Paris, Painters, Poets

PARIS, PAINTERS, POETS

JIM BURNS

PENNILESS PRESS PUBLICATIONS

www.pennilesspress.co.uk

Published by

Penniless Press Publications 2017

© Jim Burns

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of the work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

ISBN 978-0-244-38240-7

Cover: rue Racine Paris VIe 1967 – photo Ken Clay

Some other books by the author:

PROSE

Cells: Prose Pieces (Grosseteste Press, 1967)

Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals (Trent Books, 2000)

Radicals, Beats and Beboppers (Penniless Press, 2011)

Brits, Beats and Outsiders (Penniless Press, 2012)

Bohemians, Beats and Blues People (Penniless Press, 2013)

Artists, Beats & Cool Cats (Penniless Press, 2014)

Rebels, Beats and Poets (Penniless Press, 2015)

Anarchists, Beats and Dadaists (Penniless Press, 2016)

POETRY

Some More Poems (R Books, 1966)

The Store of Things (Phoenix, 1969)

A Single Flower (Andium Press, 1972)

Leben in Preston (Palmenpresse, 1973)

Playing it Cool (Galloping Dog Press, 1976)

The Goldfish Speaks from Beyond the Grave (Salamander Imprint, 1976)

Fred Engels bei Woolworth (Rotbuch Verlag, 1977, reprinted 1990)

Aristotle’s Grill (Platform Poets, 1977)

Catullus in Preston (Cameo Club Alley Press, 1979)

Internal Memorandum (Rivelin Press, 1982)

Notizen von Einem Schmerigen Loffell (Palmenpresse, 1982)

Out of the Past: Selected Poems 1961-1986 (Rivelin Grapheme, 1987)

The Gift (Redbeck Press, 1989)

Confessions of an Old Believer (Redbeck Press, 1996)

As Good a Reason as Any (Redbeck Press, 1999)

Take it Easy (Redbeck Press, 2003)

Short Statements (Redbeck Press, 2006)

Laying Something Down: Poems 1962-2007 (Shoestring Press, 2007)

Streetsinger (Shoestring Press, 2010)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many of these pieces appeared on the on-line Northern Review of Books. The appropriate details are listed below:

Shocking Paris. August, 2015 (also in The Crazy Oik 27,

Warrington, Autumn, 2015)

Modernism and Authority. January, 2016

At the Existentialist Café. March, 2016

Nadar / Offenbach. April, 2016

A History of the Barricade. May, 2016

Foreign Artists in Paris. July, 2016

Nights in the Big City. August, 2016

John Bratby. April, 2016

Stanley Spencer. August, 2016

Sven Berlin. October, 2016

Alice Neel. September, 2016

Inspiring Impressionism. September, 2016

The Visitor’s Book. August, 2016 (also in The Crazy Oik 31,

Warrington, Autumn, 2016)

The Art of Rivalry. October, 2016

Anything That Burns You. February, 2016

The Golden Age Shtetl. June, 2014

Invisible Jewish Budapest. July, 2016

The New Diaspora. June, 2016

American Pulp. November, 2014

The Communist International. September, 2015

Alexander Shlyapnikov. June, 2016

Spain in our Hearts. May, 2016

Cy Endfield. November, 2015 (also in The Crazy Oik 28,

Warrington, Winter, 2016)

The Screen is Red. September, 2016

Leaving Home. November, 2013

F.B. Eyes. March, 2015 (also in The Crazy Oik 26, Warrington, Summer, 2015)

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands. May, 2016

The Legendary Detective. May, 2016 (also in The Crazy Oik 30, Warrington, Summer, 2016)

Martyr of Loray Mill. December, 2015

Dead Dames Don’t Sing. September, 2016

Devil’s Music. August, 2016

Other acknowledgements are listed below:

Thomas McGrath. North Dakota Quarterly Grand Forks, 2017

William Wantling. Transit 20, Coventry, Autumn, 2008, and Beat Scene 59, Coventry, Summer, 2009

Jeff Nuttall. Tribune, London, 14th March, 1980 and 23rd January, 1981

Cambridge Opinion 41. Beat Scene 82, Coventry, Summer, 2016

On the International Beat. Beat Scene 84, Coventry, Winter, 2016

Tony Fruscella. Beat Scene 81, Coventry, Winter, 2016

Willie Dennis. This article was accepted for publication in Jazz Journal, but has not yet appeared at the time of publication of this book.

