Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  Many of the paintings he showed us that morning had a culinary basis—skinned rabbits or pigeons with peas—a kind of reflection of the hard time most people were having in getting food. There were others with a sausage stuck, almost like a papier collé, onto an otherwise carefully composed background; also, some portraits of women wearing hats topped with forks or fishes and other kinds of food. Finally he showed us a group of portraits of Dora Maar, very tortured in form, which he had painted over the past two years. They are among the finest paintings he has ever done, I believe. Generally on an off-white background, these figures seemed symbolic of human tragedy, rather than the simple deformation of a female face that they might appear on a superficial level.

  Suddenly he decided he had shown us enough. He walked away from his pyramid. “I saw your exhibition,” he said, looking at me. I didn’t have the courage to ask him what he thought of it, so I just looked surprised. “You’re very gifted for drawing,” he went on. “I think you should keep on working—hard—every day. I’ll be curious to see how your work develops. I hope you’ll show me other things from time to time.” Then he added, to Geneviève, “I think you’ve found the right teacher in Maillol. One good Catalan deserves another.”

  After that, little else he said that morning registered very deeply with me. I left the Rue des Grands-Augustins feeling very buoyant, impatient to get back to my studio and go to work.

  SOON AFTER THAT SECOND VISIT, Geneviève went back to the Midi. I wanted to return to the Rue des Grands-Augustins by myself but I felt it was a little early to show Picasso any new work even though he had been more than cordial in his invitation to come see him as often as I wanted to.

  I must admit I wondered more than once whether, if he had met me alone, he would even have noticed me. Meeting me with Geneviève, he saw a theme that runs throughout his entire work and was particularly marked during the 1930s: two women together, one fair and the other dark, the one all curves and the other externalizing her internal conflicts, with a personality that goes beyond the pictorial; one, the kind of woman who has a purely aesthetic and plastic life with him, the other, the type whose nature is reflected in dramatic expression. When he saw the two of us that morning, he saw in Geneviève a version of formal perfection, and in me, who lacked that formal perfection, a quality of unquiet which was actually an echo of his own nature. That created an image for him, I’m sure. He even said, “I’m meeting beings I painted twenty years ago.” It was certainly one of the original causes of the interest he showed.

  When I did go back to see him, it wasn’t long before he began to make very clear another side of the nature of his interest in me.

  There were always quite a few people waiting to see him: some in the long room on the lower floor, where Sabartés held forth; others in the large painting atelier on the floor above. Picasso, I soon noticed, was always looking for some excuse to get me off into another room where he could be alone with me for a few minutes. The first time, I remember, the pretext was some tubes of paint he wanted to give me. Having an idea that there was more involved than just paints, I asked him why he didn’t bring them to me. Sabartés, never very far away, said, “Yes, Pablo, you should bring them to her.”

  “Why?” Picasso asked. “If I’m going to give her a gift, the least she can do is make the effort to go after it.”

  Another morning, I had gone there on my bicycle, since that was the only way one could get around conveniently at that period. En route it had started to rain and my hair was soaking wet. “Just look at the poor girl,” Picasso said to Sabartés. “We can’t leave her in that state.” He took me by the arm. “You come with me into the bathroom and let me dry your hair,” he said.

  “Look, Pablo,” Sabartés said, “perhaps I should get Inès to do it. She’ll do it better.”

  “You leave Inès where she is,” Picasso said. “She’s got her own work to do.” He guided me into the bathroom and carefully dried my hair for me.

  Of course, Picasso didn’t have a situation like that handed to him every time. He had to manufacture his own. And so the next time it might be some special drawing paper he had uncovered in one of the countless dusty corners of the atelier. But whatever the pretext, it was quite clear that he was trying to discover to what degree I might be receptive to his attentions. I had no desire to give him grounds to make up his mind, one way or the other. I was having too much fun watching him try to figure it out.

  One day he said to me, “I want to show you my museum.” He took me into a small room adjoining the sculpture studio. Against the left-hand wall was a glass case about seven feet high, five feet wide, and a foot deep. It had four or five shelves and held many different kinds of art objects.

  “These are my treasures,” he said. He led me over to the center of the vitrine and pointed to a very striking wooden foot on one of the shelves. “That’s Old Kingdom,” he said. “There’s all of Egypt in that foot. With a fragment like that, I don’t need the rest of the statue.”

  Ranged across the top shelf were about ten very slender sculptures of women, from a foot to a foot and a half high, cast in bronze. “Those I carved in wood in 1931,” he said. “And look over here.” He pushed me very gently toward the end of the case and tapped on the glass in front of a group of small stones incised with female profiles, the head of a bull and of a faun. “I did those with this,” he said, and fished out of his pocket a small jackknife, labeled Opinel, with a single folding blade. On another shelf, and next to a wooden hand and forearm that were recognizably Easter Island, I noticed a small flat piece of bone, about three inches long. On its long sides were painted parallel lines imitating the teeth of a comb. In the center, between the two strips of “teeth,” was a cartouche showing two bugs meeting in head-on combat, one about to swallow up the other. I asked Picasso what that was. “That’s a comb for lice,” he said. “I’d give it to you but I don’t imagine you’d have any use for it.” He ran his fingers through my hair and parted it at the roots here and there. “No,” he said, “you seem to be all right in that department.”

