Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  “You’re headed for a catastrophe,” she said. I told her she was probably right but I felt it was the kind of catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid. She went back to Montpellier and I went back to Pablo.

  AFTER GENEVIÈVE HAD LEFT, Pablo became relatively agreeable. A day or two later he said, “Since we’re down here, let’s go see Matisse. You put on your mauve blouse and those willow-green slacks; they’re two colors Matisse likes very much.”

  At that time Matisse was living in a house he had rented before the end of the Occupation in Vence, close to where his chapel is now. When we got there, he was in bed, since he could get up for only an hour or two a day as a result of his operation. He looked very benevolent, almost like a Buddha. He was cutting out forms, with a large pair of scissors, from very handsome papers that had been painted with gouache according to his directions. “I call this drawing with scissors,” he said. He told us that often he worked by having paper attached to the ceiling and drawing on it, as he lay in bed, with charcoal tied to the end of a bamboo stick. When he had finished his cutouts, Lydia, his secretary, attached them to the wall on a background paper on which Matisse had drawn, with his bamboo and charcoal, marks indicating where they should be pasted down. First she pinned the papers in place and then changed them around until he had settled on their exact position and the relationship they should have to one another.

  That day we saw several of a series of paintings he had been working on: among them, there were variations on two women in an interior. One was a nude, rather naturalistic and painted in blue. It seemed not entirely in balance. Pablo said to Matisse, “It seems to me that in a composition like that the color can’t be blue because the color that kind of drawing suggests is pink. In a more transposed drawing, perhaps, the local color of the nude could be blue, but here the drawing is still that of a pink nude.” Matisse thought that was quite true and said he would change it. Then he turned to me and said, laughing, “Well, in any case, if I made a portrait of Françoise, I would make her hair green.” Pablo said, “But why would you make a portrait of her?”

  “Because she has a head that interests me,” Matisse said, “with her eyebrows sticking up like circumflex accents.”

  “You’re not fooling me,” Pablo said. “If you made her hair green, you’d make it that way to go with the Oriental carpet in the painting.”

  “And you’d make the body blue to go with the red-tile kitchen floor,” Matisse answered.

  Up to that time Pablo had painted only two small gray-and-white portraits of me, but when we got back into the car, all of a sudden a proprietary instinct took possession of him.

  “Really, that’s going pretty far,” he said. “Do I make portraits of Lydia?” I said I didn’t see any connection between the two things. “In any case,” he said, “now I know how I should make your portrait.”

  A few days after our visit to Matisse, I told Pablo I was ready to go back to Paris.

  “When we return I want you to come live with me,” he said bluntly. He had skirted that idea before, mostly in a semiserious vein, but I wasn’t eager to take him up on it and I had turned his suggestion aside each time it came up. My grandmother was giving me whatever liberty I needed. Furthermore, I found the idea of abandoning her unpleasant. After all, she had not abandoned me. I told Pablo that even if I wanted to, it would be impossible for me to make her understand such a move.

  “That’s true,” he said, “so you just come, without giving her any warning. Your grandmother needs you less than I do.” I told him I was very attached to him but that I wasn’t ready for such a step.

  “Look at it this way,” he said. “What you can bring to your grandmother, aside from the affection you have for her, is not something essentially constructive. When you’re with me, on the other hand, you help me to realize something very constructive. It’s more logical and more positive for you to be close to me, in view of the fact that I really need you. As far as your grandmother’s feelings are concerned, there are things one can do and make them understood, and there are other things that can only be done by coup d’état since they go beyond the limits of another person’s understanding. It’s almost better to strike a blow and after people have recovered from it, let them accept the fact.” I told him that sounded rather brutal to me.

  “But there are some things you can’t spare other people,” he said. “It may cost a terrible price to act in this way but there are moments in life when we don’t have a choice. If there is one necessity which for you dominates all others, then necessarily you must act badly in some respect. There is no total, absolute purity other than the purity of refusal. In the acceptance of a passion one considers extremely important and in which one accepts for oneself a share of tragedy, one steps outside the usual laws and has the right to act as one should not act under ordinary conditions.” I asked him how he arrived at that rationalization.

  “At a time like that, the sufferings one has inflicted on others, one begins to inflict on oneself equally,” he said. “It’s a question of the recognition of one’s destiny and not a matter of unkindness or insensitivity. Theoretically one might say one hasn’t the right to reach out for a share of happiness, however minute it may be, which rests on someone else’s misfortune, but the question can’t be resolved on that theoretical basis. We are always in the midst of a mixture of good and evil, right and wrong, and the elements of any situation are always hopelessly tangled. One person’s good is antagonistic to another’s. To choose one person is always, in a measure, to kill someone else. And so one has to have the courage of the surgeon or the murderer, if you will, and to accept the share of guilt which that gives, and to attempt, later on, to be as decent about it as possible. In certain situations one can’t be an angel.”

  I told him that a primitive person could face up to that idea much more easily than someone who thought in terms of principles of good and evil and who tried to act on the basis of them.

