HARLEQUINS, SALIMBANQUES, CLOWNS, AND FOOLS
AT THE BEGINNING OF the Fifth Duino Elegy, Rilke asks a question about Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques that seems at first merely rhetorical, an effective way of introducing those reflections on the mystery of life with which the poem is concerned. “But tell me,” he asks, “who are they, these acrobats, even a little more fleeting than we ourselves . . . ?” Through endless repetition in the literature on both the painter and the poet, the question has now become famous, almost as famous as the picture itself, the largest and most familiar of any in the Rose Period and probably of any in Picasso’s oeuvre before the Demoiselles d’Avignon.1 Yet it has never been asked seriously or literally enough. Who indeed are they, these saltimbanques? And who are their companions, the Harlequins, clowns, and fools, who figure in so many works of the Rose Period and those that precede and follow it? It is worth asking these questions, for the answers shed light not only on Picasso’s early work, but on three important issues in his later work as well.
The costumed entertainers who already appear among his subjects as early as 1900 are the first manifestations of that love of the theatrical in all its guises which was later to find such varied expression in his life as well as his art. As Douglas Cooper observes, “Any type of spectacle it seems is a visual feast, a challenge, and a source of inspiration for Picasso, who at many different times has found his subject matter in the music-hall, the cabaret, the theatre, the circus, and above all in the drama of the bullring.”2 Moreover, as the films and countless photographs make clear, Picasso has always delighted in transforming reality itself into a theatrical event, in which he plays a definite role and often wears a mask or costume improvised for the occasion. The photographs of him clowning in the manner of Chaplin and Groucho Marx, and Françoise Gilot’s account of him outlining a clown’s features in his shaving lather every morning and grimacing in his mirror, are merely a few examples, particularly relevant here.3
More than the other costumed figures in his art, those of the circus and fair, and especially the ubiquitous Harlequins, are intimately related to Picasso’s most important formal invention, Cubism. If the bullring later provided symbols for his Surrealist images, culminating in the great mural Guernica, the subtle and elusive Harlequins are closer to Cubism. For like a Cubist composition, the Harlequin’s costume of flat bright colors and strongly marked patterns both fragments and conceals the underlying forms, assimilating them to a surface design of great decorative brilliance. Symbolically, too, this interest in a form of concealment that is also a form of revelation, the familiar aspects of things disappearing while their normally hidden ones emerge, links Harlequin as a type and Cubism as a style.4 Picasso himself seems to have recognized this; for when he saw the first camouflaged truck on a Paris street in 1914, he exclaimed: “Yes, it is we who made it, that is Cubism,” and when he was asked how to design parachutists’ uniforms for maximum invisibility in 1939, he replied: “Dress them as Harlequins.”5
With their companions, the saltimbanques and fools, the Rose Period Harlequins have a further significance as the first fully realized alter egos in Picasso’s art. Well before the toreador and Minotaur of the 1930s, before the paunchy acrobat and bearded artist of the 1950s, they appear as invented types through whom he expresses the themes of alienation and fraternity, jealousy and love, that haunt his imagination. And more clearly than these later personae, those of around 1905 and earlier are related to types whose traditional appearance and nature are known both in the theater and circus themselves and in the art and literature these have inspired. Thus they make it possible to judge the relative importance of the major external sources—actual experience, literary traditions, and other works of art—that have always combined to inspire Picasso’s creation of such complex symbols.
I
Three main types of entertainer from the circus and fair appear in Picasso’s early work, and they are identified by their costumes. The Harlequins wear a lozenge-patterned suit, either in the familiar red, yellow, and green or in a more sober black and white; at times they also have a cocked hat, but never in this period the equally traditional black mask and wooden bat. The saltimbanques are generally dressed in close-fitting rose or pink suits, sometimes with large ruffles at the neck and wrists like those of a Pierrot or with a cocked hat like that of a Harlequin. The fools wear a jacket fringed with bells at the skirt, breeches and tight hose, a cap with bells, and occasionally a cape, all of which are red or rose rather than the traditional motley; and they never carry the official scepter or bauble. In a few works there are Pierrots, attired in the familiar white costume with loose sleeves and very large buttons; and in a few others there is a Columbine or Pierrette, wearing the elaborately tiered and low-cut gown of the eighteenth-century types. One early work shows a circus clown in a close-fitting, bright yellow suit whose ruffled collar alone resembles that of a Pierrot.
Traditionally, the three principal types were quite distinct. Harlequin was one of the popular figures in the Commedia dell’Arte, the improvised comedies performed by traveling troupes throughout Europe since the sixteenth century. According to Marmontel’s classic article, “the model Harlequin is all suppleness and agility, with the grace of a young cat, yet equipped with a superficial coarseness that renders his performance more amusing; the role is that of a lackey, patient, faithful, credulous, gluttonous, always in love, always in difficulties either on his master’s account or on his own. . . . “6 The saltimbanques, whose origin was in the medieval sauteurs and jongleurs, were acrobats of the lowest class, those who had no fixed abode or theater of their own and instead wandered about from one town or fairground to another, putting on impromptu performances on a rug laid directly on the ground. Those in slightly better circumstances performed in movable tents, before which they set up wooden platforms for the parade or sideshow, a running entertainment designed to attract and lure the curious into the tents. Unlike the Harlequins and saltimbanques, the fools neither traveled nor appeared before the public. They were members of the medieval and Renaissance courts whose sole task was to entertain their lords with amusing words and deeds, and whose special privileges included a freedom of speech shared only by the lords themselves and, to a lesser extent, by the poets—exceptional creatures who were also thought to be harmless, mad, and wise.
By the early twentieth century, however, the traditional distinctions between the three types had become confused, and indeed the very forms of entertainment and society in which they had played their parts had largely disappeared. This was true not only of the court fools, who vanished with the courts themselves throughout Europe in the eighteenth century, but of the characters in the Commedia dell’Arte, whose activity in the professional theater ended in the same period, surviving only in pantomimes and children’s puppet shows.7 To different degrees, all three types were assimilated into the clowns and acrobats of the modern circus, the saltimbanques alone living on in a recognizable form until the era ended in the First World War. In the English circus, for example, the harlequinade with actors in the costumes of the Italian comedy remained a familiar, though progressively less popular, feature until the end of the nineteenth century. And in the same circus more than one self-styled Lyrical Jester or Queen’s Jester, wearing a medieval fool’s attire or reciting the lines of Shakespeare’s fools, attempted to revive the role around the middle of the century.8 As for the acrobats, they were all more or less descended from the earlier Harlequin, who was already described in the eighteenth century as possessing “an agility of body which made him appear to be always in the air,”9 and who was thereafter increasingly identified as a performer of acrobatic feats.
All this would make it seem that in the Rose Period Picasso should further confuse the several types of entertainer, and this in fact is what he often did. In several compositions built on the contrast between two costumed figures, obviously acrobats in the same circus or troupe of saltimbanques, one of them appears in the incongruous role of a Harlequin or jester. In other compositions showing a family of acrobats, one often wears a Harlequin’s costume or, even more inexplicably, only his cocked hat, while another wears the parti colored tights or scalloped cap of a fool. This is the case in some of the most familiar pictures of the Rose Period, such as the Family of Acrobats with a Monkey and the two versions of the Family of Saltimbanques. Similar ambiguities already appear in the earliest examples of this subject matter, painted in 1901: Harlequin and His Companion is also called Two Saltimbanques, since the male figure wears neither the cocked hat nor the black mask of the traditional Harlequin; and Harlequin is sometimes entitled Seated Pierrot, since his checkered suit has an elaborate collar and ruffs like those of a Pierrot or a clown.10 If this confusion of types seems natural, it is nevertheless worth noting, for despite the nineteenth-century tendencies discussed earlier, most of which after all concerned the English circus, it is unlikely that Picasso would have seen such variously costumed figures in a French circus or fair around 1900.
