'LE VIEUX MARCHEUR'

AND 'LES DEUX RISQUES':

PICASSO, PROSTITUTION,
VENEREAL DISEASE, AND
MATERNITY, 1899-1907
MICHAEL LEJA

Prostitutes appear frequently in the art of the adolescent Picasso, cast generally
as objects of disdain or desire. Two early works can be taken as emblems of
these recurrent attitudes. Alms of 1899 (plate 22) portrays them as self-
indulgent revelers without compassion for the poor beggar in the foreground,
towards whom one of the women raises a champagne glass m mocking toast.
Perhaps they are attempting to attract the almsgiver in hopes of persuading
him to squander his money on them instead of the beggar. Whether we read
these femmes galantes as malicious or simply unthinking and pitiable, they
function as a foil for the act of charity in the foreground. As embodiments of
the temptation of selfishness and social irresponsibility, they are appropnate
targets for Picasso in his guise as the young anarchist of El Quatre Gats.
Disdain for such women becomes central in his caustic portraits of Madrid's
and Pans' well-to-do courtesans in elaborate hats and jewelry painted in early
1901.
A conflicting view of such women is evident in Self-portrait in a Top Hat of
1901 (plate 23) which shows the artist as one of their party Here Picasso
speaks as bohemian hedonist, imagining himself in a better financial and social
position with easy access to elegant courtesans. Their allure is evident in a
number of early works, and the series of erotic images of the artist and his
friends cavorting m brothels, probably with prostitutes of somewhat more
modest social status and cost, reminds us that he was not always inclined to
resist.
An entirely new note is struck, however, in the series of works which begins
in the second half of 1901. Woman in a Bonnet (plate 24) shows an inmate at
Saint-Lazare, a hospital-prison for prostitutes suffering from venereal disease.
The white Phrygian bonnet she is wearing was requisite apparel for all
venereal patients. There is nothing critical or erotic about this painting; it is
better characterized as a sympathetic psychological study. The palette too has
shifted from intense, garish hues to somber tonalities. This portrait is part of a
fairly large group of works infused with a grim mood new to Picasso's
treatment of the subject of prostitutes, a group which paves the way for the

Art History VoL 8 No. 1 March 1985

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 'LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' AND 'LES DEUX RISQUES'

paintings of the Blue Period Let us note in passing that in spite of radical
differences from the immediately preceding portraits of Madrid courtesans,
these solemn, compassionate works also suggest, as we shall see, an anarchist
attitude - a view of prostitutes, particularly those of lower station, as victims of
the economic and political status quo
Our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding this series of works is
quite sketchy, the story can be partially assembled from several accounts by
the biographers of the young Picasso, especially Penrose' and Palau l Fabre,^
and from a letter by Picasso to Max Jacob ^ Picasso's second stay in Pans
began in May of 1901; he had spent the final three months of 1900 in Pans
before travelling to Barcelona, Malaga, Madrid, back to Barcelona, then again
to Pans, where he remained for nine months. Some time during the summer of
1901, he apparently requested and received permission from a Dr Louis
Julien,* with whom he may have been somehow acquainted, to visit Saint-
Lazare. Few who tell the story note the strangeness of this initial fact. Why
would such a prospect have interested Picasso'' His routine practice of drawing
subjects from ordinary experience and from his pursuit of amusement has left
us rather unprepared for this morbid, investigative excursion Although he had
not evaded or refrained from depicting scenes of suffering and misery when
they presented themselves (for example, the arrival in Barcelona of refugees
from the Cuban War), it was not his custom to seek them out
While Picasso's interest in Saint-Lazare has been little studied, it is
generally assumed to be a product of the obvious shift in mood of his work
following the exhibition at Vollard's in June, 1901. The luminous bullfights,
cafes, seascapes, and public gardens yield to solitary figures in bars, pictures
commemorating Casagemas, and finally, the Blue Period There is still no
persuasive explanation for this abrupt and enduring transformation. Too often
the suicide of Casagemas is expected to bear most of the weight in any attempt
to point to causes, in spite of the six-month delay in its impact on Picasso's
work This time lag gives reason to wonder whether we might not be better
advised to understand his engagement with the tragedy of his friend as an
effect, rather than the cause, of his new solemnity. Other proposed causes
include Picasso's increasing loneliness and solitude, a spurt of rapid
maturation, the influence of Max Jacob's preoccupation with French
Symbolism, and a sort of postpartum depression following the Vollard show.
The congruities of Picasso's images of Saint-Lazare inmates with other
developments in his contemporary work are undeniable, yet I want for a while
to extract these paintings from their context in the artist's oeuvre and place
them in another. My hope is that by separating them from the overtly personal
works of the period, which have occupied the spotlight for so long, we can
escape the strictly biographical frame of reference which has plagued Picasso
scholarship. The question to be asked here is not why did Picasso's mood
change in 1901, but rather, given his new disposition, why was his attention
directed to Saint-Lazare?
Palau i Fabre has speculated that Picasso may have contracted a venereal
disease at this time, although this in itself, even if it were true, would not
account for the visit (unless we want to assume that he had reason to look for

67
 'LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' AND 'LES DEUX RISQUES'

