Vanished Smile (12 page)

In Paris in 1902, he shed Kostro and invented himself as Apollinaire. When asked once for a biographical sketch, he wrote: “I don't know what to say. I have no past, and for that reason I should be happy, like peoples without history. … My
assets consist of a total lack of money, a knowledge of literature that I believe extensive, a few languages living and dead, and a rather varied experience of life….”

Like so many aspiring poets, Apollinaire scrambled for sustenance and success. He was variously a bank clerk, an art critic, a poet, and a pornographer. As voluble as Picasso was withdrawn, Apollinaire possessed a mixture of nobility and vulgarity, energy and intelligence. For a while, he wrote a column about women authors under the pseudonym Louise Lalanne. (When he tired of the column, he announced that Mademoiselle Lalanne had been abducted by an army officer.) He also edited a series of erotic classics, including the works of the Marquis de Sade, whom he rescued from obscurity. De Sade's definition of art as “the perpetual immoral subversion of the existing order” captured Apollinaire's imagination, imbued his criticism, and came to define the new art.

Apollinaire was a passionate proselytizer, presenting modern art to a world not yet ready to embrace it. He provided the intellectual framework and the rationale for much of the art of the twentieth century. The pure freedom he discovered in the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade was a profound influence, underlying his iconoclasm, his openness to experimentation in art and life, and the imagination he brought to the creation of new canons. In his book
Les peintres cubistes
, Apollinaire expounded on the theory and psychology of cubism. He gave a name and a conceptual context to orphism, and he coined the word “surrealism.” Although he was roundly mocked as an obtuse critic and huckster by those he bolstered, he gave legitimacy and attention to Picasso and to many other painters, writers, and musicians.

“Guillaume was extraordinarily brilliant,” Gertrude Stein wrote, “and no matter what subject was started, if he knew anything about it or not, he quickly saw the whole meaning of
the thing and elaborated it by his wit and fancy carrying it further than anybody knowing anything about it could have done, and oddly enough generally correctly.”

She rather grandly described him as having the head of a Roman emperor. In reality, it more closely resembled a potato. The dominant feature was a perfect Pythagorean triangle of a nose, closely abutted by small, birdlike eyes and eyebrows like recumbent commas. For someone who discoursed continuously and with such consequence, it is surprising that his mouth was his most meager feature, the lips like slivers of pimento stuck on a large, doughy face.
^∗9

He was his own singular creation, a large man physically, with large appetites for life, art, and friendship. He dressed in English wool regardless of the season, because to someone always trying to overcome his bastard birth and reprobate mother, the British epitomized respectability, and he rarely ventured out without a pipe clenched in his mouth and a hat, which always appeared too small and precariously perched on his large head.

Where Picasso was cocky, Apollinaire was exuberant. Striding across Paris from end to end, writing poetry as he walked, he composed his own autobiography. It was a work of fiction he could live by, a story that would make him legitimate and match his enormous enthusiasms. As Kostro, he had grown up always thinking on his feet, embroidering stories to get by, one step ahead of the law—dodging creditors and absconding from hotels in the dead of night. On September 7, the law caught up with him.

THE ARREST OR
Guillaume Apollinaire was a startling development in a startling crime. The “pope of cubism”
^∗10
was transported in handcuffs to the Palais de Justice, where he was arraigned before Magistrate Drioux. The proceedings lasted well into the night. Apollinaire was told that anonymous sources had linked him to
L'Affaire des Statuettes
—specifically, that he had been in contact with the thief who signed himself Baron d'Ormesan and that he had received the stolen sculptures recently returned to the
Paris-Journal
. If he did not identify the baron, he would be charged with harboring a criminal, possession of stolen goods, and thwarting a police investigation. For hours, Apollinaire refused to provide any information. Finally, after prolonged and fruitless questioning, Judge Drioux signed an arrest warrant. Aghast at the prospect of imprisonment, Apollinaire reluctantly complied.

The Louvre Thief, Baron Ignace d'Ormesan, was Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret, a Belgian in his early thirties who had been living in Apollinaire's apartment and working for him as a secretary of sorts. Apollinaire's fictional d'Ormesan describes himself as “an artist… and what is more,” he says, “I invented my branch of art myself, and am the only one to practice it.” By all accounts, the real Géry was matinee-idol handsome, blithely amoral, probably bisexual, and absolutely irresponsible. His father, a prominent lawyer in Brussels, had committed suicide, and his bereaved mother paid her prodigal son to leave home permanently.

Géry was a disarming and polished social parasite, a
vagabond in the engaging French tradition of troubadours, living by his wits and his charm, always tempting fate. He spent four years gallivanting in the American West, then returned to Paris. Like Picasso and Apollinaire, Géry loved the circus. They went to the Medrano Circus most weeks. Picasso painted his harlequins and street performers, Apollinaire put them in his poems, and Géry became a circus promoter. When he wasn't galloping around Paris naked except for chaps, a cowboy hat, and a set of sandwich boards, he stole artifacts from the Louvre as a lark. It was a diversion and favorite pastime. As he was leaving Apollinaire's apartment in the mornings, he would say to Marie, “I'm on my way to the Louvre. Anything I can pick up for you?” Incriminating the Picasso gang was another lark.

In Apollinaire's story, Baron d'Ormesan asks, “Which of us has not a crime on his conscience? … For my part, I no longer even count them. But I have committed several which have brought me in quite a lot of money. And if I am not a millionaire today, my appetites rather than my scruples are to blame.”

D'Ormesan goes on to tell Apollinaire's first-person narrator, “You are the only person in whom I can confide, because I have known you for so long, and know also that you will never betray me.”

