The Good Samaritan, as I was finding out, was not one of Pablo’s better roles. I knew that if I accepted his invitation, he would be running away from Dora at odd hours during the day and it would not take her long to discover the reason. Once she did, she might well have a relapse. Besides, I was not at all sure that I wanted to be so close to Pablo for such an unbroken period. In Paris I saw him when I wanted to and that was all. But the idea of making myself available to him whenever he felt like seeing me and, at the same time, running the risk of creating new difficulties for Dora Maar didn’t please me at all. I wrote him that I was staying put. My summer in Brittany was not very exciting but I had a lot of time to think things over.
When I returned to Paris, I stayed away from the Rue des Grands-Augustins. I had decided not to interrupt the rhythm of lives that already had complications enough without my adding more. And from a purely selfish point of view it seemed to me that if I insisted on going further, I might be letting myself in for something I would not be able to cope with. For over two months I stayed home, determined to conquer my feeling for Pablo, to put an end to our relationship. But the longer I stayed away, the more clearly I understood that I had a real need to see him. There were moments when it seemed almost a physical impossibility to go on breathing outside his presence. Toward the end of November, realizing that I was curing myself of nothing and that my staying away probably would not restore his deteriorating relationship with Dora Maar, I began to see him again.
WHEN I RETURNED to the Rue des Grands-Augustins that November—on the twenty-sixth, as a birthday present for myself—I found Pablo deep in lithography. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” he said, “and that put me in a very black mood. A while ago, Mourlot asked me if I wouldn’t like to do some lithographs. Since I hadn’t done any for fifteen years, I thought this would be a good time to start again.” Besides, he explained, he was being more and more distracted from his work by an increasing flow of visitors, English and American, as well as old French friends, back from the war, whom he hadn’t seen in years. The chance to get out of the atelier of the Rue des Grands-Augustins and into the relative seclusion of Mourlot’s printshop seemed a good idea.
Until then, Pablo had made only a few drawings of me and two portraits in oil: small canvases in gray and white with contrasting profiles that he had done earlier that year. Now, in the proofs of the lithographs he showed me, I saw evidence that I had been much on his mind. Most of the things he had been doing were, in one way or another, portraits of me. One of the lithographs was a still life and another, I was amused to see, apparently a portrait of himself as a boy. And there was a portrait of two women, one sleeping, the other sitting beside her. The one sitting was obviously me. The other I wasn’t sure about. When I asked him who it was, he told me he wasn’t sure, either. It was either Dora Maar or my friend Geneviève, he said. When I first saw that lithograph, he had made six states of it. He continued to make changes in it throughout the winter and by the time it reached the definitive state—there were eighteen in all—its character had changed radically from highly representational to unrecognizably abstract. But in losing her pictorial identity, the sleeping woman had regained her actual one. Pablo had come to realize that she was, after all, Dora Maar, he told me. And as though to prove it he pointed, in the margins of the paper, to a number of remarques: there were little birds of various kinds and two insects drawn in minute detail. He said he had always considered Dora had such a Kafkaesque personality, that whenever he noted a spot or a stain on the wall of her apartment, he would work at it with his pen until it became a small but very lifelike insect. The fact that he had been led to make the same kind of “comment” in the margins of the stone made him realize that the sleeping woman was, indeed, Dora. The birds in the upper and lower margins were for me, he said.
I was pleased to see the evidence of his new preoccupation with lithography, not simply because much of it referred to me but because, although he had always done a great deal of etching, I had often heard him refer to lithography in what seemed unjustifiably disparaging terms. I had an idea this would prove to be more than a passing interest, and for four months he worked constantly at Mourlot’s.
One of the most interesting lithographs he produced during that time was a bullfight scene in which he applied the principle of the papier collé to lithography. He took a piece of lithographic paper, applied it to a rough surface and rubbed it at each end and at one or two other spots with a lithographic crayon until those areas had the grainy texture of a Max Ernst frottage. From the darkest of these parts he cut out the figure of a picador and pasted it down in the white area near the right-hand side. Other elements, such as the bull and the sun, he painted in with lithographic ink. On each side of the bull he had a picador: at the left a picador in white—created by the empty space left by the cut-out—against a grainy black background, and on the right, in black, the cut-out piece itself against a white background. It was an imaginative tour de force that no one had tried before. Mourlot was delighted with such a fresh approach by an “outsider.”
