ultime letture - latest reads
First | Previous | Next | Last-
Life with Picasso
Francoise Gilot -
On the last day of my second year of high school, our Italian and Latin teacher told us he was working on an anthology of Italian Literature. He was quite old and about to retire, and he explained he wanted to create a book which would reflect the insights he gained from many years of teaching. He asked us to write an essay on what we thought should be included in such an anthology.
He praised mine as being very interesting – as he chuckled – because I wrote that one aspect missing from literature anthologies was whether writers conducted their personal life in a manner congruent with their ideals.
This reminds me of a discussion I have had many times with people who judge political figures by their immoral personal life and not by their achievements. (So I guess I changed my mind there.) One good example being Clinton, who is still admired for his skills as a politician from all sides, but whose flirts with women marred his career.
If Picasso were to be judged by his personality (at least as described by Francoise Gillot) and not his artistic innovation, he would definitely not be considered a great artist. It is difficult to prove sympathy for him for the way he treated women and those close to him.
I wanted to read this book after seeing “Surviving Picasso”. I never was a big Picasso fan (everyone always quoted him, I preferred the underdogs), still I was surprised the movie portrayed him as such a selfish chauvinist. So I got the book. Gillot’s memoirs confirms the image of the artist as portrayed by the film, though I think choosing Anthony Hopkins to act as a Spaniard is the worse possible choice a director could have made.
Francoise Gillot is a keen observer of her “beast” and here and there lashes out with some typical French humor. That same humor allowed her to survive the harshness of people around Picasso - like Sabartes, Picasso’s old time friend and employee; or Ines, his maid (p.164) -, who viewed her as an intruder or competition, as she became closer and closer to Picasso.
You can’t but feel resentment for all the intellectuals who cross paths with Gillot as Picasso’s companion, since they all seem to regard her as a young, empty-headed girl infatuated with the great artist. (An example is Picasso and Francoise’s visit to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.)
It is wonderful to enter the world of Picasso through the eyes of Gillot. Picasso was such an important figure of his time. She is a keen observer.
Gillot’s depiction of Paris during the occupation and afterwards are very telling of the place Picasso occupied in the cultural and social life of France. For example, Picasso was seen as a symbol of intellectual Resistance, when many artists and intellectual fled to the United States during the Second World War. No only was he worshipped by the French, but also by the Americans, who had read about him in various accounts of American writers (like Gertrude Stein). After the War, “you couldn’t walk ten feet inside his atelier without falling over the recumbent body of some young GI. […] In the beginning they were mostly young writers, artists, and intellectuals. After a while they were simply tourists […]. (p. 63)
Picasso definitely had a knack for business, as he led art dealers up tortuous paths to buy his paintings. One funny incident is that of an American dealer who was trying to impress Picasso as he was looking for a bargain, by telling him how he would raise prices for buyers who tried to speculate on dead artists. Picasso, without loosing a beat, told him, “I am sure you don’t speculate on the death of artists, but it won’t do you any good to try to speculate on me alive. My prices are higher that way. I suggest you go back to America and try to pick up some Picassos at prewar prices there. Here there’s a certain value attached to being still alive in spite of the war. That makes my paintings more expensive.” (p. 65)
Picasso didn’t like new painting trends, such as Abstract Expressionism: “Naturally, nonfigurative painting is never subversive. It’s always a kind of bag into which the viewer can throw anything he wants to get rid of.” (p. 72)
Further on (p. 270), Picasso explains to Gillot why he doesn’t like the “bag” of abstract art: “A painting isn’t a market basket or a woman’s handbag. Valery used to say, ‘I write half the poem. The reader writes the other half.’”
