Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  I told Pablo I had always looked upon Cubism as the period of pure painting. I felt that after it, he had gone elsewhere but no higher; that he had made, since then, a more powerful work in the immediacy and force of its expression, but that he had done nothing greater than his work of the Cubist period.

  “I won’t hold you to that opinion five years from now,” he said. “Meantime it wouldn’t do you any harm to study Cubism more in depth. On the other hand, I suppose I can’t blame you for feeling that way. At that period I had just about the same attitude toward it myself, although I hadn’t, of course, had the chance to see it in retrospect.” He smiled. “Just imagine. Almost every evening, either I went to Braque’s studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other’s work. A canvas wasn’t finished unless both of us felt it was.”

  He chuckled. “I remember one evening I arrived at Braque’s studio. He was working on a large oval still life with a package of tobacco, a pipe, and all the usual paraphernalia of Cubism. I looked at it, drew back and said, ‘My poor friend, this is dreadful. I see a squirrel in your canvas.’ Braque said, ‘That’s not possible.’ I said, ‘Yes, I know, it’s a paranoiac vision, but it so happens that I see a squirrel. That canvas is made to be a painting, not an optical illusion. Since people need to see something in it, you want them to see a package of tobacco, a pipe, and the other things you’re putting in. But for God’s sake get rid of that squirrel.’ Braque stepped back a few feet and looked carefully and sure enough, he too saw the squirrel, because that kind of paranoiac vision is extremely communicable. Day after day Braque fought that squirrel. He changed the structure, the light, the composition, but the squirrel always came back, because once it was in our minds it was almost impossible to get it out. However different the forms became, the squirrel somehow always managed to return. Finally, after eight or ten days, Braque was able to turn the trick and the canvas again became a package of tobacco, a pipe, a deck of cards, and above all a Cubist painting. So you see how closely we worked together. At that time our work was a kind of laboratory research from which every pretension or individual vanity was excluded. You have to understand that state of mind.” I told him I could, very easily, because I had always felt a kind of religious veneration for Cubist painting. But, I said, I couldn’t see exactly the interior necessity that had brought forth the papier collé. It had always seemed to me that papier collé was a kind of by-product or perhaps even the fading-out of Cubist painting.

  “Not at all,” Pablo said. “The papier collé was really the important thing, although aesthetically speaking, one may prefer a Cubist painting. You see, one of the fundamental points about Cubism is this: Not only did we try to displace reality; reality was no longer in the object. Reality was in the painting. When the Cubist painter said to himself, ‘I will paint a bowl,’ he set out to do it with the full realization that a bowl in painting has nothing to do with a bowl in real life. We always had the idea that we were realists, but in the sense of the Chinese who said, ‘I don’t imitate nature; I work like her.’ ”

  I asked him how a painter could work like nature. “Well,” he said, “aside from rhythm, one of the things that strikes us most strongly in nature is the difference of textures: the texture of space, the texture of an object in that space—a tobacco wrapper, a porcelain vase—and beyond that the relation of form, color, and volume to the question of texture. The purpose of the papier collé was to give the idea that different textures can enter into composition to become the reality in the painting that competes with the reality in nature. We tried to get rid of trompe-l’oeil to find a trompe-l’esprit. We didn’t any longer want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind. The sheet of newspaper was never used in order to make a newspaper. It was used to become a bottle or something like that. It was never used literally but always as an element displaced from its habitual meaning into another meaning to produce a shock between the usual definition at the point of departure and its new definition at the point of arrival. If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.”

  OVER THE WEEKS that followed that first discussion of Cubism, I began to do just what Pablo had advised me to do: to study Cubism more in depth. In the course of my studies and reflections I worked back to its roots and even beyond them to his early days in Paris, the years he spent, between 1904 and 1909, at the Bateau Lavoir, where he had met and lived with Fernande Olivier and where he had painted the Harlequin and circus pictures, the rose-toned nudes that followed his Blue Period paintings, and finally, the early Cubist works.

  He often talked to me about those days and always with a good deal of nostalgia. One Tuesday I arrived at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, expecting to spend the afternoon there while Pablo painted, only to find him poised on the threshold, dressed for the crisp early-autumn weather outside. He was wearing an old gray mackinaw, his usual wrinkled gray trousers, a battered felt hat whose brim was snapped low over his eyes and whose folds had long since given up the struggle for form. A long, greenish-brown, knitted woolen scarf was wrapped around his neck outside his coat and thrown back to trail off one shoulder in the manner of the old Montmartre chansonnier, Aristide Bruant.

  “I’m going to take you to see the Bateau Lavoir today,” he announced. “I have to go see an old friend from those days who lives near there.”

