C O N T E X T 9 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 7 31 My day with Picasso David Heath writes: Readers of Context 81 and 85 will recall that I visited Rotterdam and Amsterdam in 1970 in search of the modern movement. My reflections of 2003 and 2004 were those of a tourist revisiting places that had a very personal significance. My purpose in 1970 had been to visit, with two friends, all the modern movement buildings in mainland Europe that were illustrated in The International Style, and Architecture: nineteenth and twentieth centuries1. Our hero and mentor, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, had clearly done it all and so would we. I was surprised by how many readers said they had made a similar journey, in similarly austere style. We also visited Paris, where the richness of a great city was a challenge to the singularity of our approach. But I have revisited Paris so many times since that I can not recall clearly the circumstances of that 1970 visit. I confess that the memories of what we saw and felt are now almost beyond recovery. I do not wholly regret this. As Edgar Allan Poe wrote: ‘There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact… that in our endeavours to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.’2 In our continuing efforts to come to terms with modernism, we tried a different tactic on our visit in 2006.This time we decided to go for the Klüver approach. In 1997 Billy Klüver, an electrical engineer born in 1927 in Sweden, but long resident in the United States, publishedA Day with Picasso: twentyfour photographs by Jean Cocteau. Klüver, who died in 2004, was an obsessive’s obsessive, and this is one of the great books about extracting information from evidence about the historic environment. Over a period of years Klüver was able to identify 24 photographs by Jean Cocteau, which have survived in various collections (it is one of the attractions of his approach that this is not connoisseurship based on possession), and put them together in a convincing sequence. Klüver concludes that there were four rolls of film, with six photographs on each. He identifies the people in the pictures, and when and where they were taken. It is an astonishing feat of detection, and everything is set out in the book. He is clear that 22 of the photographs were taken on a single day, before and after lunch, in Montparnasse, mostly inside and outside or very close to the café La Rotonde.The cast of characters includes Picasso, then 34, his current girlfriend Pâquerette, 20, and Modigliani, 32. Klüver gives very precise reasons for every identification, and the book contains a brief biography of each, but in another of the book’s attractions he tells about their lives only before the day of the photos. Klüver is convinced that only in 1916 were all the characters together in Paris. As for the exact date, he visited the area and took his own photographs. He
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