But one of the main themes of the book, resurfacing from time to time, is Picasso’s troublesome relationships with women. Picasso had a favorite saying: “For me, there are only two kinds of women – goddesses and doormats.” (p. 84) When women were hard to catch, he lavished them with his attention; once he had them, he despised them. That’s probably one of the reasons why his relationship with Gillot lasted so long: Throughout their marriage she kept on painting and never gave in to his demands she completely abandoned her personal interests. At one point, when he came back from Poland, he even dared to slap him, which made him all the more proud of her. Another reason Gillot lasted so long was maybe the fact she worked like a mule for him, always putting her art and their children aside setting up everything for Picasso so he could do his work. (p. 254)
Picasso’s attention for women didn’t spare his friends’ wives. One of them was Eluard’s German acrobat’s wife, Nusch, who had been a model for Picasso during his blue period. Picasso says, “It was a gesture of friendship on my part […]. I only did it to make him happy. I didn’t want him to think I didn’t like his wife.” (p.137)
Picasso was, of course, a real romantic: When they were courting, one day, Picasso brought Francoise some roses. Francoise immediately felt suspitious about so much romanticism. In fact, Picasso had received those roses from someone else! (p. 102)
During the early stages of their relationship, Picasso kept on trying to set up encounters between himself, Gillot and his ex-lover Dora Maar. In spite of Gillot’s continuous protests that these meetings were inappropriate, especially since Maar suffered from bouts of depression, Picasso attempted many times to create situations in which the three would visit, knowing of Maar’s complete disinterest in this. One day, after Dora Maar looses his patience with Picasso, she tells him: “You never loved anyone in your life. You don’t know how to love.” (p. 106) Picasso, as he is walking home with Francoise, who is telling him how much she resents being put in a difficult situation with Maar, drags Gillot and pushes her against a parapet on the Pont Neuf, threatening to throw her into the river below. (p.107)
Gillot recounts how her resistance to Picasso’s abuses had roots in her relationship with her father. He didn’t make a secret of the fact he had wanted a boy instead of her, and demanded she develop the physical strength and courage attributed to boys (!). So whenever a situation seemed dangerous or challenging, Gillot’s was drawn to it. And that’s her explanation for getting into her relationship with Picasso.
Gillot had been subjected to physical abuse by his father, including in an incident (also depicted in the movie) in which his father, on finding out she wanted to study art instead of enrolling in a more socially acceptable discipline, beat her until she bled.
Gillot’s attraction to Picasso also stemmed from another perception of him: “Although Picasso had been receiving the world’s adulation […], he was the most solitary of men.” Of course, he had his share of responsibility in this situation. Picasso was very jealous of his friends, and got furious when friends of his would meet without him (maybe tired of his egocentrism?). In one incident, he complained about Braque organizing a dinner without him. (p.144) His possessiveness of people around him also applied to his relationships with women: He liked to keep all of them revolving around him. (p. 242) This pattern sometimes took the form of a game:
‘As I thought about it, I realized that in Pablo’s life things went on just about the way they do in a bullfight. Pablo was the toreador and he waved the red flag, the muleta. For a picture dealer, the muleta was another picture dealer; for a woman, another woman. The result was the person playing the bull stuck his horns into the red flag instead of goring the real adversary – Pablo. And that is why Pablo was always able, at the right moment, to have his sword free to stick you where it hurt. I came to be very suspicious of this tactic and any time I saw a big red flag waving around me, I would look to one side of it. There, I always found Pablo.’ (p. 243)
Picasso was like a little child in need of attention. And like a little child he loved to make noise, like when he visited Menerbes and for Bastille Day, he paraded the streets with the locals playing bugles at the top of their lungs. (p.127)
His intense relationship with people who worked with him, like his Catalan friend Sabartes, make their way into the narrative of Gillot’s years with Picasso (p.165). Sabartes was very jealous of his place at Picasso’s court, and even more so when Gillot had their first child Claude. Claude brought a light and commotion into the Picasso household which destroyed the sense of mystery Sabartes created around the “master”.
