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Chapter Excerpts The Spanish Dead Remembering the Bullring Images Spilling From Fingers Save Spain! A Wearable Pair of Boots Exiles The Last Refugee Guernica in Gernika |
Pablo Picasso never had been an inveterate traveler, but like his peripatetic painting, he too had been physically worn by the sweep of years. His once-incredibly keen eyesight had softened, he had grown distressingly deaf, and by the occasion of his 75th birthday, he had begun to prefer the warm days and bright skies of the Côte d'Azur to the dark and too-often dreary winters of Paris. Yet he remained a man of complex and often conflicting desires, one whose delight in companionship always was matched by his need for the clarifying solitude of his studio, an artist who made things paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, figurines-as readily and as necessarily as he drew breath, one whose creative energy still stunned those he let draw near him.
It was a measure of Picasso's complexity that by the time he received the second of two Lenin prizes in May 1962, awarded by the Soviet Union in hopes of "strengthening the bonds of peace between all peoples," he had abandoned his passion of the previous decade for politics in general and Communism in particular. Late in his long life, his deceased mother remained his most profound influence, yet he continued crave the worshipful attention of a series of lovers far younger than himself: his decade-old liaison with
Dora Maar had dissolved in the midst of World War II in favor of a tempestuous relationship with a young Parisian student and artist named Françoise Gilot, and in 1953, that relationship, in turn, gave way to an affair with Jacqueline Roque, a woman fully fifty years his junior whom he met in a pottery shop in the village of Vallauris near Nice, and whom he married in 1961.
Forever something of a child himself, Picasso adored the company of children at moments of his choosing, yet by the time his third and fourth children, Claude and Paloma, were born to Françoise Gilot, he still had learned little about how to be a true and nurturing father.
He was a worldly man for whom the material and sensual gratifications of Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris always had brought him most vitally to life, yet he chose to spend his final years in a series of isolated chateaux he both adored and despised on the outskirts of tourist villages in the south of France. Throughout his life, he had paid rhetorical homage to the causes of peace and justice, yet only the Spanish Civil War ever truly elicited his outrage, his resources, and his intrepid artistic expression. He was a Spaniard, perhaps more than he was anything else, and his country's devastation by warhis war, a war in which the passionate duende of the bullring gave way to the deliberate death of the slaughterhousetransformed his love for Spain into a tragic lament.
Excerpted from Picasso's War by Russell Martin, Copyright© 2002 by Russell Martin. Excerpted by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. |
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