Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  I looked a good deal younger than my age at that time. That evening I had on flat-heeled shoes, a plaid skirt, and a loose sweater, and wore my hair long in back; there was certainly nothing about my appearance that spelled seduction. Pablo had walked into the apartment dragging me by the hand, and when he went into his speech, I’m sure Dora Maar thought he had lost his mind. She told him he must be crazy to think he could live with “that schoolgirl.”

  Since Dora was perhaps twenty years younger than Pablo and I was forty years younger than he was, I did feel a little bit like a schoolgirl listening to an argument between the teacher and the principal of the school. A good many of their allusions were over my head. Furthermore, neither one of them spoke to me nor drew me into the conversation. If Dora had spoken to me, I doubt that I could have answered her, I felt so ill at ease.

  “You’re very funny,” Dora said to him. “You take so many precautions in embarking on something that isn’t going to last around the corner.” She’d be very surprised, she said, if I wasn’t out on the ash-heap before three months had passed, all the more so since he was the kind of person who couldn’t attach himself to anyone. “You’ve never loved anyone in your life,” she said to Pablo. “You don’t know how to love.”

  “You’re in no position to decide whether I know how to love or not,” he said.

  Dora stared at him for a moment. “I think we’ve said everything we had to say,” she said, finally.

  “That’s right,” Pablo said, and he left, dragging me behind him. Outside I found my tongue. I told him I was going home to Neuilly and that he could walk me to the Pont-Neuf métro station. As we were crossing the bridge to get to the métro entrance on the Right Bank of the Seine, I asked him how he could have precipitated a scene that was so disagreeable for everybody, showing his feelings in such an ugly way and hurting Dora in front of me. For him to have acted that way showed a total lack of understanding of others. I told him that didn’t make me feel like rushing into his arms; on the contrary, I felt very much apart from him and very doubtful about the possibility of ever fathoming the workings of such a mind. He burst into a rage.

  “I did that for you,” he said, “just to make you realize there’s nobody else as important as you in my life. And this is the thanks I get—your aloofness and a bawling-out. You’re not able to feel intensely about anything. You have no grasp of what life is really like. I ought to throw you into the Seine. That’s what you deserve.” He grabbed me and pushed me into one of the semicircular setbacks on the bridge. He held me against the parapet and twisted me around so that I was looking down into the water.

  “How would you like it?” he said. I told him to go ahead if he wanted to—it was spring now and I was a good swimmer. Finally he let go of me and I ran down into the subway, leaving him behind me on the bridge.

  IN VIEW OF THE SCENE that took place in Dora Maar’s apartment, I suppose that I should have cooled off toward Pablo. But I didn’t. I was bothered by what had happened and by its implications, but my feeling for him had deepened to the point where it was stronger than any of the warning signals. It is difficult to explain why this should have been true, but perhaps I can make it at least a little clearer by dropping back, briefly, a dozen or so years to my childhood.

  My father had four sisters, and his mother had been widowed when he was fifteen. He must have had his fill of women. When he married, my mother bore him only one child. He often reproached me for not being a boy. I was dressed in a boyish fashion, with short hair, at a time when that wasn’t done in our milieu. My father supervised my studies and insisted that I be active in athletics. I had to pass tests as well as any boy and run and jump as well as any boy. He saw to it that I did.

  In the summer he used to take me sailing. He taught me to love the sea. Once the shoreline had disappeared, and we were all alone on a sailboat with only the sky to witness, then and only then could my father and I manage to get along. He was a very solitary man and the Brittany coastline, which was wild and rugged, suited him to a T. And I grew up liking solitude and wild places, as a result. Whenever we were in that kind of place, he smiled frequently, which he never did at home, and he talked easily about everything with me. But as soon as we were back in Paris, we clashed constantly.

  In winter my father used to take me hunting to La Brière, a marshy country at the mouth of the Loire, just below Brittany. There are almost no trees there and the landscape is made up of small islands and peninsulas. Everything—even the water and the reeds—is in pearly tones of greenish-gray. We would go far out into the marshes in a flat-bottomed boat. There were hundreds of birds of all kinds—wild ducks, teal, curlews, wild geese, cranes, and herons—that came in from the sea in the evening to sleep on those ponds and then, the next morning, went back to the sea again. I used to get up at five o’clock to see the dawn and watch the birds fly back to the sea against that cold, sad landscape. I think I gained from that experience a vision that served as the basis of my painting: subtle mutations of shifting light against those pale gray-green stretches.

  When I was very young I was afraid of everything, particularly of the sight of blood. If I had a cut that bled freely, I would faint. I remember, also, being afraid of the dark and of high places. My father reacted vigorously against all that. He used to make me climb up onto high rocks and then jump down. It was frightening enough to have to climb up but jumping down was a nightmare. At first I cried and howled, but with my father that achieved nothing. If he had made up his mind that I was to do something, I could protest for hours but in the end I had to do it. And as soon as I had accomplished one thing, he forced me to do something else, even harder. I felt powerless in the face of his will. My only possible reaction was anger. And the anger grew to such proportions there was no room left for fear. But since I could not show my anger, I began to nourish an inner resentment.