“You must always work with economy in mind,” Pablo said. “What I’ve done, you see, is to use the same form twice—first as positive form and then as negative form. That’s the basis of my two picadors. Besides, it makes a kind of plastic reference—one part to the other—which is very effective composition.”
From time to time Pablo took me with him to Mourlot’s. It was then in the Rue de Chabrol, near the Gare de l’Est. It was a dim, cluttered, ramshackle place, full of piles of posters, lithographic stones, and general confusion, but for a great many years it had been turning out the finest lithography ever known. It was always rather dark, damp, and cool because if it had been kept comfortably warm, the wax in the lithographic ink would have flowed too freely and direct sunlight would have made the stones and the paper too dry. It was almost like a scene from Daumier, all black and white, with just one spot of color—the big presses that turned out the bright-colored posters advertising Paris art exhibitions. There was Daumier, too, in the stones themselves. Many of the stones at Mourlot’s had been in use since well back in the nineteenth century. After each impression the stone is rubbed down to remove the drawing. But since lithographic stone is limestone, soft and porous, it absorbs a bit of the ink and an impression of the drawing penetrates beneath the surface. Portions of an old drawing occasionally seep back up to the surface again after a stone has been rubbed down. Lithographers call that the stone’s “memory” and occasionally we would see one of the stones “recalling” a passage from Daumier.
Every time Pablo went there to work, he would greet all the workmen, shake hands with them and call them by their first names. They would show him their choicest treasures, all their cut-out pin-up girls, cycling champions, and other folk heroes. They were a sharp-tongued but friendly crowd, disorderly almost to the point of anarchy. All but one.
At the very back, in the darkest of the cubicles, worked an old man named Monsieur Tuttin. For the skillful printing of the most technically exacting work he had no peer. He didn’t have the sloppy, anarchic appearance of most of Mourlot’s employees. He looked like an elderly accountant out of a Dickens novel, with his sharp blue eyes, steel-rimmed spectacles, pointed features, white hair, and carefully buttoned, neatly pressed black suit. It was Monsieur Tuttin who was always given Pablo’s work to print, since Pablo’s disregard for conventional lithographic processes created all kinds of problems for the printers. The difficulty was, Monsieur Tuttin did not like Pablo’s work. In fact he detested it.
Pablo had done a lithograph of one of his pigeons in a highly unconventional way. The background coat was in black lithographic ink and the pigeon itself had been painted on top of that in white gouache. Since lithographic ink has wax in it, gouache normally wouldn’t “take” very well but in spite of that fact, Pablo had carried it off brilliantly on the lithographic paper. When Mourlot came to the Rue des Grands-Augustins and saw what Pablo had
done, he said, “How do you expect us to print that? It’s not possible.” He pointed out to Pablo that in theory, when the drawing was transferred from the paper to the stone, the gouache would protect the stone and the ink would run only onto those parts where there was no gouache; but, on the other hand, on contact with the liquid ink the gouache itself would surely dissolve, at least in part, and run.
“You give it to Monsieur Tuttin; he’ll know how to handle it,” Pablo told him.
The next time we went to Mourlot’s shop, Monsieur Tuttin was still fussing about the pigeon. “Nobody ever did a thing like that before,” he fumed. “I can’t work on it. It will never come out.”
“I’m sure you can handle it,” Pablo said. “Besides, I have an idea Madame Tuttin would be very happy to have a proof of the pigeon. I’ll inscribe it to her.”
“Anything but,” Monsieur Tuttin replied in disgust. “Besides, with that gouache you’ve put on, it will never work.”
“All right, then,” Pablo said. “I’ll take your daughter out to dinner some evening and tell her what kind of a printer her father is.” Monsieur Tuttin looked startled. “I know, of course,” Pablo went on, “that a job like that might be a little difficult for most of the people around here, but I had an idea—mistakenly, I can see now—that you were probably the one man who could do it.” Finally, his professional pride at stake, Monsieur Tuttin gave in grudgingly.