How the West was Lost. Mayfair, London, November, 1970. An earlier version, entitled Low Noon, was published in The Guardian, London, 10th August, 1963.

1956. News that Stays News 7, Cardiff, June, 1996. Also published under the title Germany & All That Jazz as Ragged Edge Magsheet 11, Appliance Books, Ipswich, 2005, and as 1956 in Short Statements, Redbeck Press, Bradford, 2006

Last Post. Joe DiMaggio 2, Bexley Heath, 1971

Sunday. The Guardian, London, 20th March, 1964, and Buxton Christian Stewardship Campaign Newsletter, Spring, 1964

The History of the World. Short Statements, Redbeck Press, Bradford, 2006

Shotblaster. Pilot 2, Preston, October, 1972, and Workers’ Opposition 1, Oldham, n.d. (c. 1974)

The Big Man. The English Intelligencer, Hastings, September, 1967

74 Ravenna Road. News That Stays News 5, Cardiff, June, 1995

My thanks to all the editors concerned and Ken Clay and Joan Mottram

INTRODUCTION

Readers may notice that the Beats have disappeared from the title of this book. This isn’t due to any loss of interest on my part in their lives and work, and simply reflects the fact that few books on the subject came to my attention in recent times. What I did see was too often academic in tone and didn’t appeal to me. I accept that all literature may well eventually be absorbed into the academic set-up and can provide material for essays and books. But I don’t accept that I need to read or write about them. There are a couple of articles about little magazines of the 1960s. I can still feel some of the excitement of the period, insofar as magazines are concerned, when I look at those often-forgotten publications. I’m not inclined to look back on the 1960s as a sort of golden period, but it was lively, if sometimes chaotic, from the publishing point of view. Lots of mediocre material, I agree, but every period has that. And there is much to be said for the flawed but interesting rather than the tidy but boring poem or novel. The little magazines often hinted at something exciting, and obscure and overlooked writers can be found in their pages.

I’m never at a loss when it comes to what to write about, as I hope the contents of this collection will show. Paris has often been a favourite place to visit, despite a lost battle with the French language. There have always been foreign writers and artists in Paris, and they make for worthwhile investigation. But other aspects of the city, such as its philosophers and its radical history, have also occupied my attention.

England has its artists, too, and in writing about Sven Berlin, Stanley Spencer, and John Bratby, I’ve focused on three who might be said to have been oddballs, in their different ways. Berlin and Bratby can probably be categorised as bohemians, but Spencer was just eccentric. It isn’t only the bohemianism or the eccentricities that involve me. I like the work that all three produced, even if, especially in Berlin or Bratby’s case, it could be variable in quality. But they were interesting. And both Berlin and Bratby wrote novels, as well as painting. I have the feeling that the English don’t take to boisterous bohemians or people who can turn their talents to painting, sculpture, writing fiction and other prose, and who don’t have too much time for the conventions of the establishment.

My choice of poets to write about might be equally idiosyncratic. Thomas McGrath was a left-wing American poet who produced a large body of work, most of which is, I would guess, little-known in Britain. Lola Ridge is probably even more of an unknown quantity to readers, her hey-day being in the first three decades of the 20th century. And William Wantling had only a few years in the limelight before an early death. He had something to say and showed promise, though didn’t really get the opportunity to fulfil it.

Thomas McGrath found himself blacklisted during the McCarthy period in the United States, as did various people in Hollywood. The essays on Cy Endfield, Anne Edwards and the films of the Cold War, all touch on this subject. Other pieces comment on politics in the form of FBI surveillance of black writers, the early days of communism in Russia and America, the Spanish Civil War, and a strike in North Carolina in 1929 that provided the basis for several novels.

As before, I’ve added a few unclassifiable items. A couple of short stories, a humorous (I hope) memoir of seeing Westerns in local cinemas, a look at 1956 from a personal point of view, and one or two other pieces that may be of minor interest. I can’t claim any more than that for them, but I’ve spent a lot of time in my writing life salvaging other people’s bits and pieces, so I trust I’ll be forgiven for salvaging a few of my own.