  I moved back to the center of the vitrine. There was a cast of his sculpture A Glass of Absinthe, about nine inches high, with a hole cut into the front of the glass and a real spoon on top, bearing a simulated lump of sugar. “I did that long before you were born,” he said. “Back in 1914. I modeled it in wax and added a real spoon and had six of them cast in bronze, then painted each one differently. Here, this will amuse you.” He put his arm around me and sidled over to another part of the case, drawing me along with him. I saw a small match box on which he had painted the head of a woman in a post-Cubist manner. I asked him when he had done that.

  “Oh, two or three years ago,” he said. “These, too.” He pointed to a group of cigarette boxes on which he had painted women seated in armchairs. Three of them, I noticed, were dated 1940. “You see, I built them up in relief by pasting other bits of cardboard in various places,” he said. He pointed to the one in the center. “For that one, I sewed on the panel that makes the central part of the torso. Notice the hair. It’s pretty close to being hair—it’s string. These things are midway between sculpture and painting, I suppose.” I noticed, too, that the frame of the chair occupied by the woman with the sewn-on torso was formed in part by a piece of knotted string.

  Below these were several tiny stage sets, inside cigar boxes, with painted cut-out cardboard actors no larger than small safety-pins. The most curious things, though, were a number of reliefs built up, surrealist-fashion, by groupings of heterogeneous objects—matches, a butterfly, a toy boat, leaves, twigs—and covered with sand. Each one was about ten by twelve inches. I asked him what they were. He shrugged. “Just what they look like,” he said. “I had a spell of doing things like that about ten years ago, on the surface or the underside of small canvases. I assembled the compositions—some of those things are sewn on—covered them with glue and sanded them.”

  I finished looking at the sanded reliefs an
d then poked my head through a doorway cut into the back wall of the room. It opened into another small room, filled with frames. Behind them was a life-sized cut-out photograph of a Catalan peasant, who looked as though he might be guarding the museum’s treasures. I backed out again. On the opposite side of the room from the vitrine was a table covered with tools. I walked over to it. Picasso followed me.

  “These I use in finishing my sculpture,” he said. He picked up a file. “This is something I use all the time.” He tossed it back and picked up another. “This one is for finer surfaces.” One after another he handled a plane, pincers, nails of all kinds (“for engraving on plaster”), a hammer, and with each one he came closer to me. When he dropped the last piece back onto the table he turned abruptly and kissed me, full on the mouth. I let him. He looked at me in surprise.

  “You don’t mind?” he asked. I said no—should I? He seemed shocked. “That’s disgusting,” he said. “At least you could have pushed me away. Otherwise I might get the idea I could do anything I wanted to.” I smiled and told him to go ahead. By now he was thrown completely off the track. I knew very well he didn’t know what he wanted to do—or even whether—and I had an idea that by saying, placidly, yes, I would discourage him from doing anything at all. So I said, “I’m at your disposition.” He looked at me cautiously, then asked, “Are you in love with me?” I said I couldn’t guarantee that, but at least I liked him and I felt very much at ease with him and I saw no reason for setting up in advance any limits to our relationship. Again he said, “That’s disgusting. How do you expect me to seduce anyone under conditions like that? If you’re not going to resist—well, then it’s out of the question. I’ll have to think it over.” And he walked back out into the sculpture studio to join the others.

  A few days later he brought up the question in a similar manner. I told him I could promise him nothing in advance, but he could always try and see for himself. That nettled him. “In spite of your age,” he said, “I get the impression that you’ve had a lot of experience in that sort of thing.” I said no, not really. “Well, then, I don’t understand you,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense, the way you act.” I said I couldn’t help that. That was the way it was, sense or nonsense. Besides, I wasn’t afraid of him, so I couldn’t very well act as though I were. “You’re too complicated for me,” he said. That slowed him down for a while longer.

  A week or so later, I went to see him. Using the by now familiar technique, he managed to maneuver me into his bedroom. He picked up a book from a chair near his bed. “Have you read the Marquis de Sade?” he asked me. I told him no. “Aha! I shock you, don’t I?” he said, looking very proud of himself. I said no. I told him that although I hadn’t read Sade, I had no objection to it. And I had read Choderlos de Laclos and Restif de la Bretonne. As for Sade, I could make out without it, but perhaps he couldn’t, I suggested. In any case, I told him, the principle of the victim and the executioner didn’t interest me. I didn’t think either one of those roles suited me very well.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I just wondered if that might shock you.” He seemed a little disappointed. “You’re more English than French, I think,” he told me. “You’ve got that English kind of reserve.”

