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To ensure proper compliance with the treaty, official representatives would be exchanged, with a Cambodian representative serving as ambassador to the Saigon government and a French representative serving as ambassador-cum-protectorcum-judge at the Oudong court. Both sides were probably unaware at the time how crucial this latter paragraph would become for the advance of French rule in Cambodia. Finally, on a more practical note, the king was promised a steamboat for his personal use, with a French captain, a mechanic and a cook.
However, his satisfaction about this unexpected promotion did not last long. Initially, he had expressed enchantment with his appointment: Monsieur de Caraman, of whom I have been notified, in fact arrived in Cambodia in the last days of May. He presented to me a project of a contract that he intended to submit to the King. This contract, set up without the slightest knowledge of the country, of its resources, of its customs, could not be of a serious [nature]. And as a matter of fact, in terms of form as well as content, it represented nothing but a mix of childishness and absurdity.
All of those documents were signed with a string of names [that were] certainly very resounding, but naturally very little known in Cambodia. I have given him every advice I could; but he seemed so little sincere, so unsteady, so ignorant with regard to practical things of the most simple kind, that I had to make it clear to him that I would no longer busy myself with his affairs. He then turned to Monsieur Le Faucheur, a French trader established in Compong Luong, who has taken it upon himself to prepare for him a new contract and to accompany him to the King. None of this is finished, can yet crumble or change, and I would have waited to tell you about it.
But the big noise that these gentlemen make here could travel all the way to Saigon, and I believe it necessary to let you know what has happened up to now. Local residents were easily taken in by his aplomb. Among his new collaborators was the aforementioned merchant Le Faucheur, the first French trader to settle permanently in Cambodia. Boat mechanic Fleurier, on duty on the Giadinh, was similarly impressed with the eloquent visitor. Years later, he recalled that Caraman had told him about an important company that he would put together.
He said that his father had a fortune of two million [francs], [and] that he was a retired colonel in the Gendarmerie. When they arrived at the main entrance to the palace and passed into the enclosure, they found themselves in front of an array of mansions, warehouses, ponds and hallways inhabited by mandarins, guards, servants and palace staff. As they entered the hall where King Norodom gave his audiences, Caraman was surprised to see mandarins crouching around the king with their foreheads touching the floor.
They smoke cigarettes and relax from time to time on their heels. In the lateral halls, there were people who were not yet invited into the audience, [crouching] in the same position, as well as those who came out of curiosity to contemplate the august face of their sovereign.
Caraman requested land concessions and exclusion of other competitors as special privileges for his future company, asking the monarch to put these privileges in writing in an official contract. A year later, the king recalled: I said to Monsieur de Caraman that in this affair I was dealing with him like with every other Frenchman and that it was unnecessary to write anything. Monsieur de Caraman told me: The personalities involved were a fairly impressive sample of those considered to be highborn, rich and influential in Paris at the time.
He spent most of his time close to the king and his entourage. For Caraman and some of his fellow merchants, Ideas and origins, —67 43 Col de Monteiro would later become a sought-after business partner and powerful facilitator in their dealings with the king. During his month in Oudong, Caraman managed to woo King Norodom and his court into signing yet another contract, sealed and delivered on 3 July The document had two parts, the first listing amendments to the previous contract.
The second part was a simple shopping list for French merchandise, which Caraman was to buy for King Norodom in France. We [Norodom] take it under Our eminent and omnipotent protection and We engage Ourselves to contribute with all Our efforts to its development and its prosperity. From there, he continued on to Saigon to take a steamer back to France. He left the colonies with two firm convictions: Both Ministers vaguely remembered the author of the documents, recalling that a Count Thomas de Caraman had set sail a year before to scientifically explore Cochinchina and bring back to Paris specimens for the Museum of Natural History.
Checking their files, they found that they had provided Caraman with letters of recommendation for this purpose. The contents of his reports thus came as a surprise. In his reports, Caraman presented a panorama of Cambodia and its impending colonization by France that left few issues untouched. He mapped out the spatial boundaries and internal provincial divisions, noting the present lack of clearly defined borders. An anecdote concerning an attack by a wild tiger highlighted the dangers of an undomesticated environment, while French missionaries were congratulated for their efforts to convert the heathen as well as for their role as forerunners of the colonial movement.
Once upon a time, there was an incredibly rich but largely forgotten country, stretching out towards ill-defined borders and inhabited by a population of lazy natives, who refused to take possession of their land or to exploit the fertile soils. There were attractive native women waiting for manly conquest, and a majestic river opening up new frontiers. There was savage wilderness that needed to be tamed, and there was the promise that Western science and Christian faith would eventually reawaken a dormant land and deliver a degenerate society from its state of torpor.
And in the midst of it, there was Caraman himself, explorer, visionary, valiant pioneer, adding another page to the annals of glory of the motherland. For the time being, the two Ministers decided to be circumspect, limiting their reply to a brief letter acknowledging receipt of the reports and thanking Caraman for their content. From mid-November to the end of , he sent six more letters to the Ministry of Education and Culture, two to the Ideas and origins, —67 45 Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one more to the Ministry of the Marine and Colonies.
In these, he requested private audiences with the Ministers in order to prepare for a meeting with Emperor Napoleon. Emile Ollivier was contacted and asked why he had lent support to the company without first informing the government, while banker James de Rothschild was also approached and interrogated about his involvement in the scheme. Despite this inner flurry, the government maintained an unruffled appearance. I have seen several of our Ministers. They were amazed by the richness of Your states, and above all by the civilizing spirit, which animates Your Majesty.
Trust me that on this occasion, I will neglect nothing [which would be] in the interest of Your Royal Majesty. I must inform Your Majesty that the Government of the Emperor Napoleon will recognize all the ancient rights of the sovereigns of Cambodia, and thus, You can claim them as soon as the time comes.
Rothschild could not remember having met Thomas de Caraman. Every step of his voyage in Cochinchina and Cambodia had the approval of local authorities. The name of Rothschild, on the other hand, had come up because of past business ties between him and one of the nobles whom Caraman planned to nominate to the board. Under the given circumstances, he had no option other than to assume their wholehearted support for his noble venture.
Having heard of preparations for a colonial exhibition in France in , Caraman proposed that part of his mission should be to persuade governments of countries in the region to participate. He received no reply. The content of this letter was difficult to justify, and Caraman subsequently conceded that, in the view of some, he might have committed some entirely personal mistakes; but, on the shoulders of a twenty-fouryear-old, would one want to place the head of an old man?
The laws of Ideas and origins, —67 47 nature stand against it. Youth can only be guilty of the most beautiful enthusiasm, [youth] is generous by nature. By contrast, [in] its vengeance, it defends itself loyally without attacking those who misjudge it.
I am young, and desirous to succeed, in order to gain merit in the eyes of France and the Emperor. In his view, the Ministers seemed maliciously determined to thwart his projects, leaving him no option but to disregard them altogether. It was disheartening that no one seemed to grasp the visionary breadth of his plans. Announcing his departure the following month, he requested support for research in Siam, Tibet and Burma.