  He wanted me to learn to swim, but I was afraid of the water. He forced me to learn and once I had learned, he made me swim faster and faster and always for greater distances than the week before. By the time I was eight, I was afraid of nothing; in fact, my nature had changed so that I sought out difficulty and danger. I had become another person, really. He had made me fearless and stoical, but in the end his training boomeranged against him. If there was something I wanted to do that I knew he would disapprove of, I would figure out in advance what his reaction would be and the kind of punishment he would mete out, and then prepare myself for it. I would do it, but prepared as I was, my father’s reaction and the punishment didn’t bother me.

  Later on, that psychology worked against me, too. As I was growing up, whenever anything frightened me in any degree, it fascinated me at the same time. I felt the need of going too far simply to prove to myself that I was capable of it. And when I met Pablo, I knew that here was something larger than life, something to match myself against. The prospect sometimes seemed overpowering, but fear itself can be a delicious sensation. And so I had the feeling that even though the struggle between us was so disproportionate that I ran the risk of a resounding failure, it was a challenge I could not turn down. That, by way of background.

  There was another reason, more specific and immediate: I knew by now that although Pablo had been receiving the world’s adulation for at least thirty years before I met him, he was the most solitary of men within that inner world that shut him off from the army of admirers and sycophants that surrounded him.

  “Of course people like me; they even love me,” he complained one afternoon when I was trying to break the spell of pessimism I found engulfing him when I arrived. “But in the same way they like chicken. Because I nourish them. But who nourishes me?” I never told him so, but I thought that I could. I knew I couldn’t carry the full burden of that solitude, which at times seemed crushing to him, but I felt I could lighten it through my presence.

  The thing that troubled me most was the thought of leaving my grandmother, of disappointing her confidence in me. I could not expl
ain to her what Pablo wanted me to do because she would have said, “Don’t do anything as foolish as that. Do what you want to as long as you don’t leave. Don’t live completely with that man; it would certainly be a mistake.”

  Whether she sensed the dilemma that was troubling me, I don’t know, but just a little while earlier she had said to me, “Love flows naturally from one generation on down to the next. You are doing just the reverse. You’re trying to swim upstream against the current. What is there about the natural flow of the river of life that has shocked you so strongly that you should want to swim against the current, even against time? You ought to know you’re lost even before you begin. I don’t understand you but I love you and I suppose you are obeying the law of your being.”

  I don’t believe I could have made her understand that the question of age was the least of my concerns. Pablo not only didn’t seem old to me; in some ways he seemed more youthful—mature but vigorous—than friends my own age. But most of all, the fact that from the moment I knew him, I had seen that we spoke the same language made the matter of age seem irrelevant. And so, knowing very well what she would have said to me and not being able to change her feelings, I had to leave like a thief in the night, just going away, not coming back, and sending her a note the next day. That, I must say, is one of my most painful memories.

  It happened this way: Early one evening toward the end of May 1946, as I was getting ready to leave the Rue des Grands-Augustins to return to my grandmother’s house, Pablo began again, as he did almost every day at that period, to urge me to break the last tie and stay with him. He argued that if two people don’t live together, there comes a time when they begin to drift apart. He said we had gone as far as we could go in our relationship living separately and that if we didn’t change that, everything would fall apart. “Given your age, you’ll be picked off sooner or later by someone else, and I don’t look forward to that with much pleasure. And in view of my age, you have to realize that in a moment of discouragement I’d be bound, one day, to tell myself I’d be better off to make some other arrangement. So if I mean anything to you, you’ve got to make up your mind to come live with me, in spite of the difficulties. Whatever they are, they are certainly less than the problems of living apart.”

  I answered, perhaps a shade too flippantly, that I thought it was just the other way around, and that if I yielded, only bad would come of it. Pablo flew into a rage. He was wearing, as he often did, a wide leather belt like a gendarme’s. He unbuckled it, pulled it out of his trousers, and held it up as though he were going to whip me. I began to laugh. He grew angrier and shouted, “Don’t I count in your life? Is this all a game for you? Are you so insensitive as that?” The more he stormed, the harder I laughed. I suppose I was almost hysterical, but I felt as though I were witnessing the scene as a spectator. Finally he stopped. He looked disgusted. “Who ever heard of anyone laughing under such conditions,” he said. “It’s fine to have a sense of humor but I think you overdo it.” Suddenly he looked very depleted and dejected. “You’re worried all the time about your grandmother,” he said. “I’m almost as old as she is. You should be worrying about me. I need you and I’m tired of getting along without you.” And then he added, a little more fiercely, “And since I can’t get along without you, you have to come live with me.”

  I told him I found his reasoning so childish and his violence so pathetic, I could only assume he must love me very much, to show off, in both respects, to such disadvantage. I said that if he loved me that much, I would come live with him. I could see it bothered him to have me put it on that basis but he was in no mood to argue himself out of what must have seemed a sudden and unexpected victory. All he said was, “Just watch out that you don’t forget what I said about your sense of humor.”