Another person who appears later in her weavings is Picasso’s first wife Olga. The daughter of Russian aristocracy, Picasso had met her during Diagilev’s Russian Ballet’s performances in Paris. Her background had drawn Picasso to her, but soon her social ambitions had tired him, as they forced them to live a life surrounded by an entourage of house helpers and to take part in superficial “upper crust” social events. Olga never gave up on Picasso. She followed him like a shadow, from a distance, even outside of Paris. When Gillot had her first child and spent time in the “midi”, she began a campaign of harassment which eventually led to physical attack. Gillot convinced Picasso to move from the house they were being hosted at. Picasso of course, didn’t like at all to have to move as a result of two women fighting over him. Gillot recalls one of Picasso’s anecdotes:
‘“I remember one day while I was painting Guernica in the big studio in Rue des Grands-Augustins, Dora Maar was with me. Marie-Therese dropped in and when she found Dora there, she grew angry and said to her, ‘I have a child by this man. It’s my place to be here with him. You can leave right now.” Dora said, ‘I have as much reason as you have to be here. I haven’t borne him a child but I don’t see what difference that makes.’ I kept on painting and they kept on arguing. Finally, Marie-Therese turned to me and said, ‘Make up your mind. Which one of us goes?’ It was a hard decision to make. I liked them both, for different reasons: Marie-Therese because she was sweet and gentle and did whatever I wanted her to, and Dora because she was intelligent. I decided I had no interest in making a decision. I was satisfied with things as they were. I told them they’d have to fight it out themselves. So they began to wrestle. It’s one of my choicest memories.” And to judge from the way he laughed, it was.’ (pp. 110-111)
Olga had a son from Picasso, Paulo, and his friendship with Francoise seems one of the most cherished aspects of her relationship with the artist. Paulo was in love with motorbikes. He celebrated Francoise’s presence with displays of riding dexterity as they drive to Cap d’Antibes. (p. 248)
The only time Gillot saw Picasso happy was when they had children. (p.212)
A funny insight into Picasso’s personality is his disaffection for clothing. Gillot recounts how Picasso would so rarely wear suits, that he would go and have three of four made at a time and then put them away. By the time he got around to wearing them (for a special event or a public occasion), they would all be eaten away by moths! (p. 223) Fittings made him so nervous he couldn’t even paint.
Another funny side of Picasso’s personality was his attachment to superstition, even combining his traditional Spanish customs to his first wife’s Russian ones.
I was surprised to read so little about Picasso and Gillot’s children and their interactions. On page 257 she writes,
“Paloma rarely bothered me. She was, as Pablo often pointed out, an ideal girl-child. She slept almost around the clock, ate everything she was supposed to and behaved like a model for her kind.
‘She’ll be the perfect woman,’ Pablo said. ‘Passive and submissive. That’s the way all girls should be. They ought to stay asleep just like that until they are twenty-one.’ He spent many hours sketching and painting her as she slept. She was so passive, in fact, that she rarely talked to either one of us. And yet during some of her waking periods, we used to hear her chattering endlessly to Claude. Afterward Claude would speak to us for both of them. She seemed to want to remain a baby. […] Claude on the other hand, argued about everything. After one drawn-out session with him, Pablo told him, ‘You’re the son of the woman who says “no.” There’s no doubt about that.’
It must have been lonely for them much of the time: they almost never saw their father, and their mother barricaded herself behind her studio door whenever she could see a spare hour or two before her.
Once as I was working at a painting that had been giving me a great deal of trouble, I heard a small, timid knock at the door.
‘Yes,’ I called out and kept on working. I heard Claude’s voice, softly from the other side of the door.
‘Mama, I love you.’
I wanted to go out, but I couldn’t put down my brushes, not just then. ‘I love you too, my darling,’ I said, and kept at my work.
A few minutes passed. Then I heard him again, ‘Mama, what you do is very nice. It’s got fantasy in it but it’s not fantastic.’
That stayed my hand, but I said nothing. He must have felt me hesitate. He spoke up, louder now. ‘It’s better than Papa’s,’ he said.
I went to the door and let him in.