In contemporary photographs taken at the Cirque Médrano in Paris, the circus Picasso and his friends frequented, and in paintings and drawings of the same milieu by Toulouse-Lautrec, notably the album Au Cirque of 1899, we find besides the acrobats, strongmen, and bareback riders only two types of clown.11 One is the Auguste, created in the 1870s, whose costume consists of “a coat with tails too large, a white waistcoat which is too long, and black trousers which are too short, besides a staved-in top hat, white spats,” etc.12The other is the Clown proper, a more bizarre and colorful creature ultimately descended not from Harlequin but from Pierrot, whose popularity in France was established in the Romantic era, when the great mime Deburau transformed him from a minor comic figure into a pathetic symbol of almost universal appeal. It begins to be evident, then, that Picasso’s Harlequins, saltimbanques, and fools are at once more ambivalent in appearance and more complex in meaning than the circus and fairground figures whom they nominally represent. The latter, too, of course, were not simply talented entertainers, the clowns in particular having long been considered symbols of man’s propensity for error and folly and of his generally precarious position in the world.13 But as we shall see presently, Picasso himself did not see them in that light.
The ambiguities of appearance that make it difficult to identify the Rose Period figures with those of the actual circus and fair apply not only to their costumes, but to those more fundamental attributes, their physical types and habitual expressions. Regardless of their nominally varied roles as performers, they all seem marked by the same unending experience of privation and suffering. In many of them there is, as Ellen Bransten observes, “the disillusioned awareness of impotent people with all the spirit gone out of them. Picasso dwells with insistence upon sickly exhaustion. He piles up every symptom of physical ailment, emphasizing the extreme pallor of the skin and the emaciation of the bodies.”14 This was already evident in the first pictures of these subjects that Picasso exhibited in February 1905 and in Apollinaire’s article on them in the Symbolist magazine La Plume. The distance between Picasso’s actual experience of the circus and his imaginative transformation of it is in fact conspicuous in the pictures first reproduced in that article: the Acrobat and Young Harlequin, a haggard father and son hudgled together yet alienated by their suffering; the Seated Harlequin with Red Background, a young yet prematurely aged boy whose wan coloring contrasts with the brilliant red surrounding him; and the Two Acrobats with a Dog, a group of sad and hungry figures shown standing uncertainly in an equally forlorn landscape.15
Just as Picasso’s free manipulation of costumes obscures the traditional types among them, so his identification of all these circus and fairground performers with their lowest class, the wandering, often destitute saltimbanques, ignores equally clear distinctions that still existed at the time. According to one contemporary authority, the saltimbanques “constitute an inferior class . . . the proletariat among acrobats,” in contrast to those who perform in urban music halls and circuses and even to those who belong to established traveling companies.16 Moreover, among the saltimbanques themselves the type Picasso depicts is the lowest of several classes—the so called postiches, who have neither tent nor platform for mounting a sideshow, but must perform on a poor rug laid down in a city square or at a suburban fair. “In short,” writes the same authority, “the saltimbanques are the failures of the acrobatic profession. They constitute that inevitable waste product found in all branches of the arts of pleasure: street singers, wandering musicians, low class comedians, impotent poets. . . .”17 Yet Picasso’s acrobats, whether rehearsing under a circus tent or drifting aimlessly in the countryside, wear the same ambiguous and makeshift costume and have the same emaciated bodies and melancholy expressions, like the equally mysterious Harlequins and fools who mingle with them. Nothing demonstrates their remoteness from mundane reality more clearly than the images of actual saltimbanques in contemporary publications, even when the latter dwell on the private rather than public aspects of their subjects’ lives, as in the woodcut of 1898 reproduced here.18
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude from this, as was almost inevitable when far less of Picasso’s Rose Period production was known, that his Harlequin or saltimbanque is simply “the outcast of life, the image of blighted and impoverished humanity which dwells on the fringe of ordinary society.”19 For with the full record now available, including scores of studies for previously unidentified compositions, it becomes evident that Picasso also responded to other aspects of their professional and personal lives and in them saw reflected other aspects of his own life. Above all, it is obvious that such typical pictures as the ones reproduced in Apollinaire’s article constitute only one group of circus or saltimbanque subjects. In addition to these purely existential scenes, in which all action and emotion other than a resigned acceptance of suffering seem suspended, three other types can be distinguished: professional scenes, such as the Circus Family, showing preparations, rehearsals, and other aspects of a circus troupe’s daily life; domestic scenes, such as the Harlequin’s Family, showing entertainers still in costume with their wives and children in their circus quarters; and dramatic scenes, such as the Wedding of Pierrette, showing figures from the Commedia dell’Arte in actual or theatrical moments of crisis. To penetrate their varied meanings, it would be necessary to study each type separately;20 our more limited purpose here is to define the ways in which Picasso’s conception of these different characters and scenes was inspired by personal experience, by literary traditions, and by other works of art.
II
The artist, his mistress Fernande Olivier, and his early patron and friend Gertrude Stein have all testified to his enthusiasm for the circus in the Rose Period. “I was really under the spell of the circus,” he later recalled, “sometimes I came three or four nights in one week. It was here that I saw Grock for the first time. He was just beginning, with Antonet.”21 This must have been in 1905, since Grock’s debut at the Cirque Médrano was in December of the previous year.22 Fernande Olivier, too, remembered that “Grock was just beginning his career then, with Antonet. It was a revelation, and there were real tornadoes of laughter and hysteria. We were scarcely ever out of the Médrano after he arrived; we went there three or four times a week at least.”23 And Gertrude Stein, who met Picasso around November 1905, later wrote: “At this time they all met at least once a week at the Cirque Médrano and there they felt very flattered because they could be intimate with the clowns, the jugglers, the horses and their riders.”24 About the clowns, Fernande Olivier is more specific, writing that Picasso “would stay there all evening—Braque sometimes with him—talking to the clowns. . . . He admired them and had real sympathy for them.”25
Her reference to Braque, whom Picasso met toward the end of 1907, suggests that Fernande is recalling a practice that continued beyond the Rose Period. This is confirmed by her letter to Gertrude Stein of June 1910, describing a vacation with Picasso in Cadaquès: “We are now very friendly with some clowns, bareback riders, and high-wire dancers whom we met at the cafe and with whom we spend all our evenings.”26 It is also confirmed by an amusing letter written three years later by Max Jacob, who was staying with Picasso in Céret: “We have a traveling circus: the acrobats are in street dress, or rather suburban dress, if not hospital dress, but you can well imagine the charm we can find in this gay little crowd.”27 This continuing attraction to the circus even in the period of Analytic Cubism, when the character of Picasso’s art changed so radically, is worth noting; it corresponds to a continuing interest in the representation of circus subjects two Harlequins and a Harlequin’s Family in 1908, a Pierrot and a Buffalo Bill in 1911, a Harlequin in 1912, and so on.
In all these accounts, both of the Rose Period and later, two aspects of Picasso’s response to the circus stand out. One is the appeal of the clown as an unusual figure, a person set apart from others and therefore as fascinating offstage as on it. He himself later recalled: “I liked the clowns best of all. Sometimes we stayed out in the wings at the bar and talked to them through the whole performance.”28 It was indeed a fortunate coincidence for him that the Cirque Médrano, then at the height of its fame as the gayest, most brilliant of the Parisian circuses, freely allowed its patrons to penetrate backstage, to visit the dressing rooms, and thus to become intimately acquainted with the performers.29 All this undoubtedly stimulated him to envisage those informal scenes of the daily professional and domestic life of a circus troupe that constitute so important a part of his Rose Period imagery. The other striking feature of the accounts just quoted is the relative superficiality of Picasso’s response to the performances themselves. It was not the melancholy poetry or universal significance of the clown that appealed to him, but his coarse, earthy manner and broad humor. “I never saw Picasso laugh so happily as at the Médrano,” Fernande Olivier writes, “he was like a child and quite unaware of the relative shallowness of the humor.”30 The same point is made more poignantly by Brassaï, who accompanied Picasso and his family to the circus in 1932: “He laughed heartily at the clowns, seeming far more amused by their buffoonery than his son, who scarcely smiled all evening, or his wife, who remained taciturn and distant.”31 Yet this aspect of the circus, it hardly needs pointing out, found very little expression in Picasso’s art, at least in the Rose Period.