His intended research focused on geography and archeology, and the proposal presented his plans in a somewhat baroque style. It is [science], which inspires grand matters with devotion, and shapes the martyrs of civilization. He sold the rights to the contracts with King Norodom to a group of Parisian capitalists, with whom he later maintained only sporadic contact. The lesson was a good one. I thank God and also Your Excellency; for I have taken in a dose of circumspection that was lacking from my twenty-four years. One was a new type of steam train capable of climbing steeper slopes.
Despite the fact that the environs of Saigon are dead flat, Caraman envisioned this type of train linking all the major population centers of Cochinchina, provided that he received the necessary government subsidies for such a project. Another promising recent invention, enabling the extraction of gas from charcoal, would allow Caraman to light the streets of Saigon at night, again provided he was given sufficient government funding.
The only thing he desired was the encouragement of the governor, but such encouragement never came. Among his relatives and friends there, he could expect to find a more welcoming environment and an audience more likely to admire his daring feats in the colonies. But he would not give up on Asia. Early lessons Caraman was still convinced that the Orient, and more particularly the Kingdom of Cambodia, held the answer to his desire for fame and fortune. Over the past two years of travels across France and Indochina, he had spoken about Cambodia with merchants, soldiers, missionaries, scholars, politicians, ministers, mandarins, and a king.
And everything he had heard had only further reinforced his faith in the promise that this Asian kingdom held for a man like him. Two years earlier, in the Saigon of , he had heard of merchant frustration caused by a sluggish economy and hostile attitudes among officials of the naval government. Such disappointment about Saigon made some merchants project their hopes beyond Cochinchina, into a land to the west where they imagined that their business prospects would be better. Travelers coming from that direction brought home tales of immense temple ruins, the vestiges of a mysterious ancient empire.
Rumors began to circulate, contending that Indochina was far richer than anyone could imagine. The navy had no interest in opposing such rumors. It had grown considerably under Napoleon III, in parallel with the growth of the French Empire, and the two developments formed a symbiotic relationship. Given the danger that Cochinchina might be given back to the Kingdom of Annam in exchange for monetary compensation, these tales of riches, even if unsubstantiated, helped to deflect criticism of imperial adventures in Saigon and Paris.
Navy self-interest and merchant frustration fused to create an ambiance in which Caraman found it necessary to reconsider his initial travel plans after only five days in the colony, and include Cambodia on his itinerary.
The Cambodia that Caraman believed he had seen and subsequently described in countless reports and letters was promising in the extreme: The groundwork for such perceptions had been laid in Paris. More concrete motives lay behind this trend, such as the agenda of Parisian capitalist investors, the interests of trader lobbies, government embarrassment over unsuccessful foreign expeditions, the ambitions of a new breed of traveler— scholars, and the hopes of the Catholic Church to convert the Asian continent.
A new esprit colonial spread across France, promoted by geographical societies, travel magazines, museums, and grandiose colonial expositions. Caraman and his peers were sent to the colonies as collectors and hunters to build up an arsenal of Oriental paraphernalia as tangible evidence for colonial fantasies. The dominant spirit declared that Western knowledge and power had to claim all those aspects of nature not yet domesticated and regulated by the Western mind, including the uncivilized parts of humanity.
The images of Cambodia that Caraman encountered in Saigon, Oudong, and Paris, even though full of promise, would not have sufficed to turn him into a colonist, just as they would not have sufficed to turn the French into a colonial force overseas. Another ingredient was necessary to move from vision to act: All of them, however, shared with Caraman the will to reinvent a new life in the colonies: In this ambition, Caraman is joined by Truong-vinh-Ky on the other side of the colonial divide.
To the contrary, from the first day, parts of the indigenous population embraced the new state of things and rallied to the French cause and the corresponding benefits. This emerging elite were to play a central role as mediators between the rest of the population and the French, gaining positions of considerable power over the years. At the end of the day, the vision of a phantasmal Indochina cherished in the salons of Paris was turned into a concrete colonial enterprise because of the wish of people like Caraman and Ky to break out of the circle traced by their social origin.
When, towards the end of , Caraman traveled for the second time to Marseilles to embark on an Asia-bound steamer, the Saigon Governor had been warned in advance about his impending return. He was determined not to let him cause any further embarrassment either for the colonial government or for the Cambodian crown. The governor had already sent instructions to that effect to his representative at the Cambodian court. Parisian capitalists found the royal contract too vague to deserve significant investments, and were further discouraged by the unhelpful attitude of the Ministry of the Marine and Colonies.
With the rainy season coming to an end, Caraman disembarked in a Saigon that was pleasantly cool and sunny. As the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers retreated from the flooded land around Phnom Penh, a watery landscape slowly gave way to rice fields and meadows. The flood had been particularly high and prolonged in , and observers expected only a mediocre harvest.
For a town and its urban population, however, the floods represented a scourge responsible for the proliferation of disease and the rapid decay of streets and buildings. Since that time, Phnom Penh had been a town drawing its main strength and appeal from the opportunities it offered for trade. They thus ignored what the French perceived as ill-defined borders of distinct states. This ability to transcend the administrative and economic units that the French colonial administration went about creating in the occupied territories was one of the typical features of Chinese business.
It was also one of its strongest assets in competing with other traders, who were impeded by the French desire to map their new dominions, and to demarcate clear and increasingly impermeable borders. Wang Tai, whose palace was one of the first buildings passengers arriving in Saigon harbor would see. Opium, alcohol, gambling, fisheries, customs, pawnshops, slaughterhouses: However, the might and wealth of these business moguls should not obscure the fact that the majority of Chinese living in Saigon and Phnom Penh were generally no better off than their indigenous neighbors.
As in other Southeast Asian towns, most Chinese owned small boutiques or toiled as carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, launderers, cart pullers or porters. They lived off poorly paid jobs, sustained by the hope that by working long hours, day after day, they would over time manage to accumulate the minimum amount of capital necessary for a more promising future. Still, some Indians, Malay, Vietnamese and Europeans managed to carve out niches in less rewarding areas of the local market, keeping Chinese competition at bay.
By the nineteenth century, Cham-Malay settlements were found primarily to the northwest of Phnom Penh along the Tonle Sap River and upstream on the Mekong River between Koh Sutin and Krauchmar, as well as downstream around Chaudoc and across the delta. Larger Cham settlements had their own mosques, and imams served as both religious and political leaders. They engaged in fishing, boat building, weaving, brick production, and small-scale trade. There was an Abdul Hussein alias Kamruddin and his son Abdul Ali, merchants from Surat and owners of another boat serving the ports along the Great River, and Mougamadou Cassim from Karaikal, one of the few Indian residents originating from a French trading post.
