Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  He painted a sheet of paper sky-blue and began to cut out oval shapes corresponding in varying degrees to this concept of my head: first, two that were perfectly round, then three or four more based on his idea of doing it in width. When he had finished cutting them out, he drew in, on each of them, little signs for the eyes, nose, and mouth. Then he pinned them onto the canvas, one after another, moving each one a little to the left or right, up or down, as it suited him. None seemed really appropriate until he reached the last one. Having tried all the others in various spots, he knew where he wanted it, and when he applied it to the canvas, the form seemed exactly right just where he put it. It was completely convincing. He stuck it to the damp canvas, stood aside and said, “Now it’s your portrait.” He marked the contour lightly in charcoal, took off the paper, then painted in, slowly and carefully, exactly what was drawn on the paper. When that was finished, he didn’t touch the head again. From there he was carried along by the mood of the situation to feel that the torso itself could be much smaller than he had first made it. He covered the original torso by a second one, narrow and stemlike, as a kind of imaginative fantasy that would lead one to believe that this woman might be ever so much smaller than most.

  He had painted my right hand holding a circular form cut by a horizontal line. He pointed to it and said, “That hand holds the earth, half-land, half-water, in the tradition of classical paintings in which the subject is holding or handling a globe. I put that in to rhyme with the two circles of the breasts. Of course, the breasts are not symmetrical; nothing ever is. Every woman has two arms, two legs, two breasts, which may in real life be more or less symmetrical, but in painting they shouldn’t be shown to have any similarity. In a naturalistic painting, it’s the gesture that one arm or the other makes that differentiates them. They’re drawn according to what they’re doing. I individualize them by the different forms I give them, so that there often seems to be no relationship between them. From these differing forms one can infer that there is a gesture. But it isn’t the gesture that determines the form. The form exists in its own right. Here I’ve made a circle for the end of the right arm, because the left arm ends in a triangle and a right arm is completely different from a left arm, just as a circle is different from a triangle. And the circle in the right hand rhymes with the circular form of the breast. In real life one arm bears more relation to the other arm than it does to a breast, but that has nothing to do with painting.”

  Originally the left arm was much larger and had more of a leaf shape, but Pablo found it too heavy and decided it couldn’t stay that way. The right arm first came out of the hair, as though it were falling. After studying it a while, he said, “A falling form is never beautiful. Besides, it isn’t in harmony with the rhythm of your nature. I need to find something that stays up in the air. Then he drew the arm extended from the center of the body stem, ending in a circle. As he did it, he said, half-facetiously, lest I take him too seriously, “You see now, a woman holds the whole world—heaven and earth—in her hand.” I noticed often at that period that his pictorial decisions were made half for plastic reasons, half for symbolic ones. Or sometimes for plastic reasons that stemmed from symbolic ones, rather hidden, but accessible once you understood his humor.

  In the beginning the hair was divided in a more evenly balanced way, with a large bun hanging down on the right side. He removed that because he found it too symmetrical. “I want an equilibrium you can grab for and catch hold of, not one that sits there, ready-made, waiting for you. I want to get it just the way a juggler reaches out for a ball,” he said. “I like nature, but I want her proportions to be supple and free, not fixed. When I was a child, I often had a dream that used to frighten me greatly. I dreamed that my legs and arms grew to an enormous size and then shrank back just as much in the other direction. And all around me, in my dream, I saw other people going through the same transformations, getting huge or very tiny. I felt terribly anguished every time I dreamed about that.” When he told me that, I understood the origin of those many paintings and drawings he did in the early 1920s, which show women with huge hands and legs and sometimes very small heads: nudes, bathers, maternity scenes, draped women sitting in armchairs or running on the beach, and occasionally male figures and gigantic infants. They had started through the recollection of those dreams and been carried on as a means of breaking the monotony of classical body forms.

  When Pablo had finished the portrait he seemed satisfied. “We’re all animals, more or less,” he said, “and about three-quarters of the human race look like animals. But you don’t. You’re like a growing plant and I’d been wondering how I could get across the idea that you belong to the vegetable kingdom rather than the animal. I’ve never felt impelled to portray anyone else this way. It’s strange, isn’t it? I think it’s just right, though. It represents you.”

