Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  The effect of her death, so young and fine, was catastrophic for Eluard—few of his friends expected him to survive—and it shocked and distressed Picasso extremely. This, as well as the ideas that were boiling in him and his love for the work, may account for his extraordinary assiduity at the lithographic studio. In his usual course of life he would breakfast in bed, look at his post and the newspapers, and sometimes it would be close on noon before he was up and about; but now he appeared at the workshop in the rue de Chabrol, over on the other side of Paris, at nine o’clock, and, says Fernand Mourlot, he would often stay until late in the evening.

  The warm, dim, rambling place with its cubicles and presses was a refuge for him in many ways—apart from anything else he was having trouble with his unoccupied flat in the rue La Boëtie, which the authorities wanted to requisition—and he had a horror of anything to do with the law. He worked there with such steadiness that his late morning receptions, his levees, were given up for months on end. Although his dark tan faded in Mourlot’s shop (it is difficult to imagine Picasso unsunburned), the piping fauns, the nymphs, the spring of the world, were still with him, and they poured out in a stream of lithographs that showed every known technique together with some some new discoveries of his own that the craftsmen said would never print but that nevertheless produced wonderful results: his famous dove was one, though that came somewhat later.

  The owl appeared, too: it had come to Paris to join the pigeons, turtledoves, and canaries, and it was fed from the studio’s abundant supply of mice. And the classical world also overflowed into his illustration for Dos Contes. He had often been obliged, by friendship or importunity, to illustrate books, sometimes against his will; but Dos Contes, by his very old friend Ramon Reventós, was one that he suggested himself and that he worked upon with great affection. The two stories, written long before and now to be collected into a volume, were El Centaure picador and El capvespre d’un faune (capvespre being twilight), and they were to be published in Catalan and in a French translation. Picasso not only made four plates for the one and four different plates for the other (some friends had to be content with a single, often irrelevant etching) but he also impregnated himself with the text, copying it out by hand, and he designed the initial letters and both jackets. The books themselves, limited editions, quickly vanished, bought by collectors, but they revived and confirmed Reventós’ reputation in Catalonia, and the illustrations have often been reproduced. One shows the birth of the last centaur: in a maternity-ward that has something of a stable—a manger and a sort of horse in the foreground—one midwife shows another the baby with little horns, hoofs, and a tail, while a figure on a bench, perhaps the woman’s husband, bows his head in his hands. And in one of the others the centaur, grown up, has attached himself to one of those small covered carts that used to be seen all over Spain—a reminiscence of the minotaur.

  Spain and childbirth were much in his mind at this time: the first indeed was never far away, and now it was brought even closer by Reventós and by the Catalan friends who came up to Paris in increasing numbers; while the second arose from the prospect of Françoise’s baby.

  In May, 1947, Françoise had this child, a boy whom she named Claude, and presently Picasso took them, together with a nurse, down to Golfe-Juan again. It was perhaps just as well, for by this time Françoise Gilot had thoroughly antagonized the other members of the household. She represents Ines as a sly, disagreeable minx, Sabartés as a bear, intellectually null, and both of them as jealous. Geneviève Laporte saw them in quite a different light: for her Ines was charming, beautiful, and welcoming, entirely on her side, while Sabartés, though harsh to exploiters, was as kind as could be. He was also a considerable writer, as she knew very well; for although she traveled much during these early Gilot years she was in Paris from time to time, and when she was there she translated some of Sabartés’ pieces, including a novel, from Spanish into French, a most elegant French, since she was herself a poet.