Three centuries earlier, Spanish and Portuguese sailors had furnished the first generation of such European traders in Cambodia. Within little more than a century of their arrival, European trading ships largely disappeared from Cambodian waters. Apart from the occasional missionary sent from Europe to look after the spiritual well-being of these Portuguese-Khmer, Europeans remained largely absent from the area until the mid-nineteenth-century conquest of neighboring Cochinchina by a joint French—Spanish expeditionary army. The first Europeans to resurface on Cambodian territory were cattle traders and mercenaries.
Unwilling to forgo a customary diet of meat, bread and wine, the French occupation force had within a short period consumed the entire cattle population of the occupied provinces of Cochinchina, with some traders venturing further west looking for more livestock to feed the troops. After traveling throughout Cambodia, he established a sawmill near Chhlong, south of Kratie, in an area of extensive forests. Within a short time, his travels and commercial activities had brought him into conflict with both the missionaries and the Representative of the Protectorate, especially since Le Faucheur had a tendency to settle arguments with physical violence.
After Norodom had moved his court to Phnom Penh in December , Le Faucheur won the contract to provide wood for the construction of the new palace. As a sign of the favor he must have found with the king, he was also allowed to build his own house and a sawmill in front of the royal residence.
Their tiny group of independents was still far outnumbered by French naval personnel and missionaries. A free spirit and active freemason, Faraut was a knowledgeable and cultured man.
He went straight for them and filled them with flattery, so that they loved him more than Braque. To pass the entry exams at these military schools, one had first to spend several years in costly secondary studies. They knew that they worked in the best lithographic printing company in the country and tended to remain faithful to their boss Fernand. Modest assets vanished within months, and before long, would-be entrepreneurs found themselves at the mercy of Chinese merchants or more fortunate fellow countrymen who made a living by managing the failures of their peers. Neither have the circumstances in which Picasso arrives at lithography been studied. The painter has fun, he challenges himself and the lithographic technique and his compensation for so much effort is not the last state and the money that its marketing will provide, but the own path traveled and what it produces: Pretty simple mouth with modest bitterness.
Together with Ferrer, Rosenthal and occasionally Le Faucheur, he translated Western languages and mentalities for King Norodom and provided information on issues discussed in French circles. In later years, Blanc became a sought-after interpreter, proving instrumental during French military interventions in the late s, while pursuing various less patriotic personal ventures. The two remained friends for many years. An even closer friendship bound Caraman to Madame Marrot and her son Bernard, known locally as Raoul.
Joined a couple of years later by her partner, Julien Bras, she built up a prosperous business supplying King Norodom with Parisian wares. Some were proven entrepreneurs; others had a more dubious history, like Alphonse Mercurol, who introduced himself as a former croupier and bartender from Yokohama.
A rapidly growing number of Vietnamese were settling in Cambodia during the same period. For some two hundred years, Vietnamese migrants had been moving southward from Hue toward the delta of the Mekong and upriver into a vast zone between Tayninh, Chaudoc and Hatien where by the late nineteenth century Vietnamese settlements mingled with villages inhabited by Khmer, Cham and other ethnic groups.
Many of them remained on boats moored to the bank near the market. They were inhabited for the most part by people recruited on the margins of Vietnamese society, who had previously been forced to leave their home community because of debt or other reasons. The station was divided into two separate communities, a Vietnamese and a Khmer-Portuguese village. This new Catholic neighborhood grew rapidly; within a short period of time, land disputes had become commonplace along its expanding boundaries. In January , he wrote: There we see what we reap from the cruel affection of the King for our Cambodian Christians.
Poor Cambodian people, their masters pen them up like a herd of buffalos: To reward their loyalty, the KhmerPortuguese enjoyed a number of privileges at the court. Most of them held minor roles in the palace administration, which allowed them to support their families.
Over generations, some had managed to accumulate small capital reserves, allowing them to operate as moneylenders for fishermen working on the Great Lake. Thus Col de Monteiro, for example, stemming from a family of former refugees whose ancestors had fled from Sulawesi in the seventeenth century, served in the s as a clerk in the 58 In Phnom Penh, —69 treasury and translated for the king when he received European visitors such as Caraman.
He and his peers were to play a central role in the shaping of the Protectorate and the reaction of the indigenous elite to French claims for hegemony. Finally, there were the Khmer. In the rest of the country, the Khmer formed an overwhelming majority, but in the capital Phnom Penh, they were easily outnumbered by the other ethnic communities, which in addition to Chinese, Indians, Cham-Malay, Europeans, Vietnamese and Khmer-Portuguese also included the occasional Thai, Lao, Burmese, Japanese, Mnong, Jarai, or Rhade, as well as a royal guard and brass band made up of Filipinos.
Exact figures are not available, but for most of the late nineteenth century Phnom Penh had a Khmer population of somewhere between 5, and 15, Khmer served as mandarins and clerks in the royal administration, while providing services as guards, artisans, elephant drivers, pages, cooks, musicians, dancers, and courtesans. Khmer merchants were exceedingly rare, and were generally either Portuguese-Khmer or related through kinship to Chinese families.
Although culturally homogenous, the Khmer distinguished themselves from each other according to family origin, social prestige, political power, and the extent and nature of access to economic resources. Their community was highly stratified, with patron—client and kinship ties cutting across different hierarchical levels and subgroups. Slaves were, in turn, subdivided into three distinct categories: A good deal of mobility, particularly downward, existed in Khmer society. The existence of a royal pedigree, for instance, did not prevent a family from falling into the lower class of the prea vongsa, if a certain number of generations passed without an heir being named to high office.
And the pol and komlah, hereditary slaves of the crown, who came to number more than 16, by the late nineteenth century, could only escape their fate through royal pardon. In short, Khmer society was in reality a very complex and fluid web that escaped monochrome static classification. With so many communities living alongside each other, each with its own internal ways of functioning, late-nineteenth-century Phnom Penh was a cosmopolitan place.
In the absence of a general consensus, it was a society constantly under threat of disintegrating into its constituent elements, held precariously together by the market and the notion of the monarchy, which together managed to ensure its survival over the centuries despite inherent centrifugal forces. Early European colonizers, for instance, either collaborated with Chinese merchants, as in the case of Spooner, Imbert and Mercurol, or entered into the service of King Norodom where they integrated into the palace world, as in the case of Faraut, Rosenthal and Ferrer.
None of these practices were unchangeable or biologically determined. When the French began arriving in the s, Phnom Penh appeared to be a small and precarious place, perched on the banks of the chatomuk and flooded by the Mekong River every year. Yet it was home to a society that over the years had shown a remarkable amount of resilience to new challenges. This time, however, its capacity to incorporate every new generation of foreigners without damage to the finely woven social fabric would be put to a hard test.
The town, he wrote, was dull, nothing breaking the uniformity of its bamboo huts excepting a slender, pyramidal pagoda, one of the palace buildings, and two blocks of brick stores, recently built by the king; it resembles many of the villages along the banks of the [Tonle Sap River], only differing from them in size — in number of dwellings and shops.