“I had stopped painting for about three years and spent whatever time I had drawing. It had seemed to me that if I were to go on painting, it would be impossible to work next to Pablo without reflecting his presence.” (p.256)
During the years of her relationship with him, Picasso’s closest artistic friend was Matisse. Personality-wise, Matisse was very different from Picasso: He was very spiritual, and had an almost monk-like serenity. “Of all the artists Pablo knew and visited during the years I spent with him, no one meant quite as much to him as Matisse.” (p. 261)
Matisse at the time was involved in what is probably the most beautiful modern art religious projects in Europe, the Chapel in Vence. “Matisse was confined to his bed for three-quarters of the day but that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the project. He had paper fixed to the ceiling over his bed, and at night, since he didn’t sleep much, he would draw on it with a piece of charcoal attached to the end of a long bamboo stick, sketching out the portrait of St. Dominic and other elements of the decoration.” (p. 261)
“Matisse’s idea was that there should be no color inside the chapel, other than what came in with the light shining through the stained-glass windows. He laid out the maquettes for the glass in much the same manner he used for the papiers decoupes on which he spent a good part of his last years.”
“The color range he was working with included ultramarine, a deep yellow, and a green. […] that the glass should be frosted on the outside. He reasoned that if it were not frosted, the blue, for example, would five a great deal less luminosity than the yellow and woudn’t remain on the same plane. With the glass frosted, the luminosity would be uniform throughout. But once the windows were placed in the chapel, they gave a kind of uniform pink-mauve light.” (p. 263)
“As for Matisse, whether Buddhist or Christian, he radiate a serenity that I found very moving. I told him so one day. He said to me, ‘I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time.’” (p. 264)
Picasso was known in his days for producing artwork of powerful symbolism. One of them is the icon of the “dove” used many times over as a symbol of peace: “Aragon looked through a folder of recent lithographs, and when he saw that one, the pigeon looked so much like a dove to him that he had the idea of making it the symbol of the [Peace] congress. Pablo agreed and by the end of te day, the poster and the ‘dove’ had already begun to appear on Paris walls. In its countless printings and reprintings, first as an original lithograph and later in reporduction, the poster went around the world in the cause – or at least in the name – of peace. (p. 273)
Gillot speaks an eternal truth about people like Picasso: […] “although Pablo liked making fun of people, he didn’t like people to make fun of him.” (p. 274)
Picasso criticized his friend, poet Aragon, for loving and worshipping one woman: “’How can you go on always loving the same woman?’ Pable asked him one day. ‘After all, she’s going to change like everybody else and grow old.’ ‘That’s just it,’ Aragon said. ‘I like all those little changes. They nourish me. I like the autumn of a woman, too.’ ‘Well, well,’ said Pablo, ‘I’ll bet you also like the lace panties and silk stockings. Are YOU decadent!’ Aragon laughed, ‘And you? You’re an eternal adolescent, I’d say. I shouldn’t talk to you about things like that. You’re not mature enough to understand them.’” (p. 275)
Gillot’s disaffection for Communist comrades of Picasso who would come and eat with them for hours, when they would usually spend very little time eating.
