Vanished Smile (13 page)

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, pretty much alone among the dealers, artists, and friends who saw the painting in Picasso's studio, recognized what he was seeing. He bought all the preliminary drawings and studies and would have bought the
canvas, too, but Picasso put it away again. In a 1961 interview, Kahnweiler said: “I could not put a label on it. The picture Picasso had painted seemed to everyone mad or monstrous at the same time. There was something painful and beautiful there, and oppressive but imprisoned.”
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Reaction was so intense that, four years after finishing it, Picasso had still never exhibited the painting publicly.

Instead of searching the studio, the detective remained pinned at the door by the twelve watchful eyes while Picasso dressed. In an attempt at bravado, the painter chose his favorite red-and-white polka-dot cotton shirt and an elegant silk tie that clashed violently. He was shaking so uncontrollably that Fernande had to button the shirt for him. With his ashen face and vivid outfit, Picasso looked like one of his Rose-Period harlequins.

He was taken by bus from Pigalle to the Palais de Justice. No police vehicle was available. The government would not pay the taxi fare for an alleged criminal, nor was a suspect permitted to spring for a cab. Picasso would never again take the bus that went from Pigalle to Halle aux Vins.

While the police were picking up Picasso, Apollinaire was transported from his jail cell to the Palais de Justice. He was taken in “a kind of cage”
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that was very tight quarters for such a large man and very hot. At eleven o'clock, he arrived at the courthouse, where he became the newest in a long line of illustrious and infamous prisoners. The assassin Ravaillac, who stabbed Henri IV; the royal favorite Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV; Charlotte Corday and her unrequited lover Adam Lux; Queen Marie Antoinette; and the revolutionaries Danton and Robespierre had all been held there while awaiting
execution. Apollinaire spent the next four hours in a narrow and stinking holding cell, his face glued to the bars, straining to see who was passing in the corridor.

At three o'clock, a guard led him handcuffed to the courtroom to be arraigned with his accomplice. As the door opened, he was swept up in a surge of reporters and photographers. Some fifty cameras were aimed at him, and the magnesium flashes startled and unnerved him. Later, Apollinaire would say, “I found myself suddenly stared at like a strange beast. … I think that I must have laughed and wept at the same time.”

Apollinaire and Picasso faced each other across the courtroom like two strangers. Picasso appeared even smaller in that imposing hall of justice. His polka-dot shirt and clashing tie were a gesture of bravado that appeared more pathetic than defiant.

After two days in jail, Apollinaire had a hollow, haunted aspect. He was gray and unshaven, his shirt unbuttoned, the collar torn. His three-piece beige wool suit, much too heavy for the terrible heat, was rumpled and ripped.

The confrontation between the gang leaders had the dimensions of a comic opera gone awry. Seeing the large Apollinaire like “a lamentable scarecrow, gaunt and insubstantial,” affected Picasso. He would tell Fernande that he “became completely desperate. His heart failed him even more than it had in the morning when he was unable to dress himself, he was shivering so violently.”

Painter and poet were so nervous that in their confusion and desperation to assert their own innocence, truth and friendship were forgotten. They contradicted themselves and each other, each accusing the other of bringing the stolen statues to the newspaper. Both men wept and begged for forgiveness and freedom.

Apollinaire, after being grilled for hours like a criminal, had confessed to everything: harboring Géry, possessing stolen
goods, signing a manifesto that called for burning down the Louvre. He had implicated and identified Géry and Picasso in the theft of the Iberian figures. Now Judge Drioux fixed on the painter. Glaring at Picasso through his pince-nez, he rasped out questions in his gravel voice. Picasso's tough-guy pose evaporated like color under turpentine. In his fear, he pleaded absolute ignorance. He swore that he knew nothing whatever about
l'Affaire des Statuettes
. He did not know the primitive Iberian heads were stolen goods, and he did not know Apollinaire. Like Simon Peter when asked, “Do you know this man?,” Picasso replied, “I have never seen him before.”

EXACTLY WHAT TRANSPIRED
in that Paris courtroom before Judge Henri Drioux depends on who is telling the story. Apollinaire would recall sometime later: “I thought I was lost, but the investigating magistrate saw that I had done nothing, and was simply being victimized by police because I had refused to betray the fugitive to them, and he authorized me to question the witness; and using the maieutics dear to Socrates, I quickly forced X to admit that everything I had said was true.” “X,” of course, was Picasso, and “maieutics” was a word only Apollinaire could wield.

