Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  “If no one came to see me in the morning, I’d have nothing to start working on in the afternoon,” he told me later. “These contacts are a way of recharging my battery, even if what takes place has no apparent connection with my work. It’s like the flare of a match. It lights up my whole day.”

  But not all of Picasso’s visitors were welcome ones. The Germans, of course, had forbidden anyone to exhibit his painting. In their eyes, he was a “degenerate” artist and, worse still, an enemy of the Franco government. They were always looking for pretexts to make more trouble for him. Every week or two a group of uniformed Germans would come and with an ominous air ask, “This is where Monsieur Lipchitz lives, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Sabartés would say. “This is Monsieur Picasso.”

  “Oh, no. We know it’s Monsieur Lipchitz’s apartment.”

  “But, no,” Sabartés would insist. “This is Monsieur Picasso.”

  “Monsieur Picasso isn’t a Jew, by any chance?”

  “Of course not,” said Sabartés. And since one’s Aryan or non-Aryan status was established on the basis of one’s grandparents’ baptismal certificates, no one could say Picasso was Jewish. But they used to come, anyway, and say they were looking for the sculptor Lipchitz, knowing very well that he was in America at that moment, and that he had never lived there in the first place. But they would pretend they had to satisfy themselves that he wasn’t there, so they’d say, “We want to be sure. We’re coming in to search for papers.” Three or four of them would come in, with an extremely polite officer who spoke French. The disorder everywhere was an invitation to them and they would look around and behind everything.

  Picasso had had a brush with the Germans before I knew him and he told me about it one day with considerable satisfaction. One of the first things the Germans did in 1940, right after the armistice, was to inventory the contents of all safe-deposit vaults in banks. The property of Jews was confiscated. That of the others was set down in the record to be available if needed. Foreign stocks and bonds, gold, jewelry, and valuable works of art were what interested the Germans most.

  As soon as the inventorying started, most people who were away from Paris rushed back in order to be present when their boxes or vaults were opened. Everyone realized that at the start, before the “technicians” arrived from Germany, things would be handled somewhat haphazardly by the occupying soldiers and they might, therefore, have more of a chance of protecting their valuables. That was what my family did and, as I learned later, Picasso too. And in taking care of his own vaults, Picasso had looked after Matisse’s as well.

  Matisse had had a very serious abdominal operation and had gone to live in the south of France. His paintings were stored in a vault at the main office of the B.N.C.I.—the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie—adjacent to Picasso’s vaults. When Picasso’s vaults were opened, he made it a point to be there. There were three large rooms full of paintings down in the basement: two for him and one for Matisse. The manager of the bank was a friend of both of them. Because Picasso was Spanish it would have been difficult for the Germans to touch his property if his papers had been in order, but since he was persona non grata with the Franco regime, his situation was precarious. And since both he and Matisse were classified by the Nazis as “degenerate” artists, there was all the more reason to be apprehensive. The inspectors were two German soldiers, very well disciplined but not very bright, he told me. He got them so confused, he said, rushing them from one room into the next, pulling out canvases, inspecting them, shoving them back in again, leading the soldiers around corners, making wrong turns, that in the end they were all at sea. And since they were not at all familiar with his work or with Matisse’s either, they didn’t know what they were looking at, no matter which room they were in. He wound up by inventorying only one-third of his paintings, and when it came to Matisse’s, he said, “Oh, we’ve seen these.” Not knowing one painting from another, they asked him what all those things were worth. He told them 8,000 francs—about $1,600 in today’s money—for all his paintings and the same for Matisse’s. They took his word for it. None of his things or Matisse’s were taken away. It must not have seemed worth the trouble.

  “Germans always have a respect for authority,” he said, “whatever form it may take. The fact that I was somebody everyone had heard of and I came there myself and gave them exact details of sizes, values, and dates—all that impressed them very much. And they couldn’t imagine anyone telling them a story that might cost him very dear if he had been found out.”

  There was a Kafkaesque uncertainty surrounding some of the people who drifted in and out of Picasso’s studio at that time: a rather mystifying art historian, for one, and a photographer who came from time to time on some vague mission. Picasso thought they were spies but there was no way of proving they were and no basis on which to refuse to let them in. What he feared most was that one day one of these dubious Germans—the photographer, for example, who came more often than any of the others—would plant some incriminating papers so that the next time the Gestapo came to search, they would find something.

  It took a good deal of courage for him to stay there during the war, since his paintings had been denounced by Hitler and since the Occupation authorities took such a dim view of intellectuals. Many artists and writers—Léger, André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, Zadkine, and others—had gone off to America before the Germans arrived. It must have seemed wiser to many not to run the risk of staying. One day I asked Picasso why he had.

  “Oh, I’m not looking for risks to take,” he said, “but in a sort of passive way I don’t care to yield to either force or terror. I want to stay here because I’m here. The only kind of force that could make me leave would be the desire to leave. Staying on isn’t really a manifestation of courage; it’s just a form of inertia. I suppose it’s simply that I prefer to be here. So I’ll stay, whatever the cost.”