SHOCKING PARIS: SOUTINE, CHAGALL, AND THE OUTSIDERS OF MONTPARNASSE

I’m not sure how many paintings by Chaim Soutine are in British galleries. Not a lot, I suspect, and it’s doubtful if most British art-fanciers are familiar with his work. When it comes to Marc Chagall it’s a different situation, and it’s not all that long ago that I saw a large exhibition of his work at Tate Liverpool. His paintings lend themselves to being reproduced as postcards and on posters and calendars. And the success of Fiddler on the Roof, inspired by Chagall’s art but which he disliked when he saw it performed, also brought Chagall to the attention of a wide public. Amedeo Modigliani, who also figures prominently in Stanley Meisler’s book, is rather like Chagall in that postcards and posters have spread the word about his paintings and there have, no doubt, been numerous student bedsits with Modigliani posters as decorations.

But Soutine? Somehow I can’t imagine that too many of his paintings, especially those where he showed bloody animal carcasses or decaying birds, have appealed to those who enjoy the coyness of Chagall and the muted eroticism of Modigliani. Soutine did paint portraits and landscapes, but even then he never aimed for the pretty and decorative. His use of paint, while attracting admiration from artists like Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon, could be striking, even disturbing. If you go to the Orangerie in Paris, where there is a whole room devoted to Soutine, it’s possible to get an idea of the power and urgency of his paintings. They don’t appeal to everyone and I have known people leave the room quite hurriedly, almost upset by what they have seen on the walls.

Born in 1893 in Vilna, now in Lithuania but then in Russia, Soutine made his way to Paris in 1913. He had friends there and moved into La Ruche in the passage de Dantzig. This was a large building with fifty studios designed to provide cheap accommodation for young painters, poets, and sculptors, and it was established by Alfred Boucher, who Meisler describes as a prominent and wealthy sculptor honoured and prized by the government and fellow artists during a long career. Among those living in La Ruche, at one time or another, were Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Diego Rivera, Jacob Epstein, Ossip Zadkine, and Chagall. In later life Chagall reminisced that These ateliers were occupied by artistic Bohemians from all over the world.

Meisler has some interesting things to say about how the artists and writers related to each other. The highly-competitive Chagall, for example, seems to have preferred mixing with the poets. Modigliani got along with everybody and painted or drew portraits of them. Soutine thought of himself as a permanent outsider who seemed to ignore everything beside his work. He had little to say about himself or his paintings: He wrote no memoir or any other book or article. Only a few letters have survived, and they reveal almost nothing. There is a book by the Russian-Polish artist Marevna, Life with the Painters of La Ruche, which paints a lively picture of La Ruche and has a great deal of information about Soutine, some of which appears to contradict what Meisler says about him not talking about his life before coming to Paris. He seems to have told Marevna a fair amount concerning his childhood.

Soutine had arrived in Paris with little money, but managed to enrol in classes run by Fernand Cormon, who had taught Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh in earlier years, but he dropped out after a time. He decided he could learn far more by visiting the Louvre and studying the paintings there. But there is little or no evidence of what Soutine was doing in his first couple of years in Paris. He always had a habit of destroying work he wasn’t satisfied with and that’s presumably what he did with any early paintings.

Soutine did make friends with Modigliani, and both were rescued from total poverty through the interest of a collector called Jonas Netter who was in touch with the art dealer Leopold Zborowski. It was Modigliani who first interested Netter, and it was Modigliani who persuaded the dealer to get Netter to also provide some financial assistance to Soutine. It would take time for Soutine’s work to gain any real attention, and little of Modigliani’s work sold in his lifetime which was short and tragic. A regular user of hashish and alcohol he suffered from tuberculosis and died in 1920. Meisler says that Modigliani, who spoke fluent French, dressed well, and was sophisticated, could easily have slid into the world of the assimilated Jews and French society generally in Paris, but chose instead to socialise with the struggling Jewish artists he knew. Meisler quotes an art historian as saying that Modigliani’s refusal to assimilate came from his self-image as an artist who was different and individualistic. Mixing with the impoverished painters in Montparnasse satisfied his desire to feel alienated in Paris. It’s almost as if he knew that in time his life would become the subject of films and novels, and so constructed his activities accordingly. As for his art, there is the usual irony that it now sells for millions, whereas Modigliani himself earned little from it.