whoever had given him the disease) Whether or not he was personally
afBicted, his interest becomes more comprehensible m tbe context of tbe
furious controversy over prostitution, venereal disease, and Saint-Lazare then
raging in Pans and all of France ^
The years 1898 to 1902 mark the climax of the battle between tbe
abolitionists and tbe neo-regulationists over governmental control of prostitu-
tion ^ Since tbe 1830s France bad been developing a system for tbe
containment, sanitization, and regulation of prostitution by governmental
autbonties, specifically tbe brigade des moeurs of tbe Prefecture of Police Under
tbis system, wbich was based largely on the program of Parent-Duchatelet,
prostitutes were required to register with the police, to function within the
confines of a designated quarter, usually as residents of maisons closes, of which
they were virtual prisoners, and to submit to regular venereal examinations
Although prostitution was in theory illegal, in practice it was tolerated as
'I'egout seminal,' an outlet for potentially dangerous passions within, especially,
the lower classes In the late 1870s and early 1880s, this system was attacked
by a group of abolitionists, a coalition of the right, who saw it as condoning
immorality, and of the left, who opposed its authoritarian treatment of the
women This first abolitionist challenge fizzled out, but a second launched in
1898 forced conservatives to take new defensive measures. The old regula-
tionist platform, that control and confinement of prostitution were means of
safeguarding public decency and morality, was no longer adequate in the face
of this new opposition, in large part because by this time the clientele for
prostitution was primarily bourgeois and petit bourgeois, without buttressing
from the fear of the lower classes which had sustained it in the past, this
argument lacked punch Legislators generally avoided the delicate subject and
failed to formulate a new defense, but the medical profession came to the
rescue of the conservative forces by providing a motif around which they could
rally. The doctors argued for even greater control of prostitution in the name of
public bealtb, tbey conjured up tbe specter of sypbilis. He peril venerien '
Sypbihs was, indeed, a serious danger at this time Treatment for it was
unreliable at best, and death was an all too common result. One has only to
consider its modern counterpart, AIDS, to make vivid the fear it inspired But
a veritable sexual paranoia was created among the French public m the
interest of building tbe case for regulationism. witbout regulationism's
mandatory examination and treatment of afflicted prostitutes, it was claimed,
tbings would get still worse Doctors cited statistics alleging tbat 20 per cent of
the male population in Pans was infected, and that syphilis accounted for 42
per cent of infant mortality Newspapers ran regular features on the problem,
pamphlets describing the symptoms were distributed m large quantities, and
posters hung in public batbrooms tbrougbout tbe city. Sypbilis became a
common preoccupation of novels and drama; Ibsen's Ghosts was first produced
in Paris during this period.'^
The abolitionists countered by arguing that regulationism had not been
effective in controlling veneral disease. They claimed that statistics showed a
higher incidence of syphilis among registered prostitutes than among their
clandestine counterparts. They also criticized the terrible conditions to wbicb

68
22 Alms, 1899, charcoal, pencil, and colors with
turpentine, 47 X 32 cm Pnvate collection,
Tokyo (c SPADEM, Paris/V\GA, New York,
1985)
23 Self-portrait tn a Top Hat, 1901, oil on paper,
50 X 33 cm Herr och Fru Sven Salen collection.
Stockholm (c SPADEM/VAGA, 1985)
24 Woman in a Bonnet, 1901, oil on canvas.
41 X 33 cm Heirs of the artist (c SPADEM/
VAGA. 1985)
25 Two Women Pnsoners, 1901, oil, 81 X 65 cm
Private collection, USA (c SPADEM/VAGA,
1985)
 26 The Two Ststers, 1902, oil on
canvas, 152 x 100 cm Hermitage
Museum, Leningrad (c SPADEM/
VAGA, 1985)

27 Woman wtth Two Chtldren. 1902,

conte pencil on paper,
30 X 23 cm Museo Picasso.
Barcelona (c SPADEM/VAGA,
1985)

28 Mother and Baby tn Front ofa

Bowl of Flowers, 1901, oil on card-
board, 54 X 65 cm Private collec-
tion. Pans (c SPADEM/VAGA,
1985)

29 Sur le Bane, 1902, dimensions,

medium, and whereabouts
unknown (c SPADEM/VAGA,
1985)

30 La Vie, 1903,
oil on canvas,
197 X 127 cm
The Cleveland
Museum of Art,
Gift of Hanna
Fund

31 Sketch for La
Vie, 1903, pen and
ink on paper,
15 X 11 cm
Musee Picasso,
Pans (c
SPADEM/VAGA,
1985)
 LE VIEUX M^RCHELR \.\D LES DEUX RISQUES'

those needing treatment were subjected at the hands of government officials,

primarily at Saint-Lazare
Thus Saint-Lazare and \enereal disease were at the verv heart of a public
preoccupation in 1901 In spite of his sporadic residence in Pans at this time,
Picasso, as a frequenter of Parisian brothels, can hardh have been unaware of
or unaffected by this concern Consequently, his visit to Saint-Lazare assumes
a dimension of social involvement, whether or not mixed with personal
curiosity or fear. His paintings referring to this institution and its inmates
would not have been viewed as innocent, personal productions any more than
images evoking the Watergate Hotel would be so seen today When we come to
examine one of these paintings. The Two Sisters, I will trv to show just how
partisan a reading was possible
In contrast to the difBcult\ of ascertaining Picasso's motivations for his
visit to Saint-Lazare, it is surprisingly easy to get a clear idea of what he saw
once inside Just a few months earlier, in March of 1901, an abolitionist writer
named Jules Hoche published an article in La Grande Revue entitled 'Une visite
a la Prison de Saint-Lazare." It is tempting to speculate that this article may
have piqued Picasso's curiosity and contributed to his decision to go there, but
there is no evidence for this We might, in fact, wonder whether Picasso was
sufficiently competent in French at this time to read such a journal Yet, like
Picasso, Hoche specifically mentions a 'M le docteur Julhen" (he spells it with
two Ts) whom the Prefect of Police had asked to serve as Hoche's guide
There are at least two respects in which this article helps to illuminate
Picasso's subsequent work ^ The first centers on a passage which describes the
author's surprise upon encountering a two-vear-old child there By interrogat-
ing the child's mother and other women in the prison he learns that it is quite
common for a child to accompany its mother to Saint-Lazare This one has
been there for eighteen months, having entered at the age of six months. Hoche
IS understandably appalled by this revelation, and it figures in his indictment
of regulationism at the end of the article It is worth noting also that a few
pages prior to his description of this encounter, Hoche had tried to underscore
the injustice of the treatment of these women To this end, he argued that they
had committed no crime, but only 'loved', for this they were treated as
prisoners rather than patients Furthermore, they were usually driven to sell
themselves by poverty and, significantly, 'maternity and its difficult obliga-
tions '
C'est par misere qu'elles ont 'aime,' c'est parce qu'elles ont eu faim et froid
qu'elles se sont vendues, c'est, chez quelques-unes memes, la maternite et
ses dures obligations, la maternite, cette gloire et cette benediction des
riches et des regulieres, qui les a livrees aux souillures dont leur triste
rhetorique populaciere resume les peripeties en proclamant qu'elles 'font la
noce' (p. 703).
Both of these glosses upon maternity, that it was visible among the inmates
at Saint-Lazare and that it was considered by some analysts, usually leftists
and liberals, to be a cause of prostitution, have some bearing upon Picasso's
work of 1901-2. Contemporary with the portraits of women in bonnets are