  Marcel, Pablo’s chauffeur, drove us up near the top of Montmartre. Pablo had him stop at an open, deserted corner and we left the car. The trees were all stripped of their leaves. The houses were small and shabby-looking but there was something very appealing about their quiet air of neglect. The rest of Paris seemed far away. Except for an occasional modern apartment building, I would have thought we had made a long journey through time and space to reach this faded corner of the past. Pablo pointed behind us to a low, shedlike structure set back from the street on a slight rise. “There’s where Modigliani lived,” he said. We walked slowly down the hill, toward a gray house with a big studio window facing north. “That was my first studio, the one straight ahead,” he said. We turned off to the right, into the Rue Ravignan and continued to walk downhill. Pablo pointed to a high, boxlike house that stood on higher ground to our right, in a little garden surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. “That’s where Pierre Reverdy lived in those days,” he told me. Just beyond that, on the right, I noticed the Rue d’Orchampt with its tiny pavilions and nineteenth-century street lamps, just the way I had seen them in Utrillo’s lithographs of that corner.

  A little farther along we reached a sloping paved square, rather pretty and a little melancholy. Ahead of us was the Hôtel Paradis and beside it, a low, flat, one-story building with two entrance doors, which I recognized, without his telling me, as the Bateau Lavoir. Pablo nodded toward it. “That’s where it all started,” he said quietly. We walked across the little square to the left-hand door. To the left of it the windows were shuttered. “That was where Juan Gris worked,” Pablo said, pointing to the shutters. He opened the door and we went inside. There was a stale, damp smell. The walls were dirty-white and brown. The floorboards were wide and ill-fitting and wobbled under our steps. “It hasn’t changed much in forty years,” Pablo said with an attempt at a laugh. Straight ahead of us was a stairway that led down to the floor below. We walked down. He pointed to a small door that looked as though it might be the entrance to a water closet. “That was Max Jacob’s room,” he said. “It’s almost under my studio. You’ll see when we go back upstairs. Next door to Max lived a fellow named Soriol, who sold artichokes. One night when Max and Apollinaire and all the gang were in my studio, we were making so much noise over
Soriol’s head that he couldn’t sleep. He shouted up to us, ‘Hey, dunghill, how about letting the honest workers sleep.’ I started to bang on the floor—his ceiling—with a big stick and Max ran around shouting, ‘Soriol, ta gueule, ta gueule. Soriol, ta gueule, ta gueule.’ We kept up our racket long enough for him to figure out that he’d have been far better off without the protest. He never gave us any trouble after that.”

  Pablo shook his head. “Max was marvelous,” he said. “He always knew how to touch the sore spot. He loved gossip, of course, and any hint of scandal. He heard once that Apollinaire had arranged for Marie Laurencin to have an abortion. One night a little while after that, at one of our poets’ dinners, Max announced he had composed a song in honor of Apollinaire. He stood up and, facing toward Marie Laurencin, he sang,

  Ah, l’envie me démange

  de te faire un ange

  de te faire un ange

  en farfouillant ton sein

  Marie Laurencin

  Marie Laurencin.

  Marie Laurencin turned red, Apollinaire grew purple, but Max stayed very calm and angelic-looking.

  “I think Apollinaire was Max’s favorite target,” Pablo said. “He could always be sure of getting a rise out of him. Apollinaire’s mother, who called herself the Comtesse de Kostrowitzky, was a very flamboyant figure. She had been kept by a long series of admirers, but Apollinaire didn’t like to hear references to her amatory career. One night Max sang a song that started,

  Epouser la mère d’Apollinaire

  de quoi qu’on aurait l’air?

  de quoi qu’on aurait l’air?

  He never did get a chance to finish the song. Apollinaire got up in a rage and chased him around the table.

  “Apollinaire was very careful with money, too. One night he invited Max and me over to his place. Marie Laurencin was with him. He had bought a good-sized sausage and had cut off eight slices—two for each of us, I suppose—but he didn’t offer us any. He and Marie Laurencin had been drinking and were pretty high. After we’d been there a few minutes they left the room to be alone together. Since it looked to us as though that sausage was going to be a long time coming, Max and I each ate one of the slices Apollinaire had cut off. When Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin came back into the room, the first thing Apollinaire did was count the slices. When he saw there were only six he looked at us suspiciously but didn’t say anything; he just cut off two more. In a few minutes they left the room again and Max and I ate those two. We had hardly got them down before Apollinaire was back again, counting the ones that remained. Still six. He looked puzzled but cut off two more and left again. By the time he came back for good, the whole sausage had gone, two slices at a time.”

  Pablo looked down another corridor, then turned abruptly and started back upstairs. This time we went around the stairwell to the back, and on the right came to a door with a carte de visite tacked onto it. He looked at it carefully. “Never heard of him,” he said. “Anyway, this was my studio.” He put one hand on the doorknob and the other on my arm. “All we need to do,” he said, “is open this door and we’ll be back in the Blue Period. You were made to live in the Blue Period and you should have met me when I lived here. If we had met then, everything would have been perfect because whatever happened, we would never have gone away from the Rue Ravignan. With you, I would never have wanted to leave this place.” He knocked at the door but no one came. He tried to open it but it was locked. The Blue Period remained shut away on the other side of the door.