Much less is known about Picasso’s contacts with that other major source of inspiration in actual experience, the saltimbanques he presumably saw in the streets of Paris and at the fairgrounds just outside it. No contemporary document refers to them, although two more recent writers who have been close to him mention his familiarity with them. According to Roland Penrose, “outside, among the sideshows of the fair that traditionally occupies the whole [exterior] boulevard during the winter, Picasso made friends with the Harlequins, jugglers, and strolling players. Without their being conscious of it, they became his models.”32 And according to Douglas Cooper, who employs virtually the same terms, one of Picasso’s chief distractions around 1905 was “to frequent the groups of acrobats, Harlequins, and strolling players who had their quarters among the booths of the fair which in winter lined the boulevards.”33 To learn how much he may have been inspired by witnessing these figures perform, we must turn to the writings of Rilke and Apollinaire, both of whom by the way were acquainted with Picasso at about this time.
In a letter of July 1907, Rilke, who was later to look so searchingly at the Family of Saltimbanques, describes the performance of a similar family outside the Luxembourg Garden in Paris. Like Picasso, he dwells on the hardships they have experienced and the toll these have taken, particularly on the old man père Rollin, who “used to swing the heavy weights,” but now “no longer works and says nothing.” Rilke is also alert to the interplay of personalities within the little group—the contrasted roles of the retired father, his son in law who now performs the difficult feats, his grandson who is also an acrobat, and his daughter who is “so quick-witted and firm, almost like himself,” and who really controls everything.34 Still more graphic in representing an actual performance is Apollinaire’s poem Un Fantôme de Nuées, published in December 1913; like Rilke’s letter, it describes a small group of acrobats and weight lifters at work, in this case in a little square near Saint-Germain-des-Près. Having indicated briefly the appearance and attitudes of the organ-grinder and the other performers, Apollinaire focuses on “a small saltimbanque dressed in consumptive red / With fur at his wrists and ankles,” and follows his actions closely: “He gave a few brief cries / And saluted with his forearms prettily held / His hands spread out / With one leg back ready to genuflect / He bowed to the four cardinal points / And when he balanced on a ball / His slim body became so delicate a music that none of the spectators could resist it / . . . / The little saltimbanque turned a cartwheel / With so much harmony / That the organ stopped playing. . . .”35 Between these nearly contemporary accounts of the saltimbanques’ performance and Picasso’s pictures—specifically, between Rilke’s père Rollin and his family and Picasso’s famous Family of Saltimbanques, and between Apollinaire’s little acrobat balanced on a ball and Picasso’s Young Acrobat on a Ball—the correspondence both in subject and in mood is obviously close, thus confirming the fact of their origin in actual experience.
If Picasso rarely represented the circus in its conventional guise, as a place of entertainment and distraction, he may nevertheless have been affected by one unusual feature, its predominantly rose coloring. In Apollinaire’s poem, the youngest acrobat is “dressed in consumptive red,” and the oldest wears tights of a “purplish rose color.” That this was also the traditional color of the circus acrobat’s costume is evident in the prose sketches of circus life by Gomez de la Serna, a friend of Picasso’s who lived in Paris around 1910. In one sketch, he writes of “the rose of their tights, tinted the color of fresh roses, [which] gives to their thighs the splendor of rose-buds”; and in another, of “the rose costumes of the circus, [which] are of a rose seen only at the circus, the true rose made of fresh roses.”36 In addition, the interior of the Cirque Médrano itself was painted a “tender rose shading slightly into grey,” and around the entrance into the arena there was “a vast red curtain,” so that one author could describe it simply as “the rose circus.”37 A similar color scheme, dominated by rose, pink, and red tones, already existed in its predecessor, the Cirque Fernando, which was renamed Médrano in 1898; for it appears both in Degas’ picture Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando and in Seurat’s picture The Circus. The shift from a blue to a rose tonality in Picasso’s art in 1905 was, of course, not an absolute one, many traces of the former remaining even when the latter became more prominent. And in a larger sense it should probably be seen as reflecting those generally improved social and physical conditions of his life which, even in popular parlance, would be expressed in terms of “feeling less blue” and of beginning to see “la vie en rose.” Yet the influence of the rose atmosphere of the circus itself, especially on an artist as responsive to his surrounding as he has always been, an artist who later spoke of the “green indigestion” he had gotten while walking in Fontainebleau forest,38 can hardly be ignored.
III
Picasso’s fascination with the circus, above all with the clowns whom he knew intimately at this time, probably also explains another unusual feature of his Rose Period imagery, the tendency to identify himself with one or another of the costumed entertainers. That the Harlequin in particular served as an alter ego for the artist, who in two pictures—At the Lapin Agile and Family of Saltimbanques—actually gave this figure his own features, has long been recognized. Interpretations of the significance of this identification have, however, varied widely. For the analytic psychologist C. G. Jung, if “Picasso transforms himself and appears in the infernal form of the tragic Harlequin,” it is in order, like Faust in his successive transformations, to broaden his metaphysical experience “in the course of his wild wanderings through the centuries and millenia of humanity.”39 For the more socially oriented Ellen Bransten, the Harlequin is “merely the alter ego, the objectified essence of Picasso’s own predicament as an artist,” since “in the clown’s unfortunate exclusion from normal life Picasso evidently detected a resemblance to the artist’s isolation in modern society.”40 This is also the view of Phoebe Pool, who however emphasizes not so much the social alienation as the “exalted loneliness of the outsider which entertainer and painter had in common,” and who rightly adds that “the clothes of Harlequin, like the color blue, tend to remove him from the world of reality . . . [and to] link him with a more mysterious and generalized order of being having its own mystique and ritual.”41 These remarks may also explain why, even many years later, Picasso chose to portray the writer Jean Cocteau and the painter Salvodo, as well as his son Paolo (another Pablo), in a Harlequin’s costume, and why he acquired the “charming seventeenth-century Italian puppet, strung together with wires and dressed as Harlequin,” that Françoise Gilot saw in the storeroom of his rue La Boétie apartment.42
Like the more conspicuous Harlequins, the saltimbanques, clowns, and fools in many works of the Rose Period must also have symbolized the artist himself. In fact, given the ambiguities in their costumes, it is difficult to decide whether his identification with a figure like the Harlequin in the Family of Saltimbanques is based primarily on the Harlequin or the saltimbanaue type. For the latter, too, was obviously congenial to Picasso, and not simply as an image of his own economic insecurity or alienation from society. The vagrants, beggars, and street musicians he had depicted in the Blue Period were also such images: what distinguishes the saltimbanques, and marks the greater self-confidence of the Rose Period in general, is precisely this new emphasis on the acrobat as a skilled performer. As Meyer Schapiro observes, in a picture like the Young Acrobat on a Ball “the experience of balance vital to the acrobat, his very life, in fact, is here assimilated to the subjective experience of the artist, an expert performer concerned with the adjustment of lines and masses as the essence of his art.”43 This fascination with the acrobat’s performance as a metaphor of his activity evidently continued to hold Picasso long after the Rose Period. One of his’ most brilliant compositions, the Acrobat of 1930, is built on just such an equation of the figure’s dazzling contortions and the artist’s highly expressive inventions of form. And in a series of pictures painted two years later, after seeing at the Cirque Médrano what Brassaï describes as “a group of acrobats: three nude and muscular bodies forming daring compositions, balancing one upon another,” he transformed them into progressively more abstract images, so that “the acrobats gradually disappeared as the composition became tauter, stripped of detail.”44