69
 LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' AND LES DEUX RISQUES'

mother and child paintings m which the mother wears a Phrygian cap Some
paintings from the group conjoin mother and child with woman alone (plate
25) and among these is The Two Sisters (plate 26). Picasso described the
circumstances of this painting in a letter to Jacob. 'Je veux faire un tableau de
le desin que je t'envoye qui (les deux seurs) est un tableau que je fait - c'est
une putain de S Lasare et une mere ''' Around this flimsy remark whole
scenarios have been constructed by Picasso's interpreters For a long time
'mere' was mistakenly read 'soeur' and translated as 'nun,' which, not
surprisingly, gave rise to some bizarre readings of the painting. Now that the
woman is seen as a mother again, it has become popular to speculate that the
two women are sisters, on the basis of the title m Picasso's handwriting on one
of the studies, and that the mother was visiting the diseased whore at Saint-
Lazare (Among the several other names by which the painting is known is The
Visitation ) Palau i Fabre, for example, says 'Here we have a moving
representation of a scene witnessed in the prison of Saint-Lazare, and already
quickly sketched on the spot a healthy woman coming to see her sick sister'
(p. 295). On this basis, the pamting is commonly thought to be an allegory of
sacred and profane love 'Picasso obviously intended an allegory of profane
and sacred love The spiritual love of the mother is rewarded with life, hence
her pregnancy and the child in her arms, the profane love of the prostitute
results in barrenness and venereal disease '"^ And Gedo takes this reading a
step further. 'The conception of womankind as either wanton or saindy
implicit in this canvas is one which appeals to many Latin males, and Picasso
seemed particularly infected with it His partiality for painting so many
madonna-mothers suggests that he had never resolved his own early
overidealization of his mother ' "
Careless assumptions here have bred utter nonsense. In so far as the
painting is the record of a real event witnessed at Saint-Lazare, if indeed such
It IS, It is not a visitation. According to Hoche, visits to the venereal patients at
Saint-Lazare took place across two sets of bars separated by a distance of 1.5
to 2 meters Furthermore, that the mother is wearing a Phrygian cap in a
preparatory study (plate 27) suggests that she too was an inmate and,
consequently, an unlikely candidate for the embodiment of sacred love '^
Rather than blood sisters, they are more likely sisters in suffering, evoking the
two dismal after-effects of sex. venereal disease and the hardship of
motherhood. Such a reading corresponds closely to an attitude articulated at
the time, especially by an anarchist contingent within the abolitionist
movement. This group and others demanded that prostitutes be better
informed about sexual mechanics in order better to avoid the two risks sex
engendered - venereal disease and maternity.
This notion of 'les deux risques' is succinctly articulated in Ve'nus, a novel by
Michel Corday published in Pans in 1901 '^ Its seventh chapter contains a
dialogue in which the themes of the drama and the novel's ratson d'etre are
expressly stated. I will quote it here at length because of the unavailability of
the text outside of France.
- . . . N'y a-t-il pas pres d'elles (les courtisanes) un risque plus
epouvantable encore qu'aupres des autres femmes? La maternite, apres
70
 LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' \NT> LES DEUX RISQUES'

tout, n'est qu'une rebellion de la nature dupee C'est une blessure

guenssable Mais l'autre risque, la maladie, est l'erreur de la nature
aveugle On ne la repare pas
- Peuh' on ne la repare pas^ . Et puis, enfin, la encore, toutes les
balles ne tuent pas
- Et vous trouvez que ce n'est pas deja payer trop cher un court instant
de plaisir, que d'eprouver cette peur, puis cette attente, cette anxiete de
I'homme, qui, des semaines, s'examine, se scrute. se demande s'll n'est pas
empoisonne^ Nous parhons de Fangoisse de la femme penchee sur elle.
apprehendant dejour en jour la preuve de la faute A cette attitude, je crois
qu'il existe un male pendant Et ce sont la deux terribles statues de
r.A.mour
- Bah' on court tout de meme la chance Qui ne risque nen, n'a nen
- Et c'est justement pour ne nen avoir qu'il ne faut nen risquer' Ou
alors, la fraude, l'eternelle fraude, sous sa forme la plus repugnante et la
plus decevante Non, voyez vous, la vie est ainsi faite, actuellement. qu'un
homme quelconque ne peut pas rencontrer une femme quelconque, sans
qu'aussitot se dresse entre eux, l'une des deux craintes celle de l'enfant. ou
celle de la maladie Plus ou moins lmpeneuses, soit' Mais presentes.
toujours Je les imagine, ces deux etres, comme deux danseurs de corde qui
s'avancent l'un vers l'autre, sur le meme fil Lorsqu'ils se rencontrent et
s'etreignent, lls tombent ensemble de Fun des deux cotes, dans l'un des
deux abimes de crainte Encore une fois, la chute est plus ou moms
profonde, mais elle est inevitable Dans ce grand besoin qui prend les
hommes d'ameliorer le sort commun, leur zele s'applique, dans de
multiples directions, a de nobles reformes Mais lls ne songent point a
l'amour Et pourtant ll y aurait tant a faire' . Armer la femme
contre elle-meme et contre I'homme refrener - et non point regir - la
prostitution, relever la maternite, que sais-je^ Et surtout, ouvnr les yeux
des jeunes gens, leur montrer tout ce que la fiction poetique et romanesque
cache de pieges, d'obstacles et de dangers, tout ce qu'elle contient de
mensonge, tout ce qu'elle prepare de deceptions (pp 165-7, all
ellipses appear in the text and do not designate omissions)
Corday has put his rationale for wnting Ve'nus into the mouth of its central
character. Mirat, who is also a writer. Poetry and art, he asserts, must stop
idealizing sexual love and own up to the fears and difliculties it always entails
The legend of the fall from paradise is true in this respect, Mirat says - a free,
passionate embrace is chastized, forbidden, impossible In relations involving
prostitutes, where the illusion, for men at least, of carefree sex persists, the
threat of venereal disease is always present In relations with 'honest' women,
the primary fear is maternity, a danger, says Mirat, 'que nous redoutons tous
Sauf le man decide a feconder des enfants jusqu'a ce que mort s'ensuive - celle
de sa femme, bien entendu - sauf celui-la, tous les hommes sont aux pnses
avec la peur de l'enfant a naitre. Tous, vous entendez, tous, tous, tous!' (p
159). There are physical dangers surrounding delivery and there are hardships
which follow, hardships which Mirat descnbes as particularly acute for the
unwed mother. This dour view of maternity far better corresponds to Picasso's
71
 LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' AND 'LES DEUX RISQUES'