As we sailed down the river, the first objects that attracted my attention were the small but neat buildings — chapel and schools — of the Roman Catholic Mission. Next we passed an old dilapidated steamboat, and back of this, on the shore, waved the national Cambodian flag — blue with a red In Phnom Penh, —69 61 border, and emblems of peace and plenty in the center ground.
The city extends along the bank of the river for a distance of about three miles, and perhaps not more than half a mile at the farthest into the interior; on that side there is a low embankment of earth, erected recently — at the time of the Annamite trouble. There is no wall about [Phnom Penh], not even around the palace. The main road runs north and south along the river; there are a few cross-roads, but this is the street. It is about thirty feet wide, macadamised with broken brick and sand, and lined throughout its entire length with little bamboo shops, the greater part owned by Chinese, many by Klings [Indians], and the remainder by Cambodians and Cochin Chinese.
As we walked along, the street was crowded with natives. Dwellings differed in style and function between neighboring quarters, and each neighborhood exuded a distinctive ambiance. Some Europeans on intimate terms with Norodom, like Le Faucheur and Faraut, were allocated plots of land next to the palace.
Housing for French staff of the Protectorate clustered around an administrative post in the north of town. A small number of European peddlers, so impoverished that they could not afford anything but a bamboo hut, remained at a respectable distance from the Grande Rue. It was here that King Norodom had built his new palace.
Other Khmer followed suit, constructing their own neighborhood around the royal quarters. Gardens, trees and shrubs dominated the space between the palace and the riverfront. The farther south one went on the Grande Rue, the less defined this road became, before yielding to vegetation somewhere to the south of the palace grounds. The Khmer neighborhoods were composed of wooden houses on stilts, about two meters above ground, surrounded by gardens, fruit trees and flowering bushes.
Small pathways linked one house to another, with each dwelling set at a respectful distance from the next. To the north, Vietnamese dwellings were similarly built of wood and palm leaf, like those of their Cambodian neighbors, but with variations in layout and design. Thatched shacks erected directly on the ground served as dwellings for the poor. The uniformity of leaf-covered bamboo and wooden huts was interrupted only in the central market area where two long rows of shophouses had been built around Penny Edwards has recently presented a refreshing study of the Protectorate period that includes an analysis of colonial urban planning in Phnom Penh.
The messiness of the Cambodian capital and its social structure were of great concern to French officials from the very early days. By the s, they believed it was high time for assainissement, an effort that as a first step aimed at improving the unhealthy and swampy conditions prevalent in most neighborhoods and thought to cause all kinds of tropical diseases. These bamboo structures were the prime source of the fires that ravaged the town during the dry season, wiping out entire streets in no time.
As in many of the preceding years, cholera spread through Phnom Penh in with the onset of the rainy season. Construction and real estate signified revenue, and revenue was not only what the Chinese were interested in but also what the cash-strapped Protectorate was most in need of. All Cambodians across the country were required to register any land titles or other papers supporting claims to property or usufruct with the colonial administration.
Land and buildings could be expropriated at the discretion of the administration if deemed necessary for state purposes. In most places, the 66 In Phnom Penh, —69 French were holding on to their forts only with considerable difficulty. The former system of temporary land grants and rental agreements with the palace gradually gave way to a real estate market that allowed for the purchase and trade of urban property. To a greater extent than under the old system, housing was integrated into a capitalist economy.
Another decree of December ordered the immediate demolition of all wooden dwellings within fifty meters of a brick building. Henceforth, the Grande Rue became the domain of Chinese, Indians and Europeans, while Khmer and Vietnamese drifted towards the southern, northern, and western peripheries of the town. Large government edifices, among them a hospital, a new market, the treasury and the customs authority, were built, reflecting the new optimism. Within a few years, the frenzied construction activity transformed the capital completely.
By the turn of the century, Phnom Penh bore little resemblance to the town that Caraman had first visited in The building boom provided a bonanza for merchants dealing in construction materials. For a quarter of a century before, he had already envisioned a new and grander Phnom Penh, built from bricks coming from his own local factory. The colonial government had recently acquired the splendid structure on the Saigon Quay to serve as offices for the Municipality and as headquarters for the police force. In December , various Frenchmen and local staff were pacing up and down its rooms and hallways, mopping floors, rearranging furniture and decorating the interior: King Norodom and his entourage were due for an official visit.
The French planned to receive the monarch with pomp and military honors. French, Vietnamese and Chinese onlookers shoved each other aside to get a view as soon as the colorful procession of royalty and mandarins began walking down the gangway. Navy officers nervously straightened their breeches, while cheering crowds waved handkerchiefs and French flags. King Norodom had brought him along to ensure that the Cambodian silver bars would be exchanged into local currency at an advantageous rate.
He was an intelligent, sincere and hard-working officer who combined these qualities with a gentle personality. At the end of his visit, the colonial hosts were confident that their objectives had been met. In a way yet unforeseen, his royal mentor would help him tackle a number of challenges that had recently threatened to overwhelm him. It is difficult to reconstruct the precise purpose and itinerary of this voyage.
From the available 68 In Phnom Penh, —69 evidence, it appears that the trip was yet another fantastic, confusing scheme to lead Caraman to wealth and fame. The trip resulted in allegations of spying, piracy, and unpaid bills in excess of half a million piasters. Later in the year, gunpowder was at the center of another controversy involving Caraman.
From his hotel room on the Saigon Quay, Caraman had ordered a large quantity of gunpowder that he intended to sell to the King of Siam. To make matters worse, a number of letters had recently arrived in Saigon from Paris, which risked ruining his reputation with the local public once and for all. Ridiculed for his lack of success in business and mocked for his claims to high birth, Caraman felt the urge to leave Saigon behind and start anew. Among those opportunities, construction appeared to him to be particularly promising. Caraman knew from Le Faucheur that there were grand plans to improve the Cambodian capital.
Construction materials would be in high demand in the years to come, so Le Faucheur would have argued, and builders and suppliers were bound to make a fortune, a hope Le Faucheur also harbored for himself and his newly established chalk quarry near Chaudoc. His letters to the French authorities in Saigon and Phnom Penh were imbued with refreshed enthusiasm and a strong sense of purpose.
Only days after his arrival in the Cambodian capital, Caraman requested that the French government give him the southern part of its land concession on the Chruy Changvar peninsula, opposite the market. Caraman also contacted Chinese merchants in Saigon and Phnom Penh for support in setting up his factory.
Lee was attacked and beaten by his own unpaid employees, while Vietnamese woodcutters besieged the Protectorate offices, complaining that Caraman refused to pay for their deliveries. Moura not only denounced such dubious dealings by local merchants, but also came to forbid his staff from associating with them, prohibiting visits to their homes for any reasons except business.
To their chagrin, however, the merchants continued to frequent the palace, and King Norodom appeared to encourage them to stay in the kingdom and do business. To ensure their presence in Phnom Penh, the king disbursed considerable amounts of money in aid and loans to the least fortunate among them. As such, the king established a kind of divide-and-rule policy within his sphere of influence. The signs for such a strategy were evident almost immediately after Norodom ascended the throne.