  So I stayed there without saying good-bye or offering any explanation to anyone. The next morning I wrote a letter to my grandmother and another one to my mother to explain to them, without saying exactly where I was or what I was doing, that I had decided to go away, to live in another manner and that they would hear from me afterward and not to worry. Pablo dictated the letters for me. I was incapable at the moment of writing anything of that kind on my own.

  PART III

  DURING THE FIRST MONTH after I went to live with Pablo, I never left the house. Most of that time I spent in the studio watching him draw and paint.

  “I almost never work from a model, but since you’re here, maybe I ought to try,” he said to me one afternoon. He posed me on a low tabouret, then sat down on a long green wooden bench—the kind one sees in all the Paris parks. He picked up a large sketching pad and made three drawings of my head. When he had finished, he studied the results, then frowned.

  “No good,” he said. “It just doesn’t work.” He tore up the drawings.

  The next day he said, “You’d be better posing for me nude.” When I had taken off my clothes, he had me stand back to the entrance, very erect, with my arms at my side. Except for the shaft of daylight coming in through the high windows at my right, the whole place was bathed in a dim, uniform light that was on the edge of shadow. Pablo stood off, three or four yards from me, looking tense and remote. His eyes didn’t leave me for a second. He didn’t touch his drawing pad; he wasn’t even holding a pencil. It seemed a very long time.

  Finally he said, “I see what I need to do. You can dress now. You won’t have to pose again.” When I went to get my clothes I saw that I had been standing there just over an hour.

  The following day Pablo began, from memory, a series of drawings of me in that pose. He made also a series of eleven lithographs of my head and on each one he placed a tiny mole under my left eye and drew my right eyebrow in the form of a circumflex accent.

  That same day he began to paint the portrait of me that has come to be called La Femme-Fleur. I asked him if it would bother him to have me watch him as he worked on it.

  “By no means,” he said. “In fact I’m sure it will help me, even though I don’t need you to pose.”

  Over the next month I watched him paint, alternating between that portrait and several still lifes. He used no palette. At his right was a small table covered with newspapers and three or four large cans filled with brushes standing in turpentine. Every time he took a brush he wiped it off on the newspapers, which were a jungle of colored smudges and slashes. Whenever he wanted pure color, he squeezed some from a tube onto the newspaper. From time to time he would mix small quantities of color on the paper. At his feet and around the base of the easel were cans—mostly tomato cans of various sizes—that held grays and neutral tones and other colors which he had previously mixed.

  He stood before the canvas for three or four hours at a stretch. He made almost no superfluous gestures. I asked him if it didn’t tire him to stand so long in one spot. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “That’s why painters live so long. While I work I leave my body outside the door, the way Moslems take off their shoes before entering the mosque.”

  Occasionally he walked to the other end of the atelier and sat in a wicker armchair with a high Gothic back that appears in many of his paintings. He would cross his legs, plant one elbow on his knee and, resting his chin on his fist, the other hand behind, would stay there studying the painting without speaking for as long as an hour. After that he would generally go back to work on the portrait. Sometimes he would say, “I can’t carry that plastic idea any further today,” and then begin work on another painting. He always had several half-dry unfinished canvases to choose from. He worked like that from two in the afternoon until eleven in the evening before stopping to eat.

  There was total silence in the atelier, broken only by Pablo’s monologues or an occasional conversation; never an interruption from the world outside. When daylight began to fade from the canvas, he switched on two spotlights and everything but the picture surface fell away into the shadows.

  “There must be darkness everywhere except on the canvas,
so that the painter becomes hypnotized by his own work and paints almost as though he were in a trance,” he said. “He must stay as close as possible to his own inner world if he wants to transcend the limitations his reason is always trying to impose on him.”

  Originally, La Femme-Fleur was a fairly realistic portrait of a seated woman. You can still see the underpainting of that form beneath the final version. I was sitting on a long, curved African tabouret shaped something like a conch shell and Pablo painted me there in a generally realistic manner. After working a while he said, “No, it’s just not your style. A realistic portrait wouldn’t represent you at all.” Then he tried to do the tabouret in another rhythm, since it was curved, but that didn’t work out, either. “I don’t see you seated,” he said. “You’re not at all the passive type. I only see you standing,” and he began to simplify my figure by making it longer. Suddenly he remembered that Matisse had spoken of doing my portrait with green hair and he fell in with that suggestion. “Matisse isn’t the only one who can paint you with green hair,” he said. From that point the hair developed into a leaf form and once he had done that, the portrait resolved itself in a symbolic floral pattern. He worked in the breasts with the same curving rhythm.

  The face had remained quite realistic all during these phases. It seemed out of character with the rest. He studied it for a moment. “I have to bring in the face on the basis of another idea,” he said, “not by continuing the lines of the forms that are already there and the space around them. Even though you have a fairly long oval face, what I need, in order to show its light and its expression, is to make it a wide oval. I’ll compensate for the length by making it a cold color—blue. It will be like a little blue moon.”