Soutine had also followed a bohemian life-style, and one of his acquaintances referred to him as raving mad, constantly drunk and dirty. But things began to change when a rich American collector, Doctor Albert Coombs Barnes, visited Paris in 1922 and came across a Soutine painting in a gallery. Meisler describes him as saying, It’s a peach, and adds that Barnes’s memory of discovering the Soutine was that it was in a bistro, though most commentators have preferred the gallery as the location. It would seem that the gallery owner had a poor view of Soutine as a person, and claimed that it was an article of faith to him that ablution is a heresy, changes of clothing a sacrilege. All that aside, Barnes’s enthusiasm led to him buying 52 of Soutine’s canvases. The artist then being almost unknown, Barnes did obtain the paintings at a relatively low price. It’s perhaps not to his credit that in later years he told someone: I caught him when he was drunk, sick and broke and took the contents of his studio for a pittance. Barnes may have intuited that Soutine’s work would gain in reputation and value in due course, but he had no time for the artist himself.

The money that Soutine got for the paintings did change his life. But his new-found fame also brought problems in the shape of resentment by other artists, especially non-Jewish ones. And anti-semitic critics referred to Slavs disguised as representative of French art, with the word Slav as a euphemism for Jew. It was around this time that the term School of Paris was coined primarily to describe the concentration of Jewish painters in the city, though it was not widely used immediately.

Meisler emphasises the differences, as people and artists, between Soutine and Chagall. The latter’s work drew heavily on his Jewish background, whereas Soutine’s showed no influence of his shtetl upbringing. Meisler points out that various commentators have attempted to find elements of Jewishness in his paintings but have been unsuccessful. As people, compared to Soutine’s bohemian ways, Chagall dressed conservatively, behaved in the same manner, and knew how to cultivate friends with influence. His view of Soutine was that he was a morbid expressionist. There is a telling story that Meisler cites about how, in the 1940s when the Jews were being rounded up, Chagall was in a police station with others and asked for preferential treatment because he was a famous artist with highly influential friends, and not like the rest of them. They were all eventually released after registration, and Chagall was one of the lucky ones who later escaped to America.

Chagall had been in Paris as early as 1911, but having returned to Russia for a visit in 1914 he was trapped by the war and only managed to get back to France in 1923. His reputation was growing, though he was still subject to the kind of criticism that anti-semitic writers aimed at all the members of the School of Paris. In some ways, the term could be applied to almost any artist active in Paris in the inter-war years, even if it was generally understood to refer to those who were Jewish. But it wasn’t that they had any sense of purpose in terms of breaking new ground or painting in a specific way. They were remarkably diverse in their approaches to art. And it was significant that, on the whole, they were little influenced by art movements like Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. It’s true that the Surrealists did try to claim Chagall as one of their own, but he was far too individualistic to identify with the group. The point that needs to be stressed about the term School of Paris is that it wasn’t descriptive of a form of painting, or a theoretical analysis, and was simply a blanket phrase that covered a wide variety of artists, most of them Jewish. A look at paintings by Chagall, Modigliani, and Soutine, not to mention many others, will quickly indicate how different they were in their styles.

Anti-semitic attacks mounted in the 1930s as the Nazis came to power in Germany. There had always been a strong anti-semitic tradition in France and, in Meisler’s words, The Jewish character of the School of Paris provoked the most puzzlement and comment and rancour in the city. A Dutch poet, writing in the prestigious magazine, Mercure de France, referred to a swarming of Jewish painters, and he wondered why this passion for paint and brushes had suddenly hit so many Jews. It was, perhaps, almost inevitable that he came to the conclusion that they’d realised there was money to be made from art.

Meisler relates how the windfall that Soutine gained when Dr Barnes bought his paintings changed some of his habits: Aside from portraits and landscapes, the still lifes took up a good deal of Soutine’s time and energy, especially in the 1920s.  For the most part, he was obsessed with fish, poultry and meat, after their killing and sometimes butchering but long before they were ready for cooking.  When he was impoverished, he painted emaciated herring. After Dr Barnes enriched him, he painted beef.  Soutine had spent hours in the Louvre studying Rembrandt’s paintings, including one in particular which was of a slab of flayed beef. And he made trips to Amsterdam so he could look at the Rembrandts there. When Soutine painted landscapes it was sometimes said there were similarities to Van Gogh, but he tended to be a bit dismissive of the Dutch artist.

The onset of the Depression in 1929 affected artists as galleries cancelled contracts and collectors stopped buying. Soutine was lucky because he was taken up by a wealthy couple, the Castaings, who liked to patronise poets and painters. Soutine and Madeleine Castaing became close, but despite rumours it would appear that there was nothing sexual in their relationship. Soutine had, in fact, formed a liaison with Gerda Groth and she moved to live with him in the Villa Seurat, where he was a neighbour of the American writer, Henry Miller. When she began to tidy up Soutine’s apartment she found that he had few books (Balzac, Montaigne, Dostoyevsky), and had not kept copies of a couple of monographs written about his work or catalogues from his exhibitions. He had stuck a few reproductions of paintings by Rembrandt, Courbet, and Corot on the walls. Henry Miller thought that Soutine seemed tame now, as if trying to recover from the wild life of other days. If they met on the street Soutine had little to say beyond routine comments about the weather or the noise from a neighbour’s radio.