  “Never mind your theories,” he said. “You must realize that there is a price on everything in life. Anything of great value—creation, a new idea—carries its shadow zone with it. You have to accept it that way. Otherwise there is only the stagnation of inaction. But every action has an implicit share of negativity. There is no escaping it. Every positive value has its price in negative terms and you never see anything very great which is not, at the same time, horrible in some respect. The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.”

  I told him I had often thought he was the devil and now I knew it. His eyes narrowed.

  “And you—you’re an angel,” he said, scornfully, “but an angel from the hot place. Since I’m the devil, that makes you one of my subjects. I think I’ll brand you.”

  He took the cigarette he was smoking and touched it to my right cheek and held it there. He must have expected me to pull away, but I was determined not to give him the satisfaction. After what seemed a long time, he took it away. “No,” he said, “that’s not a very good idea. After all, I may still want to look at you.”

  We started back to Paris the next day. Pablo never liked to ride in the back seat, so we sat in front with Marcel, the chauffeur. Pablo sat in the middle. Marcel entered freely into the conversation. From time to time Pablo would begin again to argue with me about coming to live with him. Marcel would look over and smile, occasionally putting in something like, “I think she’s right there. Let her go home now. Give her some time to think it over.” And Pablo always listened to Marcel. So when we reached Paris I went back to my grandmother’s house with no further comments from Pablo. But from that moment on, since he had launched in earnest the idea that I must come live with him, he worked every day toward moving me in that direction.

  ONE MORNING a few weeks after our return from the Midi I was working in my studio. I had the bad habit of getting out of bed, not bothering to wash, eat, or dress, putting on an old bathrobe, now paint-spattered, that had once belonged to my grandmother, tying it around me with a rope because it
was too big for me and then starting to paint, with my hair flying, and working like that until noon. It was a kind of warm-up session for me but it gave me something to work on later in the afternoon with more order and purpose. That morning I was in the midst of my work looking like some kind of witch when suddenly the door opened. I saw Pablo, in a heavy sheep-lined khaki mackinaw, peeking out from behind two dozen long-stemmed white roses. Both of us must have had quite a shock, because I had never seen him hiding behind two dozen white roses before and he had certainly never seen me wrapped up in a paint-stained old bathrobe tied with a rope, barefooted and hair uncombed. When the astonishment had passed, we both began to laugh. I said to him, “Don’t tell me you went out and bought those roses for me.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Somebody brought them to me, but I thought it would be more appropriate to give them to you. Now I’m beginning to doubt it. I never would have believed you could look like this.”

  I told him to wait a minute and I went into my bathroom to clean up. While I was changing, a strong, low-pitched masculine voice from the floor below called to me. “What is this?” Pablo asked. “A man in this house?” I told him it wasn’t a man; it was my grandmother. Skeptical as always, he said, “I’d like to meet your grandmother. She has a most extraordinary voice.” On our way out to lunch we ran into her on the landing. She had come out of her sitting room to say good-bye. It was a historic meeting. My grandmother was a small woman but she had a very strong personality and an unforgettable head, like an aged lion, very wrinkled and with a great mane of white hair that stood out in all directions. Her massive head together with her tiny body and her extremely deep, powerful voice made an unbelievable combination and when she spoke to Pablo, he said to me, in a stage whisper, “I’ve just met the great German orchestra leader.” It was a nickname that stuck. As for my grandmother, I didn’t learn her opinion on the spot, but in the afternoon when I came back, I asked her what she thought of him. She said, “It’s extraordinary. I’ve never seen a man with such a smooth skin. It’s like a piece of polished marble.” I said it wasn’t so smooth as all that. She said, “Yes, and hard and solid like a statue, I assure you, just like a statue.” I think Pablo’s way of looking at people with those piercing dark eyes exerted a fascination and might even have suggested something smooth. In any case, the opinion of both of them was fixed forever.

  ASIDE FROM MY DISINCLINATION to leave my grandmother, and all the other reasons I had or thought I had for not going to live with Pablo, I had little desire to go there as long as there was any tie between him and Dora Maar. He assured me, naturally, that he would have no major interest in his life but me. In fact, he told me, he had already given Dora to understand that there was no longer anything between them. He insisted they understood each other perfectly on that point. When I seemed reluctant to believe him, he urged me to go to her apartment with him so I could see for myself. I was even more reluctant to do that. But he kept on urging.