There is also a hint of Picasso’s antisemitism towards Chagall. Chagall had been in Russia during the revolution and didn’t have any desire to return there, but Picasso questioned why he had been in many other countries but not there. Chagall told him he would go back only after Picasso settled there. Picasso’s answer was, “’With you I suppose it’s a question of business. There’s no money to be made there.’” (p. 281) Chagall had his sharp comments about Picasso too. A long time later, he remarked, “’What a genius that Picasso. It’s a pity he doesn’t paint.’” (p. 282)
The book also talks about Picasso’s troubled relationship with two other Cubists, Leger and Braque. One anecdote I liked: As Braque travelled through Italy with his wife, in every town they stopped, Braque would drive to the local museum and ask his wife to go inside it, “’Marcelle, you go in and look around and then tell me what’s good in there.’” (p. 283)
I liked the description of how Kahnweiler, one of Picasso’s most important art dealers, got around Picasso’s persistent questions about why he didn’t join the communist party. When Picasso accused him of choosing the easy argument out, of being disgusted by Stalin, Kahnweiler replied, “’Not at all, I’ve just come to realize something I never understood before, and that is, Stalin was a pessimist. I supposed he must have picked it up in his early years at the seminary, when he was studying theology. Developed a kind of Manichaean dualism, apparently. He must have decided thatevil is so well rooted in human nature that he could only eliminate it by wiping out human life. So, after studying the question very carefully, I have come to the conclusion that there’s just too much of a contradiction there. On one hand, Marxism preaches the doctrine of endless possibilities of human progress: in other words a doctrine based on optimism. Yet Stalin gives us the proof of just how false he thought that doctrine was. He was better placed than anyone to know whether optimism in that matter was possible, and he answered with a thumping negative by killing everyone within reach, apparently on the grounds that human nature was so bad, there was no other way of settling affairs. Under those conditions, how can you expect an intelligent man to become a Communist?’” (p. 289)
Both Gillot and Picasso were obviously on the left in their view of the world, and because of this, I thought it was funny how Gillot and Picasso always had maids, cooks, nurses for the kids (p. 292). Isn’t that in contradiction with their anti-bourgeois posture?
There is a famous quote from Picasso later in Gillot’s memoir. “Most of the painters and sculptors Pablo called on were a little uneasy when Pablo was in their ateliers, perhaps because Pablo often said, ‘When there’s anything to steal, I steal.’” (p. 317)
But it is Gillot’s grandmother’s death who pushes her to get out of the relationship with Picasso. She knew all along that he had tender eyes for other women, which sometimes translated into action. What made things more difficult was the complicity of Picasso’s friends in covering up his affairs. (p. 345) Finally, she told him she was planning to move out, he started a circus to try to dissuade her, even though it was obviously a not very conviced acting performance. (p. 347) Another event helped Gillot in her decision, and it was the romantic admiration of a friend’s Greek friend, Kostas. When Picasso found out, he told all his friends, and that, of course, created even more tension between Gillot and Picasso’s ‘friends.’” (p. 348) Picasso of course was endlessly selfish: When Gillot started having health problems after the birth of Paloma, she needed to be operated to stop the persistent hemorrages she was having. She wrote to Ines, Picasso’s chambermaid, to come to Vallauris to take care of the children while she went to the hospital. She said she couldn’t leave Paris (she was very jealous of Picasso too!). When she told Picasso, he told Gillot there was no way she was going to get operated then. “’I’m much too busy to let you take time off now. There’s no need for women to be sick so often, anyway.’” (p. 257) That was when Gillot picked up her kids and left Picasso to go back to Paris.
A last shocking (or maybe not) episode recounted in the book was that of the selling of the house Picasso and Gillot had lived together in, while in Vallauris, in the south of France. Gillot had just married again, and she sent her children and maid to spend the summer with Picasso in Cannes, in a new house he had bought there. Her maid wrote to her that the house Gillot and Picasso had lived in together had been sold. She asked the maid to call the police and get a bailiff to inspect the house and write a report: The house had been completely emptied of all of her personal belongings, her favourite books and her own artwork. Picasso and his friends completely shunned Gillot after their separation. Art dealers who were so eagerly seeking her work, suddently terminated their contracts with her, for fear Picasso would get upset. The book ends with a touching paragraph, fruit of both admiration and some concealed resentment, I think:
“Pablo had told me, that first afternoon I visited him alone, in February 1944, that he felt our relationship would bring light into both our lives. My coming to him, he said, seemed like a window that was opening up and he wanted it to remain open. I did, too, as long as it let in the light. When it no longer did, I closed it, much against my own desire. From that moment on, he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that." (p. 367)
He praised mine as being very interesting – as he chuckled – because I wrote that one aspect missing from literature anthologies was whether writers conducted their personal life in a manner congruent with their ideals.