It was around this time that Soutine was diagnosed with an ulcer, probably a result of his earlier dissipations and lack of proper food. A move out of Paris was advisable, especially as the general situation in Europe deteriorated. When the French and British armies collapsed in the face of the German onslaught in 1940 Soutine’s position as a Jew was fraught with danger. He managed to avoid being rounded up by the Germans and their French collaborators, the notorious Milice, a paramilitary right-wing police force, partly thanks to help from a few sympathetic officials. But his health was worsening and Gerda Groth, who was German by birth, had been forced to move away, to a camp for aliens, when the war started. She tried to return to Soutine but met with bureaucratic difficulties in obtaining the right documents. In the meantime, Madeline Castaigne had arranged for another woman, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, to look after Soutine. She was familiar with artists’ circles, having been married to Max Ernst and consequently friendly with many surrealists. Man Ray photographed her, Luis Bunuel gave her a small part in L’Age d’Or, and it was said that André Breton used her as a model for the central character in his novel Nadja.

Taking on the role of caring for Soutine, a sick man who needed a special diet in a time of scarcity, and was also a hunted Jew, was certainly not easy, so Marie-Berthe deserves credit for what she did. He did eventually succumb to his various health problems (anaemia as well as ulcers) and died during an unsuccessful operation in Paris in 1943. There were suggestions that Marie-Berthe was at fault in some ways by delaying getting him to hospital, but there seems little point in running through all the arguments surrounding Soutine’s death and the subsequent details of his burial and the disposal of his paintings. Meisler does provide the necessary information for those interested.

Is it true to say that, with the exception of Soutine, Chagall, and Modigliani, the School of Paris has been forgotten? There have been various exhibitions over the years, mostly in France and the United States, and books have been written about at least some of the artists who can be said to have been identified with the group, a term that might not be completely accurate as people came and went and didn’t necessarily know or associate with each other. I recall an exhibition at the now sadly-closed Montparnasse Museum which focused on Jewish painters active in Paris before the Second World War. It saddened me to read how many of their lives ended in Auschwitz and other death camps. Meisler does say that around 20 painters associated with the School of Paris perished in the camps, but he adds that the total was possibly higher. It has been estimated that around 150 artists can be classed as belonging to the School of Paris, so it’s probable that Meisler’s 20 is too low.

So, who were some of the other painters and sculptors? Many were probably minor figures and it’s unlikely that their work will ever re-surface unless it’s in a specialised exhibition like the one I visited at the Montparnasse Museum. But others did make a bigger impact, even if their reputations later declined. Jules Pascin might be a good example. He was well-known in his day, but committed suicide in 1930. Ossip Zadkine managed to get to America before the Nazis took over, but returned to Paris after the war and died there in 1967. There is a Zadkine museum in Paris. Moise Kisling also spent the war years in the United States where, Meisler says, he had enormous success in both New York and Los Angeles. His studio in Paris had been ransacked while he was away, and though he initially returned to the French capital he soon settled for much of the time in Sanary on the Mediterranean. Chana Orloff was in Swizerland and returned to Paris, but frequently visited Israel, where she died in 1968. Jacques Lipchitz stayed in the United States, and often spent some months each year in Italy.   It would be fascinating to track down details of what happened to all the artists, and Meisler recommends the website ecoledeparis.org run by Nadine Nieszawer, a specialist in the art and personal histories of those she places under the heading of the School of Paris. Having looked at it myself I can testify to its usefulness.

Meisler says that it’s likely that the School of Paris might well have fragmented and lost its impetus by 1940 or so even if there hadn’t been a Second World War. Art movements tend to have a limited life. But the School of Paris was hardly a movement. A surprising number of the artists did return to Paris after 1945, but they lacked the cohesion of earlier days. And, in any case, other factors affected what happened. Meisler refers to post-war Europe being too poor and dazed and involved in reconstruction work to revive the vibrant and commercial pre-war art scene. Attention was more and more focused on America where the Abstract Expressionists were in full flow. New York and not Paris became the place to be. My own feelings are that, having seen exhibitions of post-war French art (not necessarily just those with an emphasis on Jewish painters), there was more interesting work being done in Paris than was acknowledged at the time and later. But that’s a personal impression and art historians may well disagree.

