Picasso's posh period

A new exhibition explores the great work and grand life that the artist created at his Normandy château. By Lucy Davies

PICASSO WAS NEARLY 50 when, in June 1930, he bought the Château de Boisgeloup. Hidden away in Normandy, about 45 miles northwest of Paris, it was the latest of the bourgeois purchases the artist had begun making – a vast Hispanosuiza limousine was another – partly to underscore his success as an artist, but also to placate his then wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova, who was a ravenous social climber.

As country boltholes go, it was pretty spectacular. Built on the site of a medieval stronghold that was connected by tunnels to a Knights Templar fortress at nearby Gisors, it included a domed dovecote, stables and an original 13th-century chapel, now overgrown with ivy. Mass was still sometimes said there, a notion the superstitious Picasso was very taken with.

Swagger aside, Boisgeloup had another, crucial purpose. For several years, Picasso had been spending summers at the Normandy coast, to which many artists were drawn (Monet, Pissarro, Braque, Manet) for the even quality of its light. But, much as these trips fulfilled Picasso artistically, he had become weary of lugging canvases, paints, sketchbooks, ‘all the paraphernalia of [a] travelling studio’, as he put it, back and forth from Paris.

So, though it was without electricity or heating, Picasso moved into Boisgeloup almost immediately. It became, as his friend the photographer Brassaï later remarked, ‘one of the landmarks of Picasso’s existence’, a new working environment that fostered a creativity that reached its zenith during his so-called ‘year of wonders’ – 1932, now the focus of an exhibition at Tate Modern.

The exhibition is a month-by-month account of Picasso’s life over this pivotal year, one in which he produced some of his finest and most sought-after paintings (Le Rêve, for instance, which at $155

million is the most expensive Picasso ever sold and staged his first ever retrospective, in Paris.

Plotting the year visually, we see Picasso moving effortlessly between mediums, genres and styles. First he is hard at work on huge, bulbous sculpted heads and paintings of seated figures. Next come sleeping or dreaming women, then still lifes. From March, colour is his thing, followed by reclining figures and views of the village from the château’s tower. By summer, it’s endless bathers on sun-drenched beaches. Come September, a restless note appears, in drawings of the Crucifixion and a cycle of drowning figures. As we shall see, tensions were rising, his mood darkening.

Among the exhibits are these recently discovered snapshots, taken at Boisgeloup. Here is Picasso, hair immaculately oiled, in spats and plus fours, enjoying a spot of rough and tumble with Bob the dog, or playing host to friends, such as Gertrude Stein and the painter Elie Lascaux. Here too, is a nine-year-old Paulo, Picasso’s son, in his miniature car, with Olga and Picasso’s mother, María, in their wicker chairs squinting in the sun.

Exactly who took the photos has been lost to history but this is, perhaps, beside the point. ‘When you look at them, you recognise the way people have arranged themselves,’ says Achim Borchardt-hume, curator of the Tate exhibition, ‘they act out the same funny jokes as you. But then you think – it’s Picasso – and it creates a curious tension between being ordinary and being excep-

When Picasso bought the château, he told both his wife and mistress that it was for her

tional; between doing the things we all do and at the same time having the talent and the drive to produce the most extraordinary, wonderful art.’

Olga loved Boisgeloup, revelling in her new role as chatelaine. The daughter of a Russian colonel, she had been dancing with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes when she met Picasso in 1917. ‘She liked to be dressed in Chanel and to live the life of somebody who had become part of society,’ says Borchardt-hume, ‘to go to theatre openings and ritzy dinners. But then, so did Picasso.’

But by the time Olga was throwing elaborate tennis parties at Boisgeloup, Picasso’s attentions had drifted elsewhere. The paintings flying from his easel during that Herculean year were inspired not by his wife, but his lover, Marie-thérèse Walter, whom he had met not long before he first set eyes on Boisgeloup. Indeed, when he bought it, he told each woman that it was for her.

Once ensconced, Picasso embarked on a chaotic arrangement whereby Olga and Paulo would spend the weekend with him playing happy families, but on a Monday, when they had returned to Paris, Marie-thérèse appeared. Perhaps he later regretted blocking up the château’s secret tunnels – they might have proved useful.

Picasso’s biographer John Richardson believes a chief motivation for the artist when he moved to Boisgeloup was his forthcoming 50th birthday. ‘For someone so fearful of mortality and so conscious of all he had to achieve, this anniversary must have been an enormous challenge,’ he writes.

Indeed, in a self-portrait Picasso painted in December 1931, he portrays himself in the studio, wiggling his fingers in front of recent work. ‘[The artist is] a little mixed up,’ he later explained, ‘he’s not sure of which way he wants to work… he doesn’t know what he wants.’

‘By 1932, Picasso had accomplished every goal he had set himself,’ agrees Borchardt-hume. ‘Now came an intense questioning – what next?’ Much of the difficulty lay in his feeling that having gained the gilded bourgeois life he once craved, he had lost the intense companionship of his early years in Montparnasse, where he and fellow Cubist Georges Braque had seemed, as Braque said, ‘two mountaineers roped together’. Another former brother-in-arms, the avant-garde poet and artist Max Jacob, even began referring to Picasso’s ‘Duchess period’. All of which only increased his sense of unrest and anxiety.

Much of the poignancy of the snapshots rests in their depiction of the calm before the storm. The precious equilibrium Picasso had achieved at Boisgeloup was coming to an end. Within months, the cracks were showing, not just in his own life but in the world. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. In 1935, when Picasso formally separated from Olga, he gave her Boisgeloup as his parting gift. He never returned. The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy is at Tate Modern from 8 March until 9 September; tate.org.uk

Previous page Picasso with Bob, the Pyrenean mountain dog; the artist with his wife, Olga, and their son’s governess in front of the château. Above left Picasso’s son, Paulo, in his toy car. Above With Olga, Paulo and Picasso’s mother, María