This reminds me of a discussion I have had many times with people who judge political figures by their immoral personal life and not by their achievements. (So I guess I changed my mind there.) One good example being Clinton, who is still admired for his skills as a politician from all sides, but whose flirts with women marred his career.
If Picasso were to be judged by his personality (at least as described by Francoise Gilot) and not his artistic innovation, he would definitely not be considered a great artist. It is difficult to prove sympathy for him for the way he treated women and those close to him.
I wanted to read this book after seeing “Surviving Picasso”. I never was a big Picasso fan (everyone always quoted him, I preferred the underdogs), still I was surprised the movie portrayed him as such a selfish chauvinist. So I got the book. Gilot’s memoirs confirms the image of the artist as portrayed by the film, though I think choosing Anthony Hopkins to act as a Spaniard is the worse possible choice a director could have made.
Francoise Gilot is a keen observer of her “beast” and here and there lashes out with some typical French humor. That same humor allowed her to survive the harshness of people around Picasso - like Sabartes, Picasso’s old time friend and employee; or Ines, his maid (p.164) -, who viewed her as an intruder or competition, as she became closer and closer to Picasso.
You can’t but feel resentment for all the intellectuals who cross paths with Gilot as Picasso’s companion, since they all seem to regard her as a young, empty-headed girl infatuated with the great artist. (An example is Picasso and Francoise’s visit to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.)
It is wonderful to enter the world of Picasso through the eyes of Gilot. Picasso was such an important figure of his time.
Gilot’s depiction of Paris during the occupation and afterwards are very telling of the place Picasso occupied in the cultural and social life of France. For example, Picasso was seen as a symbol of intellectual Resistance, when many artists and intellectual fled to the United States during the Second World War. No only was he worshipped by the French, but also by the Americans, who had read about him in various accounts of American writers (like Gertrude Stein). After the War, “you couldn’t walk ten feet inside his atelier without falling over the recumbent body of some young GI. […] In the beginning they were mostly young writers, artists, and intellectuals. After a while they were simply tourists […]
Picasso definitely had a knack for business, as he led art dealers up tortuous paths to buy his paintings. One funny incident is that of an American dealer who was trying to impress Picasso as he was looking for a bargain, by telling him how he would raise prices for buyers who tried to speculate on dead artists. Picasso, without loosing a beat, told him, “I am sure you don’t speculate on the death of artists, but it won’t do you any good to try to speculate on me alive. My prices are higher that way. I suggest you go back to America and try to pick up some Picassos at prewar prices there. Here there’s a certain value attached to being still alive in spite of the war. That makes my paintings more expensive.” (p. 65)
Picasso didn’t like new painting trends, such as Abstract Expressionism: “Naturally, nonfigurative painting is never subversive. It’s always a kind of bag into which the viewer can throw anything he wants to get rid of.”
But one of the main themes of the book, resurfacing from time to time, is Picasso’s troublesome relationships with women. Picasso had a favorite saying: “For me, there are only two kinds of women – goddesses and doormats.” (p. 84) When women were hard to catch, he lavished them with his attention; once he had them, he despised them. That’s probably one of the reasons why his relationship with Gilot lasted so long: Throughout their marriage she kept on painting and never gave in to his demands she completely abandoned her personal relationships. At one point, when he came back from Poland, he even dared to slap him, which made him all the more proud of her. Another reason Gilot lasted so long was maybe the fact she worked like a mule for him, always putting her art and their children after setting up everything for Picasso so he could do his work. (p. 254)
His attention for women didn’t spare his friends’ wives. One of them was Eluard’s German acrobat’s wife, Nusch, who had been a model for Picasso during his blue period. Picasso says, “It was a gesture of friendship on my part […]. I only did it to make him happy. I didn’t want him to think I didn’t like his wife.” (p.137)
Picasso was, of course, a real romantic: When they were courting, one day, Picasso brought Francoise some roses. Francoise immediately felt this was not a gesture he was capable of. In fact, he had received those roses from someone else! (p. 102)
During the early stages of their relationship, Picasso kept on trying to set up encounters between himself, Gilot and his ex-lover Dora Maar. In spite of Gilot’s continuous protests that these meetings were inappropriate, especially since Maar suffered from bouts of depression, Picasso attempted many times to create situations in which the three would visit, against Maar’s complete disinterest in this. One day after Dora Maar tells Picasso, “You never loved anyone in your life. You don’t know how to love.” (p. 106), Picasso, as he is walking home with Francoise, expresses physically his contempt for her by dragging Gilot and pushing her against a parapet on the Pont Neuf, threatening her to throw her into the river below. (p.107)
Gilot recounts how her resistance to Picasso’s abuses had roots in her relationship with her father, who had wanted a boy, and had demanded she develop the physical strength and courage (erroneously shall we say?) attributed to boys. So whenever a situation seemed dangerous or challenging, Gilot’s was drawn to it.
