Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory (review)

Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire first met in 1905. Their intense friendship, powered by humor, letters and postcards, gifts, and evenings à la bohème, also developed as a fruitful conversation conducted through the restless artistic practices of each man. Apollinaire, who died in 1918, had a short life, Picasso a very long one; parts one and two of the book cover, respectively, the fourteen years of the friendship and the several decades following, during which Apollinaire persisted in Picasso’s memory and took form again in his sculpture and painting.

Peter Read attends rigorously to facts, evidence, and chronology, but he also meets the challenge of capturing a relationship that would have been extraordinary in its affection, loyalty, and playfulness even had it not generated some of our most important works of modernist art and literature. Apollinaire wrote poetry, plays, novels, and the most prescient art criticism of the “new” painting of the twentieth century. He also drew and painted while collecting (he owned more than one hundred of Picasso’s works, many of them gifts of the artist) and dealing in contemporary art. Creating in several genres and media as he reported from various “zones”—historical, spiritual, emotional, topographical, typographical—Apollinaire multiplied his own perspectives. And as he explored the zone of artistic intimacy with Picasso, he increased his own creativity by a power of two.

Most of us are more familiar with Picasso’s creative superabundance. Read captures in thirty one brief, superb analytical tales the developing arc of Apollinaire’s and Picasso’s “fraternal complicity” (20). Their work shared many qualities: fascination with the art of Africa and Oceania, caricature, Cervantes, Pascal, detective novels, the circus, and European painting; broad themes of quest and alienation; the tendency to offer shadowy versions of each other and of their circle of friends within poems and paintings; common verbal and visual images; explicit references to the moments and physical spaces they had inhabited together.

Read carefully establishes their creative mutuality, beginning with the early months of the friendship when Apollinaire drafted “Saltimbanques” and “Twilight” and Picasso finished Family of Saltimbanques. In the forward-looking atmosphere of their “interdisciplinary laboratory” Picasso’s artistic revolution of 1907 began (17).

That laboratory stayed open for decades after Apollinaire’s death. Asked to create a monumental tomb for his close collaborator in modernism, Picasso responded not with a single monument, but with a progression of ideas and practices that utterly transformed modern sculpture. Read shows us, work by work, how the project inspired in Picasso some of the “most innovative artistic decisions of his career,” many of which had their genesis in his musings on Apollinaire (167). For example, his wire maquettes, Read points out with characteristic acuity, “resemble Calligrammes in space, recalling Apollinaire’s picture-poems” (176). Perhaps even more intensely elegiac was Picasso’s refusal to create the monument by adhering to either tired aesthetic norms in funerary art or the wishes of fund-raising and administrative committees. Because Apollinaire experimented ceaselessly in his poetry, any monument to his memory had to be, for Picasso, freely experimental. “There is no literary ideal. Ever onward”—the poet’s aperçu also summed up the sculptor’s dynamic programme (45).

Read is our foremost critic of Apollinaire’s art criticism and reviews, and if this book did no more than guide us through the poet’s art-writing about Picasso, it would be worth our attention. Apollinaire was not the first to review Picasso’s work, but Read makes the case that he was the first of Picasso’s own generation to comprehend the extent of the painter’s genius, and to do so with creative sensitivity. Furthermore, his art criticism, which was personal, speculative, and imaginative, embodied the notion of that other poet-critic of painting, Baudelaire, that “the best response to a painting could be a sonnet or an elegy” (69). Read shows us exactly how, in his art-writing, Apollinaire “slips between...