  Over the days that followed, I often noticed Pablo studying the wide oval head on my portrait. “As long as you paint just a head, it’s all right,” he said one day, “but when you paint the whole human figure, it’s often the head that spoils everything. If you don’t put in any details, it remains just an egg, not a head. You’ve got a mannequin and not a human figure. And if you put too much detail onto the head, that spoils the light, in painting just as in sculpture. Instead of light you’ve got shadow, which makes holes in your composition, and the eye can’t circulate freely where it wants to. One of the possibilities open to you is to keep the complete volume of the head in its normal proportions, or even slightly larger, and to add, so as not to disturb the average viewer’s habits too much, a minimum of small graphic signs close together for the eyes, nose, mouth, and so on. This gives him the necessary references to the various functional features. In that fashion you lose nothing in the way of luminosity, you gain an advantage for the composition of the painting as a whole, and you add an element of surprise. The viewer who is interested in the plastic problems involved will understand why you’ve done this and the interest it has. And for the viewer who understands nothing about painting, it becomes subversive: ‘How can that man put only two dots for the eyes, a button for the nose and a bit of a line for the mouth?’ he says. He rages, he fumes, he foams at the mouth. And for a painter, that’s not a negligible accomplishment, either.”

  At that time Pablo had been working for several months on a series of still lifes built around the theme of a skull and some leeks on a table. From the point of view of form, the leeks replaced the cross-bones that traditionally accompany a skull, their onionlike ends corresponding to the joints of the bones.

  “Painting is poetry and is always written in verse with plastic rhymes, never in prose,” Pablo said to me one day when he was working on one of those still lifes. “Plastic rhymes are forms that rhyme with one another or supply assonances either with other forms or with the space that surrounds them; also, sometimes, through their symbolism, but their symbolism mustn’t be too apparent. What have leeks got to do with a skull? Plastically, they have everything to do with it. You can’t keep on painting the skull and crossbones, any more that you can keep on rhyming amour with toujours. So you bring in the leeks instead and they make your point without forcing you to spell it out so obviously.”

  One of this group of paintings I thought extremely well arranged: the forms and the space around them were nicely balanced. It seemed to me it wasn’t possible to change anything about it. The skull itself was particularly expressive. But Pablo was dissatisfied. “That’s just the trouble,” he said. “It’s so well balanced it annoys me. I can’t leave it like that. It’s a stable kind of balance, not an unstable one. It’s too solid. I prefer a more precarious one. I want it to hold itself together—but just barely.”

  I suggested that since all the elements of the composition were perfect and it was only the question of balance that bothered him, he try the solution he had brought to my portrait: cut out the skull from a piece of paper and move it around in different areas of the canvas. He cut out a
nother skull form and, hiding the painted one with one hand, moved the paper skull wherever he felt it might prove sufficiently disturbing. He finally found a spot that was much more unexpected than the original one and provided just the kind of fateful juxtaposition he was seeking, where the balance hung by a thread. Then he was satisfied.

  “When you compose a painting,” he said, “you build around lines of force that guide you in your construction. There’s one area where the first graphic sketch evokes the idea of a table, for example; another one, where you create the idea of the movement of space behind the table. Those lines of force set up a resonance that leads you to where you are going, because in general you don’t arbitrarily decide for yourself. But once you remove one of those elements from your composition and move it around as though it were walking at will through that two-dimensional space, you’re able to achieve a far greater effect of surprise than you could ever do by leaving it in the first position.” He painted out the first skull, pinned down the paper one and marked carefully the area it occupied. Then he removed the paper and painted in the skull in its new location. When he had finished, he saw that one portion of the first skull was still partly visible beneath the surface. He studied it for a moment, then quickly painted in a piece of Gruyère cheese over the obtrusive edge of the original skull, in such a way as to make the two forms coincide.

  “The cheese serves a dual purpose,” he pointed out. “It eliminates the void created by the disappearance of the old skull, but since it has the same form, in part, as the new one, which was modeled after the old, it sets up a plastic rhyme between cheese and skull. And wait.” He added holes to the cheese. It was now unmistakably Gruyère. “You see how the holes in the cheese rhyme with the eye cavities in the skull?” he said. He set down his brush. The picture was finished and Pablo was happy. In solving the problem of balance, he had created and simultaneously solved another problem in a manner that made the painting far more effective than it could have been if the problem had never been raised. And it happened so quickly, it seemed almost like a miracle taking place before my eyes.

