Picasso was very fond of “Le Peintre et son modéle” (so were other people: the exhibition at the Leiris Gallery next year was a great success) and in the winter he engraved a large number of the pictures, often changing them in the direction of an even greater simplicity. He had spent a pleasant summer after the hard work of the first six months of 1963, relaxing in his usual way by turning out hundreds of pots and painted tiles as well as by swimming, sun-bathing, and watching all the bull-fights he could reach. He would take off for Nîmes, Aries, or Fréjus with his traditional caravan of friends and children, a caravan now headed by a massive white Lincoln Continental: and this monster was now driven not by Paulo but by an orthodox chauffeur. Some few of the bull-fights were uncommonly spectacular and Picasso’s heightened sensibilities were not disappointed; and although he, like so many aficionados, suffered from something resembling the post coitum sadness after the moments of ecstatic mass-excitement, they left him eager for the next. A more enduring pleasure was the fact that the Barcelona museum opened at last this year, after the delay caused by the appalling floods that ravaged Catalonia in the autumn of 1962. It opened quietly, with no drums or trumpets, perhaps because of Picasso’s Communism, perhaps for reasons connected with internal politics; but the existence of the museum, the friendly, appreciative attitude of the city, and the evident competence and good will of those in charge of the foundation gave him a profound satisfaction.
In spite of the bull-fights this summer was quieter than most. Jacqueline, as Madame Picasso, now had rights that she had not formerly possessed, and she protected him with greater effect than before, if not necessarily with greater discrimination; and although a house with growing children in it can scarcely be an abode of peace, Picasso did not mind the din: at least it did not stop him working, although at times it was very considerable. Claude and Paloma were at the noisiest age; so were Kathy Hutin and Isabelle Ley marie, the daughter of the poet and curator Jean Ley marie, her companion at school and for two years and more an inmate of Notre-Dame-de-Vie; so were Pablito and Marina, Paulo’s children; and in the holidays they were often all there together.
With the turn of the year he took to painting large nudes in some degree related to those of his “Painter” and in some to Jacqueline. Then in February of 1964 a long-legged kitten, generally black, joined the nude, who grew far more like Madame Picasso and who played with the little creature much as the very different models of ten years before had played with their young cats.
A great number of bucolic heads followed the nudes, reminiscent in feeling though not in technique of those he had painted at Mougins just before the war. Then came more nudes, still-lives, Jacquelines, and some postscripts to the “Peintre et son modéle.” It was a productive year, though with no great blazing masterpieces, and one has the impression of an agreeably busy turning-over of ideas long matured and restated, often in a highly-colored shorthand, for the pleasure of it, a somewhat private rumination. This impression is strengthened by the surprising autumnal series of what might be called secondary “Painters”: a German publisher who had reproduced a Picasso of an artist close up to his easel, working away on a canvas whose back is towards the spectator, sent a whole parcel of the prints to Notre-Dame-de-Vie by way of compliment, and Picasso, very pleased, spread all the identical sheets about his studio. Then he took them one by one and painted over them so that as the days went by an astonishing number of variations appeared—the man’s features changed and shifted, his hat and beard came and went, but in every version he still worked with the same fixed intensity, while the untouched areas of the prints, perpetually repeated, and the unvarying spatial relationships gave the strangest feeling of eternity.
Long ago Matisse had said that the disaster of May, 1940, would not have come about “if everyone did his job as Picasso and 1 do ours.” Yet this total devotion had its dangers, and one was that in time the painter might overcome the man; that his art might become wholly concerned with itself, sinking or rising to an inward meditation so personal that communication would be lost, as it was lost for Frenhofer in Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu.
However, there was no want of communication in the Picasso who received his guests at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in the summer of 1964, nor of communicative merriment. Most were old, approved friends, although there were still a fair number of intruders and people who had to be received out of kindness to those who sent them; and one of the particularly tiring things about these new acquaintances was that as the introduction was a great occasion for them they expected Picasso to react with greatness—they expected the great man to utter great thoughts. They had seen concentrated Picasso in his pictures and they supposed that the same concentrated Picasso would sparkle out in words at any hour of the day: he was aware of their hopes—no man more sensitive to atmosphere—and having a wonderful gift for paradox and repartee he did his best to fulfill them. Occasionally sudden gloom would keep him mute, as it had done ever since the Quatre Gats, but far more often he succeeded: yet it is wearing to be Sir Oracle and to be listened to with bated breath, and perhaps it was because of this that he continued to wear false noses and comic hats, by way of jerking the interview on to another, less reverential plane.
Others came on business, among them emissaries from Paris, making the first approaches for the celebrations that were planned for his eighty-fifth birthday. Then there were the organizers of the exhibition in Tokyo and other cities; and they showed him how to write his name in Japanese. He was delighted, and he traced the characters over and over again.