Some European visitors belittled his lack of stateliness and his bad taste, which they said ranged from clothing and palace furniture to his choice of confidants. Caraman, in the wake of one of many fallings-out with his royal protector, characterized him as a man who had nothing but the arrogance, the silliness and bad faith of Asian kings.
In that respect he is the most accomplished prince. Shabby and penny-pinching, he looks for any means to deny his signature, because he regrets the morning after what he did the night before. Actually, he went first to prepare the lithographs of Album 13 and those of his book Parler Seul, and then on the occasion of the preparation of the catalog of his first exhibition at the Maeght Gallery, inaugurated on November 19th.
We are facing a revolutionary novelty introduced by Maeght, who had a greater commercial and media sense than the other gallerists: By having original graphic work, these catalogs are sold by the publisher at a good price to collectors who could not afford to buy the exposed paintings, and will reach years later in auctions prices of tens of thousands of euros. In fact, only in , he made more than one hundred lithographs in the Rue Chabrol workshop, all edited by Maeght. The reaction of Deschamps was immediate, dismissing Maeght without any consideration Of Chagall's immense lithographic work, one thousand fifty lithographs, only thirty-five —all black and white—were made before starting work with Mourlot in In fact, out of thirty-five, ten were printed for the first time by Mourlot, in His late arrival at Mourlot's workshop was also due to the fact that, fearful of persecutions of Jews in occupied France, he had left the country in and did not return from the United States until seven years later, settling in Saint Paul de Vence, on the Cote d'Azur.
But at least the painter makes a visit to the workshop of Mourlot, where he meets young chromist Charles Sorlier, who will make all his lithographs until his death, becoming over the years the true 'factotum' of Chagall. And from there he launches his immense production of over a thousand original lithographs until his death in In all of them the chromist is Sorlier, who will never leave his job in the Mourlot workshop, even when Maeght breaks with him and creates his own lithographic printing. Sorlier knew that working with Mourlot provided him with numerous contacts and benefits that he knew how to take advantage of better than all his colleagues in the workshop.
In his only lithograph for Maeght, Picasso also demanded the same treatment. According to his secretary, the painter returned to lithography simply because he had to return, because he had not exploited the technique sufficiently, because despite having managed to 20 Mourlot , p. In fact, his lithographic experience prior to was limited. His first foray into the medium was made by Picasso in when he made a small invitation card and the cover of the catalog Mourlot I and II, Cramer No. He makes it on report paper and prints it in B. In he made, also on report paper, a portrait of the poet Raymond Radiguet, lover of his friend Jean Cocteau, which is used as frontispiece Mourlot III of the book Les joues en feu, published by Grasset in Cramer That same year Picasso also makes, always on report paper, another small drawing entitled Trois chevaux au bord de la mer, and printed at only three copies M.
This is the Quatre lithographies folder M. Apparently, the painter did not receive the promised money and in gave the copies that were left to the Galerie Simon, that is his dealer since the beginning of the century, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who put them on sale with a simple sticker that covers the name of Zayas and correcting the date by hand.
These are the first lithographs that Picasso executed directly on the stone. He would not return to the report paper until many years later, with Mourlot. In that same year and the next, with the same printer, but already under the patronage of Kahnweiler, he made a series of lithographs with classic drawings of the style of the etchings of the Vollard Series or the illustrations for Ovid's Metamorphoses. Picasso fills the stone with black and obtains white by scraping the surface. He prints it at of copies — of which 25 are numbered and signed— by the Engelmann printing company, founded by Godefroy Engelmann, the inventor of the chromolithography.
It is marketed by Galerie Simon to numbered and signed copies. In he made one of the most beautiful lithographs of his career: But the work is so beautiful that, apart from the book Cramer 16 , it is also decided to commercialize an edition with large margins of numbered and signed copies, shot by the printer Marchizet. Also in he made a daring but failed attempt: Figure et profil Mourlot XXV , which is shot only three times. It is a work with pen and wash on stone.
In he makes another beautiful lithograph, with pencil on stone of abstract nature, Figure R. The magazine was sold at 20 francs a copy, and the beautiful lithograph is quoted today at thousands of euros for each copy. From this lithograph some copies with large margins on imperial Japan paper were also printed. From this print with margins the Berggruen Gallery sold a copy on the occasion of its exhibition Picasso 85 gravures, in October Its price was 2, Francs or dollars.
The main illustrations of the book are several beautiful pochoirs in colors and 37 reproductions of drawings of the 20s on a theme recurrent in the artist: Here Picasso changed again of printer: In short, the two main characteristics of those first 11 years of lithography are probably the experimentation and constant change of printer, not by choice of the artist, but surely because each publisher or gallerist had one and this simply brought to Picasso the stones or the lithographic paper needed to execute the work. There is no evidence either that during the whole period he visited any of the printers of these lithographs.
Among the twenty-seven lithographs made in this period, it can only be said that seven are of high quality, the rest are simple drawings on report paper or stone. His great leap to lithography is undoubtedly based on concentrating on a single printer — Mourlot— and on working in his workshops until he manages to master all the stages and procedures of the technique, and also on identifying the collaborators that best adapt to his technique and personality. In his case, it was the chromist Henri Deschamps and the stamper Gaston Tutin.
Mourlot the magnificent But let's see what is the trajectory in art lithography of the workshop chosen by Picasso to return to the technique. Fernand Mourlot came from a family linked to the graphic arts since the mid-nineteenth century.
If his grandfather was devoted to wallpaper, very fashionable among the bourgeoisie of the time, his father Jules Mourlot started as a representative of a printing press, to immediately create his own workshop in the Temple neighborhood in Paris. Father of a large family, every time he had a son Jules bought a new machine to facilitate business growth. As he had nine children, the business soon reached a certain volume. At the end of the 19th century, the Mourlot printing company on Saint-Maur Street in Paris already has a certain prestige.
The young Fernand, born in , is sent to the School of Decorative Arts, while he is enrolled as an apprentice in another lithography printing press, where he works on preparing the stones, controlling the printing press and managing the colors. But Fernand is not a school man, and his father ends up incorporating him as an apprentice in his own printing house, where he is entrusted to a worker who teaches him the secrets of the profession.
When the First World War broke out, just when his father had just bought a new printing press on Chabrol Street —which would later become the company's legendary headquarters— Fernand joined the army and went to the front, where he was wounded in combat in losing an eye. After recovering from his injuries, he returns to the front, but this time not as a combatant, but as a draftsman in the topography section.
His mission was to draw the contours of the enemy lines. When the war was over and Fernand returned from his last assignment as part of the occupation army in Alsace, his father sent him to the new printing house on Chabrol Street, which was temporarily managed by the brother of the owner of the first printing press bought by Jules.