  At Golfe-Juan they lived in Louis Fort’s small house again, and now, with two more people in it, the house was smaller still. There was another disadvantage: Olga Picasso appeared and she began to haunt them, sitting close by on the bench and calling out to her son, now a young man of twenty-six who had grown up without the benefit of any particular education, trade, or profession and who was often with his father; and she followed them in the street. Picasso was irritated: once he slapped her. No doubt the crowded rooms displeased him too. But after a short while he spent little time either on the beach or in the house. Gilot says that he went to Antibes to paint the huge “Ulysse et les sirenes” at the castle, which was now beginning to function as a Picasso museum, and certainly the catalog dates it 1947; yet on the other hand he spoke of it as a finished picture when he was telling Brassaï about Antibes in November, 1946, and he showed him a photograph. There are innumerable contradictions of this kind in the record, but one quite undisputed, fully documented fact is that in the summer of 1947 Picasso went back to Vallauris.

  He went merely to see what had happened to the little objects he had made the year before: then he returned to make more, with no strong inclination at first, but presently with a mounting enthusiasm as he began to get the feel of this new medium, plastic above all others, and to realize its potentialities, coming back day after day until the days’ lengthened into months, the summer waned, winter came on, and the tale of his pots mounted to close on two thousand; and still he twirled, kneaded, shaped, incised, glazed, and painted his now docile clay.

  Chapter XIX

  IT has been said that pottery is not a medium that can express any very significant concept; that the technical processes which necessarily follow the artist’s work blur his line and color, destroying fine differences and taking away from the immediacy of his touch; that it is at its best when it is anonymous form and color; that in “personal” ceramics gaiety, decorativeness, and fantasy can survive but not much else; and that quite apart from the limitations of size and surface the ceramic equivalent of a “Guernica” is unthinkable. And in this particular case it has also been said that in the course of years the dispersion of Picasso’s energy over some thousands of minor objects encouraged his facility and, by sapping his concentration, did lasting damage to his creative power.

  This seems to me to overstate the case: but although I love many of the Picasso vases, figurines, and dishes I have seen I think few people would place his ceramics on the same level as his drawing, painting, or sculpture. It may be that he did not intend to express more than in fact he did express: or it may be that Picasso was no more able to perform the impossible than another man—that neither he nor anyone else could do away with the inherent nature of baked clay.

  Yet even if one were to admit that pottery cannot rise much above gaiety, fantasy, and decoration (and there are Sung bottles by the thousand as evidence to the contrary, to say nothing of the Greek vases), what a range is there! Picasso certainly thought it wide enough, and he worked on and on, learning and innovating among the wheels, the various kilns, and the damp mounds of clay in the Ramiés’ Madoura pottery, taking little time off for anything except some studies of young Claude, a certain number of lithographs and illustrations, particularly for Reverdy’s Le Chant des Morts, and for Góngora. He had always valued Góngora and this selection of twenty poems was another book that he set himself to do with great good will: he carefully wrote them out (his hand was to be reproduced) and then embellished nineteen with etchings—the twentieth, Góngora’s sonnet on El Greco, he left untouched, out of respect for the painter.

  Paris saw scarcely anything of him apart from a short visit about the turn of the year, and in February, 1948, he was back in the south, living at Golfe-Juan and working at Vallauris. Still the pots came from his hands by the hundred: doves and owls; figurines allied to those of archaic Greece or at least born under the same sun; plates with his Antibes fauns, others with Mediterranean fishes, with bulls, bull-fights, and with the sun
itself; every combination of the creature and the hollow vessel, nearly all for use. His square, stubby hands had always been quick to learn the use of any implement, and here they were the living tool: by now he had a mastery of the craft, and some of his new, hazardous techniques were surprisingly successful. At times he came near to achieving a wholly satisfactory synthesis of painting, sculpture, and collage, of color and the third dimension, and that on a scale comparable to what he had accomplished in each of them separately. Although in general his aim was not nearly so high, he may in fact have done so; and if he did then it was when he molded and shaped his great vases, turning them into smooth, perfectly rounded women, sometimes without heads and on occasion transmuted into bronze, with its more living surface.