Gilot had been subjected to physical abuse by his father, including in an incident (also depicted in the movie) in which his father, on finding out she wanted to study art instead of enrolling in a more socially acceptable discipline, beat her until she bled.
Gilot’s attraction to Picasso also stemmed from another perception of him: “Although Picasso had been receiving the world’s adulation […], he was the most solitary of men.” Of course, he had his share of responsibility in this situation. Picasso was very jealous of his friends, and complained when his friends would meet without him (maybe tired of his egocentrism?). In one incident, he complained about his old time friends for meeting with Braque without him. (p.144) His possessiveness of people around him also applied to his relationships with women: He liked to keep all of them revolving around him. (p. 242) This pattern sometimes took the form of a game:
‘As I thought about it, I realized that in Pablo’s life things went on just about the way they do in a bullfight. Pablo was the toreador and he waved the red flag, the muleta. For a picture dealer, the muleta was another picture dealer; for a woman, another woman. The result was the person playing the bull stuck his horns into the red flag instead of goring the real adversary – Pablo. And that is why Pablo was always able, at the right moment, to have his sword free to stick you where it hurt. I came to be very suspicious of this tactic and any time I saw a big red flag waving around me, I would look to one side of it. There, I always found Pablo.’ (p. 243)
Picasso was like a little child in need of attention. And like a little child he loved to make noise, like when he visited Menerbes and for Bastille Day, he paraded the streets with the locals playing bugles at the top of their lungs. (p.127)
His intense relationship with people who worked with him, like his Catalan friend Sabartes, make their way into the narrative of Gilot’s years with Picasso (p.165). Sabartes was very jealous of his place at Picasso’s court, and even more so when Gilot had his first child Claude. Claude brought a light and commotion into the Picasso household which destroyed the sense of mystery Sabartes created around the “master”.
Another person who appears later in her weavings is Picasso’s first wife Olga. The daughter of Russian aristocracy, Picasso had met her during Diagilev’s Russian Ballet’s performances in Paris. Her background had drawn Picasso to her, but soon her social ambitions had tired him, as they forced them to live a life surrounded by an entourage of house helpers and to take part in superficial “upper crust” social events. Olga never gave up on Picasso. She followed him like a shadow, from a distance, even outside of Paris. When Gilot had her first child and spent time in the “midi”, she began a campaign of harassment which eventually led to physical attack, until Gilot convinced Picasso to move from the house they were being hosted at. Picasso of course, didn’t like at all to have to move as a result of two women fighting over him. Gilot recalls one of Picasso’s anecdotes:
‘“I remember one day while I was painting Guernica in the big studio in Rue des Grands-Augustins, Dora Maar was with me. Marie-Therese dropped in and when she found Dora there, she grew angry and said to her, ‘I have a child by this man. It’s my place to be here with him. You can leave right now.” Dora said, ‘I have as much reason as you have to be here. I haven’t borne him a child but I don’t see what difference that makes.’ I kept on painting and they kept on arguing. Finally, Marie-Therese turned to me and said, ‘Make up your mind. Which one of us goes?’ It was a hard decision to make. I liked them both, for different reasons: Marie-Therese because she was sweet and gentle and did whatever I wanted her to, and Dora because she was intelligent. I decided I had no interest in making a decision. I was satisfied with things as they were. I told them they’d have to fight it out themselves. So they began to wrestle. It’s one of my choicest memories.” And to judge from the way he laughed, it was.’ (pp. 110-111)
Olga had a son from Picasso, Paulo, and his friendship with Francoise seems one of the most cherished aspects of her relationship with the artist. Paulo was in love with motorbikes. He celebrated Francoise’s presence with displays of riding dexterity as they drive to Cap d’Antibes. (p. 248)
The only time Gilot saw Picasso happy was when they had children. (p.212)
A funny insight into Picasso’s personality is his disaffection for clothing. Gilot recounts how Picasso would so rarely wear suits, that he would go and have three of four made at a time and then put them away. By the time he got around to wearing them (for a special event or a public occasion), they would all be eaten away by moths! (p. 223) Fittings made him so nervous he couldn’t even paint.