Fernand settles on Chabrol Street, trying to get the business off the ground thanks to industry commissions, but also trying to give it a culture varnish by promoting artistic lithography. As recounted by Mourlot in his memoirs of , Georges had met on the front "one Kervel", who when the fight ends launchs in the business of selling motor oil for cars: Mourlot, who writes by heart, is mistaken in name, because Georges should have known one of the Quervel brothers, founders of an oils society of that in passed into the hands of the American Standard Oil of the Rockefellers.
In any case, Quervel hires Mourlot to make his labels and also for all their advertising campaigns, which included color albums with the history of cars. Fernand comes to represent the firm at the Paris Motor Show. Thanks to its contract with Kervoline, the printing company obtains numerous industrial clients. In the time and work gaps left by industrial orders, Mourlot opens the press to artistic works. Painters of "second class" come to make small lithographies, illustrations of books and albums.
Immediately other publishers follow. And that same year of , thanks to the publisher Marcel Seheur, a famous painter, Maurice de Vlaminck, went to the workshop to make the 24 lithographs of a book by Georges Duhamel, Les hommes abandonnes. It is a small print run, of only copies, each with 24 lithographs by Vlaminck, but with the suites it involves an order for more than 10, lithographs for Mourlot manual presses. Mourlot also begins to make illustrations of children's books.
This is appreciated by publisher Paul Hartmann, who asks Mourlot to illustrate his books for young audiences. Through this new child-youth vein, Mourlot starts working in the 30s for another powerful editor, who will flood him with work. He soon made progress in publishing the main writers of the 19th century, such as Gautier, Dumas, Baudelaire, Hugo, Balzac or Lamartine. Mourlot's work is limited to illustrating books for children and young people, but this implies a lot of illustration, in runs of several thousand copies, that have him well occupied for a decade.
The publishing business begins to weigh in the volume of work of the printing press: We must bear in mind that in the first half of the twentieth century the craft of a painter was rarely enough to make a living. And this can apply to lesser-known artists such as those cited above as well as others that are very celebrated. Take for example the case of Raoul Dufy, the painter of the joie de vivre and one of the most celebrated French artists of the century.
Well, Dufy lived practically all his life of the trade of illustrator of luxury editions of books, which sold well among the French bourgeoisie. At the end of the Second World War, and when Mourlot becomes, thanks to Picasso, the printer of original lithographs par excellence, Fernand does not abandon the 'industrial' business provided by the publishers. He started working for him in , printing lithographs for books in runs of 1, copies, which in went up to three, four or five thousand.
If there are, say, 8 lithographs, we are talking about 25, to 45, prints per book, and Fernand prints several books each year for Sauret. At the end of , Fernand, Mourlot came into contact with the advertising department of the National Museums of France, to which he shows the few exhibition posters that he had made until then. And the institution commissioned him to print his posters, the first, in , for an exhibition by Delacroix.
And the artists, anxious that the lithographic reproductions of their works were of the best quality, begin already in the 30s to visit the printing press to supervise the works. When the time comes for the International Exhibition of , for which Picasso painted the Guernica, the organization asks Mourlot to make two posters for a show made in the framework of the celebration.
This is how Mourlot meets Matisse: The painter was an extremely meticulous man who demanded to see every proof of color state and imposed constant corrections, even for photographic reproductions. From that moment, Mourlot becomes the printer of almost all the exhibition posters in France, and not only of the National Museums, but for almost all the art galleries of some importance, especially those of Paris.
Even the National Gallery in London asks Mourlot to work for them. Born in on the island of Lesbos, the future publisher leaves at 18 to Paris with the intention of studying law. In , his compatriot Christian Zervos, publisher who would later produce Picasso's first catalog of paintings, offers hom to join the magazine he has just created: Years later, Skira's mother showed up at the door of Picasso's house in Juan-les-Pins, asking him to welcome her son back.
The painter accepted, on the condition that Skira did not mention the name of Napoleon, and proposed a mythological theme. When the young man returned to the painter's studio, he proposed to illustrate Ovid's Metamorphoses, which the artist accepted The Americans wanted to publish 'the most beautiful magazine in the world' and provided the necessary funds so that the publisher can unleash his imagination and realize his dream.
The Verve magazine will be published in French and English versions, both printed in France. His technique is still used today in the facsimile editions of medieval books. The quality of reproduction of Draeger in the 30s has not even been surpassed today. To do this, he looks for the best possible lithographer to convince the artists to come with him and cooperate in the lithographs of interpretation or even make original lithographs for the magazine. The leap from photogravure to lithography is fundamental for painters: But in the lithograph in painter chooses and directly touches the color that is going to be applied by a merely mechanical procedure.
While a painter can never accept a photogravure reproduction as his own, they could, and did recognize lithographs as their own original work. With your procedure that is not photography, and all the better, you have made a Braque! There is a qualitative leap between photography and lithography, and the latter can be designated as an own work by the artist.
He had the best lithography workshop in France, extensive relations with the editors and was well known to the artists for having made for them or with them the posters of the National Museums and their exhibitions in various galleries. For Verve he will print hundreds of original and interpretation lithographs 26 in runs of several thousand copies if we count the French and English editions, both printed in Paris.
It was a splendid letter of introduction for Braque, Picasso and other great masters, and it was undoubtedly this association that allowed him to make the next qualitative leap: Matisse pays special attention to this work, instructing publisher and printer not to touch the collages, that he sends pressed between two glasses, 'supplicating' —a word unknown in the vocabulary of the proud Matisse— them that if a 24 Mourlot , p.
This explains for example that Picasso let co-sign many of his works to his chromist Henri Deschamps or that Chagall did the same with Charles Sorlier, also employed by Mourlot. Picasso appears therefore represented by the photo of his partner and will not do any work for Verve until eleven years later, that is, until much later than he began to collaborate with Mourlot. And this despite the friendship that united him with the publisher. The number of Verve of April , Couleur de Picasso is entirely dedicated to him. The employees of Mourlot, coauthors of artistic feats so admired and who are ultimately responsible for the success of their employer, were a separate race among the printers.
They knew that they worked in the best lithographic printing company in the country and tended to remain faithful to their boss Fernand. Some because they felt safer there and earned a little more than in the printing presses of the competition, although they were still workers' salaries of a time when they earned very little.
Others, more educated or more savvy, knew how to take advantage of the perks that working in the printing press could provide them and even get other jobs after hours. Henri Deschamps was the favorite chromist of Georges Braque, the one who had executed the first lithograph of interpretation for the painter in and made all of the book Braque le Patron between and Braque supervised the work day by day and made several original lithographs for the work, but he did not see it finished, since he died months before it was put together in He went straight for them and filled them with flattery, so that they loved him more than Braque.
But he did not get it. With his great stature, air and elegant dress and his gentle condescension, Braque seduced better than the easy-going Picasso, always willing to make jokes to be nice. An anecdote illustrates the opportunities provided by the work in the Mourlot workshop. Sorlier recounts that at the beginning of working in the printing press, Picasso gave his admired pressier Gaston Tutin a dedicated and signed proof of each plate he printed.