brooding mother figure in The Two Sisters and to the evidence of the
preparatory studies than do, for example, the secular madonnas of Maurice
Dems with which they are sometimes compared.
It IS worth recalling that Picasso would have been in sympathy with the
political group primarily responsible for articulating this view of maternity as
risk Anarchism was the prevailing political philosophy at El Quatre Gats, and
Picasso's Catalan friends have described him as an anarchist during these
years Early in 1901 in Madrid, he had become involved in Arte Joven, the only
magazine over which he exercised editorial control and at the same time one
with an expressly anarchistic orientation There are no indications that Picasso
became active in Parisian anarchist circles, but it must not be overlooked that
his paintings done in Pans move towards a form and focus much more
receptive to leftist interpretation Scenes of bourgeois leisure gradually yield
prominence to depictions of the impoverished, the miserable and outcast, and
the increasingly severe style, featuring darkened palette and heavy outlines,
evokes Steinlen and Nonell, artists of the left We have already noted the
tendency among art historians to attribute these changes in Picasso's work to
personal problems, however inadequate this approach may be, my purposes
here do not require a Bergeresque reconstruction of the account in terms of the
artist's growing radicalism in response to urban poverty '* It is enough to
establish Picasso's anarchist sympathies and to attend to the description of his
depictions of maternity
Picasso's mother-and-child paintings undergo m 1901 a change roughly
paralleling that observed in his portrayals of prostitutes Mother and Baby in
Eront of a Bowl of Elowers, early summer 1901 (plate 28), is characteristically
bright and naively sentimental, a secular madonna in a bourgeois drawing
room in the spirit of Maurice Denis and the Intimists. The contrast with Sur le
Bam (also known as Mother and Child, the Mother in a Pensive Mood) (plate 29)
from 1901-2 could not be more extreme. Here the forlorn mother finds no
solace in the baby in her arms, instead, the responsibility for her child
intensifies her situation and exacerbates her grief This painting and a string of
subsequent mother-and-child images, including especially Mother and Child on
the Seashore ( Z e r v o s V I , 4 7 8 ) , Woman Huddled on the Ground with a Child ( I , 115),
The Eorsaken (I, 169), and The Soup (I, 131), force us to conclude that after the
summer of 1901 Picasso's conception of maternity was primarily pessimistic,
emphasizing its hardships and pressures for lower-class women Even those
works which portray a mother consoled or gratified by her child are equivocal;
celebration of their relationship is tempered by foreboding. Furthermore, in
some of these maternites, prostitution, venereal disease, and motherhood are
fused The Phrygian bonnets worn by the prostitutes and mothers in the Saint-
Lazare pictures gradually evolve into the more flowing hoods and shawls seen
in such paintings as Mother and Child beside a Eountain (I, 107), Portrait of
Germaine (XXI, 410), and Mother and Child on the Seashore (VI, 478). It is hard to
tell at which stage the references to prostitution and venereal disease cease,
and the shawl becomes simply a garment signifying poverty. But the point
remains that these pictures present a perception of motherhood in fundamental
agreement with the notion of Hes deux nsques.' As such, the mother-and-child

72
 LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' AND 'LES DEUX RISQUES'

images from this time cannot function simply as symbols of sacred love,
whether presented in isolation or in more complex compositions, such as The
Two Sisters, Evocation, and La Vie.
We may now proceed to the second respect in which Hoche's article is
revealing. He tells of visiting another section of the institution, the quartier
judtctatre, where female thieves and common-law criminals are imprisoned
Here he encounters a very attractive prisoner, one so beautiful tbat he
compares ber to La Goulue, and is quite surprised by ber presence, since tbe
patients m tbe venereal-disease section bad been so lacking in beauty After
speaking to ber for a moment in tbe presence of 'tbe cbief,' bis guide for tbis
section of tbe tour, be turns to leave but takes a last sympatbetic look at her
She responds with
un sourire lmprevu, mysteneux, qui la transfigure toute, et qui, malgre
moi, me fait tressaiUir, un sounre ou revit soudain la dangereuse magie du
sexe, l'lnextinguible soif de plaire et de seduire qui est au fond de toutes les
jolies filles Peut-etre aussi est-ce simplement une bravade, ou une fieche
decochee au Hasard male, et sans doute infiuent, qui passe devant sa cage
Mais je ne suis pas influent du tout, etje ne puis que lui rendre son sourire
avec l'expression muette de mes regrets les plus sinceres (pp. 713-14).
He later learns that she is in prison for conspiring with her male procurer to
rob her clients.
This IS, of course, maudlin romance, but 'the dangerous magic of sex' is
not to be taken ligbtly Even m tbe dingy, depressing, infected milieu of Saint-
Lazare, a man could find bimself succumbing to feminine cbarms To fail to
resist was dangerous, not merely in that location but anywhere, one's health,
personal security, even life might well be the price, or so it seemed amidst the
abolitionist vs neo-regulationist brouhaha This passage from Hoche makes
vivid the impact of Hes deux risques' on ordinary behavior Passionate attraction
was perceived as something dangerous which had to be met with suspicion and
restraint And when mere sex seems so precarious an enterprise, how much
more so are sexual relationships and love. Of course, love and sex are always
problematic, especially for the young, but in an atmosphere in which a sexual
encounter appears fraught with imminent peril, as W C Fields would have
phrased it, sexual relationships seem and to some extent become hopelessly
complex and difficult, terribly distant prospects where risk and hardship
persist.
Such, I believe, were the musings of the young Picasso in such paintings as
The Couple (XXI, 409), The Embrace (I, 161), and La Vie. These works and
others of this period indicate that it is not only poverty and misfortune which
make life for the ordinary full of suffering and sorrow, love itself, indispensable,
yet sougbt, like sexual release, in full recognition of attendant bazards and witb
little promise of fulfilled bopes, bas a central part m life's tragedy. La Vie (plate
30) IS a powerful encapsulation of tbis view. Tbe lovers, Casagemas and
Germaine, face a severe, joyless motber before them, a figure usually
interpreted as an ideal of some sort - a reprimand against sensual love or an
embodiment of procreation, in reference to Casagemas' alleged impotence. We