  A few weeks after his first meeting with my grandmother, Pablo drove up to the house with Marcel one morning to take me to an exhibition of French tapestries that included the famous series of the Lady of the Unicorn. As we were leaving the exhibition, we stopped at a vitrine in the center of the hall to look at a narwhal tusk they had on display as the nearest thing available to the unicorn variety. The hall was nearly empty but just ahead of us, studying one of the tapestries, I saw Dora Maar. I felt a little embarrassed but Pablo seemed delighted to meet her and began questioning her about the exhibition. After they had discussed the tapestries, he said, facing her directly, “What would you say about having lunch together?” It seemed to me, when she accepted, that she was thinking that “having lunch together” meant together with him. Then Pablo said, “That’s very nice. I see you’re broad-minded. In that case I’ll take you both to Chez Francis.” I thought Dora looked surprised and disappointed, but she said nothing. We all went outside, where Marcel was waiting with the car, and drove down to the Place de l’Alma, to Chez Francis. During the short ride, Dora, I felt, was sizing up the situation and deciding that in all likelihood things had reached a phase she didn’t much care for. We went inside the restaurant, were seated, and began to study the menu.

  “You don’t mind if I order the most expensive thing on the card, do you?” Dora asked. “I suppose I still have the right to a little luxury, for the time being.”

  “By all means,” Pablo said. “Whatever you like.” Dora ordered caviar and the rest of the lunch in keeping with it. She kept up a steady stream of very witty conversation, but Pablo didn’t laugh at all. On the other hand, whenever I tried to say something reasonably clever, in order not to be totally eclipsed, he laughed so heartily, it was embarrassing. Throughout the meal, he kept saying to Dora such things as, “Isn’t she marvelous? What a mind! I’ve really discovered somebody, haven’t I?” It looked to me as though none of this was making Dora any happier.

  After lunch Pablo said to Dora, “Well, you don’t need me to take you home, Dora. You’re a big girl now.”

  Dora didn’t smile. “Of course not. I’m perfectly capable of getting home by myself,” she said. “I imagine you need to lean on youth, though. About fifteen minutes ought to do it, I should think.”

  SOMETIMES WHEN I VISITED PABLO in the afternoon he would ask me to have dinner with him. I wasn’t much interested in being seen with him in restaurants, so either Inès, the chambermaid, would prepare something for us or if she wasn’t there, Pablo would go to the ample stock of American canned goods he had accumulated through gifts from GI’s who had come to call on him at the Liberation and find something edible there. One evening after we’d gotten rid of our quota of the inevitable little Vienna sausages Pablo said, “We’ll take a walk before you go home. That will give me some fresh air before I go back to work. Let’s go to the Flore.” That was the last place I wanted to go; I knew many of his friends would be there and the next day everybody would know something was going on between us. When I explained that to him, he said, “You’re right. In that case we’ll just go up to the Boulevard St.-Germain.” I said no; on the Boulevard St.-Germain we’d meet the same people on their way to or from the Flore, probably. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “Well, we’ll just go as far as the Rue de l’Abbaye, then.” I made the point that once we reached the end of the Rue de l’Abbaye, parallel to the Boulevard St.-Germain and one short block behind the Flore, we were practically there.

  “You’re hard to please,” Pablo said. “I’ll tell you what. We won’t go inside; we’ll just stand outside and look in.” I finally gave in. At that period there wasn’t the covered terrace that now stands outside the Café de Flore until warm weather. Everyone sat inside. When we got there Pablo said, “I’ll just look through the window. Nobody will recognize me.” But as soon as he had looked he said, “Oh, there’s Dora Maar sitting with some friends, and I’m sure she saw me. She’ll think it very strange if we don’t go in now.” We went in. Full of good cheer, Pablo went over to the table where Dora was sitting and said, “I didn’t want to pass by without saying hello, since I saw you were in here. I haven’t seen you for such a long time. You remember Françoise.” Dora didn’t acknowledge my presence but told him he needn’t have come that far if he only wanted to see her; he could have walked around the corner to her apartment.

  “Of course,” Pablo said, still brimming over with good cheer. “It would be much better at your place.”

  “Why not?” said Dora, assuming again, I suppose, that he was talking about the two of them. When we got outside he said to me, “You see? She invited us to call on her.” I told him I hadn’t understood it that way. In any case, I said, I wouldn’t go.

  “Oh, yes, you will,” he said. “My mind is made up. I want to straighten out a few things with her, first of all, and I want you to hear from both of us the fact that we are completely detached from each other.”

  One evening about a week after that, Pablo maneuvered himself, and me,
into another “chance” meeting with Dora Maar at the Flore. This time he said he wanted to talk with her at her place in an hour. I dreaded the visit. I told Pablo I didn’t want to go but he was in no mood to listen. When we reached her place, she looked at us coldly but was very composed. To break the ice, Pablo asked her to show us some of her paintings. She showed us five or six still lifes. I said I thought them very handsome. She said to Pablo, “I imagine you came for something else.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You know what it is. I simply want Françoise to hear it. She’s troubled about coming to live with me because she thinks she’d be usurping your place. I’ve told her it’s all finished between us, and I want you to tell her, too, so she’ll believe it. She’s worried about her responsibility in all this.”

  Dora Maar looked over at me briefly and witheringly. It was true; there was no longer anything between Pablo and her, she said, and I certainly shouldn’t worry about being the cause of their break-up. That was about as preposterous an assumption as she could imagine, she said.