  He loved women’s bodies as much as ever Maillol did or Renoir, and his pleasure can be seen in every flowing curve. But those he had not shaped himself left him little peace: Françoise, idle and discontented in the small rented house, now had real cause for complaint. Olga had come back again and she renewed her persecution with greater zeal. Taking advantage of the fact that Madame Fort knew her, she even got into the house, and there she would slap her rival when they met in the hall, while at the front door she would both pinch and scratch.

  According to Gilot’s account Picasso was not particularly moved when she told him, so she “drummed into him, day after day, my dissatisfaction” until the month of May, when, badgered beyond endurance, he found and bought a house above Vallauris itself, a horrid little villa called La Galloise, half a mile or so out of the town and up a steep hill.

  The removal came at a bad time, and Picasso refused to have anything to do with it: the powerful, healthy young woman had only the chauffeur and Paulo and the nurse to help her take the baggage and some papers from Golfe-Juan to the villa, and her sense of grievance stayed with her for fifteen years. As she says herself, “the new house didn’t improve my disposition all at once, however. In one of the photographs taken of us sitting on the beach at that period, I have a long face—brooding, if not actually sulky.”

  A less tender witness might have said “positively sulky, discontented, and deeply selfish”; and Picasso, who loved to laugh, remembered her as a kind of permanent tragedy-queen. At no time does she seem to have had the least idea of the tension under which a creative man must work; her convenience was to come first, or there would be the steady domestic hostility that Picasso knew only too well—a sadly familiar pattern. Even before this he had learned so much of the young woman’s developing nature that a tactless suggestion of marriage caused him to react violently. The suggestion, to be sure, was accompanied by other ill-timed and perhaps even more provocative words, but even so the outburst is significant.

  Françoise Gilot speaks of the incident—it is fairly well known from other sources—and the passage in which she does so is one of the few in her book that show an entirely recognizable Picasso. They had invited Madame Cuttoli and her husband the senator, a typical southern politician and a man of great local importance, to dinner at a restaurant on the shore. The senator blundered into the delicate subject of the pictures in the Antibes museum. He urged Picasso to make a formal donation—to relinquish his right to his own creation—and he went on to say that Picasso should also become a French citizen. This would allow him to get his divorce and to marry Françoise: after all, they had a child now.

  Picasso was not half the size of the politician, but his instant explosion of rage completely dominated the big man. He spoke intemperately, it must be admitted: among other things he cried out that to the quotation “I do not seek: I find” should be added “I do not give: I take” (a palpable falsehood, by the way: he spent his life giving, and at about this time he handed over ten capital pictures, of enormous value even then, to Cassou’s Musée d’Art moderne which could not afford to buy them), adding some furious remarks about the relative importance to him of the Spanish Republic on the one hand and Françoise Gilot and her son on the other, and asserting that he had no intention of submitting his life “to the laws that govern the miserable little lives of you petits bourgeois.”

  This took away their appetite. Gilot continues: “ ‘Well, why don’t you eat?’ he shouted. ‘This food isn’t good enough for you? My God, the stuff I get at your house sometimes! But I eat it anyway, for friendship’s sake. You’ll have to do the same. You’re my guest.’ Pablo was out of all control now, beating his feet up and down on the floor and rolling his eyes like a hysterical woman. [This simile is pure Gilot.] No one answered him. He stood up, picked up his plate, and hurled it into the sea.”

  The little scene is valuable not only for showing Picasso’s hatred of being manipulated, his love for Spain, and his aversion to marrying Françoise, and all this in a short space, but also as an example of his remarkably forgiving nature. Few people can overlook having given or received an affront, but Picasso was one of those few, and presently he and Madame Cuttoli, and even the senator, were as well together as ever they had been: he looked upon such things as part of the normal give and take between friends, and his personality was such—he was so pleasant at other times—that many of them agreed with him.