  After that his campaign slacked off. He was no less friendly whenever I dropped in mornings but since I hadn’t encouraged his early approaches he was clearly hesitant about attempting further advances. My “English reserve” was holding him off successfully. I was just as well pleased.

  One morning toward the end of June, he told me he wanted to show me the view from “the forest.” In French that word is used to refer to the framework of beams that come together to form the support for the roof. He took me into the hallway outside his painting studio on the upper floor. There, at an angle against the wall, was a miller’s ladder leading up to a small door about three feet above our heads. He bowed gallantly. “You go first,” he said. I had some qualms about it but it seemed awkward to argue the point, so I climbed the ladder and he followed right behind. At the top I pushed open the door and stepped into a small room, about twelve feet by twenty, under the eaves. On the right side of the room was a small open window, almost to the floor. I walked over to it and looked out on a kind of Cubist pattern formed by the roofs and chimney pots of the Left Bank. Picasso came up behind me and put his arms around me. “I’d better hold on to you,” he said. “I wouldn’t like to have you fall out and give the house a bad name.” It had grown warmer in the last few days and he was wearing what seemed to be his usual warm-weather outfit for receiving his friends in the morning: a pair of white shorts and his slippers.

  “That’s nice, the roofs of Paris,” he said. “One could make paintings of that.” I continued to look out the window. Opposite us, a little to the right, across a courtyard, an empty building was being remodeled. On one of the outside walls, a workman had drawn in whitewash an enormous phallus, about seven feet long, with baroque subsidiary decoration. Picasso went on talking about the view and the handsome old roofs against the light gray-blue of the sky. He moved his hands up and lightly cupped them over my breasts. I didn’t move. Finally, a bit too innocently I thought, he said, “Tiens! That drawing in whitewash on the wall over there—what do you suppose that represents?” Trying to sound as offhand as he had, I said I didn’t know. It didn’t seem to me to be at all figurative, I told him.

  He took his hands away. Not suddenly, but carefully, as though my breasts were two peaches whose form and color had attracted him; he had picked them up, satisfied himself that they were ripe but then realized that it wasn’t yet time for lunch.

  He backed away. I turned and faced him. He was slightly flushed, and he looked pleased. I had the feeling he was glad I hadn’t committed myself, either to draw away or to fall too easily. He guided me gently by the arm out of the forest and helped me onto the ladder. I went down, he following, and we joined the group in the painting atelier. Everyone talked animatedly as if neither our departure nor our return had been noticed.

  THAT SUMMER I went to a little village called Fontès, near Montpellier, which was then in the Free Zone—not occupied by the Germans—to spend my vacation with Geneviève. While I was there, I passed through one of those crises young people sometimes experience in the process of growing up. Picasso wasn’t the cause of it; it had been coming on for some time before I met him. It was a kind of mental stocktaking brought on by the conflict between the life I had led up until then and the vision I had of the kind of life I should be leading.

  Ever since early childhood I had suffered from insomnia and had used my nights more for reading than for sleeping. And since I was a rapid reader, I had managed to work my way through a considerable number of books. My father had encouraged this bent in me. He was, by training, an agronomical engineer, and had built up several manufacturing businesses in chemicals. But he was also a man with a passionate interest in literature and his large library was never closed to me. By the time I was twelve he had read me enormous chunks of the works of Joinville, Villon, Rabelais, Poe, and Baudelaire, and by the age of fourteen, all of Jarry. By the time I was seventeen I was rather proud of my attainments and fond of imagining that I knew what life was all about, even though whatever I did know came out of books.

  My physical appearance did not seem extraordinary to me; on the other hand, I did not consider it a handicap. I felt afraid of nothing, objective and detached in all my judgments and serenely free from the various illusions inexperience confers on youth. In short, I saw myself a seasoned philosopher disguised as a young girl.

  My father tried to wake me up by telling me, “You’re floating on air. You’d better put on some lead-soled shoes and get down to earth. Otherwise you’re in for a rude awakening.” That awakening came when I decided to become a painter. For the first time I got a sense of my own limitations. In my studies, even in areas that didn’t interest me at all, such as mathematics and law, I had no trouble handling whatever p
roblems came up. But when I took up painting, and no matter how singlemindedly I gave myself over to it, I gradually came to realize there were things I could not bring off. I had difficulties of all kinds, conceptual as well as technical. For a long time I felt I was up against a wall. Then suddenly it occurred to me that, at bottom, a good part of my difficulty came from my lack of the experience of living. I had an intellectual grasp of many things, but as far as first-hand experience went, I was pretty close to being a total ignoramus.

  I had started to paint at the age of seventeen. For the past two years I had been working under the guidance of a Hungarian painter named Rozsda. At the same time, I was studying for my licence in literature at the Sorbonne (roughly the equivalent of an A.B. degree in an American or English university) and for a law degree, as well. My father would not have allowed me to drop out of the university and devote all my time to painting, but I used to cut my morning classes and go to Rozsda’s studio to paint.