73
 LE \ lEUX MARCHEUR' A.ND LES DEUX RISQUES'

have already recognized some difficulties attending the former of these

proposals, like the mother in The Two Sisters, this one is not tactfullv construed
as an image of sacred love The latter proposal becomes awkward when we
consider the preparatory studies and the underpaintmg The painting was
originallv intended to portrav Picasso himself with Germaine. this couple
facing an older man, perhaps an artist who was painting the two lovers, as Reff
has proposed ' ' The upper of the background images, showing a couple
clutching one another (husband and wife^ mother and adolescent child'),
originally rested on an easel The impotence thesis leaves the prior states of the
work without significant relation to the final one, furthermore, it does not
accord with the apparent progress of this and several other of Picasso's
compositions of this time - from plausible scene perhaps actuallv witnessed to
decontextualized, symbolically ambiguous image (We shall see that the same
mav be true of the Demoiselles d Avignon as well as of Z,a Vie and The Two Snters )
In two of the four sketches (plate 31) for the pamting, the figure of the
older man at the right is either absent or barely indicated, the focus, therefore,
IS squarely on the juxtaposition of melancholy, affectionate foreground couple
with terrified, clenched couple portrayed on the canvas in the background. The
gesture of the male lover indicates resistance directed towards the older man at
the right, lmplving a presence there even when none is shown The older man
ma\ be seen as either the maker of the bleak background image or as a beggar,
m either case a force which the Picasso figure apparently wants to restrain In
the final painting, the threats hovering about the young lovers, the threats
responsible for the fear bared in the background painting, are compounded
and made more explicit The easel disappears, although the painting on it
remains oddlv in place, and the settmg is no longer clearly a studio A new-
canvas has been added below the original one and apparently supporting it It
shows a solitary woman seated on the ground and hunched over, her head
resting on her knees Radiographic analysis has revealed that this lower canvas
originally contained a large creature with the black wings and head of a bird
and the body of a human descending towards a semi-rechnmg woman "" With
the appearance also of the mother and child, whom Blunt and Poole aptly
relate to the figure of Death in Maeterhnck's The Intruder,^'' a whole spectrum
of dangers now presents itself to the young couple- rejection, abandonment,
mutual misery, enduring obligations after love has passed By changing the
male figure from a self-portrait to a likeness of Casagemas, Picasso makes
poignant reference to an authentic victim of love's vicissitudes. Furthermore,
the easy switch here in partners portrayed with Germaine, a switch apparently
with foundation m reality, would have been an acute personal reminder of the
transience of affection.
Love-related torment was a frequent theme offin-de-siecle literature and art,
and as the above readings of La Vie, the matermtes, and the Saint-Lazare
pictures attest, much of Picasso's work between 1901 and 1904 should be seen
in relation to this tendency. But certain characteristic features of these works
by Picasso distinguish them within this larger context, a fact consistent with
Picasso's often noted ambivalence towards the Symbolists and the Decadents
A first contrast appears when we consider such works as Tristan and Isolde and

74
 'LE VIEUX .MARCHEUR' AND LES DEUX RISQUES"

Pelleas et Melisande in which extraordinary circumstances conspire to prevent a

passionately desired union This sort of doomed love is quite distant from
Picasso's work, which avoids dependence upon artificial or fortuitous
conditions in presenting love's outcomes The one notable exception here is
poverty, the condition often shown to exacerbate the dangers inherent in love
At times these two motifs are blended inextricably in an unusual combination
of social criticism and symbolist pessimism
A second contrast emerges from comparison with the work of Munch,
Strindberg and Beardsley. These men were more willing than Picasso to
ascribe the blame for love's torments to women While it is sometimes asserted
that Picasso became misogynistic following the suicide of Casagemas, the
paintings under discussion here lend no support to this view The women they
give us are not femmes fatales but victims, as wretched and miserable and
blameless as men, if not more so It is, after all, woman who is shown
abandoned and with sole responsibility for the care of an infant amidst
conditions of impoverishment Woman even more than man is subject to the
cruel and unjust logic of life
By the time of the DmoiseHcs ((\-\vi^non (plate 32), woman m the guise of
the prostitute has apparently become the bearer of much of the responsibility
for the unpleasant ramifications of sex, but such a viev\ is defensible only with
respect to its final version As Steinberg has persuasively shown,'** the earlier
studies depict an enactment of a double-edged attitude towards sex similar to
that described above - attraction and resistance But the cases of The Two
Sisters and La Vie have prepared us to notice two attributes of the studies for
the Demoiselles that have gone unremarked, I beheve that the painting's origin
may be a scene actually witnessed, or at least a scenario more plausible than
has been acknowledged, and that in this scene woman retains a measure of her
former status as victim alongside man These are complex arguments, for
which only the outlines can be sketched here
An account of the realism of the studies (plate 33) for the Demoiselles, based
on what we know of the operation ofmaisons closes ca. 1906, might go as follows
A sailor is seated at a table in the principal room of the brothel; the women of
the house have just entered and are competing for the account. The fact that
the client is a sailor and that the women are entirely undressed marks this as a
brothel of the lower strata. The women have surrounded the sailor, and each
has assumed her favorite seductive posture in hopes of striking his fancy '^ One
squats open-kneed before him, one sits at his side, later on his knee (plate 34),
another raises both elbows behind him, a fourth is just entering, a fifth stands
at the right. At the same time, the agent of the brigade des moeurs, in the person
of the medical student (plate 35), is entering to conduct the weekly
examination of the women. He carries his record book and, in some studies, a
skull to secure the reading of his role. A dog, the usual pet of the maisons closes
and a favorite companion of prostitutes, or so the prevailing stereotype alleged,
leaps at his feet in a greeting which can be read as either friendly or
threatening. In some of the earliest studies (plate 36), all the other characters
huddle at the far side of the room as he enters. Gedo has already associated the
medical student with venereal disease and Picasso's experience at Saint-