Another funny side of Picasso’s personality was his attachment to superstition, even combining his traditional Spanish customs to his first wife’s Russian ones.
I was surprised to read so little about Picasso and Gilot’s children and their interactions. On page 257 she writes,
“Paloma rarely bothered me. She was, as Pablo often pointed out, an ideal girl-child. She slept almost around the clock, ate everything she was supposed to and behaved like a model for her kind.
‘She’ll be the perfect woman,’ Pablo said. ‘Passive and submissive. That’s the way all girls should be. They ought to stay asleep just like that until they are twenty-one.’ He spent many hours sketching and painting her as she slept. She was so passive, in fact, that she rarely talked to either one of us. And yet during some of her waking periods, we used to hear her chattering endlessly to Claude. Afterward Claude would speak to us for both of them. She seemed to want to remain a baby. […] Claude on the other hand, argued about everything. After one drawn-out session with him, Pablo told him, ‘You’re the son of the woman who says “no.” There’s no doubt about that.’
It must have been lonely for them much of the time: they almost never saw their father, and their mother barricaded herself behind her studio door whenever she could see a spare hour or two before her.
Once as I was working at a painting that had been giving me a great deal of trouble, I heard a small, timid knock at the door.
‘Yes,’ I called out and kept on working. I heard Claude’s voice, softly from the other side of the door.
‘Mama, I love you.’
I wanted to go out, but I couldn’t put down my brushes, not just then. ‘I love you too, my darling,’ I said, and kept at my work.
A few minutes passed. Then I heard him again, ‘Mama, what you do is very nice. It’s got fantasy in it but it’s not fantastic.’
That stayed my hand, but I said nothing. He must have felt me hesitate. He spoke up, louder now. ‘It’s better than Papa’s,’ he said.
I went to the door and let him in.
“I had stopped painting for about three years and spent whatever time I had drawing. It had seemed to me that if I were to go on painting, it would be impossible to work next to Pablo without reflecting his presence.” (p.256)
During the years of her relationship with him, Picasso’s closest artistic friend was Matisse. Personality-wise, Matisse was very different from Picasso: He was very spiritual, and had an almost monk-like serenity. “Of all the artists Pablo knew and visited during the years I spent with him, no one meant quite as much to him as Matisse.” (p. 261)
“Matisse found himself a prime mover in the construction and decoration of the Dominican chapel in Vence.
Matisse was confined to his bed for three-quarters of the day but that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the project. He had paper fixed to the ceiling over his bed, and at night, since he didn’t sleep much, he would draw on it with a piece of charcoal attached to the end of a long bamboo stick, sketching out the portrait of St. Dominic and other elements of the decoration.” (p. 261)
“Matisse’s idea was that there should be no color inside the chapel, other than what came in with the light shining through the stained-glass windows. He laid out the maquettes for the glass in much the same manner he used for the papiers decoupes on which he spent a good part of his last years.”
Entered on: Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 at 18:23.