About the personal significance of the clown and the fool in Rose Period works, much less has been written, partly because such works are fewer in number, and partly because there is less evidence outside them of Picasso’s attitude. However, it seems obvious that in such images of domestic intimacy as the Jester Holding a Child and The Jester’s Family—the former dedicated to Apollinaire, the latter to Fernande Olivier—Picasso projects feelings about himself and those closest to him. This supposition is strengthened, not weakened, by the presence in these pictures of a small child; for if Picasso and Fernande had no child of their own at this time, there is evidence in the memoirs of their friends Salmon and Max Jacob that she had temporarily adopted one.45 Moreover, the fact that he tended in several other works of this period to identify these and other close friends with fools and jesters provides further proof of his own imaginative identification with such types. According to Roland Penrose, the bronze head of a jester of 1905 “was begun late one evening after returning home from the circus with Max Jacob. The clay rapidly took on the appearance of his friend, but next day he continued to work on it and only the lower part of the face retained the likeness.”46 The same resemblance is found in the related painting of a jester’s head, also of 1905. And as for Apollinaire, the bookplate Picasso designed for him, caricaturing him as a Gargantuan king, portly and intoxicated, is as Phoebe Pool observes a “variation on the theme of the clown who is also a king and the king who is ho more than a clown—a subject which is common in mediaeval literature and which received its most moving expression in King Lear.”47 Moreover, since in all these works the clown or jester is also a poet, they are variations on another traditional theme, that of the fool who is a poet and clairvoyant. Both ideas may well have been in Picasso’s mind, since he later remarked that he had come to think of the bookplate as “representing Apollinaire as king among poets and as jester, i.e. amuser of painters among art critics.”48
Although the circus clown rarely appears as such in Picasso’s art, he is inseparable from the other costumed figures, especially the Harlequins and fools, from whom he is directly descended historically. And he was, of course, the only type among them with whom Picasso was actually well acquainted. Hence the appropriateness of Françoise Gilot’s later statement that “the clown, too, with his ill-fitting costume, was for him one of the tragic and heroic figures.”49 It was clearly the same sentiment that, as Françoise also reports, made him “an avid Chaplin fan during the silent-film days. . . . More than once he had expressed a desire to meet Chaplin.”50 The clown is in fact one of the first circus figures Picasso painted: a picture of 1901 shows him in a bright yellow suit, standing in the center of an arena with his partner, a monkey in formal attire that Picasso must have seen at the Cirque Médrano. Monkeys, who had long been associated with clowns and fools, were popular at this time: Glasner’s Cirque des Singes, founded in 1898, performed regularly thereafter in Paris; and a drawing of Le Singe Consul, reproduced in 1902, depicts a monkey entertainer in formal dress like Picasso’s.51
IV
However deeply rooted in his own experience at the circus and fair, Picasso’s tendency to identify himself with the clowns and acrobats in his Rose Period pictures depends ultimately on the example of nineteenth-century artists and writers. The notion of the wandering saltimbanque symbolizing the nonconformist artist is a Romantic one. Already present in a youthful story by Flaubert,52 it is fully developed in the preface to Banville’s Pauvres Saltimbanques, a collection of essays on the theater, where each of these alienated creatures is compared with the other. “What is the saltimbanque, if not an independent and free artist who works wonders to gain his daily bread, who sings in the sun and dances under the stars without hope of entering an academy?”53 But the reverse is equally true: “Saltimbanques, and poor saltimbanques in fact, these inspired poets, these actors drunk with passion, these eloquent voices,” who are the subjects of Banville’s essays. The same theme occurs in Baudelaire’s prose poem Le Vieux Saltimbanque, which concludes with an explicit comparison of the old acrobat, alone and neglected in his fair booth, and the old poet who has outlived the generation he had once entertained brilliantly.54 Significantly, it also occurs in the early 1860s in the art of Baudelaire’s friend Daumier, whose profoundly pessimistic images of saltimbanques struggling to draw an audience, mount a sideshow, or flee the hostile city undoubtedly reflect the difficult, unsettled conditions of his own life after his dismissal from Le Charivari. By the end of the century, the association has become so familiar that a volume of biographical sketches of famous circus performers, comparing them in their inescapable loneliness and unhappiness to all entertainers and artists, is almost inevitably entitled Pauvres Saltimbanques.55
Like Picasso himself at times, however, some writers chose instead to identify their achievements with the professional skill and courage of the acrobat’s performance. The most familiar example is probably Edmond de Goncourt’s novel, Les Frères Zemganno, an allegory of his own career and that of his brother Jules, whose early death inspired the motive of the younger Zemganno’s nearly fatal accident. With his own experience in mind, Edmond dwells on the arduous early training of the two acrobats and on their subsequent efforts to invent increasingly complex movements and forms. Less familiar, but no less revealing, are two essays inspired by the publication of Les Frères Zemganno in 1879. In reviewing it, Barbey d’Aurevilly carried the analogy of acrobat and writer even further: “If we writers could write the way those people move, if we had in our style the inexhaustible resources of their vigor, their almost fluid suppleness, their flowing grace, their mathematical precision . . . we would be great writers.”56 And in a note published in the same year, Banville makes essentially the same point, remarking on the writer’s need to weigh and balance his words as the acrobat weighs and balances his own limbs, and affirming rather grandly that both must “soar with agility and confidence through space, above the void, from one point to another.”57
To another nineteenth-century tradition, also Romantic in origin, belongs the conception of the artist as a clown, a Harlequin, or a Pierrot that likewise pervades Picasso’s early work. In frontispieces designed to introduce albums of lithographs, for example, Charlet and Victor Adam already employ the circus sideshow and the Harlequin as metaphors of entertainment around 1830; and in a frontispiece for an album of etchings published in 1862, Manet employs a Punch for the same purpose.58 These figures had in fact become so popular by then, largely through the success of the Pierrot type created by the great mime Deburau, that the painter Anatole in the Goncourts’ novel Manette Salomon, haunted by its image, thinks of specializing in painting this type and of becoming known as “the Master of the Pierrots.” And not simply for artistic reasons, since Anatole also feels himself drawn to this legendary figure more intimately: “Between Pierrot and himself, he recognized ties, a parentage, a community, a family resemblance. . . . He loved him like someone who resembled himself, a little like a brother, and a lot like his own portrait.”59 Some twenty years later, there did emerge a Master of the Pierrots in the popular illustrator Willette, whom Apollinaire, a great admirer of his work, called “the whitest Pierrot who lives in Montmartre.”60 In his illustrated fantasies, published in Le Chat Noir and other magazines, Pierrot is a kind of bohemian artist, wistful and idealistic, while Harlequin is once again his shrewd and heartless self. In one such composition of 1885, Pierrot carouses with women, tangles with the wily Harlequin, wanders off to declare his love to the moon, and is eventually found hanging from a lamp post.61 Willette himself, in an autobiography appropriately entitled Feu Pierrot, affirmed that the latter was “no longer the facetious scoundrel of the Fun-ambulatory tradition: he has become a poet, an artist,” and that even Harlequin was now a painter whose latest success was “the exhibition and sale of a framed fragment of his multi-colored costume,” a sly allusion to Cubism and probably to Picasso himself.62
V
It was not only for the image of himself as an alienated yet exalted entertainer, like those of the circus and fair, that Picasso would have found precedents in older literature and art. His very choice of those subjects, although inspired by personal familiarity with them, is unimaginable without the example of specific paintings, novels, and poems, with some of which at least he must have been acquainted at the time. One of these, Cézanne’s Mardi Gras, which was available to him both at Vollard’s gallery, where he himself had exhibited, and at the Salon d’Automne of 1904,63 has been cited more than once as a source for the type of tall, slender, enigmatic Harlequin he began to paint in the fall of 1904, notably in pictures like the Harlequin’s Family. In fact, for Daix and Boudaille, who argue that “Picasso may have found in it a kind of authorization to paint this character,” its exhibition in November 1904 establishes a terminal point for dating the emergence of his new subject matter.64 Yet a similar type also appears, generally with a Columbine and other figures, in several pastels by Degas, which, in their narrative or dramatic aspects, centering on a tension between the sexes, resemble other pictures by Picasso, such as the Wedding of Pierrette and At the Lapin Agile, more closely than does the Cézanne. Although apparently not on view at the time, except at Durand-Ruel’s gallery, Degas’ pastels were known through photographic reproductions; in his Intimate Journals, Gauguin even discusses one that he had brought with him to the Marquesas Islands.65 Harlequins, Pierrots, and other characters from the Commedia dell’Arte also abound in the popular art of around 1900, not only as bohemian types in those amusing drawings by Willette that were much admired by the writers in Picasso’s circle, but as more worldly and flirtatious creatures in illustrated magazines like Le Courrier Français and above all in the widely reproduced prints and posters of Chéret.66 The earliest Pierrots in Picasso’s work, who are shown with their companions, also dressed in carnival costume, in studies for a poster celebrating New Year’s Day 1900, are in fact very similar to the types so often drawn by Chéret, and are rendered in an emphatic graphic style like his.