75
 LE VIEUX .MA.RC.HEUR A.M) LES DEUX RISQUES'

Lazare, and she has seen him as a 'w ages of sin' figure, although the imputing
of a moralizing tone to Picasso is dubious This personage can be understood
as embodying a warning for the sailor and the women of the perils, collectively
represented, of sexual love, in somewhat the same way that the mother and the
background canvases do in La Vie
It would be foolish to press this realistic reading too hard, Picasso was
clearly not interested in a shce-of-life illusion It is perhaps unhkely that a
health inspector would barge in upon a client making his choice, but such a
possibility is not inconceivable. Or Picasso, who was certainly familiar with
brothel routine, might have hit upon the idea of willfullv uniting these
normallv separate moments for allegorical purposes This procedure would
accord quite well with what we knov\' of the development of The Two Sisters and
La Vie I am referring to the progression from initial depiction of an actual or
plausible occurrence in a recognizable location to final portrayal of symbolic
figures engaged in ambiguous encounters in abstract space The svmbolic
aspects of an evocative scene graduallv eclipse realistic particulars and often
direct significant variations from these particulars in the final revisions But
while Picasso, still adhering in 1907 to essentially Symbolist practices, is
eliminating particularities of reference, obscuring connections to a specific
time, place, and situation, and thus opening his painting to evocative
ambiguities and unforeseen meanings, he frequently leaves loose ends -
unrevised residues of earlier states of the composition or conception which
provoke, even underwrite, genetic investigations such as the present study The
best examples of these residues are found in situations where the removal of
particulars has resulted in bodies defving laws of nature One such instance
concerns the background canvas in La Vie, which remains suspended without
benefit of its easel Another case is the demoiselle seated on the knee of the sailor
who retains her pose after the sailor and his knee have been removed.^" Such
unresolved details impel us to look back to the painting's sources, all the while
aware that in so doing we are swimming against the current That current is
the dominant drive in the works towards svmbohsm and away from contextual
particularity. When Picasso transforms the Phrygian cap on the putain in The
Two Sisters into a simple shawl, he thereby renders impossible any unequivocal
reading of her as a prostitute or of the painting's meaning as specifically 'les
deux risques ' We must be content to locate the work's origins in contemporary
discourse and to remain, with Picasso, imprecise about the meanings
attributable to the finished work I take it as important that Picasso
consistently deletes contextual specifics from his final compositions; to resupply
them, as I am attempting to do here, is not to eliminate that calculated
ambiguity but to underline it and to show its incompleteness The value of
genetic study here is not in providing the meaning of individual artworks but
in locating a common origin for a broad and superficially disparate collection
of paintings in a set of distinct and persistent concerns and attitudes.
When, in the final version of the Demoiselles, Picasso elected to eliminate the
two male characters, the encounter motif was retained but recast so that the
(male) viewer functions as the patron of the brothel. It is now up to him to
select a woman for his pleasure. This format - a group of prostitutes in poses

76
32 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 oil on canvas 244 x 234 cm
Collection, The Museum of Modern Art New York, acquired
through the LiUie P Bliss Bequest

33 Sketch for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1906-7 pencil and pastel,

48 X 63 cm Kunstmuseum, Basel (c SPADEMA AGA, 1985)

34 Sketch for Les Demoiselles d'Atignon, 1906-7 charcoal, 48 x 48 cm

Collection of Douglas Cooper, Monte Carlo (c SPADEM/\ AGA,
1985)

35 Sketch for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1906-7,

drawing, 24 cm high Reproduced bv Steinberg,
part 11^ fig 34

36 Sketch for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1906-7, pencil,

20 X 24 cm Musee Picasso, Pans (c SPADEM/
VAGA, 1985)
 37 Anonymous photographer,
ca 1900 Reproduced from
Le Nu 1900 by Philippe Jullian
(Andre Barret, Pans)

38 Anonymous photographer, ca 1900 Reproduced

from Vtctonan Erotic Photography by Graham Ovenden
(Academy Editions, London)

39 Mask-face, 1907, ink on newsprint, 16 X 9 cm

Heirs of the artist (c SPADEM/VAGA, 1985)
 LE \ IEUX MARCHEUR' AND LES DEUX RISQUES'

Signifying solicitation directly addressing the viewer was a common one in

contemporary erotic and pornographic photography Two examples drawn
from the turn of the century are reproduced here (plates 37 and 38) Although
the former's brand of insipid anecdote is more common, the latter illustrates a
tendency within this genre which may relate to the Demoiselles It shows five
women cavorting in a lavishly appointed den amidst trophies of the hunt
animal skins and skulls, antlers, mounted birds, and even a human skull It
titillates through coupling sexuality with bestiality and death in a distinctly
Decadent manner, vestiges of which certainly remain in the Demoiselles It is,
however, the differences between Picasso's painting and the photograph that I
want to consider here
The photograph celebrates cav alier gaiety in the face of death and decay,
threats which are perhaps real to these women but distant, only the distracted
expression of the nude holding the skull indicates the difficulty of maintaining
psychological distance despite physical proximitv By and large, however, skins
and bones are a dehciously spicy context for sensual pleasure, the photo
suggests
There is no frivolity in the Demoiselles to temper the deadly seriousness of
the threats, real and imminent, which the women symbolize In this sense the
painting is a distinctly post-/^^ deux risques production Its thrust is
diametrically opposed to that of the photograph Unlike the latter, where the
emphasis is on titillation, the Demoiselles concentrates upon evocation of the
reality of danger, danger not contextual but inherent Picasso's effort to find a
more and more potent, shrill, and urgent means of conveying peril - not with
mere props and memento mon but now with the forms of bodies - becomes so
concentrated that the magic irresistibility of sex, which makes its dangers so
insidious, IS given short shnft Seduction is not effected, and the real pain of
the dilemma is lost The use of the female form to symbohze peril produces an
imagery here in which all sense of peril's attractiveness is lost, though the
central figures, remnants of an earlier stage of the painting, suggest that such a
balance was possible Even these central nudes are cold, angular and inhuman,
but when all five figures were painted in this style they were apparently
insufficiently terrifying to satisfy Picasso His failure to recast the last two in
the later African mode has puzzled many viewers and interpreters, is the
picture unfinished, or has Picasso accepted, willingly or not, its stylistic
disjunction-* The account of its development outlined here suggests that the
displacement of fears and anxieties surrounding sex on to the body of woman
so totally transformed her image that the dangerous magic of her allure was
lost, as Picasso must have recognized The exclusion of the central nudes from
revision may represent either a futile attempt to preserve some hint of the
magic or a recognition that the project had gone wrong The latter possibility
IS supported by Picasso's failure to exhibit the painting, his friend Andre
Salmon recalled that the Demoiselles, christened, significantly, 'the philo-
sophical brothel' by another, unnamed friend,^' remained face to the wall in
his studio, a disappointing fate for such an ambitious work.
A fitting conclusion to this survey is provided by a small work from
precisely the same moment as the final version of the Demoiselles which