Sometimes Pablo would bring him lithographs drawn with ordinary crayons rather than with lithographic crayon. Monsieur Tuttin would be horrified. “How could anyone possibly print from that?” he would ask. “It’s a monstrosity.” In the end, after Pablo had finished building him up, Monsieur Tuttin would agree to give it a try and one way or another he always managed to make it work. I think that finally he came to look forward to those challenges as a chance to prove to Pablo that he was just as good a man as he was.
IN FEBRUARY 1946, although the war had been over for a year and a half, electricity was still being rationed. Late one afternoon, while the current was off, I fell on the stairway of my grandmother’s house and broke my arm. They had to operate on my elbow and I spent ten days in the hospital. One afternoon while I was there, a delivery boy came with an enormous package: a giant azalea with bright red flowers, covered with little bows of pink and blue ribbon. It was truly hideous; enough to set your teeth on edge. At the same time it struck me so funny I couldn’t help laughing. In it was a note from Pablo saying that he had been driving along in his car and seen this plant in a show window. It had seemed to him in such bad taste that he had found it irresistible. He hoped I would appreciate his intention at its true value. I think the prettiest bouquet in the world would have been less effective than that absurd assemblage of colors. I understood very well why he had sent it. One bouquet more or less, what difference did that make? But this monstrous thing was something one could never forget.
When I came out of the hospital, I decided to go down to the Midi with my grandmother. Pablo gave me the address of his old friend Louis Fort, who lived at Golfe-Juan and who still had his handpresses and copperplates and everything necessary to make etchings. Since I had to go for a rest anyway, he said, I might as well go there and perhaps learn something, too. I left my grandmother in Antibes, where she had been in the habit of going, and then went over to Golfe-Juan to stay at Monsieur Fort’s.
Pablo had rented the two upper floors of Monsieur Fort’s house for me and I had arranged with Geneviève to come over from Montpellier and stay with me. The house was in the same taste as the massive azalea Pablo had sent me while I was in the hospital. Outside, it looked like all the other houses along the harbor of Golfe-Juan, but inside it resembled only itself. It had four floors, with two rooms on each floor. Monsieur Fort, in all his naïveté, had worked very hard to decorate it in a manner that was, to say the least, original. One room was painted royal blue and spattered with white. The ceiling was studded with white stars edged in red, and all the furniture was painted red with white stars. That room wasn’t very big so the fourth “wall” was the bay window that looked out over the sea. It seemed a bit like a planetarium, a dark hole from which one could see the infinite expanse of the sea on one side and, in a somewhat vaguer way, the infinite expanse of the stars on all the other sides. The other rooms were simply ugly, decorated in pyrography, with designs of chestnut trees burned into the wood, and the furniture painted white with flowering almond trees on it.
Monsieur Fort was a very thin man, over eighty at the time, with a red face, white hair, blue eyes, and a very long nose. He wore a béret basque and leaned into the wind, whether he stood or walked. After all those years of bending over his copperplates he was no longer capable of standing up straight. He always looked a little drunk, too, and once I had seen his wife, about thirty years younger than he, I understood his need to bolster up his courage in that way.
By trade he was an artisan-engraver and he had printed the illustrations for many of Ambroise Vollard’s editions, including Pablo’s famous series of etchings and drypoints, Les Saltimbanques. He taught me the rudiments of the various techniques of engraving and etching. I learned how to use varnish, how to do soft-ground etching, how to bite into the copperplate with acid, and all about the various tools—the etching needle, the scraper, the burnisher. I began to try my hand in the medium. At the end of a week, I found it all so interesting that I wrote to Pablo, since he had said he might visit me for a while, telling him I was working very well and that there was no point in his taking the trouble to come down. I was astonished, two days later, to see Pablo and Marcel drive up. I asked Pablo why he had come, since I had told him I was getting along fine by myself.
“Exactly,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you are but how could you write me that you were happy without me?” That, of course, wasn’t just what I had meant. He said, “I had an idea that since you didn’t want to see me, I’d better get here as quickly as I could.” The next day he was already in a bad mood just because he was there.
