an effort. One day I arrived at La Californie and there were still parts of a manifesto stuck on his portal. He greeted me—va, Lucien?” “Oui. Ça va, Pablo?" “Oui. Ça va bien?” “Et toi? Ça va bien, Pablo?” He said: “Tu sais comment ça va." “Yes. We won’t talk about it if you like.” “Yes. That would be better.”—but he went on: “They asked a sketch of me. Why should I give it? They offer nothing—no work. You come here with work to show me. For you, I am at your orders. Whenever you want, I will do what you like.

But I gave them nothing. Then they paste up a manifesto saying I am not generous. That is bad—eh?” On the other hand, he can be cruel and keep another waiting for months.

 

FIFIELD

Do you see him now?

CLERGUE

Impossible to see him. I went there—I was told by the gate telephone he was packing to go to Japan. A boutade.

 

FIFIELD

What about his Communism?

CLERGUE

He is a close friend of Aragon, and was closer to Eluard who joined the Communist Party with him the same day. Perhaps you must take into account his position as an antifascist Spaniard in a France which, just after the war, was strongly directed by the Communists—who had stood against the Nazis, as Picasso had too. But his proletarianism isn’t doubtful. He inhabits mansions, but lives in their kitchens.

 

FIFIELD

Why the mansions?

CLERGUE

Because he needs space to put things. He fills up a house with his works, and when there’s no more room moves on to another.

 

FIFIELD

You said he stood up against the Nazis.

 

CLERGUE

He took grave risks—because he could hardly afford to be deported to Spain. Now Spain wants to stage a great comprehensive Picasso showing, just as famous Rightists are being feted in Moscow. Actually, Pablo agreed—on condition “Guernica” and the “Lies Of Franco” be included—the idea was dropped. In Paris during the Occupation a Nazi officer came to him and said—admiringly—“Are you the man who made Guernica?” Picasso said: “No. You are.” But when an American general came later and said it must be just wonderful to be able to paint like that he said—“You should understand. It’s like firing an A-bomb. The great thing is not to miss.” When there was the Fascist outbreak, his answer was “Guernica.” After Budapest his reply was silence—refusal to work—and he wrote a demand for explanation to the headquarters of the Party. A letter which, I believe, was unanswered. At the time of the ’29 crash he said to Kahnweiler: “Good. Tomorrow we start from nothing. I do not like it when my son is pointed out as the son of the richest man in the village.”