He turned to the next sheet. A sculptor worked at a portrait head, looking very pleased with himself. Rays emanated from the head. “While he’s working on it, he’s sure it’s pure genius, you see.” He turned to another. The sculptor sat before his work, the model standing between him and the sculpture. “She’s telling him, ‘I never looked like that.’” He took another look at the sheet, then looked at me. “But of course, that’s you again, that model. If I had to do your eyes right now, I’d do them just that way.”
The next print showed a darkly bearded Rembrandt-like figure facing a young painter wearing a Phrygian cap. Picasso sighed. “Every painter takes himself for Rembrandt,” he said. “Even this one, and you can tell from the cap he flourished at least three thousand years before Rembrandt came along. Everybody has the same delusions.”
In the next plate a nude model was bending over a reclining sculptor. The weight and curve of her body were defined in a few slender lines. “He’s got a very serene look on his face, hasn’t he?” Picasso said. “When he succeeds in doing something with one pure line, he’s sure then that he’s found something. If sculpture is well done—if the forms are perfect and the volumes full—and you pour water from a pitcher held over the head, after it’s run down, the whole sculpture ought to be wet.”
He turned to another print. A partially draped model stood beside another one, seated in front of a painting that looked like a bouquet of flowers in ebullition. “The one sitting down looks like a model of Matisse’s who had decided to try another painter and now that she’s seen the results, she’s wishing she’d stayed home—it’s all too confusing. The other one’s telling her, ‘He’s a genius. Do you have to understand what it’s all about?’ ”
He looked over at me. “What is it all about, anyway? Do you know?” I told him I wasn’t altogether certain, but I had the beginnings of an idea, at least.
“In that case you’ve seen enough, then. Enough for today.” He closed the album. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said. “I’d like to get an idea about something, too.”
We climbed the winding stairs to the floor above. Picasso linked his arm through mine and guided me into the bedroom. In the middle of the room he stopped and turned to me. “I told you I wanted to get an idea about something,” he said. “What I really meant was that I wanted to see if the idea I already have is right.” I asked him what that idea was.
“I want to see if your body corresponds to the mental image I have of it. Also, I want to see how it relates to your head.” I stood there and he undressed me. When he had finished, he put my clothes on a chair, stood back near the bed, nine or ten feet from me, and began to study me. After a while he said, “You know, it’s incredible the degree to which I had prefigured your form.” I must have seemed a little unsure of myself standing there in the middle of the room. He sat down on the bed and told me to come to him. I walked over to him and he pulled me down onto his knees. I think he saw that I was embarrassed and that I would certainly have done whatever he asked me to, not because I really wanted to, but because I had made up my mind to. He must have sensed that and realized I was still, in a measure, undecided and had no real desire, because he began to reassure me. He told me that what he wanted was to have me there beside him but that he didn’t feel the consummation of our relationship was irrevocably fixed, like the striking of a clock, to take place at a predetermined moment. He said that whatever there was between us, or whatever was to be, was surely a wonderful thing and that we must both feel completely free; that whatever was to happen should happen only because we both wanted it.
I had said I would come to see him and I knew what that would lead to. I was willing to accept the consequences but I didn’t really want to. Whatever I might have done I would have done to please him, but not wholeheartedly. He understood the difference. From the moment he undressed me and studied me as I stood there in the middle of the room, my whole point of view had begun to change, because his doing that had produced a kind of shock. I suddenly felt that I could trust him completely, and that I was beginning to live the beginning of my life. One doesn’t necessarily live the beginning at the beginning.
He stretched me out on the bed and lay down beside me. He looked at me minutely, more tenderly, moving his hand lightly over my body like a sculptor working over his sculpture to assure himself that the forms were as they should be. He was very gentle, and that is the impression that remains with me to this day—his extraordinary gentleness.
He told me that from then on, everything I did and everything he did was of the utmost importance: any word spoken, the slightest gesture, would take on meaning, and everything that happened between us would change us continually. “For that reason,” he said, “I wish I were able to suspend time at this moment and keep things exactly at this point, because I feel that this instant is a true beginning. We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it’s all gone. That’s why I wish I could hold it back at the start. We should make a minimum of gestures, pronounce a minimum of words, even see each other as seldom as possible, if that would prolong things. We don’t know how much of everything we have ahead of us so we have to take the greatest precautions not to destroy the beauty of what we have. Everything exists in limited quantity—especially happiness. If a love is to come into being, it is all written down somewhere, and also its duration and content. If you could arrive at a complete intensity the first day, it would be ended the first day. And so if it’s something you want so much that you’d like to have it prolonged in time, you must be extremely careful not to make the slightest excessive demand that might prevent it from developing to the greatest extent over the longest period.”