Once he revealed Géry's identity, Apollinaire expected to be freed. Instead, he was taken to Le Sante prison, where he was stripped, searched, and locked in a cell. The next day, he was grilled again for hours. Apollinaire admitted that on the now infamous date of August 21, he had bought Géry a train ticket to Marseilles, packed up his friend's belongings, and urged him to leave the country. Instead of being safely out of France, Géry had resurfaced five days later and sold his story to the
Paris-Journal
.

The circumstantial evidence against Apollinaire was damning. Although Géry was a restless rogue never long in one place, Apollinaire always put him up during his various sojourns in Paris and often found him work. He knew that Géry had been in possession of stolen art that originated in the Louvre, yet he had sheltered him, and more damaging, he had aided and abetted his friend's aborted getaway. Mona Lisa and Baron d'Ormesan disappeared on the same day—she from the Louvre, he from Apollinaire's apartment.

Prefect Lépine was confident he had apprehended a ringleader in the international gang of art thieves he had been hunting. All the pieces—target, motive, and opportunity—implicated Apollinaire in Mona Lisa's abduction. It only remained for the poet-provocateur to identify his accomplices. Lépine wanted the names of Géry's other “colleagues”—particularly the painter who had bought the stolen statues. When Apollinaire did not comply, Lépine warned that, unless he cooperated and named the painter, everyone close to him—his mother, Marie, and his brother—would be brought in for questioning and their homes searched. Eventually, Apollinaire gave his interrogators the name they wanted. Even then he tried to protect his friend, insisting Picasso had been “taken advantage of” and never knew the antiquities came from the Louvre.

Picasso and Fernande had been waiting anxiously for word from Apollinaire. “Hearing nothing from our friend, we were worried,” she recounted, “but we didn't dare go and see him.” Apollinaire had been detained for more than thirty-six hours before news of his arrest broke in
Le Matin
. Over a picture of the poet in handcuffs, the headline of September 9 read:

Apollinaire was one of the most public and popular members of the artistic community of Paris, and his arrest caused such a sensation that Magistrate Drioux was forced to issue a formal statement defending the action. The investigation had “collected evidence tending to show that Guillaume Apollinaire had transgressed against the penal code,” the judge wrote. “I will add that his arrest appeared to me to be indispensable to the prosecution of the search made with a view to discovering the Louvre thieves.”

The
Paris Herald
reported: “The police believe the theft of the three statuettes to have been the work of a gang of international museum thieves and that this same gang is responsible for the disappearance of
la Gioconda.”
According to Lépine's strained logic, if gang members had possessed the primitive statues stolen from the Louvre, it only remained to uncover where they had stashed the other missing work.

As the story of Apollinaire's arrest broke in the morning paper, the police were rounding up the other ringleader.

NINETEEN DAYS AFTER
Mona Lisa disappeared, the police paid a visit to Boulevard de Clichy. Picasso, who liked to sleep until noon, was roused at seven a.m. by a persistent knocking at the door. A groggy Fernande, her eyes little more than slits, a gossamer dressing gown wrapped around her extravagant body, opened the door.

The studio presented a scene of eclectic chaos with no concern for color, order, or harmony. In the early light, the chalky silhouette of the Sacré-Coeur gleamed through a high window, looking more like a stage set than a place where sins were confessed and sacrifice offered. Easels and canvases shared studio space with ceremonial African figures, an immense Louis-Philippe couch upholstered in violet velvet with gold buttons, and stolid, ungainly, secondhand furniture that Fernande referred to as Picasso's “Louis XIV style.” Suspended randomly and at odd angles on the walls were tattered Aubusson tapestries, primitive masks, battered musical instrument cases, chipped gilt frames, and a lovely, small Corot painting of a woman. Picasso was a compulsive collector.

Six dark, suspicious eyes and six cool baby blues stared from the clutter. The dark eyes belonged to Picasso, now wide awake and trembling with fear; his chattering monkey, Molina; and his white dog, Frika, who looked more like an unshorn sheep than a canine. The baby blues belonged to Picasso's trio of Siamese cats. All eyes were fixed on the intruder.

The detective read a summons from the safety of the doorway, ordering Picasso to appear before the examining magistrate
Henri Drioux for questioning. The artist was suspected of dealing in art stolen from the Louvre.

According to Fernande: “Géry, whom Apollinaire had taken to see Picasso, had given the painter two quite beautiful little stone statues, without revealing where he had got them from. He had only said that they should not be exhibited too conspicuously. Picasso was enchanted, and he treasured these gifts.” Fernande's account is either naive or disingenuous.

Isolated by the natural barrier of the Pyrenees, the Iberians sculpted a powerful primitive archetype that affected Picasso profoundly. He had visited the Louvre exhibit several times, and he had probably heard the flamboyant Belgian boast of his light-fingered activities. At the very least, Picasso knew the statues he had bought from Géry belonged to the museum. At worst, he may have commissioned their theft, ordering two specific figures from the exhibit, describing exactly which pieces he wanted to use in his new painting—a large, disturbing brothel scene that André Salmon would name
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
.

If the detective had searched Picasso's studio, he would have found the incriminating evidence. When the police came calling that September morning,
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
was still in a corner. Picasso had finished the canvas in March 1907 and had shown it to a handful of friends. Even for these avant-garde pioneers,
Les Demoiselles
registered as a deliberate act of scandal. Braque said Picasso was “making us eat cotton waste or swallow gasoline, so we can spit free.” Others called it “a shout of insurrection and rage,” “a return to barbarism and primitive savagery.” Apollinaire was uncharacteristically reticent.