French art was not, of course, the only kind that Picasso was familiar with at the time, and not the only kind in which the ubiquitous Pierrot appears. In many of Beardsley’s drawings for books published in the 1890s, such as Ernest Dowson’s play The Pierrot of the Minute and volumes in the Pierrot’s Library series edited by John Lane, he is shown in various contexts of contemporary or fantasy life, like a modern everyman, and is drawn in a brilliant linear style whose appeal for the young Picasso is unmistakable.67 Moreover, Beardsley’s drawing The Death of Pierrot, a subject rarely found in the Commedia dell’Arte or in the art inspired by it, may well lie behind Picasso’s later picture of the Death of Harlequin, as Blunt and Pool have suggested.68 And needless to say, in Barcelona, where Picasso first came into contact with the art of Beardsley, Chéret, and other fin de siècle illustrators, Pierrot was an equally familiar figure. Witness the advertisement drawn by his friend Ramon Casas for the café Els Quatre Gats, showing its proprietor Pere Romeu manipulating a Punchinello puppet, and his own drawing of about 1901 made to advertise Lecitina Agell, in which Pierrot and Columbine are the principal elements.69
Through Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and other friends, Picasso must also have become acquainted around 1905 with the Commedia dell’Arte figures who so often appear in Symbolist poetry, particularly that of Verlaine and Laforgue. The former, we are told, was then “the most popular poet” in their circle, and the latter, although derided in their expression “Down with Laforgue,” was obviously familiar to them.70 In the early poems in Verlaine’s Fêtes Galantes and Jadis et Naguère, inspired by the art of Watteau and the Rococo generally, the Italian comedians, and above all “that rascal Harlequin,” “that fantastic swindler in crazy costumes,” naturally have prominent parts. But they also figure in some of the later poems in Parallèlement, for example in Pierrot Gamin, in whom Verlaine personifies his own longing for freedom and vice.71 Also inspired by Watteau and by the acting of Deburau is the Pierrot who dominates many of the poems in Laforgue’s Complaintes and his little play Pierrot Fumiste, although here he has been given a modern soul and has become “subject to all the hesitations and interior debate characterizing an impressionable man of the time.”72 Precisely the same fate, the product of a universal modern malaise, overtakes Harlequin in Henry Faure’s fantasy Les Deux Remords d’Arlequin, published in 1900. If Picasso would hardly have known this minor Symbolist work, he may well have seen or read Rudolph Lothar’s play König Harlekin, which was performed in Paris in 1902–03, published in the latter year, and discussed in the literary reviews to which his friends contributed.73 In scenes of brilliant irony, Harlequin comments here on the ambiguities of illusion and reality in a manner that corresponds closely to Picasso’s own, both in the Rose Period and later. And significantly, in doing so he assumes the very guises that Picasso had adopted: “Who am I?” Harlequin asks. “Sometimes I believe I am a King—so exalted do I feel. Sometimes I think I am a miserable beggar, an outcast. . . . Life is not what we have been, or what we are, but what we feel. My life is a search after the forms that express my feelings—it is pouring my soul daily into new moulds—it is being daily a different man. That is my life—that is my art. I am a creator.”74
Just as Lothar’s Harlequin corresponds to the exalted and mysterious one who figures in the types of Rose Period picture we have called existential and dramatic, so the Harlequin in the so-called domestic type has a literary precedent and possible source in several plays by Florian in which, abandoning his traditional role, he plays that of the lover, the husband, and the father. Although written over a century earlier, and in the idiom of the ancien régime, they were still popular enough in the late nineteenth century to be arranged as a comic opera, performed as a ballet—the very one that inspired Degas’ pastels of 1885—and even adapted for the use of school children.75 In fact, of all the literary and artistic sources on which Picasso might have drawn, Florian’s texts and the engravings illustrating them are unique in showing Harlequin in the domestic roles he so often plays in the Rose Period.
Of the countless images of saltimbanques in nineteenth-century art and literature, only those that Picasso might actually have come in contact with before 1905 are relevant here. Foremost among them are the paintings and watercolors by Daumier, such as The Saltimbanques and Saltimbanques Moving, whose spiritual affinities with Picasso’s works have already been discussed, and whose compositional similarities are in some cases equally striking. Occasionally reproduced in the early literature on Daumier, they also appeared in the retrospective exhibition of 1901, where they were singled out for praise by contemporary reviewers.76 Some of Seurat’s drawings of acrobats, made independently or as studies for the painting La Parade, were also to be seen in a retrospective exhibition, this one held early in 1905, at the peak of Picasso’s own interest in such subjects. Like La Parade itself, drawings such as Three Dancers project a mood of sadness and ritual solemnity that would surely have appealed to Picasso.77 Their literary counterparts are in those Romantic interpretations of saltimbanques of which Banville’s essay and Baudelaire’s prose poem have already been cited as examples, and which also include an essay by Huysmans whose affinities with certain pictures of the Rose Period are indeed striking. It is the early yet fully realized piece La Rive Gauche, in which Huysmans describes as a setting for a performance by a family of destitute saltimbanques exactly the kind of barren but curiously evocative rural landscape that appears in the background of Picasso’s pictures: “It is heart-rending, and yet this solitude doesn’t lack charm. . . . It is not the true countryside, so green, so smiling in the bright sun; it is a world apart, sad, arid, but for that very reason solitary and charming.”78
Once again, however, French art and literature are not the only ones we must consider in seeking Picasso’s sources, even for a period when he was most intimate with French painters and poets. In Spain, too, the saltimbanque had been and continued to be a popular subject. Los Saltimbanquis, a melodramatic opera by Calisto Navarro set in eighteenth-century Madrid, was performed there from 1886 on. More important, this was also the theme of a novel by Juan Pons y Massaveu published in Barcelona in 1905 as part of that Catalan resistance in which Picasso himself had participated earlier, and its illustrations showing acrobats performing in a public square or resting in their quarters were drawn by his former companion at Els Quatre Cats, Ricardo Opisso.79 Realistic in depicting the poverty and degradation of its protagonists, but consciously symbolic in raising this condition to the level of a tragic destiny, one that affects all such alienated creatures, En Mitja-Galta may well have encouraged Picasso to represent saltimbanques in these terms himself. Its very title, which refers both to the birthmark that divides Mitja-Galta’s face into a normal and a purple half and to the rational and violent sides of his personality, setting him apart from other men as the clown’s face patterned by makeup and the Harlequin’s half concealed by a mask set them apart, implies a symbolism close to Picasso’s own in many Rose Period works.
Still more popular in later nineteenth century art was the circus, which, with the theater, the music hall and the café-concert—subjects also treated often in Picasso’s early work—satisfied the taste for scenes of urban entertainment that emerged in the 1880s. Degas’ painting of the mulatto acrobat Miss La La hanging by her teeth at the Cirque Fernando and Huysmans’ vivid account of a high-wire act at the Folies-Bergere, both dating from 1879, are the most impressive early examples,80 but there is no evidence that Picasso knew them. On the other hand, Seurat’s painting of an equestrienne, a tumbler, and a clown at the Cirque Fernando was so popular in Picasso’s circle, at least in the Cubist period, that Apollinaire could speak of it as revealing “everything that modern art can have found of novelty.”81 And many of the paintings, drawings, and lithographs of the same circus by Toulouse Lautrec were accessible in reproductions and photographs and in retrospect exhibitions held between 1902 and 1905. Moreover, in the latter year, twenty two of his large colored drawings of these subjects were published in an album entitled Au Cirque.82 But if some of Lautrec’s images are like Picasso’s, the equestrian figures, for example, resembling his etching Little Circus, their concentration generally on the colorful and dramatic aspects only reinforces by contrast the inwardness and passivity of his own circus scenes.