But Tutin did not appreciate this gift at all, because in spite of working thoroughly to satisfy the painter in all his technical desires, he did not stop considering what Picasso did as 'stupidities' without any value. On one occasion he told Sorlier: You have to be credulous to think that these things are expensive.
These are things that are said, and you may believe them, but they do not cheat me. Of course they do not cheat me Consistent with this opinion, the printer broke into pieces the lithographs dedicated by Picasso again and again, until in the end he got Picasso to stop giving them, offering him instead bottles of port wine, what the stamper interpreted as a sign that Picasso was becoming less scratchy. If he had kept the tests that the painter man dedicated to him, most of which were not published commercially and can only be admired now in one lucky museum, Tutin would have become a millionaire.
The smokescreen of Kahnweiler's cold theory Among the reasons that could impel Picasso to 'go back' to lithography, we can suppose that one is that the technique provides the painter with an opportunity. The critic Kurt Leonhardrecalls an aspect of Picasso's personality: That could have driven him to dedicate himself to lithography. This procedure allowed him to preserve every stage of the creative work, as he did in some way asking DoraMaar to photograph each stage of his work in Guernica. The Spaniard had also pointed out to Zervos that "it would be interesting to fix the evolution of a painting on film".
The problem is that in oil painting, and leaving aside the preparatory studies in another medium or size, each stage of the creative work is buried in the final work.
However, in lithography it is possible to record each phase of the painter's work, because he can print, as Picasso often did, 'state proofs' of each modification made to the lithographic stone or zinc plate. After each change, the stone or plate remain irremediably changed, but the state proofs preserve what was each previous stage.
In the case of Picasso, the lithographic technique allows him to keep samples of each step of his work. If we look at the number of impressions he will make of his lithographs, we realize that there is a clear contradiction, at least from the commercial point of view. In a natural way, we should suppose that the object of the painter's work is, through a series of stages, to produce a final work that will be commercialized by Kahnweiler.
Well, if we take for example the case of his famous 'decomposition of the bull' that he realizes shortly after settling in Mourlot's workshop, we will observe that of the eleven states that Mourlot registers later we will see that he actually did some more , only one, the last, was published commercially, but from the artistic point of view they are all independent works and have a similar value. In short, the fruit of the entire process will be only one edition of fifty numbered and signed copies of the final state, which is actually the least elaborate of the entire series.
But Picasso ordered to print —to take them home— 18 artist proofs from each of the states. In total, the final commercial product of the six long weeks in which the painter focuses on this project between Wednesday, December 5, and Thursday, January 17, is only 50 prints.
But there is still a by-product that the painter remains, without sharing it with the Galerie Louise: In any case, it seems clear that the successive states are not only stages in the way of obtaining the final result, but works worthy of being appreciated independently, even if they are part of a whole. It seems clear that Picasso's objective in making this series is not to produce the commercial lithograph known as the eleventh state, but the very exercise of the production of the series.
The painter has fun, he challenges himself and the lithographic technique and his compensation for so much effort is not the last state and the money that its marketing will provide, but the own path traveled and what it produces: It is also useful to illustrate what the lithographic technique offers to the painter the work Les deux femmes nues, in which Picasso worked between November 10, and February 12, That is, he started it a month before the decomposition of the bull and finished a month after ending that series. Observing each one of the states 30 we have before us an impressive sample of the creative process of the painter, and of which there would be no trace if it were a painting.
The last state is of a nature completely different from the first few states and it could be said that these are more beautiful. And again, the final state is printed at 50 numbered and signed copies. Against that, 19 artist proofs of each intermediate state have been produced, this is more than lithographs that Picasso keeps and that, in one way or another, will end up in museums or in the market. In addition, as Jean Adhemar recalls, above all other graphic techniques etching, aquatint, drypoint, linoleum , lithography offers Picasso the broadest field of action and the greatest creative possibilities.
The lithographic stone offers the supreme suppleness to combine lines and colors, designs or impressions of colors or shapes. Even if you use zinc plates instead of stones, as Picasso is often forced to do when he left Paris for the Cote d'Azur, the plates can be treated with lithographic ink or even be 'bitten' by the acid, in the manner of etching.
The painter can even use transfer or report paper, which also offers unique possibilities and which Picasso often uses. All lithographs in which the date pre- written by the painter is read from left to right have been made using transfer paper. The other dates, as in etchings, have been naturally 'turned' only once when printed and can not therefore be read naturally, while with the transfer paper they are turned twice, the first time going from the transfer paper to the stone and the second from the stone to the paper, which returns the left-right sense that Picasso originally used.
Another reason that could theoretically have prompted the painter to make lithographs, as he had previously done etchings, is to 'popularize art. The critic and collector Castor Seibel remembers that he acquired his first lithographs of Braque in , when he was only 24 years old, and studied and worked at the same time.
The price was so reasonable that he could afford it with just a few extra hours in his work But despite the fact that Picasso declared in to art critic Anatole Jakovsky that he was dissatisfied with the limited number that was printed of his lithographs and that he was soon to execute prints with a larger print run that would be sold at an affordable price to reach an audience that could never buy his paintings 32, his exclusive contract with Kahnweiler prevented that desire from being realized.
None of the lithographs marketed by his dealer were printed to more than 50 numbered and signed copies. The person who decided which plates should be printed or not was Picasso himself, without Kahnweiler being able to influence the decision. The Andalusian simply gave the order to print the 50 copies. Once printed, Mourlot took them to Picasso to be signed and then they were delivered to Kahnweiler, who then paid painter and printer the agreed amounts. In this sense there is no doubt that it was Picasso himself who deliberately decided the limitation on the number of lithographic works that came out onto the market.
But Kahnweiler or his successor and stepdaughter Louise Zette Leiris —single Louise Godon, married in to ethnologist and poet Michel Leiris, a friend of Picasso's since his youth— did the same with his graphic work as with his paintings: But this probably did not displease Picasso at all, that like every painter preferred that his works sell expensive, independently of what he charged for them. Only the lithographs of Picasso made around the French Communist Party, notably for the newspaper Le Patriote of Nice, with the theme of the dove of peace or others, came to have a wide dissemination and were sold at 'democratic' prices , although they ended up mostly in the hands of dealers.
It could be said that Picasso uses the lithographic technique to satisfy four main objectives. In the first place it is, as we have seen, to explore a means of expression that will allow him to make some of his masterpieces, with the additional advantage of being able to follow and 'preserve' the stages that lead to the final work. Second, this technique provides him with regular income. It is not that the painter makes lithographs to earn money that he did not obtain from paintings, but rather that his investment of time and effort in lithography, which is often —as we will see later— is very considerable, is compensated with a regular and adequate remuneration.