  For a long while he even forgave Françoise her glumness, her martyrdom, and her nagging about the house; he had a remaining fondness for her and he was very much attached to the little boy; and she says that this summer he suggested she should have another child, to cure her discontent. Her statement is difficult to reconcile with his words “I did not want any children. It was she who wanted them,” though perhaps not with his “for me, getting a woman with child means possession and it helps me destroy the feeling that was there. You can’t imagine what an everlasting need I have to break free!”

  In any case, by the time Picasso went off to Poland in August, 1948, Françoise was pregnant again. The journey was no sudden whim—he did not break the routine of his days without great reluctance—but the result of much negotiation and pressure on the part of the Communists. The cold war between Russia and the West had begun, a war in which moral and intellectual standing played an important part; and among the intricate maneuvers was the calling of a Congress of Intellectuals for Peace at Wroclav, or, as it used to be called, Breslau, a heterogeneous assembly that included some men of great eminence and passionate sincerity. Although in spite of his conversion Picasso’s painting showed no signs of Socialist-Realism, and although it was still as degenerate for the Russians as it had been for the Germans, his reputation and his known integrity would add such weight to the manifestation that the Polish embassy sent a woman down to Vallauris to deal with his procrastination; he had said he would attend, but he showed not the least sign of moving. She went to work with the energy of one well acquainted with Stalin’s short way with saboteurs: Picasso’s obsolete Republican passport did not signify—the Poles would fly him there in one of their own planes without formalities—there was nothing to be frightened of: the plane would certainly not fall down: there were aerodynamic laws to keep it up—he would like the congress when he got there. After three days or so she got him into a flying-machine for the first time in his life: he was despondent and anxious, but at least he had Eluard and Marcel Boudin with him—they would all fly in the face of nature together, three Icaruses sharing, and thus dividing, the impiety.

  The woman was right about the plane; it stayed in the air all the way to Poland. But she was mistaken about his liking the Party when he got there. Picasso had always bored easily, and there were innumerable speeches: a photograph shows him wearing earphones and listening to the simultaneous translation with an air of dismal resignation. His round bald head looks younger than it had some years before, as though he now reached an age that really suited him, an age that he wore as naturally as he had worn his long-lasting youth. His dark eye is more lustrous still now that no forelock competes with it; no surrounding wrinkles are to be seen, and the fold of the eyelid, the most expressive part of a face, shows a purity of line often found in Orientals or
very young children. He has a respectable suit on for once (though a button is missing) and in his lapel there is the chain attached to the schoolboy watch in his breast-pocket: it was many, many years before his conservative mind could be brought to accept the modern fashion of wearing it on his wrist.

  There were some brighter moments, however. At one point a Russian delegate saw fit to make a speech reproaching the Impressionist-Surrealist Picasso for his decadence, representative of the worst in Western bourgeois culture, and Picasso replied with all his wonted fire, drawing the obvious parallel between this attack and those of the Nazis. On another occasion he read out a speech of his own, in which he denounced the imprisonment of his friend Pablo Neruda, in Chile. And then he and Eluard had time to visit Warsaw and buy embroidered Polish clothes for Claude and to see the Leonardo at Cracow. It is probable that the Poles also meant to give him pleasure by awarding him a decoration, the cross of one of their orders: the French government, perhaps in an attempt at forestalling the Communists and diminishing the value of their gesture, perhaps out of real gratitude for his gift to the Musée d’Art moderne, had already given him the silver medal of the Reconnaissance française just before he left. What Picasso thought of these honors does not appear, but it is a fact that unlike many of his eminent contemporaries he never put in for the Légion d’Honneur—a formal solicitation is required, and Cézanne had begged for it in vain.

  Françoise Gilot had expected him to be away for three days: he stayed for three weeks. This was a very grave offense, particularly as her interesting state entitled her to every consideration. It is true that he sent her a telegram every day, but as they all ended with the proletarian formula bons baisers she suspected them of having been written by Marcel, and when Picasso returned, bearing gifts, she greeted him with a blow in the face and then locked herself into the little boy’s room. She relates the incident with a self-applause undiminished by fifteen years of reflection.