Visitors were distracting, of course, but builders in the house were infinitely more so. This year he added another studio to Notre-Dame-de-Vie, bridging a terrace with a flat roof on to which he could climb: the place was growing crowded as the household increased—a secretary as well as the chauffeur—and as more and more pictures, more and more pots and possessions accumulated; and although he liked the craftsmen and loved seeing their yellow crane at work (he wanted to keep it, says Pierre Daix), their inevitable delays and the necessity for supervising them no doubt deprived the world of many a picture.
It is pleasant to think of Picasso in the tranquillity of a house free of them at last, working steadily with fresh space around him. It was a golden autumn in 1964, unusually beautiful even for the south of France, and although the threat of war, the final cataclysm, met one every time one opened a paper, Picasso seemed to be living in another world, sheltered behind his cypress-trees. There appeared to be no reason why this should not last forever; his small, trim form, brown and unaltered apart from a sprinkling of silver where any hair was left, had already defied the common laws of mortality so long that they did not seem to apply to him. Why should not this autumn stretch out to 1965, 1966, and beyond, indefinitely?
The reasons why it should not were in the first place Françoise Gilot and in the second real illness at last. For some considerable time there had been rumors that Françoise Gilot was going to bring out a book that would demolish Picasso: early in 1965 it appeared in French, German, and Spanish translations from the original English, and it was far worse than he had expected.
I have already said that I think it a nasty piece of work, nastier the more one reads it. This opinion was widely, though not universally, shared in France: Le Monde, the most influential and intelligent paper in the country, spoke of “a scandal-mongering production in which she recounts her private life, often quite without shame,” and a large number of the most distinguished artists, including André Beaudin, Pierre Soulages, Léon Gischia, Hans Hartung, E. F. Fenelosa, Joan Miró, Raoul Rebeyrolle, Vieira da Silva, and Léopold Survage signed a public protest in which they impugned its accuracy as well as other aspects, while many painters refused ever to exhibit with her again.
Why she published it I cannot tell; but it does occur to me that at least some of the malignancy may be due to the sacking of La Galloise in 1955. It will be remembered that Picasso was obliged to leave the house early that year, since
legally it belonged to Françoise Gilot: when she returned in August or September she found much of her property gone, including the paintings and drawings that Picasso had given her and that she evidently intended to keep, together with the house.
The effect of the book on Picasso was disastrous. In 1933 Fernande Olivier’s had vexed him extremely; but Picasso et ses amis had been about a youth long since vanished. Gilot’s book was about the mature and virtually unchanging Picasso, about Picasso in what amounted to the present: it distressed, wounded, and angered him as a gross betrayal that laid his privacy open to his enemies and as a caricature that exhibited him to the world as a ridiculous, an odious figure and even worse a bore. His friends, with understandable though perhaps excessive zeal, heightened his anger; messages of indignant sympathy poured in, some of them from people whose condolence was exquisitely painful. He began to take measures, none of them successful except in one small but particularly touching case, when he telephoned Madame de Lazerme and begged her not to read the book, which she never did. His lawyers instituted proceedings, but in the widely-publicized trial they were unable to persuade the judges to halt the distribution of the book or to order changes. The court decided against Picasso, apparently on the grounds that if Gilot chose to expose her private life, which was clearly a marketable commodity, she therefore acquired a right to expose Picasso’s, which was not. The only result of the case was to increase the book’s sale prodigiously and to strengthen Picasso’s hatred for Françoise to such a degree that it extended to everyone favorable to her.
Most unhappily this included her children, Claude and Paloma. They had not spent the summer of 1964 with their father, possibly because of the builders, possibly because of some abortive attempt at a compromise about the threatened book, and now, apart from a single embarrassed interview, they never saw him again.
It appears that they knew nothing of their parents’ disagreement; and it must be supposed that they either never read their mother’s book or that they found nothing offensive in it. They often came to the outer gate of Notre-Dame-de-Vie, and they were always turned away except on one occasion when Picasso himself happened to open it and Paloma was allowed in. Eventually much the same applied to Maya (now Madame Widmayer and a mother herself) and to Paulo’s children, Pablito and Marina. Much of my information comes from newspaper interviews given after Picasso’s death, when an unbelievably squalid battle for the inheritance broke out: the statements are always emotional, sometimes inconsistent, and never wholly to be relied upon; but even allowing for all the exaggerations of one-sided testimony it does appear that their exclusion reached monstrous proportions, and that they attributed their misfortune not to any fault of their own but solely to undue influence exercised upon their father. Journalists quoted Emilienne, Paulo’s wife, as saying, “Jacqueline created a vacuum around him,” Marie-Thérèse, “When that person arrived, Picasso’s whole life underwent a change,” and Marina, “Every time I went up to the house, Jacqueline received me for a few minutes and told me that grandfather was too tired to see me.”
Another explanation, quite apart from the book, is often put forward to account for Picasso’s unfortunate relationship with his children and grandchildren: according to this, once they were no longer small their presence reminded him of his age and he wished them away. It is true that Picasso resented the insults of time more than most men, but it is hard to believe that so complex and so affectionate a spirit could be moved by so simple a spring.
