by Jerome du Bois
All this thinking and writing about stealing brought to mind Picasso's famous saying:
Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
It makes him sound edgy and brave, doesn't it? and I wonder when he said it, because all this thinking about stealing also brought to mind a pivotal point in Picasso's aesthetic, if not moral, development. I haven't found out yet, but I wonder: did he make this claim before or after the 1911 Affair of the Statuettes?
I came across this true story in Calvin Tompkins's lucid and luminous Duchamp, pages 105-6, which I'll both paraphrase and quote liberally.
In 1907, Guilliame Apollinaire befriended Géry Pieret, "a young Belgian drifter and petty thief," and employed him as his occasional secretary. One day Pieret went to the Louvre and came out "with two small stone sculptures under his coat."
Pieret later put out the story that he had done it as a joke, but the Picasso biographer John Richardson suggests another reason: Picasso had recently been looking hard at a new installation in the Louvre of ancient Iberian stone sculptures of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., and Pieret, when he lifted two of these same Iberian pieces, almost certainly had the artist in mind. Pieret showed them to Picasso, at any rate, and Picasso promptly bought them. Certain aspects of their crude, primitively carved features soon turned up, moreover, in the heads of the two central figures in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the revolutionary 1907 canvas that is considered to be the beginning of Cubism.
Pieret went to America, and when he returned four years later he was dressed to the nines and flush with money, "which he lost soon enough at the racetrack." Apollinaire bailed him out again, and ensconced him again, and Pieret repaid him by stealing yet another stone head from the Louvre and installing it on the mantelpiece at his host's apartment.
Apollinaire's tolerance for this engaging and somewhat crazy Belgian was running out, however, and he succeeded in evicting him from his apartment on August 21, 1911, which happened to be the same day that every Paris newspaper ran big headlines announcing that the Mona Lisa had disappeared from the Louvre.
Pieret had nothing to do with the Mona Lisa theft -- that's another story you can look up later -- but when the Paris-Journal offered a reward for the painting's recovery, Pieret "saw a chance to pull off a new scam." And off we go (you gotta love this guy):
He sold his most recently acquired Iberian head (the one over Apollinaire's mantel) to the Paris-Journal, along with his own colorful account of how he had spirited it out of the Louvre -- just to prove, he claimed, that the museum's security system was ineffectual. The Paris-Journal returned the sculpture to the Louvre withut revealing Pieret's identity, but Picasso and Apollinaire now became very nervous about the other two Iberian heads. Terrified that their involvement with Pieret would become known, Apollinaire gave him 160 francs and put him on a train to Marseilles, the usual sanctuary for petty criminals on the lam. Picasso and Apollinaire spent that night lugging Picasso's two stolen heads around Paris in a suitcase, waiting for the right moment to drop them in the Seine [!!!]; the moment never arrived, and Apollinaire subsequently took them to the offices of the Paris-Journal, under a pledge of secrecy, for restitution to the Louvre. Someone must have tipped off the authorities, though, because on September 7 the police raided Apollinaire's apartment, found some incriminating letters from Géry Pieret, and took Apollinaire off to the Santé, Paris's central prison, as a prime suspect in the Mona Lisa theft.
The police kept him there for six days and might have kept him longer if his many friends in the art and literary establishments had not brought pressure for his release. The worst moment came when Picasso, whose name had been wrung from the suspect during interrogation, was brought in and questioned. The presiding magistrate asked him whether he knew Apollinaire, who was also in the room, and the pale and trembling Picasso mumbled, to his lifelong shame, "I have never seen this man."
I doubt only one phrase in this account: " . . . to his lifelong shame." Picasso was an instrumental operator from the get-go here. As Apollinaire's friend of many years, he knew the latter's history with the Belgian, and he manipulated Pieret; he got to lovingly use the heads for as long as he wanted to create what some claim is an immortal painting; and he was willing to dump priceless ancient artworks from his own ancestors into a stinking river, and betray his friend, to save his own ass from deportation.
It was ironic to read this story in a biography of Marcel Duchamp, a stand-up man to whom Picasso pales in every way that really matters.
Posted by Jerome at March 11, 2004 01:55 PM | TrackBack