  When we went outside into the square again, it was still deserted. We walked over to the fountain in the center. “The first time I saw Fernande Olivier was here at this fountain,” he said. We walked down some stairs at the lower end of the square onto the street that ran behind the Hôtel Paradis. In back of the hotel was a driveway that led to the rear of the Bateau Lavoir. We followed it to the end. Pablo pointed up to two large windows. “That was my studio,” he said. Since the ground sloped away sharply from the front of the building, the windows were too high to see into. At the ground level were several workshops. I said that the building looked about ready to crumble. Pablo nodded. “It always did. It just holds together by the force of habit,” he said. “When I lived here, there was a little girl, the concierge’s daughter, who used to play hopscotch and jump rope outside my windows all day long. She was so sweet I would have liked to have her never grow up. After I moved away and came back to visit, I saw that she had become a serious young woman. The next time I saw her she was rather fat. Years later I saw her here again and she looked quite old and it depressed me enormously. In my mind’s eye I had kept on seeing that little girl with her jump rope and I realized how fast time was flowing and how far away I was from the Rue Ravignan.” He started to walk down the driveway, controlling his emotions with difficulty. He was quiet all the way back to the square.

  I thought back to the time Pablo had urged me, half seriously, to come stay under the eaves at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, so that we could live together in secret. From time to time since then he had brought up the idea again, now in one form, now in another: “You should wear a black dress right down to the ground,” he had told me one afternoon, “with a kerchief over your head so that no one will see your face. In that way you’ll belong even less to the others. They won’t even have you with their eyes.” He had the idea that if someone is precious to you, you must keep her for yourself alone, because all the accidental contacts she might have with the outside world would somehow tarnish her and, to a degree, spoil her for you.

  In the light of that I could understand even better the meaning the Bateau Lavoir had for him. It represented the golden age, when everything was fresh and untarnished, before he had conquered the world and then discovered that his conquest was a reciprocal action, and that sometimes it seemed that the world had conquered him. Whenever the irony of that paradox bore in on him strongly enough, he was ready to try anything, to suggest anything, that might possibly return him to that golden age.

  We made our way up the hill again until he found the Rue des Saules. We went into a small house. He knocked at a door and then walked inside without waiting for an answer. I saw a little old lady, toothless and sick, lying in bed. I stood by the door while Pablo talked quietly with her. After a few minutes he laid some money on her night table. She thanked him profusely and we went out again. Pablo didn’t say anything as we walked down the street. I asked him why he had brought me to see the woman.

  “I want you to learn about life,” he said quietly. But why especially that old woman? I asked him. “That woman’s name is Germaine Pichot. She’s old and toothless and poor and unfortunate now,” he said. “But when she was young she was very pretty and she made a painter friend of mine suffer so much that he committed suicide. She was a young laundress when I first came to Paris. The first people we looked up, this friend of mine and I, were this woman and friends of hers with whom she was living. We had been given their names by friends in Spain and they used to have us come eat with them from time to time. She turned a lot of heads. Now look at her.”

  I think Pablo had the idea that he was showing me something new and revealing by bringing me to see that woman, a little like showing someone a skull to encourage him to meditate on the vanity of human existence. But my grandmother had got there before him. She had already given me, several years earlier, a number of lessons of that kind—all I was capable of assimilating at that period. She had the habit of going every day to the cemetery across from her house. She walked slowly, being old and tired, and she would sit down tranquilly on the tomb of her husband and three of her children and those of her relatives who were buried in that family plot. She said nothing but she always had a gentle smile on her face. At that age, still in my teens, I felt that such familiarity with death was frightful. I asked her why she sat there like that.

  “You will see,” she told me. “There comes a day in life when you have undergone so much suffering that you have what feels
like an enormous stone on your heart. From that day on, you can afford the luxury of sitting on a stone like this. We are living out a kind of reprieve and when you come to realize that, you live no longer for yourself, but as much for the sight of a flower or for the odor of something or for other people as for your own desires or comfort. Because you know your time is limited.”

  BEGINNING IN 1945 there were several periods when I completely stopped seeing Pablo—for a week, two weeks, or as much as two months. In spite of my feeling for him and his desire to have me with him, I had learned fairly early that there was a real conflict between our temperaments. For one thing, he was very moody: one day brilliant sunshine, the next day thunder and lightning.

  In his conversations with me he gave me plenty of rein, encouraged me to speak about everything that went through my head. He stimulated me enormously. At the same time I sensed that the interest he had in me did not suit him completely. I realized that although I amused him and interested him, the deeper feelings that came into play troubled him, at least periodically, and that he was saying to himself at such times, “I mustn’t get too involved with her.” There was the attraction and then, to counterbalance it, the disturbance this attraction stirred up.

  In our lovemaking, whenever he let himself go too far and became especially tender and childlike, the next time we were together he would invariably be hard and brutal. Obviously Pablo felt he could permit himself everything with everyone and I have always been someone who accepts “everything” with great difficulty.