And this is achieved because Kahnweiler always has clients for the graphic work of Picasso, including at times when it is very frequent. These two aspects constitute what the technique contributes to Picasso, artistically and economically. But the painter also uses it to fulfill other altruistic objectives. On the one hand, he uses lithography, in the same way he has used etching before, to contribute to books of friends, especially poets, such as Reverdy or Cocteau, greatly facilitating their sale and popularity. The friendship with the intellectuals has been a constant of Picasso both in Spain and especially since he 33 Mourlot , p.
Apart from the fascination produced by the overflowing verb of writers, especially the French, given his limited command of this language. To Picasso, aspiring bard who admires this ability as an art as powerful as painting, poets provide not only the spiritual nourishment that allows him to learn and advance, but also essential contacts to be present in the French art scene. During the first half of the 20th century, poets are the intellectual vanguard of France, and their social leadership is unquestionable. And since liberation, in , communist intellectuals dominate the French cultural scene, and Picasso is very close to them.
Fourth, the lithographic technique is the most used by the painter to offer his solidarity to the causes that matter to him, mostly linked to his militancy in the French Communist Party. Some of these initiatives undoubtedly had as final recipient of the funds the Spanish exile. In addition, lithography is just another form of engraving, and we know that Picasso uses this artistic technique to relax, to overcome the stress caused by painting.
The person who was his secretary in his last years gives us evidence of that when he tells us that when the painter dedicated his time to making prints he remained accessible and in a good mood, he talked with who passes by his side and accepted willingly to interrupt his work to attend to whatever they ask, whether to receive a visit or give instructions on how to react to a phone call. However, when he paints he is another man, he remains locked in himself, does not accept any interruption and is not in the mood to chat. In those moments, his secretary must act as an 'invisible man' until the painter has solved the artistic puzzle that occupies his mind None of the numerous studies on the painter, not even those dedicated especially to his graphic work, explain the circumstances or the reasons that prompted Picasso to explore the lithographic technique.
Perhaps the specialists considered that the interest to know the details of the reason of the sudden impulse of Picasso to come to the Rue Chabrol was purely anecdotal, without any academic interest. They saw no reason to dig further into the matter given its lack of transcendence. However, two elements suggest that the interest in knowing the profound reasons that drive the painter to develop a lithographic career and the circumstances in which this occurs goes beyond the simple anecdote.
The first is the intensity of Picasso's effort in his new technique. In fact, the painter turned literally from November 2, into lithographic production. The second element that justifies the search is the precursor character of Picasso in the matter. For Carsten-Peter Warncke, the intensity of Picasso's lithographic effort must be found in the playful pleasure that the technique offers the painter. The most widespread explanation of the reason behind the installation of Picasso in Rue Chabrol is provided by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, very close to Picasso, and that apart from the painter or Mourlot, would appear as the right person to give it to the extent that he had an exclusive contract to market all his graphic work.
The winter of was very cold in Paris, and the coal reserves had not been reconstituted. The private residences had no heating and Picasso's studio was frozen. The lithographic press of Mourlot, as an industrial building, had a share of coal. The photographer had indeed indicated in his book Conversations avec Picasso when asked about how Picasso began to make lithographs, that at that time it was cold in his apartment and he preferred to work in a heated studio. It was for that purely material reason that he devoted himself to lithography Interestingly, Leonhard attributes the beginning of the linoleum career of the painter to the difficulty and delays of transporting lithographic stones from the workshop of Mourlot to Cannes, also following here Brassai He forgets that this difficulty, alleviated by the work with zinc plates and report paper, did not prevent the painter from continuing to work with Mourlot, or to make for example the lithographs of Le Chant des Morts.
Thus, Bernd Rau, in his book Pablo Picasso graphic work, states: As we will see, this is not true at all. The cold theory is just a fabulation of Kahnweiler. And it is easy to prove it, since a simple query to the weather yearbooks shows that when Picasso decides to go to Mourlot, it is not cold in Paris. The meteorological records show that was the warmest year since the beginning of the meteorological data collection in , with temperatures above the average, as pointed out by the portal Meteo- Paris. In fact, we have the minimum temperatures of Paris day by day.
The next day, when the first interview between the printer and the painter takes place, the minimum temperature is 7. And when Picasso joins the workshop to spend several months there, the minimum temperature rises to As for the maximum temperatures, they are those same days of It is not therefore freezing cold. Also, if cold had been the main reason to go to the Rue Chabrol, Picasso would not have left the workshop at the end of February as he actually did, since in March there is a cold wave that covers Paris with a layer of snow of 60 cm As we can see, the cold theory, which critics closest to Picasso blithely disseminate, is completely dismantled.
Besides, we are not talking about the hardest period of the war in terms of access to supplies of coal, food, etc. At that time Picasso could not miss the few sacks of coal or firewood that would have satisfied his austere needs for heat. In fact, as Pierre Cabanne recalls, even in the harshest years of the world war, Picasso had a considerable allocation of coal, achieved through his numerous contacts And we can not forget that Picasso enjoyed, thanks to his buoyant finances and the black market, a comfort far superior to that of any Frenchman.
And he even had problems because of that buoyancy. And ostensibly he refused to receive favorable treatment from the occupation forces. The friend of the painter Pierre Daix, in his monumental "Dictionnaire Picasso", does not make any reference to the cold theory, but he insinuates in fact that the argument is not valid, but of course he does that in , 23 years after the death of the Andalusian.
Daix seems to want to remind critics that they should not give any credibility to Kahnweiler's theory. Daily dataset of 20th-century surface air temperature and precipitation series for the European Climate Assessment. International Journal of Climatology, 22, See table in http: Indeed, in his book Picasso: Do not forget that the secretary is indirectly at the origin of the dissemination of the cold theory given his work as censor of the books published about Picasso.
Despite the war I have hot water. In short, Picasso could not have gone to Mourlot's workshop or take refuge from a cold that did not exist and that would not have affected him, nor to seek a warmth that really did not exist in the printing press. The theory of cold is reversed by the facts: But this evident fabulation of the gallerist takes a long time to disappear from the treaties. In fact, when in Bernhard Geiser published the book Picasso: Clear amber w a white head. Aroma medium malty caramel and hoppy grapefruit, citrus. Flavor medium sweet and fresh grapefruit, acidic and bitter, long lasting.
Medium body and carbonation. Sweet nose with tons of grapefruit. Smells like a grapefruit cooler. Pretty simple mouth with modest bitterness. Pours a deep golden with a white head. Grapefruit and seltzer nose. Flavors are the same. Unique expression of grapefruit. A lightly hazed golden ipa with a thin off white head. In aroma, sweet fruity malt with loads of grapefruit juice, like a Radler, light floral hops, nice. In mouth, a nice sweet fruity malt with loads of pink grapefruit, light mineral notes, resinous floral hops, nice.
On tap at Craft beer market, Ottawa. Pours a hazy red orange with white head. Scent is grapefruit, citrus, grape. Taste is strong grapefruit, orange, pineapple, grapes, sugar. Very smooth and refreshing. I was at an Airbnb so I had to enjoy this straight from the can.