Année érotique

By 1930, Pablo Picasso, nearing 50, was as rich as Croesus. He was the occupant of a flat and studio in rue La Boétie, in the ritzy 8th arrondissement, owner of a country mansion in the north-west, towards Normandy, and was chauffeured around in an adored Hispano-Suiza. He stored the thousands of French francs from the sale of his work in sacks deep inside a Banque de France vault, like a ‘country bumpkin who keeps his savings sewn into his mattress’, someone once said.

Married since 1918 to one of Sergei Diaghilev’s ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova, Picasso was coming to dominate the art world in a manner no painter has before or since — including, increasingly and importantly, New York. But by mid-1931, he had worries. After the pioneering profligacy of his cubist period some 15 years before, followed by the gigantist neoclassical works of the 1920s, he had begun to sculpt — as a hobby, really — and was no longer painting with quite the verve and daring of his twenties and thirties.

This, of course, is relative. An astounding ‘Crucifixion’ of February 1930 and his jagged ‘Seated Bather’ from later that year are, by any standards, masterpieces. But he was, in his own mind, in hiatus. Picasso was pursued throughout his long life by a pathological dread of death, specifically of dying before he had created what he considered a proper legacy.

It was the Picasso paradox: turning 40 in 1921, his fame and earning power were assured and growing. Yet as the 1920s wore on he became highly acquisitive, a hoarder, terrified of not doing enough and being returned to the abject poverty he’d suffered in his early Paris years.

In 1930, moreover, his mother had been robbed in Barcelona of 400 of her son’s artworks, a miserable episode that would drag on for eight years, and which saw Picasso frequently attacked for self-publicity and for keeping his mother in penury (he didn’t).