Geneviève had arrived from Montpellier only the day before, a week late. Pablo’s first act was to pack her off to stay at the little hotel-restaurant, Chez Marcel, down the street. I tried to protest, but he didn’t want any company, not even a pretty girl like Geneviève. From the start it was apparent that they couldn’t get along. Pablo’s ribbing, which he spared no one, didn’t go down with Geneviève. She had been rather strictly brought up, had a somewhat limited sense of humor, and I think Pablo found her a bit stiffnecked.
Each afternoon, I went to Antibes to see my grandmother. The first two days, when I returned, I could see that Pablo and Geneviève were at swords’ points, but with a certain reserve. The third day, when I reached Monsieur Fort’s after my visit to Antibes and got upstairs, I found Pablo looking very red and angry, and Geneviève rather white but even angrier, glaring at each other across the front room on the third floor. I looked from one to the other.
“I want to talk to you in private, Françoise,” Geneviève blurted out.
“I’ll do the talking,” Pablo said.
I had a pretty good idea what they both wanted to talk about. I told Pablo I’d talk to him later and I took Geneviève downstairs and walked with her toward the hotel.
“How can you put up with a monster like that?” she said. Why a monster? I asked her.
“It’s not only what he did, or what he tried to do, but the way he took to go about it,” she said. “He brought me back to the house after we left you at Antibes. He said—with a straight face—he would give me a lesson in etching and then, without a lesson or anything else, he simply looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to take advantage of Françoise’s absence and you at the same time.’ I told him he wasn’t going to do anything of the sort. Then he sat me down on the bed and said, ‘What’s more, I’m going to make you a child. That’s just what you need.’ I got up off the bed immediately because I’m sure he intended to do just that.”
Geneviève was begi
nning to get some of her color back now but she didn’t look any less angry. I realized, of course, that whatever Pablo might have said, his chief desire was to be rid of her but I couldn’t tell her that. I told her I believed her but I thought she would have done better not to have gotten so excited. I said if she had laughed at him she might have had an easier time of it.
“That may work for you,” she said, “but I don’t have that kind of laugh, unfortunately.” For the next hour she tried to convince me that the only reasonable, decent, sane thing to do, the only way to save, if not my skin at least my soul (Geneviève had always been more amenable to the nuns’ teachings than I, during our days at boarding school), was for me to leave with her for Montpellier the next day. Besides, my elbow would heal a lot more quickly in the calm and proper atmosphere of her parents’ home, she assured me, than in the company of a monster like Pablo. I told her I would think it over and come back and talk with her in the morning. “One way or the other, I’m leaving for Montpellier in the morning,” she warned me.
When I got back to Monsieur Fort’s, Pablo was quite calm, as I had expected. “I can imagine the pack of lies she’s told you,” he said. I decided to teach him a lesson. I told him I had known Geneviève for a great many years and I believed all that she had told me. I said that she was leaving for Montpellier in the morning and that I was going with her.
He scowled and shook his head. “How can you put your faith in the kind of girl who would try to seduce me behind your back? How can you even have that kind of girl as your friend? I don’t understand things like that. But to leave me and go off with her—well, in that case there’s only one answer: there’s some sort of unnatural relationship between you.”
It was my turn to take the advice I had given Geneviève. I laughed in Pablo’s face. “You missed your vocation,” I said. “You’re pure Jesuit.” He grew very red all over again and started dancing around me. “Petit monstre! Serpent! Vipère!” he shouted. I kept on laughing. Gradually he calmed down. “How long are you going to stay away?” he asked me. I told him I thought I would stay away, period. He suddenly grew very morose. “I came down here to be alone with you,” he said, “because in Paris we’re never really alone—not for more than a few hours. Now that I’m here, you talk about going away. You’re ready to leave me. I don’t have many more years to live, you know. And you don’t have the right to take away whatever little bit of happiness remains for me.” He went on in that vein for at least an hour. When he had talked himself out and I saw that he was genuinely repentant, I told him that perhaps I would stay, after all. The next morning I went back to the hotel and told Geneviève.
Life with Picasso Page 11