I lay there in his arms as he explained his point of view, completely happy without feeling the necessity of anything beyond just being together. Finally he finished talking. We continued to lie there, without saying a word, and I felt that it was the beginning of something very marvelous, in the true sense of the word. I knew he wasn’t pretending. He didn’t say he loved me—it was too soon. He said it, and showed it, but weeks later. If he had taken possession of me then by the power of his body or unleashed a torrent of sentiment in declaring his love, I would not have believed in either one. But as it was, I believed in him completely.
Until then he had been, for me, the great painter that everyone knew about and admired, a very intelligent, witty man but impersonal. From then on he became a person. Until then he had aroused my interest and engaged my mind. Now my emotions and affections were involved. I had not thought before then that I could ever love him. Now I knew it could be no other way. He was obviously capable of sidestepping all stereotyped formulas in his human relations just as completely as in his art. One recognizes the stereotypes even if one has not experienced them all. He took command of the situation by stopping the intellectual game, sidestepping the erotic one, and putting our relationship on the only basis possible in order to be significant for him and—as I even then realized—for me as well.
Finally I knew it was time to go and I told him. He said, “We mustn’t see each other too often. If the wings of the butterfly are to keep their sheen, you mustn’t touch them. We mustn’t abuse something which is to bring light into both our lives. Everything else in my life only weighs me down and shuts out the light. This thing with you seems to me like a window that is opening up. I want it to remain open. We must see each other but not too often. When you want to see me, you call me and tell me so.”
When I left there that day, I knew that whatever came to pass—however wonderful or painful, or both mixed together—it would be tremendously important. For six months we had been walking all around each other in an ironic sort of way and now, in the space of an hour, in our first real face-to-face meeting, the irony had been taken out of it and it had become very serious, a kind of revelation.
It was a cold gray
February day, but my recollection of it is filled with midsummer sunlight.
PART II
DURING THAT WINTER and spring of 1944 I worked harder than ever at my painting. Sometimes when I went to the Rue des Grands-Augustins I would take a drawing or a painting to show Pablo. He never gave me any direct criticism. His instruction was always in the form of general principles: for example, “You know, we need one tool to do one thing, and we should limit ourselves to that one tool. In that way the hand trains itself. It becomes supple and skillful, and that single tool brings with it a sense of measure that is reflected harmoniously in everything we do. The Chinese taught that for a watercolor or a wash drawing you use a single brush. In that way everything you do takes on the same proportion. Harmony is created in the work as a result of that proportion, and in a much more obvious fashion than if you had used brushes of different sizes. Then, too, forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.” So even though he appeared not to be giving me any direct advice, whenever I applied those general principles of his, I would make progress.
Sometimes he would have me do things for composition. He would give me a piece of blue paper—perhaps a cigarette wrapper—and a match, tear off a piece of cardboard and say, “Make me a composition with those. Organize them for me into this,” and he would draw a form on a piece of paper to indicate the size and shape. “Do whatever you want, but make a composition out of it that stands on its own feet.” It’s incredible the number of possibilities one has with three or four elements like that. He used to say to me, “You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”
At that time he was painting a series of views of Paris and the bridges of the Seine, with three or four bridges, one above another, then Notre Dame or the boats in the Seine. He did also a series of canvases of the Vert Galant, the western point of the Ile de la Cité, with an enormous tree—now no longer there—bent way over and held up by a kind of crutch. That end of the island was a meeting-ground for lovers in the springtime. All that (including the amatory legend of Henri IV, the original Vert Galant) inspired Pablo to make several versions of the scene. He always put in the lovers and the river, and the essential element of the composition was always that large hanging tree. He liked to walk along the quays of the Seine between the Quai des Grands-Augustins and the Pont du Carrousel. Even in wartime there were plenty of painters who came to paint that historic site. Pablo made a series of caricatures in an old daybook, showing dozens of them in the form of monkeys, or with angels’ wings and donkeys’ ears, in the act of painting. He said, “Every time I see a painter like that working from nature and I look at his canvas, I always see bad painting.”
As a rule, when I got to the Rue des Grands-Augustins in the afternoon, Pablo was not yet at work. One day after he had let me in, he took me into his studio. On the easel was a canvas that he must have started a day or two before and then set aside. There was a fat round spot like a green sun at the right center of the canvas. Lunging up through the center from the lower left-hand corner was a violet triangular shape that came to a point just above the green sun. They were linked by a heavy black line like a slightly curving V that passed through both of the colored forms. I asked him what this was in the process of becoming.