Yet affectionate though he was, none but his most ardent worshipers could maintain that Picasso was as effective a parent as he was a painter. He brought up his eldest son to no calling and he kept him in a state of dependence until the boy was a middle-aged man; and as far as education and professions were concerned his other children and his grandchildren fared little better. And then he cast them off, leaving no provision for them after his death.
These facts have been brought forward again and again, as though they were in some way relevant to his painting: they form part of the detractors’ common stock of ammunition. I am not concerned with making a case for or against Picasso; my aim is to see him whole, as far as ever I can; and to do so one must get the evidence as straight as possible.
In the first place, Picasso had little to do with the bringing up of his children. He lost the control of Paulo when the boy was about thirteen and of Claude and Paloma when they were six and four. And as far as Paulo was concerned, he does not appear to have had the least aptitude for learning at any time nor the least desire to take up any profession. Most people who knew him agree that he was an amiable young man, full of animal spirits and little else, not particularly interested in anything but motor-cycles, cars, and bull-fights, and that he was perfectly content to hang around, living on an allowance and having as much fun as possible with the riffraff of the Côte d’Azur. After a number of adventures he married, and at one time he tried running an hotel (the Unic-Hotel in the rue de Rennes); but neither the marriage nor the hotel answered his expectations, and presently he returned to his life of waiting, while his children, Pablo, born in 1949 and known as Pablito, and Marina, stayed with their mother. Brassaï found him at Boisgeloup in 1961, “looking after” the abandoned house. It had been occupied during the war by the French and German armies, and although it was in a fairly desolate condition, Picasso retained it still. By French law Paulo should by now have inherited his mother’s claim to a large share of Picasso’s fortune, but Picasso still felt that in natural justice a man might do what he liked with money he had earned himself and it is said that Paulo’s filial piety or his father’s overwhelming personality induced him to accept a monthly sum until such time as he should inherit the combined estate. When that time did come he surprised those who had known him as a pleasant though weak and insignificant youth by suddenly displaying an extraordinary hardness towards his own children and all other possible claimants. (It is true that the stake was huge: the estimates vary from twenty to fifty million pounds.)
Then as for Claude and Paloma, Picasso had no hold over them whatsoever: they were enfants adultérins, love-children of the most unprivileged kind, since they were the fruit not of fornication, which for French law results in enfants naturels, but, Picasso still being married to Olga, of adultery; and according to the legal fiction then in force enfants adultérins could not be recognized—they were necessarily the children of an unknown father, and they belonged to their mother entirely. Nevertheless he did what he could, and some time after the parting with Françoise he won a certain legal status as their guardian, while later he obtained a decree that gave them the right to bear the name Ruiz-Picasso. (Not that this overcame the legal fiction: officially they were still the children of an unknown father.) He also asked the court to give him the guardianship of Pablito and Marina, with whose upbringing he was dissatisfied; and although in their case he was unsuccessful, on the face of it he does not look like an altogether careless parent, begetting children and then leaving them to sink or swim.
In the second place, where a relationship is unsatisfactory, it is unlikely that all the faults should be on one side. On the whole Picasso was not lucky with his women, nor with his children. What he expected of the little creatures he drew and painted with such affection there is no telling, but surely it was something more than the rather common, uninteresting, and indeed unamiable young people most of them became. Admittedly they would have had to be exceptionable beings to overcome the disadvantages of having a sacred monster as a father, to withstand the unhealthy influence of his court (the flattery and the deference overflowed on to them), the notoriety in which they shared, and the prospect of enormous unearned wealth; but in spite of all the examples to the contrary it was still natural for Picasso to hope that they would turn out exceptional beings, as indeed they had been as babies, like everybody else.
But they did not. Paulo was a disappointment to him throughout, and the later conduct of the rest, who eventually sued their father t
o compel him to recognize them—an action that would give them a legal right to share in his estate—justified him in supposing that their eyes were fixed less on his heart than his pocket. As Marie-Thérèse observed, he loved to give but he hated to be asked; and asking could hardly have taken a stronger form.
By the time he was eighty Picasso had been preyed upon by several generations of parasites, and disillusionment may have gone too far, so that he discounted the affection that might exist side by side with cupidity and saw nothing but interested motives. At all events, when this general disappointment and suspicion is added to his anger at Gilot’s book and perhaps to a certain amount of domestic influence as well, there are quite enough factors to account for the unhappy situation of 1965 without invoking any criminal indifference on the part of Picasso. Parents are supposed to love their children: yet surely there is the implied condition that the children should be reasonably lovable?
An unhappy situation it was, although in the early stages few people could have read the unhappiness in Picasso’s journal, his daily production of drawings and pictures, unless it was in the reappearance of a thin and devilish cat approaching a lobster. But both the lobster and his companion the crab have claws; they defend themselves, and the cat is kept at arm’s length.
Picasso: A Biography Page 64