Picasso with Olga in London, 1919 — Image: Popperfoto
I’ve been posting in recent days about Volume III of John Richardson’s Picasso biography. Here’s part of a conversation I had last week with Richardson himself. I’ll put this up in two installments.
LACAYO: Volume III opens in 1917, just before Picasso met Olga Khokhlova, the Russian ballerina who became his first wife. You say that he fell in love with Olga, but soon after you’re referring to his “ambivalent tenderness” towards her. And after their marriage in 1918 he seems to tire of her after just a few years. Was he ever really in love with her, or did he just feel it was time to marry? Not long before his courtship of Olga he had tried to marry his previous mistress, Irene Lagut, but she turned him down. Then suddenly he took up with Olga.
RICHARDSON: I think he was really in love with her, but in love in a diffferent way from the pre-1914 mistresses, which was a whole sort of Bohemian erotic thing. He’d fallen in love with the woman he wanted to be his wife and the mother of his children. The fact that she was respectable and wouldn’t go to bed with him until they married was, in his mind, in her favor. Olga was a nice, ladylike, suitable wife.
LACAYO: Olga usually gets the blame for tempting Picasso out of Bohemia and into the world of the rich and famous, where she could play the role, as you write, of “a glamorous ballerina married to a charismatic celebrity”. Plainly Picasso missed his old buddies, like Max Jacob, but was he such an unwilling participant in Olga’s vision for him, with the big apartment, the servants and the tailored clothes? It seems that at least for a while he fell very willingly into the life she made for them.
RICHARDSON: He all too willlingly fell in with her bourgeoise approach to married life and to being the wife of a famous man. They both fell into this path. Picasso was always apologizing, saying he liked pork and beans and she liked caviar and pastries. That was not altogether honest on his part. He loved having a butler in white gloves and leading this comme il faut life in Paris.
LACAYO: What do you make of Picasso’s move to classicism in these years. What was he looking for?
RICHARDSON: It was two or three things. I think he wanted to distance himself from Cubism because during World War I it had been a dirty word. I mentioned in Volume II that “Kub” was the name of a German soup concentrate and that lunatic chauvinists in France thought they [cubist paintings] were signs to the German army about where to invade. Cubism became such a dirty word during the war that he [Picasso] felt he had better get out of it. But of course he couldn’t get out, because it was very much a part of his whole vision.
But also, the most avant garde thing he could do was to turn on his tracks and adopt classicism. It was a huge shock to his followers and I think he reveled in that. Also never forget that Picasso grew up in Malaga and when he was young there was a Spanish classicism, which Maillol, who a Basque, was also part of. So this was a way of going back to the world of his forefathers.
LACAYO: It’s also interesting that the classicism Picasso had in mind was much wilder than the French idea. It wasn’t classicism as Puvis de Chavannes understood it, as serene white marble. It was, as you say in your book, a Dionysian classicism, full of sex and violence.
RICHARDSON: Yes, it was a sort of Nietzschean idea — which also enabled him to express his erotic feelings, to eroticize his work.
LACAYO: So this wasn’t John Ruskin’s sedate Victorian idea of classicism.
RICHARDSON: It certainly wasn’t.