Much closer in spirit are the pictures of clowns, acrobats, and wrestlers, sometimes seen in action in a sideshow but more often shown in sad and lonely meditation, that already begin to appear in Rouault’s work in 1903, and that he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne the following year. Their possible influence on Picasso has never been discussed, yet the pessimistic content of such works as Pierrot, Punch, and Harlequin and Head of a Tragic Clown would surely have been meaningful to him.83 Rouault’s symbolic conception of the clown, based on his recognition of “the contrast between brilliant, scintillating things intended to amuse us and this infinitely sad life” that the clown actually leads, and on his conviction that “this rich, spangled costume is given us by life, we’re all of us clowns, more or less,” is obviously very close to Picasso’s own conception, particularly in the Rose period.84 That the latter could indeed take a recently exhibited work like Rouault’s as a point of departure is evident only two years later in the relation between the Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse’s Joy of Life, as it is still later in the connection between the Three Musicians and Henri Hayden’s painting of the same subject.
No such sources in recent art or literature can be found for the fool who is shown in certain works of the Rose Period. This is the more surprising in that he, unlike the circus clown or acrobat, is a purely historical type, and already appeared as such in the Romantic novels and dramas in which he played a prominent part. In Victor Hugo’s Cromwell, he is Trick, Giraff, Gramadock, and Elespuru, the Lord Protector’s court fools; in Marion Delorme, he is L’Angély, the female buffoon of Louis XVI at Versailles; and in Le Roi S’Amuse, he is Triboulet, the famous jester of Francis I and one of the play’s two protagonists. Similarly, in Dumas père’s novel La Dame de Monsoreau, he is Chicot, the court fool of Henry III; and in Les Deux Fous by Paul Lacroix, he is once again the famous Triboulet. Although much earlier than Picasso’s pictures, these plays and novels are worth mentioning, since they were still being produced on stage or published in illustrated editions well into the twentieth century. The jester was also a popular subject among the Salon painters of the 1860s and 70s, satisfying a taste for historical genre with a piquant accent. Lambron’s widely reproduced picture, for example, shows a tall, slender Shakespearean fool rather like Picasso’s, and with a monkey that also figures in the latter’s works.85 Roybet’s picture of A Fool under Henry III is a more somber image, dwelling on the disturbing rather than the amusing aspects of folly; and the same is true of the strangely evocative drawings by Redon of a fool’s head with cap and bells that have been related to Picasso’s but were probably unknown to him.86 His source, if indeed he had one, is more likely to have been a popular work, such as Cham’s poster for the Almanach Pour Rire, where a gay jester wearing a cape and a feathered hat like some of those in Picasso’s drawings is shown.87
A jester also plays a part in Apollinaire’s poem Salomé, published in 1905, the year in which Picasso etched his own macabre version of that subject; it is Herod’s fool whom the poet plaintively addresses: “Weep not charming jestter / Take this head in your hands for a bauble and dance.”88 But the occurrence of these subjects simultaneously in the work of the two men merely hints at the extent of Picasso’s affinities with his literary friends. The more conclusive evidence lies precisely in their representations of those other fanciful entertainers, the Harlequins, saltimbanques, and clowns. Like Un Fantôme de Nuées, whose similarities to some of Picasso’s saltimbanque pictures were discussed previously, two of Apollinaire’s earlier poems, Crépuscule and Saltimbanques, resemble his pictures both in the choice and the conception of their subjects. The Columbine who “disrobes and / Admires her reflection in the pool” in the former poem is a sister to the narcissistic nude who contemplates her beauty while her husband holds their child in Harlequin’s Family, a picture that Apollinaire had in fact singled out in reviewing Picasso’s 1905 exhibition.89 Similarly, the mountebanks who “withdraw past garden walls / By doors of gray inns / Through villages without steeples” in the other poem correspond to those who wander in an equally bleak and lonely landscape in the Family of Saltimbanques and other works.90 More important, the poet and the painter share a mystical conception of their subjects that leads the one to write wistfully of the saltimbanque who dies en route and the other to paint the Death of Harlequin as a secular Lamentation, and that leads both of them to depict a circus family in vaguely religious terms, Apollinaire alluding to the mother’s child as “her Jesus” and to her husband as “Harlequin Trismegistus,” and Picasso evoking Renaissance images of the Holy Family in the Acrobat’s Family with a Monkey.91 Although these poems were first published in 1909, they may well have been composed earlier, since similar themes occur in Apollinaire’s work around 1901.
Acrobats and clowns are also treated in the early poems of two other writers in Picasso’s circle, Max Jacob and André Salmon. The latter’s first volume of verse, published in 1905 with a frontispiece by Picasso showing two saltimbanques, contains a poem explicitly identifying himself with the tightrope walker: “I am the acrobat who dances on the cord / Happy with his dizziness and his tattered finery.”92 And in his next volume, published two years later, there is a poem celebrating Rimbaud as an “angel and demon, poet and acrobat,” another one about the love of a circus clown and a tightrope walker, and still another one in which a gypsy acrobat, recalling the events of his long life, links his fate with that of the poet in the manner of Baudelaire’s Vieux Saltimbanque.93 The chronological relevance of Jacob’s early prose poems, which first appeared in Le Cornet à Dés in 1916, is less certain, but many undoubtedly date from the years of the Blue and Rose Periods. They, too, are often about the circus and wandering acrobats—Les Indigents Non Ambulants et les Autres is about a troupe of saltimbanques, Mutuel Mépris des Castes about a wild animal trainer, Tableau de la Foire about acrobats at a country fair, and so on—but their vision is always oblique, even eccentric, and their tone always ironic.94 Indeed, the real significance of Jacob for Picasso’s Rose Period probably lies more in his actual clowning than in his literary treatment of it. Even more than Picasso and Apollinaire, with whom he later formed the typically mystifying Société des Amis de Fantômas to celebrate their cult of the popular detective stories, he delighted in entertaining his friends with improvised acts. “He always loved making other people laugh,” Fernande Olivier recalls, “and he could be brilliantly witty and animated when he wanted to be . . . [His] songs used to delight us evening after evening. We never grew tired of them.”95
This was surely one reason why Picasso used Max Jacob as a model for the bronze head of a jester that he modeled after returning home with him from the circus one night,96 and more important, why he gave Jacob’s features and diminutive stature to the smallest of the wandering acrobats in the great painting to which all the other Rose Period works lead, the Family of Saltimbanques. For we find the same features in the portraits Picasso made of him two years later in preparation for the Demoiselles d’Avignon, where he was to play another imaginary role, that of a sailor, and the same sense of his stature in his own recollection that at this time he was “the ‘dancingest’ little clown on earth.”97 Similarly, the taller acrobat with a drum on his shoulder is based on the lean, attenuated figure of André Salmon, as he appears in a photograph taken in Picasso’s studio around 1908 and in Fernande Olivier’s memoir: “A dreamer with an alert sensibility, he was tall, thin, distinguished, with intelligent eyes in a very pale face, and he looked very young.”98 And finally, the stout acrobat or jester in the red costume bears an obvious resemblance to Apollinaire, as Salmon himself was the first to observe.99 Indeed Jacob compared Apollinaire, in the passage already quoted, with “A Farnese Hercules,” and Picasso caricatured him both as a muscle bound athlete devoted to “physical culture” and as a jester who is also a jovial, Gargantuan king—an image in which, as we have seen, he came to see Apollinaire “as king among the poets and as jester, i.e. amuser of painters, among art critics.”100 Almost inevitably, Picasso too is present in the Family of Saltimbanques, and in his favorite guise: the tall Harlequin at the left is an idealized self-portrait, his form and features lean in contrast to those of the stout acrobat, from whom he remains proudly aloof, just as Picasso himself was impressed but not awed by Apollinaire’s physical strength and dominating personality. Whether Fernande Olivier should also be seen in the seated woman at the right is less certain; for if the woman’s features are not hers, she does appear in the same position, holding her hand in the same affected manner, in a group portrait painted three years later by Marie Laurencin that bears an intriguing relation to the Family of Saltimbanques, since it shows Picasso and Apollinaire, too, in the places they occupy in that work.101
In any event, it is evident that the latter can also be seen as a group portrait, although an imaginary one, in which Picasso and his closest friends, all of them associated in temperament, behavior, and interests with both. the gaiety and the sadness of wandering acrobats and clowns, play the leading roles. The Family of Saltimbanques may in fact be one of the examples Max Jacob had in mind when he later wrote about Picasso: “Apollinaire’s face is often repeated in his works; mine too.” 102 In their fantastic yet highly autobiographical novels, his friends returned the compliment, Apollinaire portraying him as the visionary artist Benin Bird in Le Poète Assassiné, and Salmon as the Montmartre painter Sorgue in La Negresse du Sacré Coeur. This is why the real prototype in Picasso’s art for the Family of Saltimbanques is not the Blue Period Luncheon of the Soler Family, with which it has been compared,103 but the earlier drawing reproduced in Arte Joven, in which Picasso and several literary friends stand together as a similar group of bohemian outcasts against a similarly bleak landscape. And it is why the answer to the famous question of Rilke’s with which we began, “Who are they, these acrobats?,” is on one level quite simply “Picasso’s gang,” that select circle of painters and poets which was already known and admired at the time as “la bande à Picasso.”