Fernande gave a different version, minus both Socrates's method of eliciting the truth through clever questioning and Apollinaire's wordplay. Her account was gentler and, as always, protective of Picasso:

At the end of the arraignment, Picasso, who had bought the stolen goods, was released on his own recognizance and warned not to leave Paris. For weeks afterward, he lived furtively. By nature brooding, he became paranoid, worried that he would be arrested again. He ventured out only at night, and then only in a taxi. He was convinced he was being shadowed and would switch cabs to shake his tail. He slept fitfully, always listening for another knock at his door.

Apollinaire was returned to the Sante prison, still suspected of belonging to a gang of international art thieves. Géry, not without remorse—although it was late in coming—dashed off a wry note from Frankfurt to the
Paris-Journal
to exonerate his friend.

With nothing to substantiate the gang of international thieves except Géry's fanciful fabrication, Apollinaire was released provisionally on September 13 after a final interrogation, but all charges were not dismissed until January 1912. Apollinaire's last appearance before Magistrate Drioux was very different from the previous ones. He knew his bad dream was ending, and with his wits and wit restored, he parried with the judge.

Géry had stolen from the Louvre three times, twice in 1907 taking the statues that Picasso had bought, and a third time in 1911.

The moment he was released, Apollinaire went directly from the courtroom to the offices of the
Paris-Journal
and dashed off his own account of his jail term.

“Mes Prisons”
by Guillaume Apollinaire ran in the paper the next day. The account began:

Later, Apollinaire would call it “strange, incredible, tragic, and amusing all at once” that he was the only person arrested in France for the theft of Mona Lisa.

L'AFFAIRE DES STATUETTES
may have started as a practical joke instigated by the arts editor for the
Paris-Journal
with Géry's feckless collusion. André Salmon had lived in
le bateau-lavoir
. He was a friend of Apollinaire and Géry, and one of
la bande de Picasso
. Like all the actors in the tragicomedy that played to sold-out audiences in the newspapers and courtrooms of Paris, Salmon was impudent and ambitious.

A slender man in every way—face, physique, and talent—with an acerbic charm, he was a lesser star to the twin suns of Apollinaire and Picasso. Perhaps that tempted him to exploit Géry's chronic quest for easy money. When the opportunity presented itself, Salmon may have devised a humorous ruse that got out of hand. It may have been irresistible to a clever mind like his—a prank, perhaps embarrassing, though with no malevolent intent—but it became something else, something much larger and damaging that he could not control.

Salmon probably intended the “confessions” to be amusing, and they were, but, as noted before, the Paris police were not celebrated for their sense of humor. If he instigated the hoax, Salmon misjudged the mood of Paris, the magnitude of the Mona Lisa theft, the pressure on the police, and the backlash against the cultural anarchists—excoriated as foreign thieves despoiling the museums of Paris. Above all, he misjudged the depth of shame he would bring on his friends. Salmon never admitted that he had played a role in the affair, and he continued to write articles and books. His greatest success would
come years later, in his memoirs of that band of creative brothers. In
Souvenir sans fin
, he would conjure again the romance of the Picasso gang that he, more than anyone, may have destroyed.

As for Géry, he turned up the next year in Cairo, where he was arrested and eventually acquitted. In his fiction, Apollinaire wrote of Baron d'Ormesan, “Our numerous encounters … had given me occasion to appreciate his singular character, his lack of scruples, his somewhat disorderly erudition, and his agreeable and kindly disposition. …” In relaying the news of Géry's arrest, Apollinaire wrote, “The poor fellow was crazy rather than a criminal, the courts must have thought so, too.”

With the detention of Apollinaire and Picasso, the theft of Mona Lisa assumed an added dimension—a clash of the twentieth-century contender with the Renaissance master. Leonardo's Mona Lisa was a climactic performance of the Renaissance. Picasso's
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
was the opening act of modern art.

Mona Lisa personified what the Picasso gang was rebelling against, and in
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
, Picasso painted her antithesis. He was becoming increasingly alienated from the empirical world that Leonardo had drawn from. He destroyed the perspective that Leonardo had mastered, and he obliterated the human face that Leonardo had perfected. The eternal
Gioconda
that could never be surpassed draws us in, holding us entranced. Picasso's whores “stare us down.”
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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
has been called “the most worked-on picture in the history of art,” and in its initial stage, all the figures had Iberian features. Under the spell of the
ancient sculptures from his native Spain, Picasso painted feverishly, creating the huge brothel scene. Sometime later he would say that the asymmetrical faces of the central figures with their angular planes were copied directly from the stolen art. The dominant features were the Iberian eyes, much larger than in life, bulging under “lids like the rim of a cup,”
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and the ears, equally oversize and disproportionate, curling like scrolls. Years later, when it was safe to do so, Picasso admitted that he had used the stolen figures, but even then he blamed Apollinaire for their theft: