Metamorphosis II

‘From the time Picasso first settled in Paris, in 1904, one of his closest friends was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who fostered the artist´s appreciation of French literatura and philosophy. The two men came to share intelectual and asthetic preoccupations that cross-pollinated their creative efforts. Apollinaire´swriting contained both traditional and transgressive strains that stimulated parallel trends in Picasso´s art. Their cherised bond was cut short on November 9, 1918, when Apollinaire, weakened by wounds suffered in combat during the First World War, died of influenza at the age of thirty-eight. Two years later, a committee of the poet´s heirs and admirers launched a campaign to finance a monument to adorn his tomb at the Père Lachaise cementery in Paris. Picasso was the natural choice to design the commission even before sufficient funds had been raised to realice it. Metamorphosis II is one of the many results of this commission. It belongs to a pair of nearly identical maquettes, first molded in plaster, then each cast as a unique bronze, that mark Picasso´s first return to freestanding sculpture since his groundbreaking Glass of Absinthe of 1914 [1].

Disagreements over what style and tone Apollinare´s memorial should take were destined to prevent the Project from moving forward for many years: conservative members of the committee preferred a conventional effigy, while Picasso envisioned a revolutionary work informed by the radical ideas that underlie Apollinaire´s writing. One of those ideas is intersexuality, a central theme of his comedic play Les Mamelees de Tirésias (The breast of Tiresias, 1903), in which the protagonist switches genders at will, from female to male and back again, while her husband, incredibly, gets pregnant and gives birth to thousands of babies, “something like a daughter-father with a maternalized paternal instinct” [2]. Promoted by its autor as a “drame surréaliste”, the piece premiered in June 1917 [3].

Fig 1. Pablo Picasso, Female Figure (Bather) (Picasso Sculptor Sketchbook) September 1927. Pen, india ink, black ink, and graphite on cardboard, 30,3 x 23,2 cm Musée national Picasso-Paris

Ten years later, during a summer holiday in Cannes, Picasso visually expounded the concept of androgynous fertility in his earliest putative drawings for the Apollinaire monument. By this time the term “Surrealism” has become the banner of a literary artistic movement headed by the poet André Breton, a devotee of both Apollinaire and Picasso. The Cannes drawings fill two sketchbooks with Surrealistic bathers composed predominantly of male and female generative parts. Their nudity, plumoness, and statuesque presence indicate that Picasso probably had in mind their body of his new teenage mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who would captivate his erotic and artistic imagination for the next several years. In one memorable example, a towering erection stands for a woman´s head and neck between conical breasts that point in different directions (fig. 1). Despite their biomorphic weirdness, born a cubist rearrangements of the human anatomy, most of these bathers are classically modeled in subtle gradations of light and shadow, and well balanced on at least one study foot.

Metamorphosis II is a three-dimensional synthesis of the virtual sculptures drawn in the Cannes sketchbooks. Partly for this reason, commentators have repeatdly focused on the sculpture´s genital characteristics. As Luise Mahler and ther collagues have rightly remarked, “Picasso approached the human subjetcs as if to focus only on the infromation of sexual relevance: orífices, protuberances, swellings, slits, and curves” [4]. That the largest of these protuberances takes the form of an aquiline nose has gone unmentioned in the extensive literature of the Methamorphosis culptures. Yet there can be Little doubt that an emphatic nasal bulge overhangs the footlike appendage on which these sculptures stand. While the fetishist humour of placing an enormous olfactory organ above a dangling set of toes could refer to certain kinky scenarios in Apollinaire´s pornographic novel Les Onze Mille Verges (The eleven thousand rods), of 1907, it more likely alludes to one of his last poems, dedicated to Picasso on the day of the artist´s wedding to Olga Khokhlova on July 12, 1918. Apollinaire, who had himself gotten married just two months prior, honored the occasion with the following lines:

If from Cleopatra´s long nose
By chance four noses had been made
The way of the world would have required
That in your moldering bachelorhood
You should stay without partner
And this is why I went into battle
Our marriages are the children
Of this war and are triumphant [5]

Fig. 2. Guillaume Apollinaire, À mon ami Pablo Picasso… Letter from Guillaume Apollinare to Pablo Picasso, July 12, 1918

Peter Read points out that “smell, according to Apollinaire, was the primary human sense,” and the image of Cleopatra´s long nose is “characteristically bawdy because in France a long nose is trasditionally associated with sexual potency.” [6]. As if to make the pun perfectly plain, Apollinaire sketched a phallic nose in profile below the text on the only surviving manuscript of the poem (fig. 2) [7]. It would appear, then, that a trace of Apollinaire´s poetic tribute to Picasso remerged, a decade later, in one of Picasso´s sculptural tributes to Apollinaire.

In late 1927 the artista submitted a selection of potential designs for the tomb monument, including his recent bather drawings and, possibly, the original Metamorphosis maquettes. The committee in charge summarily rejected these proposal, suspectings that Picasso was making a grotesque joke at their expense. The following year, he presented another set of designs based on an entiretly different concept, but these, too failed to satisfy. In the end, the comittee´s cautious disapporval would serve to fuel Picasso´s daring sculptural experiments in plaster, iron, and sheet metal. As he later remarked to Roland Penrose, “But what did they expect?.. I can´t make a muse holding a torch just to please them [8]’ [9].

[1] The plaster originals of Metamorphosis I and Metamorphosis II, as well as the bronze cast of Metamorphosis I, are in the Musée national Picasso-Paris.
[2] ‘En somme vous êtes quelque chose comme une fille-père. Ne serait-ce pas chez vous instinct paternal maternisé’. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Drame surréaliste en deux actes et un prologue, Paris, Éditions Sic, 1918, act II, scene II, p. 87.
[3] For more on the play´s thematic links to Picasso´s designs for the Apollinaire monument see FITZGERALD Michael C., Pablo Picasso´s Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire: Surrealism and Monumental Sculpture in France, 1918-1959. PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987, pp.146-51.
[4] MAHLER Luise and Virginie Perdrisot with Rebecca Lowery, ‘Metamorphosis I and Metamorphosis II 1928’, in TEMKIN Ann and Anne Umland, Picasso Sculpture, exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, p.105.
[5] ‘Si du grand nez de Cléopâtre/Par hazard on en eût fait quatre/La loi du monde aurait voulu/Qu´en ton célibat vermoulu/ Tu fusses resté sans compagne/Et cést pourquoi j´ai fait campagne/Nos mariages son enfants/De cette guerrre et triomphants’. Transcribed and reprinted in Pierre Caizergues and Hélène Seckel, eds., Picasso/Apollinaire: Correspondance, Paris: Gallimard, 1992, pp. 169-71, no. 142. Eng, trans. from Peter Read, Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008, pp. 130-31.
[6] Read, Picasso and Apollinaire, pp. 130-1
[7] See Caizergues and Seckel, eds., Picasso/Apollinaire, pp. 169-71, no. 142.
[8] Picasso, quoted in Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, 1958, repr. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981, p. 229, quoted in FitzGuerald, “Pablo Picasso´s Monument”, pp. 93-94.
[9] Ross Finocchio in FITZGERALD, Michael. Pablo Picasso. Structures of invention. The unity of a life´s work. [Cat. Exp.: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2024]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, pp.188- 193.