  AS I CONTINUED to turn up regularly at the Rue des Grands-Augustins mornings, Sabartés grew more and more glum in my presence. One morning when only he and Picasso and I were in the painting studio, he apparently decided he had been diplomatic long enough. I suspected they had been talking about me before I arrived that morning because I hadn’t been there but a few minutes when Sabartés said, as though he were simply contributing an opinion to a conversation that had been under way for some time already, “All this looks pretty bad to me, Pablo. And it will end badly. You see, I know you. Furthermore she has too many changes of clothing and that’s not a good sign.”

  It was true that a week or two earlier my mother had had a change of heart and had smuggled some of my clothes out of the house and brought them to my grandmother’s. I suppose I had been making the most of them after weeks of wearing the same outfit every day.

  “You mind your business, Sabartés,” Picasso said. “You don’t understand anything. You haven’t got the intelligence to realize this girl is walking a tightrope—and sound asleep, at that. You want to wake her up? You want her to fall down? You just don’t understand us somnambulists. And what you don’t understand, either, is the fact that I like this girl. I’d like her just as much if she were a boy. In fact she’s a little like Rimbaud. So keep your gloomy, evil thoughts to yourself. You better get back downstairs and do some work.”

  Sabartés looked unconvinced. He sighed heavily and went downstairs. Picasso shook his head.

  “What a treasure of incomprehension,” he said. “In life you throw a ball. You hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope your friends will provide that wall. Well, they’re almost never a wall. They’re like old wet bedsheets, and that ball you throw, when it strikes those wet sheets, just falls. It almost never comes back.” Then, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, he said, “I guess I’ll die without ever having loved.” I laughed and said, “No point in making up your mind now. You haven’t got there yet.” Picasso grew quiet for a moment and then said, �
�Do you remember the time we went up the miller’s ladder into the forest, where we could look out over the rooftops?” I told him I did. “There’s one thing I’d like very much,” he said, “and that is if you would stay there, beginning right now, up in the forest; just disappear completely so that no one would ever know you were here. I’d bring you food twice a day. You could work up there in tranquillity, and I’d have a secret in my life that no one could take away from me. At night we could go out together, wandering wherever we wanted to, and you, who don’t like crowds of people, you’d be completely happy, because you wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the world, just about me.” I said I thought that was a very good idea. But then he began to think it over and he said, “I don’t know whether it’s such a good idea or not because it’s binding on me, too. If you’re agreeable to having no more liberty, that means I wouldn’t have any more, either.”

  I could see it was hard for him to let go of the idea, all the same. “It would be nice, though,” he went on. “You’d live here without seeing anyone else in the world but me, either writing or painting, and I’d give you all the materials you needed for your work, and we’d have that secret to share. We’d go out only after dark and only in quarters where we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew.”

  I must admit that, at least poetically, the idea had a strong appeal for me at that moment. Living up there alone would have cut me off from all the people I would have preferred to avoid and left me in contact with one person who interested me enormously and who would have been quite sufficient for me at that time. I knew it wasn’t yet a question of love, but I knew also that there was a very strong mutual attraction, a need to be together.

  When I left, that morning, Picasso said, “I’m as tired as you must be of listening to Sabartés grumbling about finding you here mornings. Since he’s never here after lunch, why don’t you come see me afternoons from now on?” I said I’d like that, but not to count on me for the forest right now. Since it was February, I had an idea I’d find it rather cold up there under the eaves.

  “I agree,” he said. “Besides, I’ve got a better idea for February. Since nobody is allowed in here afternoons and I don’t even answer the telephone if it rings, we’ll be completely undisturbed and I’ll give you lessons in engraving. Would you like that?” I told him I believed I would.

  Before my first afternoon visit to the Rue des Grands-Augustins, I telephoned to Picasso in the morning to make an appointment. I arrived on time, wearing a black velvet dress with a high white lace collar, my dark-red hair done up in a coiffure I had taken from a painting of the Infanta by Velázquez. Picasso let me in. His mouth dropped open. “Is that the kind of costume you put on to learn engraving?” he finally asked.

  Certainly not, I told him. But since I was sure he hadn’t the slightest intention of teaching me engraving, I had put on the costume that seemed most appropriate to the real circumstances. In other words, I was simply trying to look beautiful, I said.

  He threw up his hands. “Good God! What nerve! You do everything you can to make things difficult for me. Couldn’t you at least pretend to be taken in, the way women generally do? If you don’t fall in with my subterfuges, how are we ever going to get together?” He stopped. He seemed to be reconsidering his criticism. Then he said, more slowly, “You’re right, really. It’s better that way, with the eyes open. But you realize, don’t you, that if you don’t want anything but the truth—no subterfuges—you’re asking to be spared nothing. Broad daylight is pretty harsh.” He paused, as though he felt unsure. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got plenty of time. We’ll see.”