“It’s already a still life,” he said. “That’s the pictorial idea. It makes no difference whether the principal element turns out to be a glass or a bottle. That’s only a detail. And there may be moments all along when reality comes close and then recedes. It’s like the tide rising and falling, but the sea is always there.
“What you see now is the first proposition: the spot of green, the thrust of the violet, and the black line that joins them. Those elements are struggling with one another. And there are intrigues everywhere. The green spot, for instance, has a tendency to grow, to work out from the center. It’s not contained within a line or a form—color never should be. It’s there to send out rays. It’s dynamic by its very nature. So it will expand. On the other hand, the violet starts big and grows smaller all the way up to its point. And aside from the forms of the green and the violet, there’s a struggle between the colors themselves, just as there is between the straight line and the curve. In each case they’re strangers to each other. Now I have to heighten the contrast.”
I asked him if he thought the green was balanced by the violet. “That’s not the question,” he said. “I don’t need to know that. I’m not trying to make this first proposition more coherent. Right now I’m interested in making it more disturbing. After that I’ll start to construct—but not to harmonize; to make it more deeply disturbing, more subversive.
“So far it’s instinctive, you see. Now I’ve got to set down something that goes further than that, something a good deal more audacious. The problem is, how can I shake up that first proposition? How can I, without destroying it completely, make it more subversive? How can I make it unique—not simply new, but stripped down and lacerating? You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations. The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I’m concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic act, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction.
“Juan Gris said, ‘I take a cylinder and I make a bottle out of it,’ reversing, in a sense, Cézanne’s remark. His idea was that beginning with an ideal plastic form—a cylinder—one can make a portion of reality—the bottle—enter into that form. Gris’s method was a grammarian’s. I suppose you might call mine an entirely romantic one. I start with a head and wind up with an egg. Or even if I start with an egg and wind up with a head, I’m always on the way between the two and I’m never happy with either one or the other. What interests me is to set up what you might call the rapports de grand écart—the most unexpected relationship possible between the things I want to speak about, because there is a certain difficulty in establishing the relationships in just that way, and in that difficulty there is an interest, and in that interest there’s a certain tension and for me that tension is a lot more important than the stable equilibrium of harmony, which doesn’t interest me at all. Reality must be torn apart in every sense of the word. What people forget is that everything is unique. Nature never produces the same thing twice. Hence my stress on seeking the rapports de grand écart: a small head on a large body; a large head on a small body. I want to draw the mind in a direction it’s not used to and wake it up. I want to help the viewer discover something he wouldn’t have discovered without me. That’s why I stress the dissimilarity, for example, between the left eye and the right eye. A painter shouldn’t make them so similar. They’re just not that way. So my purpose is to set things in movement, to provoke this movement by contradictory tensions, opposing forces, and in that tension or opposition, to find the moment which seems most interesting to me.”
I told him if he had never painted a single picture in his life, we would probably have known of him as a philosopher. He laughed. “When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
THAT SUMMER, just before the Liberation, there were many air-raid alarms. The only way of getting around Paris was the subway but very few took it, because once you were in, it was often hard to get out. What with one alarm after another, you might go down into the métro in the morning and not come out all day long. The only practical method of locomotion for me was my bicycle. When I crossed Paris from my grandmother’s house in Neuilly to see Pablo, I would take my bicycl
e, whatever the weather, and often arrive at his house spattered with mud. One day when I showed up in that condition, he laughed and said, “This must be the new kind of make-up. In my day girls went to a great deal of trouble to make up their face and eyes but now the latest thing is mud on the legs.”
In the last few days before the Liberation, I talked with Pablo by telephone, but it was next to impossible to get to see him. People were already beginning to bring out the cobblestones to build the barricades. Even children were working at the job, especially in the sixth arrondissement, where Pablo lived; around the Senate, where there was a great deal of fighting, and as far over as the Pont Sully, at the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis. Resistance was organizing, also, around the Prefecture of Police, so to get into those quarters and out again was difficult. German snipers were everywhere. The last time I talked to Pablo before the Liberation he told me he had been looking out the window that morning and a bullet had passed just a few inches from his head and embedded itself in the wall. He was planning to spend the next few days with his nine-year-old daughter Maya and her mother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who lived in an apartment on the Boulevard Henri IV at the eastern end of the Ile Saint-Louis. There was a great deal of fighting in that area and he was concerned for their safety.
Life with Picasso Page 6