77
 LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' AND 'LES DEUX RISQUES'

indicates that Picasso was searching for new ways to recover the balance, to
express the sexual dilemma, without giving up new formal enthusiasms Mask-
face (plate 39) is a study for a woman's head with raised arms drawn in
Picasso's African mode, it participates in the brutalized, threatening image of
sexuality offered by the Demoiselles, just as it shares its analytical formal
expenmentation. Unlike the Demoiselles, however, it is an informal, experi-
mental work, probably never intended for exhibition itself. It is done on a
section of newsprint cut from Le Vteux Marcheur,^^ a light, 16-page weekly
magazine filled with ribald articles and cartoons featuring bare-breasted
women pursued by aging bourgeois dandies Attention to the fragment of text
beneath Picasso's drawing reveals that this clipping was chosen, by no means
at random, to contribute its literary content as well as its design etements to
the drawing Parts of the text are obscured, but most is legible and its sense is
easily apprehended
devant le bucher qui flambait dans la vaste cheminee gothique, ll parla
Je n'ai eu dans ma vie qu'une passion, la femme. Des ma ptus tendre
enfance, j'etais hante par des visions de fees et de magiciennes, qui
m'offraient leurs gorges nues et la fleur de leur chair. A seize ans, evade du
college, libre de mes actions, n'ayant pas de parents, confie a la
surveillance d'un tuteur indulgent, je devins un coureur defiUes,j'eus des
maitresses, par douzaines, par centaines A Pans, j'ai connu les pires
debauchees, les plus folles orgies Mais jamaisje n'eus de liaison J'aimais
trop la femme, pour me clore dans la chaine d'une unique tendresse Je
preferais la joie des truandailles et des souleries ou Ton a des nbaudes a
foison, oii Ton embrasse en meme temps et la brune et la blonde, ou Ton
prend des bains delicieux de luxure dans des amoncellements de chairs
entremelees.
In the lower nght corner of the clipping is a fragment of a cartoon containing
the arm and shoulder of a woman.
The passage is excerpted from a short piece of fiction by a M. Montrachet
entitled 'Le repas de l'ogre,' the story of a young debaucher named Guy
d'Estranges whose insatiable womanizing had resulted in an attack of paralysis
from which he emerged impotent. But having suffered this infirmity, having
succumbed to what might be construed as a third risk attendant sexual activity
and particularly overindulgence in it, he continued none the less to be plagued
by a hunger for female flesh. Unable to appease this hunger in normal ways,
he turned to satisfying it quite literally - by eating young women. Much of the
story IS a first-person description of the sensual ecstasy to be found m the
biting, chewing, and tasting of female flesh.
Picasso clipped the section of text which contains the beginning of
d'Estranges' tale as he relates it to an old school friend, the description of his
intense passion for women before that passion turned macabre. It is precisely
at the line where the narration turns to the attack of paralysis that Picasso
chose to make his cut. I find it unlikely that such precision is coincidental.^^
We would do better to recognize the making of this work as a two-part process
- the careful selection of a segment of text conveying the powerful attraction

78
 LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' \ND LES DEUX RISQUES'

operative in the sexual sphere, and the superimposition of an image of ironic

seduction, woman with arm raised, but woman hardened, sharply-faceted,
planar, a demoiselle who makes evident the tragic nature of this attraction
The tragedy is that even full consciousness of the dangers does not diminish
the allure, as all of our witnesses have testified Hoche felt the dangerous magic
even in the bowels of Saint-Lazare, Corday's Mirat fell victim to venereal
disease in spite of his own cautionary words, d'Estranges was driven to eat
women when furious sexual activity left him infirm Picasso too was certainly no
stranger to this pressure The dilemma is the larger subject of his work in this
early period' sensual or erotic images of beautiful women persist throughout,
contemporaneous with the various series of depictions of love's darker outcomes
- the vene'riennes, the disconsolate mothers, the death of Casagemas, the troubled
lovers, and so on. The Demoiselles was an ambitious attempt to portrav the
dilemma whole, to make the viewer recognize simultaneously the twin
inevitabilities of submission and subsequent harm. Picasso's failure in this effort
stimulated radical experimentation with significance for the later development
of papiers colle's the newspaper text in Mask-face replaces a crucial thematic
component which had fallen beyond the reach of Picasso's aggressive formal
language
Michael Leja
Harvard University

NOTES

The author is grateful to Diane Upright, Henri Zerner, and especiallv T J Clark for criticizing earK versions
of this article Grants from Harvard University's Westengard Fund and from the Josephine de Karman
Fellowship Trust greatlv facilitated mv research

1 Roland Penrose, Picasso His Life and Work
(London, 1958)
2 Josep Palau l Fabre, Picasso, The Early Years 1881-
7907 (New York, 1981) Translation bv Kenneth
hvons o{ Picasso Vtvent
3 Reproduced in Roland Penrose, Portrait of Picasso
(New York, 1971), p 32, and translated in
Manlvn McCuUy, A Picasso Anthology (Pnnceton,
1982), p 38
4 The name was related to Palau l Fabre bv
Picasso See Palau l Fabre, p 277, where the
surname is spelled with one T although there is
reason to suspect that there should be two
5 In fact, the controversy raged throughout much of
Europe, as Alain Corbin shows in Les Filles de Noce
(Paris, 1978) But examination of the situation
surrounding prostitution in Spam specifically has
been omitted from the present study for lack of
relevant secondary source material There is some
evidence that Picasso visited an institution like
Saint-Lazare while he was in Barcelona in 1902
See Patnck O'Bnan, Picasso, A Biography (New
York, 1976), p i l l
6 The following paragraphs are heavily indebted to
Corbin See also Elizabeth A Weston,
'Prostitution in Paris in the Later 19th Centurv \
Study of Pohtical and Social Ideologv
(unpublished PhD dissertation SUNY at Buffalo
1979), and Abraham Flexner Prostitution tn Europe
(New York, 1914)
7 Traces of this mania are still visible in the
newspaper clippings used in certain/ia/>iM colles,
for example the advertisement for Dr Casasa in
Picasso's Guitar (El Diluvo) of 1913
8 A third interesting aspect of the article has no
direct bearing on this studv but is worthv of note
Here is Hoche's description of a large painting
hanging at Saint-Lazare of which Dr Jullien was
evidentlv rather proud
Dans une sorte de vestibule qui me parait etre
une annexe de la grande chapelle, et qui est
constamment ouvert sur le guichet ou passent
toutes les entrantes, c'est-a-dire toutes les
nouvelles, le docteur me montre une grande
toile peinte representant un enterrement a
Saint-Lazare Le convoi - celui d'une fiUe,
comme de juste - s'avance, emerge de l'ombre
du porche, et le cercueil apparait, flanque de
geoliers et de rehgieuses Et c'est comme une
macabre lefon de choses evidemment destinee

79
 'LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' \ND 'LES DEUX RISQUES'
a redilicdtion des pcnsionnaires, mais dont la
portee m'echappe, a moins que ce ne sou un
lue;ubre a\ertissement donne aux entrantes, les
preparant aux austcntes, disciplines et
macerations qui les attendent dernere ces
murs, ou encore une sorte de memento mori
pictural destine a hater leur repentir et leur
entre( en ^race Considcre conimt tnsei?ne
d'hospice aussi, le tableau apparait d'un
allegorisme tres prenant, mais je me demande
\raiment sous quel crant a pu firmer la
sin^uliere idee de I'accrochtr la, et si la routine
administratee est telle qu'il faille une
re\olution pour renvover cette croute absurde a
la hotte du chilTonnier (p 701)
Perhaps Picasso saw this painting, and perhaps it
mspired him to begin the Casagemas paintings -
Eiocatwn and The Dead Man - or contributed
something to their form Or perhaps the
conjunction of memento mori, prostitutes, and
venereal disease was formed in his mind to
resurface in the studies for the Demoiselles
d'Aiignon Such possibilities can be no more than
speculative at this point, especialK in the absence
ofa reproduction of the pamting, and I mention
them onlv in passing
9 Penrose, Portrait of Picasso (see note 3), p 32 The
French is here transcribed as written
10 Garv Iinterow, \iaster Drawings by Picasso
(Cambridge, 1981) p 46 See also Theodore RefT,
' Ihemes of Love and Dtath in Picasso's Earlv
Work ' in Roland Penrose and John Golding
Puasso m Retrospeit {\cH \(tA 1980) p 11
11 Marv Mathcws Gedo, ftffltfo Art as Autobiography
(Chicago, 1980), p 45
12 The preparatorv studies for this pamting depict
both women bareheaded in Phrvgian bonnets
and in hoods or shawls at various stages in the
evolution of the work
The Phrygian cap, as Maurice Agulhon has
shown in Marianne au combat (Pans, 1979),
appears frequentiv in nineteenth-centur\' French
art as a symbol linked with the Republican ideal
of liberty Its use in this context refers to the
ancient Roman function of the cap as signiher of
status as a freed slave In the years following the
French Revolution and throughout the nineteenth
centurv, the cap was a primary attribute -
sometimes worn, sometimes positioned atop
another essential attribute, a pike - of the female
allegorical figure Liberty/The Republic/
Marianne, an attribute especially indicatiye of
her revolutionary aspect We cannot rule out the
possibility that some crude symbolism, on the
order of, for example. Liberty and The Republic
as sisters, survives in Picasso's pamting, but any
symbolic significance of the cap is overshadowed by
Its reahsttc function here While its signification of
hberty becomes cruelly ironic when it returns as
prison garb at Saint-Lazare, an irony which
Picasso may have intended to underline, it has
become to some extent a difTerent cap Its color
80
now IS white, rather than the rev olutionarv red,
and this color change mav have been enough to
stabilize a shilt of signiheds Ihewhiti Phrvgian
cap, in combination vMth certain other distinctive
features, was probablv bv this time suflicientlv
detached from other signilving relations to thcit
from Its viewers recognition that a woman
wearing one was a lenertenne rather than a
republican or an allegoncal figure Of this we
cannot be certain however, in the absence ol
contemporarv interpretations ol the paintings
Furthermore, much work remains to be done on
the connection betwe-en the white Phrvgian eap
and the hospital/prisons for leneriennei How and
when did the association come about ^ How
distinctive was the particular tap lnvolveei' How
widelv was it recognized as a sign e)f venereal
disease'' And so on
13 Cited in Corbin p 360
14 John Berger, The Success and tailure of Puasso
(London, 1965)
15 Retr p 16
16 Picasso's bird-man brings to mind another which
appears in Cezanne's studies lor his Temptation of
5/.-inMonv (see \'enturi no 1214 for example)
Instead of human bodies Cezanne s birds have
human heads This is onlv one of manv thematic
and lconographic intersections with Cezanne's
Temptation of St Anthony and Judgment of Parts
pictures to be found in Picasso's earlv work
intersections often neglected in the effort to
articulate formal connections between Picasso
and Cezanne On this, see RelT, Cezanne
Flaubert, St Anthonv, and the Queen of Sheba '
Art Bulletin, \ol .XLIV, no 2 June 1962 In
addition to the parallels he draws, two others are
worth specifying the overlapping treatment ol
sexualitv as threat, and the occurrence ofa shift in
point of view - from third person to first person -
in the evolution of Picasso's Demoiselles is
prefigured in a similar juxtaposition of viewpoints
m Cezanne's first Temptation See RelT, p 117
17 Anthony Blunt and Phoebe Pool, Picasso, The
Formative Years (New York, 1962), caption to
illustration 115 (unpaginated)
18 Leo Steinberg, 'The Philosophical Brothel,' .irt
News 71, September and October, 1972
19 See Corbin, p 126 for a description of this
practice
20 This figure has been over-ingeniouslv interpreted
by Leo Steinberg as an uprighted reclining nude
a reading which then contributes to an
implausibly complex account of Picasso's
conception of pictorial space Yet despite these
problems, Steinberg was the first to demonstrate
that Picasso's preliminary sketches offer useful
clarifications of manv ambiguities in both staging
and symbolism in the final paintings
21 I am inclined to interpret this nickname as
suggestive of recognition that the brothel was
serving in this painting as a vehicle for what
would commonly be called 'philosophizing' about
 LE VIEUX MARCHEUR' '^ND 'LES DEUX RISQUES'
the dialectic of sexual relations, the inseparability
of attraction and fearful refusal
22 The date of the paper, 23 August 1907, was
discovered bv Daix, as cited in Palau l Fabre, p
556
23 I anticipate an objection running roughlv as
follows surelv this quick, casual sketch will not
bear the weight of such analvsis It is more likelv
a spontaneous formal idea dashed off on a piece of
newsprint which simplv happened to be handv
Obviouslv, this possibilitv cannot be ruled out
but mv rejoinder would contain two parts first a
restatement of the argument about the aptness
and lntegritv of the excerpt, which leads me to
consider the prospect of its random inclusion
81
unlikely, and second, a questioning oi the
implication that lnformalitv is hert accompanied
bv quickness and casualness excluding tht
possibility of serious experimentation Recent
studies of the later collages and papiers idles have
alerted us to the calculation governing the textual
components of manv works and I v\ant to suggest
that from verv earlv on the possibilitv of thematic
connection between text and lmagt v\as
entertained and explored albeit
unsvstematicallv bv Picasso, and that this,
connection was often more than mere punning
and joking See Robert Rosenblum, Picasso and
the Tvpographv of Cubism in Penrose and
Golding