—Theodore Reff
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NOTES
1.See especially P. H. von Blanckenhagen, “Rilke und ‘La Famille des Saltimbanques’ von Picasso,” Das Kunstwerk, 5, no. 4, 1951, pp. 43–54.
2. D. Cooper, Picasso, Theatre, New York, 1968, pp. 11–12.
3. F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, pp. 349–350. For the photographs, see Life, 65, no. 26, December 27, 1968, pp. 124–131.
4. See F. Wight, “Picasso and the Unconscious,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 13, 1944, pp. 210–212, and R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London, 1958, p. 108.
5. G. Stein, Picasso, London, 1938, p. 11, and A. Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, Paris, 1955–61, III, p. 257, respectively.
6. J. F. Marmontel, “Arlequin,” 1776, quoted in M. Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, Eng. trans., London, 1915, I, p. 64. See also P. L. Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, trans. R. T. Weaver, London, 1929, pp. 133–134.
7. See G. Attinger, L’Esprit de la Commedia dell’Arte dans le theatre francais, Paris and Neuchatel, 1950, pp. 435–450, and H. Warland, Die literargeschichtliche Entwickelung des fran-zösischen Harlekin, Cologne, 1913, pp. 80–85.
8. See M. W. Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, Boston and New York, 1925, pp. 189–192.
9. L. Riccoboni, Histoire du théâtre italien, 1731, quoted in Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, I, p. 63.
10. P. Daix and G. Boudaille, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods, Greenwich, Conn., 1967, no. VI.20 and VI.22.
11. See H. Thétard, La Merveilleuse histoire du cirque, Paris, 1947, II, pp. 33–34 and 254–262, for the photographs, and H. de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Circus, New York, 1952, for the drawings; also M. Joyant, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paris, 1926–27, II, pp. 234–237, on their publication in 1905.
12. Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, p. 196; see p. 30, on the earlier clown’s costume.
13. See E. Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, New York, 1935, chap. XII.
14. E. H. Bransten, “The Significance of the Clown in Paintings by Daumier, Picasso, and Rouault,” Pacific Art Review, 3, 1944,
p. 26.
15. G. Apollinaire, “Les Jeunes: Picasso, peintre,” La Plume, May 15, 1905, his Chroniques d’art, ed. L. C. Breunig, Paris, 1960, pp. 29–31.
16. G. Strehly, L’Acrobatie et les acrobates, Paris, 1903, p. 47.
17. Ibid., p. 50; also the pessimistic concluding remarks in chap. XXI.
18. It is from H. Frichet, Le Cirque et les forains, Tours, 1898, p. 153; a similar woodcut, showing a circus troupe making camp, is on p. 121.
19. Bransten, “The Significance of the Clown,” p. 26.
20. I discuss the major existential scene, the Family of Saltimbanques, in the final section of this article, the professional scenes in a Festschrift contribution to be published in 1972, and the domestic end dramatic scenes in “The First Decade,” Picasso: An Evaluation, ed. R. Penrose and J. Golding, London, 1971 (in press).
21. Quoted in Brassaï, Picasso and Company, trans. F. Price, New York, 1966, pp. 20–21.
22. Adrian, Histoire illustré des cirques parisiens d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, Bourg-la-Reine, 1957, pp. 112–116.
23. F. Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, trans. J. Miller, New York, 1965, p. 127.
24. Stein, Picasso, p. 7.
25. Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, p. 127.
26. Letter of June 17, 1910, in Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; kindly transcribed by Professor Anne Coffin Hanson.
27. Letter to D. H. Kahnweiler, April 1913, in M. Jacob, Correspondance, ed. F. Garnier, Paris, 1953–55, I, pp. 90–91.
28. Quoted in Brassaï, Picasso and Company, pp. 20–21.
29. Serge, Histoire du cirque, Paris, 1947, p. 194. See also Grock [A. Wettach], Sans blague, Paris, 1948, chap. IX.
30. Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, p. 127.
31. Brassai, Picasso and Company, pp. 20–21.
32. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, p. 109.
33. Cooper, Picasso, Theatre, p. 15.
34. See von Blanckenhagen, “Rilke und ‘La Famille des Saltim-banques’ von Picasso,” p. 47.
35. See G. Apollinaire, Selected Writings, trans. R. Shattuck, New York, 1949, pp. 160–165, for the text and translation. It was brought to my attention by Professor LeRoy Breunig.
36. R. Gomez de la Serna, Le Cirque, trans. A. Falgairolle, Paris, 1927 (first ed., 1917), pp. 22 and 187.
37. Serge, Histoire du cirque, pp. 194–195. For the other information, see M. Verne, Musées de voluptes, Paris, 1930, p. 272.
38. Statement of 1935, translated in A. H. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, New York, 1946, p. 273.
39. C. Zervos, “Picasso étudié par le Dr. Jung,” Cahiers d’Art, 7, 1932, pp. 352–354, translates and discusses Jung’s article of 1932 in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung.
40. Bransten, “The Significance of the Clown,” p. 27.
41. A. Blunt and P. Pool, Picasso: The Formative Years, Greenwich, Conn., 1962, p. 22.
42. Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 151. See also J. Cocteau, My Contemporaries, ed. M. Crosland, London, 1967, p. 84.
43. M. Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly, 1, 1937, p. 92.
44. Brassaï, Picasso and Company, pp. 20–21.
45. Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, II, pp. 328–329. H. Fabureau, Max Jacob, son oeuvre, Paris, 1935, pp. 28–29.
46. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, pp. 113–114.
47. Blunt and Pool, Picasso: The Formative Years, caption of ill. 157–160. See W. Willeford, The Fool and His Scepter, Evanston, III., 1969, chap. IX.
48. Quoted in F. Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters, London, 1963, p. 152.
49. Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 349.
50. Ibid., pp. 350–351.
51. It is reproduced in Les Spectacles à travers les âges, Paris, 1931, p. 271. On the Cirque des Singes, see J. Garnier, Forains d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, Orleans, 1968, pp. 114–115.
52. See E. W. Fischer, Etudes sur Flaubert inédit, Leipzig, 1908, p. 3.
53. T. de Banville, Les Pauvres saltimbanques, Paris, 1853, pp. 1214.
54. C. Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, ed. M. Ruff, Paris, 1968, pp. 156–157. See also the contemporary genre paintings of saltimbanques and their quarters by Gustave Doré and Joseph Stevens, reproduced in 1. Valmy-Basse, Gustave Doré, Paris, 1930, pp. 251 and 253, and G. Vanzype, Les Frères Stevens, Brussels, 1936, pp. 17, 82, 93, etc.
55. Signor Saltarino [H. W. Otto], Pauvres saltimbanques, Düsseldorf, 1891.
56. J. Barbey d’Aurevilly, “Les Freres Zemganno,” Le Constitutionnel, May 12, 1879, quoted in H. Trudgian, L’Evolution des idées esthétiques de J. K. Huysmans, Paris, 1934, pp. 120–121.