I thoroughly enjoyed Shocking Paris and Stanley Meisler manages to range over the period concerned, and the lives of the main artists he looks at, in a readable and interesting manner. He doesn’t include a bibliography, but there are ample notes which point to catalogues, books, articles, and other publications. It’s a great pleasure to see him drawing attention to Soutine whose work, as I mentioned at the start of this review, doesn’t get shown enough in Britain. And though Modigliani and Chagall are familiar names he summarises their lives effectively and puts them in context. He also offers some tantalising glimpses of the lesser-known artists and makes one yearn for a major exhibition of the School of Paris to be shown in this country. It’s unlikely, and I’ll have to content myself with the exhibition I viewed at the Montparnasse Museum, and the small selections I’ve seen at the Ben Uri Gallery in London and the Manchester Jewish Museum. And with Stanley Meisler’s informative book.

SHOCKING PARIS: SOUTINE, CHAGALL, AND THE

OUTSIDERS OF MONTPARNASSE

By Stanley Meisler

Palgrave MacMillan. 238 pages. $26. ISBN 978-1-137-27880-7

MODERNISM AND AUTHORITY: PICASSO AND HIS MILIEU AROUND 1900

On February 17th, 1901, a young Spanish poet and artist, Carles Casagemas, organised a dinner party at a café on the boulevard de Clichy in Montmartre. Among the guests was a model, Germaine Pichot. Casagemas had become infatuated with her, but she had not reciprocated. At some point during the dinner, Casagemas stood up, handed several letters to Germaine, then took out a pistol and fired at her. Luckily, she had noticed that one of the letters was addressed to the Chief of Police, and she seems to have intuited that something was about to happen and ducked under the table. Casagemas, perhaps assuming that the bullet had hit her, turned the pistol on himself. Shot in the head, he was taken to a hospital but died shortly after.

Casagemas had been a close friend of Picasso and had shared a studio with him for a time. When the café incident occurred Picasso was still in Spain, where the pair had gone for Christmas, but only Casagemas had returned to Paris following the festive season. When Picasso finally got back to the French capital he had what William H. Robinson, in Picasso and the Mysteries of Life: La Vie, referred to as a sexual liaison with Germaine, and he also started to produce a series of paintings which related to Casagemas’s death. This was near the start of what is usually referred to as Picasso’s blue period. Picasso, in fact, was later quoted as saying that It was thinking about Casagemas that got me started painting in blue.  Some earlier Picasso sketches, when Casagemas had still been alive, had been slightly satirical, but the new work was much more sombre. Robinson says that Haunted by memories of his dead friend, perhaps compounded by guilt over allowing him to return to Paris alone, Picasso painted a series of posthumous images in which the mocking humour of his earlier portraits was replaced by a compassionate, tragic tone. Casagemas had mental problems, and was an alcoholic who also used drugs. Picasso’s guilt probably arose from his awareness that Casagemas was likely to get into trouble if left on his own in Paris.

It’s interesting to look at some of the paintings that Picasso produced. One shows Casagemas with the bullet hole clearly evident on his head. Another, Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas, is more allegorical and has Casagemas in what can be interpreted as a religious setting, with dark-clothed mourners gathered by the shrouded corpse and with a tomb nearby. Some commentators have interpreted the scene as a reference to mourners contemplating Christ’s corpse. But elsewhere in the painting, two naked women are embracing and some other women are shown with their bare buttocks facing the viewer. Picasso, it seems, wanted to debunk religious interpretations of the picture, and instead draw attention to his ideas about the situation of the artist in the modern world. Robinson points to two figures in the painting which show a naked woman kissing the dead Casagemas as his body rises into heaven, and adds: Here the suffering artist finally triumphs over the world’s sadness and pain.

Probably the most well-known painting associated with Casagemas is Picasso’s La Vie, which shows a near-naked man being embraced by a naked woman. The man is clearly Casagemas, and the woman has been identified as Germaine Pichot. There are some other figures in the painting, most prominently a barefoot woman holding a baby. Charles Palermo says that, "Given the presence of Casagemas and of a baby, the picture seems inescapably to oppose the two figure groups as embodiments of life and death, or some