  I followed him into the long room where Sabartés worked mornings. The room was empty now, except for its usual clutter. Picasso left the room and came back in a few minutes with a large album. He pushed aside some of the piles of papers and books on the long table in the center of the room and set it down. He untied the cover and folded it back. Inside was a thick pile of prints.

  “You see, we’re going to get around to the subject of engraving, after all,” he said. “This is a series of etchings, a hundred of them, that I made for Vollard in the 1930s.”

  On top of the pile were three etched portrait heads, two of them with aquatint, of the picture-dealer Ambroise Vollard. Picasso laughed. “The most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn, or engraved any oftener than Vollard—by Cézanne, Renoir, Rouault, Bonnard, Forain, almost everybody, in fact. I think they all did him through a sense of competition, each one wanting to do him better than the others. He had the vanity of a woman, that man. Renoir did him as a toreador, stealing my stuff, really. But my Cubist portrait of him is the best one of them all.”

  He turned to a print that showed a fair-haired seated nude wearing a flower-covered picture hat. Opposite her was a standing nude with dark hair and eyes, partly draped. He pointed to the one who was standing. “There you are. That’s you. You see it, don’t you? You know, I’ve always been haunted by a certain few faces and yours is one of them.” He turned to another print that showed another partially draped nude standing beside a curious looking male figure who held her by the hand—a painter, apparently, because he seemed to be holding in his other hand a palette and brushes. He was a very hairy fellow, wearing a ruff and a crumpled hat. “You see this truculent character here, with the curly hair and mustache? That’s Rembrandt,” Picasso said. “Or maybe it’s Balzac; I’m not sure. It’s a compromise, I suppose. It doesn’t really matter. They’re only two of the people who haunt me. Every human being is a whole colony, you know.”

  He turned over several more of the prints. They were filled with bearded and clean-shaven men, with minotaurs, centaurs, faunlike figures, and all kinds of women. Everyone was nude or nearly so and they seemed to be playing out a drama from Greek mythology.

  “All this takes place on a hilly island in the Mediterranean,” Picasso said. “Like Crete. That’s where the the minotaurs live, along the coast. They’re the rich seigneurs of the island. They know they’re monsters and they live, like dandies and dilettantes everywhere, the kind of existence that reeks of decadence in houses filled with works of art by the most fashionable painters and sculptors. They love being surrounded by pretty women. They get the local fishermen to go out and round up girls from the neighboring islands. After the heat of the day has passed, they bring in the sculptors and their models for parties, with music and dancing, and everybody gorges himself on mussels and champagne until melancholy fades away and euphoria takes over. From there on it’s an orgy.”

  He turned to another plate that showed a minotaur down on his knees, a male gladiator giving him the coup de grâce with a dagger. A crowd of faces, mostly women’s, peered down on them from behind a barrier. “We’re taught that Theseus came and killed a minotaur but he was only one of many. It happened every Sunday: a young Attic Greek came over from the mainland and when he killed a minotaur he made all the women happy, especially the old ones. A minotaur keeps his women lavishly but he reigns by terror and they’re glad to see him killed.”

  Picasso was speaking very quietly now. “A minotaur can’t be loved for himself,” he said. “At least he doesn’t think he can. It just doesn’t seem reasonable to him, somehow. Perhaps that’s why he goes in for orgies.” He turned to another print, a minotaur watching over a sleeping woman. “He’s studying her, trying to read her thoughts,” he said, “trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster.” He looked up at me. “Women are odd enough for that, you know.” He looked down at the etching again. “It’s hard to say whether he wants to wake her or kill her,” he said.

  He turned to another plate. “The painters are a little out of contact with reality. Look at this one: someone brings him a girl and what does he draw? A line. He’s a nonfigurative. But at least the painters live a more orderly life than the sculptors. You’ll notice that wherever there are orgies, there are beards. That’s the sculptors: warm flesh in one hand, cool champ
agne in the other. No doubt about it, the sculptors are very much in contact with reality.”

  He turned over several more prints. He came to a fair-haired nude in the arms of a sculptor. On a plinth beside them was a female head in profile that resembled several pieces of his that I had seen in his sculpture studio. “The sculptor’s a little mixed up, too, you see,” he said. “He’s not sure of which way he wants to work. Of course if you note all the different shapes, sizes, and colors of models he works from, you can understand his confusion. He doesn’t know what he wants. No wonder his style is so ambiguous. It’s like God’s. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor. First he works from nature; then he tries abstraction. Finally he winds up lying around caressing his models. And look here.” He pointed to a model standing in front of a sculptor’s construction that appeared to be made from a rococo armchair some of whose elements were based on the forms of a woman. “Who could make sculpture with odds and ends of junk like that?” he asked, grinning. “He’s not serious. Of course, he does take himself pretty seriously: the very fact that he grows a beard shows that. Then, too”—he pointed, in another etching, to a fair-haired model lying in a sculptor’s arms—“twining the garlands around their hair like that . . .” He looked more closely. “I imagine that’s wild clematis in her hair,” he said, “but he’s got ivy in his. Men are always so much more faithful than girls!”