57. T. de Banville, “Le Clown et le poète,” Le National, May 12, 1879, his Critiques, ed. V. Barrucand, Paris, 1917, pp. 421–422.
58. R. Füglister, “Wer aber sind Sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden? Hinweise zum Motiv der fahrenden Komödianten, Gaukler und lahrmarktartisten in der französischen Kunst zur Zeit Daumiers,” Bulletin Annuel de la Fondation Suisse, Cité Universitaire, University de Paris, 12, 1963, pp. 34–35. T. Reff, “The Symbolism of Manet’s Frontispiece Etchings,” Burlington Magazine, 104, 1962, p. 184 and fig. 1.
59. E. and J. de Goncourt, Manette Salomon, Paris, 1894 [first ed., 1867], pp. 96–97.
60. G. Apollinaire, “Adolphe Willette,” L’Intransigeant, Jan. 26, 1911, his Chroniques d’art, pp. 142–143; see also pp. 159 and 305.
61. See Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, pp. 307–308.
62. A. Willette, Feu Pierrot, Paris, 1919, pp. 123–128, from a lecture on “Pierrot et Pierrette” given in 1912.
63. L. Venturi, Cézanne, son art, son oeuvre, Paris, 1936, no. 552. Also popular at the time were Couture’s numerous pictures of Harlequins and Pierrots; see G. Bertauts-Couture, “Essai de catalogue des oeuvres du peintre Thomas Couture,” Etudes d’Art, no. 11–12, 1955–56, pp. 204–205.
64. Daix and Boudaille, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods, p. 70.
65. P. Gauguin, Intimate Journals, trans. V. W. Brooks, New York, 1936, p. 146. For the pastels, see P. A. Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre, Paris, 1946–49, III, no. 771, 806, 817, 818, 1032 bis, 1033, etc.
66. See C. Mauclair, Jules Chéret, Paris, 1930, pp. 115–125, passim, and H. Schardt, Paris 1900, New York, 1970, pp. 61 and 85, for posters.
67. The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley, New York, 1967 [first ed., 1900], pl. 73–77 and 144–148.
68. Blunt and Pool, Picasso: The Formative Years, caption of 134–135.
69. See J. F. Rátols, Modernismo y modermstas, Barcelona, 1949, p. 131, and A. Cirici-Pellicer, Picasso avant Picasso, trans. M. de Floris and V. Gasol, Geneva, 1950, pp. 113–114, respectively.
70. See J. Sabartes, Picasso: Documents iconographiques, trans. F. Leal and A. Rosset, Geneva, 1954, pp. 61–62, and R. Guiette, “Vie de Max Jacob,” Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 43, 1934, p. 251.
71. P. Verlaine, Oeuvres poetiques completes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec, Paris, 1954, pp. 83, 90, 94–95, 200–201, 374–375, etc.
72. W. Ramsey, Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, New York, 1953, p. 143, with references to the texts mentioned above.
73. See the reviews in Mercure de France, 44, 1902, p. 526, Revue Blanche, 29, 1902, pp. 315–316, Joventut, 4, 1903, pp. 440–442, and ibid., 6, 1905, pp. 656–657.
74. R. Lothar, König Harlekin, Munich and Leipzig, 1904, p. 20. A French translation by R. de Machiels was published in Paris in 1903,
75. See J. P. C. de Florian, Les jumeaux de Bergame, arranged by W. Busnach, Boulogne, 1875, for the comic opera; L. Browse, Degas Dancers, London, 1949, p. 58, on the ballet; and G. de Wailly, Arlequin maitre de maison, Paris, 1897, and Colombine héritière, Paris, 1898, for the adaptations; also A. Nicoll, The World of Harlequin, Cambridge, 1963, p. 191, on the plays themselves.
76. See the reviews in Mercure de France, 35, 1900, pp. 146–149, ibid., 39, 1901, pp. 215–218, and Revue Blanche, 25, 1901, pp. 215–216; also K. E. Maison, Honoré Daumier, Greenwich, Conn., 1968, I, no. 25, 126, 185, and II, no. 534, 543, 550, etc.
77. See C. M. de Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, Paris, 1961, I, no. 187 and 213, and II, no. 671, 672, 674, etc.
78. J. K. Huysmans, “La Rive gauche,” 1874, his Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Descaves, Paris, 1928–29, I, pp. 65–76.
79. Two of the illustrations are reproduced in A. Cirici-Pellicer, El Arte modernista catalan, Barcelona, 1951, pp. 414 and 416. For help in translating the novel, I am indebted to Professor José Barrio-Garay.
80. See T. Reff, “Degas and the Literature of His Time II,” Burlington Magazine, 112, 1970, p. 677 and fig. 28.
81. G. Apollinaire, “La Vie artistique,” L’Intransigeant, Dec. 23, 1910, his Chroniques d’art, p. 135; see also pp. 140 and 192 on this painting.
82. See H. de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Circus, New York, 1952, and M. Joyant, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paris, 1926–27, I, pp. 265–299, passim, and II, pp. 255–256.
83. See P. Courthion, Georges Rouault, New York, 1961, pp. 377, 378, 389, and 410–411, also pl. 47, 75, 116, etc., and Bransten, “The Significance of the Clown,” pp. 34–39.
84. Undated early letter to Edouard Schuré, quoted in Courthion, Georges Rouault, p. 86.
85. The engraving reproduced here is from the Art Journal, 37, 1875, opposite p. 108. On the monkey as a companion of fools, see H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, London, 1952, chap. VII.
86. See J. F. L. Merlet, “Les Bouffons et les fous de cour,” in J. Grand-Carteret, L’Histoire, Ia vie, les moeurs et la curiosité, Paris, 1927–28, II, pp. 219–234, and K. Berger, Odilon Redon, Phantasie und Farbe, Cologne, 1964, pl. 43 and 44.
87. Schardt, Paris 1900, p. 53. For the jesters on playing cards, another “popular” source, see H. R. D’Allemagne, Les Cartes jouer, Paris, 1906, I, pp. 179–197.
88. G. Apollinaire, Alcools, trans. A. H. Greet, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965, pp. 90–91.
89. Ibid., pp. 46–47. For the review, see G. Apollinaire, “Les Jeunes: Picasso, peintre,” La Plume, May 15, 1905, his Chroniques d’art, pp. 29–31.
90. Apollinaire, Alcools, pp. 100–101.
91. See the first (combined) version of these poems, in G. Apollinaire, Oeuvres poetiques, ed. M. Adema and M. Decaudin, Paris, 1959, pp. 1056–1057; and Blunt and Pool, Picasso: The Formative Years, caption of ill. 130–133.
92. A. Salmon, Créances 1905–1910, suivi de Carreaux 1918–1921, Paris, 1968, p. 8. Also quoted in Blunt and Pool, Picasso: The Formative Years, p. 22. On the frontispiece, see Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, I, p. 189.
93. Salmon, Créances 1905–1910, pp. 96–97, 81–82, and 90–93, respectively.
94. M. Jacob, Le Cornet à dés, Paris, 1945 (first ed., 1916), pp. 87, 139, and 178, respectively; see also pp. 198 and 207.
95. Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, pp. 59–61.
96. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, pp. 113–114.
97. Letter to Tristan Tzara, Feb. 26, 1916, his Correspondance, ed. F. Garnier, Paris, 1953–55, I, p. 116. For the portraits, see C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1932– , II, no. 6 and 7.
98. Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, p. 75. For the photograph, see E. Fry, Cubism, New York, 1966, fig. 8.
99. A. Salmon, “Picasso,” L’Esprit Nouveau, 1, 1920, pp. 64–66.
100. Quoted in Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters, p. 152. For the athlete drawing, see Zervos, Pablo Picasso, XXII, no. 286.
101. See Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters, pp. 156–165.
102. M. Jacob, “Souvenirs sur Picasso,” Cahiers d’Art, 2, 1927, p. 202.
103. See von Blanckenhagen, “Rilke und ‘La Famille des Saltimbanques’ von Picasso,” p. 47.
