Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [93]
Years later, on one of the few occasions Picasso talked about his influences, he recalled those days. He had gone to the Trocadéro Palace, where an exhibition of African masks was on view. “I understood that it was very important: something was happening to me, right? The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things.… The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators; ever since then I’ve known the word in French. They were against everything — against unknown, threatening spirits.… I understood; I too am against every-thing. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! Everything!… I understood what the Negroes used their sculpture for.… They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent.… If we give spirits a form, we become independent.… I understood why I was a painter.” 31
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At the beginning of 1907, Apollinaire met a young Belgian named Géry Pieret; they were working as writers for a magazine that offered advice to investors. (Evidently, the advice was not entirely objective, for the police appeared one day and shut down the publication.) The year before, Apollinaire had moved into his own apartment on the rue Henner, near the base of Montmartre. Picasso had introduced him to Marie Laurencin, a young woman who aspired to be a painter, and she had moved in with him. Marie recalled that they would make love in an armchair because Apollinaire did not like to muss the bed.
Pieret needed a place to stay, and Apollinaire unwisely let him use the couch to sleep on. Marie Laurencin recalled that he tried to make himself useful. One day, Pieret said to her, “Marie, this afternoon I am going to the Louvre: can I bring you anything you need?” 32 She assumed he meant the Magasins du Louvre, a department store. Instead he returned with the stone statuette that four years later, in his letter to the Paris-Journal, he admitted stealing from the “real” Louvre, the museum. The person he sold it to was Picasso, who purchased a second when Pieret pilfered that from the museum the following day. The theft of those two statuettes was to have a greater impact on the history of art than the disappearance of the Mona Lisa itself.
The previous winter, Picasso had ordered a large canvas stretched and mounted. He was preparing to paint a major work with several figures, something that would rival Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre and even Cézanne’s unfinished painting Baigneuses. Both of these works had depicted nudes in a landscape. Picasso almost never worked outdoors, so he chose a setting for his nudes that would, by itself, guarantee to shock: a brothel.
Picasso had patronized brothels in the prostitutes’ quarter in Barcelona before he reached his fifteenth birthday, 33 and he painted this picture entirely from memory. His first sketches for the planned painting showed four prostitutes with two customers, a sailor and another man carrying a skull. Eventually Picasso dropped the crude symbolism of the skull and then eliminated the men altogether, adding a fifth prostitute. The viewers of the painting would now be the “customers.”
Picasso continued to draw studies for the work, experimenting, trying new forms. No one is sure how long it took him, but finally he applied paint to his huge canvas, finishing the work, by some accounts, in May 1907. There are five figures in it, all apparently nude women covered only by a few scraps of white cloth. The faces of the three on the left reflect the Iberian sculpture that had already contributed to the portrait of Gertrude Stein and to Picasso’s 1906 self-portrait. The faces of the two figures on the right are more out of the ordinary — grotesque, some would call them. What they most resemble are bronze masks from the French Congo, like those then on display in the ethnological museum