  Over the months that followed, Pablo worked on other portraits of me. He seemed greatly interested in doing a different kind of head, using a different symbol, but he kept coming back to the oval moon-shape and the plant forms. It exasperated him.

  “I can’t do a thing about it,” he said. “It just wants to be represented in that way. That’s the way it is sometimes. There are forms that impose themselves on the painter. He doesn’t choose them. And they stem sometimes from an atavism that antedates animal life. It’s very mysterious, and damned annoying.”

  The insistent moon-shape of the head was particularly annoying to him. “I’ve never thought in terms of the stellar zones before,” he said. “Those are not my preferred structures. They’re something from another kingdom. But I just don’t have any control over it. An artist isn’t as free as he sometimes appears. It’s the same way with the portraits I’ve done of Dora Maar. I couldn’t make a portrait of her laughing. For me she’s the weeping woman. For years I’ve painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one. You see, a painter has limits, not always of the kind one imagines.”

  It wasn’t until two years later that Pablo was able to break out of those limits in painting me. By then I had surely become more real to him. He could no longer think of me as someone from another kingdom and his portraits of me began to reflect that fact. He was making many lithographs at that period and Mourlot arrived at the atelier one day bringing the proof of a portrait Pablo had recently done of me. That morning Pablo had on the easel an unfinished painting, also a portrait of me, with a very rhythmic pattern, in which the proportion of the head was giving him a great deal of trouble. He had made it smaller, larger, moved it about, painted it out, but nothing satisfied him. If it was small he complained it was too close to the proportion of the hands. If it became larger it corresponded too closely to the proportion of the legs, he said. He had put it aside because he could see no solution. That morning he took the lithograph Mourlot had brought and pinned it, just as it was, onto the canvas, the top edge of the lithograph corresponding exactly to the top edge of the canvas. It was really an “impossible” thing to do because it threw the picture plane completely out of focus. Introducing an extraneous element into the composition in that way was like opening a window in the painting and letting in another structure from another plane. The painting was very colorful and the lithograph was black-and-white. It made, therefore, such a tremendous contrast in color as well as in form and plane, that it delighted him. He removed the lithograph and immediately painted in, in the spot where he had pinned it up, the same composition—a head of me—that was represented in the lithograph. He considered it such an exciting discovery that he made four or five other paintings embodying the same principle, but not based on any existing lithograph.

  SOMETIMES PABLO WOULD BEGIN a canvas in the morning and in the evening he would say, “Oh, well, it’s done, I suppose. What I had to say plastically is there, but it came almost too quickly. If I leave it like that, with only the appearance of having what I wanted to put into it, it doesn’t satisfy me. But I’m interrupted continually every day and I’m hardly ever in a position to push my thought right up to its last implication. A painting has to be transformed slowly and sometimes I can’t get to the point of adding that last weight of reflection that it needs. My thought moves rapidly and since my hand obeys so fast, in a day’s work I can give myself the satisfaction of having said almost what I wanted to say before I was disturbed and had to abandon that thought. Then, being obliged to take up another thought the next day, I leave things as they are, as thoughts that came to me too quickly, which I left too quickly and which I really ought to go back to and do more work on. But I rarely get a chance to go back. Sometimes it might take me six months to work over that thought in order to reach its exact weight.”

  I asked him why he didn’t shut out the world, and with it the interruptions. “But I can’t,” he said. “What I create in painting is what comes from my interior world. But at the same time I need the contacts and exchanges I have with others. If I tell Sabartés I’m not available, and people come and I know they’re there and I don’t let them in, then I’m tormented by the idea that maybe there’s something I ought to know and don’t and I can’t concentrate on my work. Braque’s a lucky devil. He’s a solitary, meditative type who lives completely within himself. I need others, not simply because they bring me something but because I have this damnable curiosity that has to be satisfied by them.

  “I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It’s not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that time is speeding on past me more and more rapidly. I’m like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It’s the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of life around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is, increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I’ve reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”

  I asked him if he wouldn’t be better off to paint fewer pictures; in that way the insufficiency of time or thought wouldn’t trouble him so. He shook his head. “One must be the painter, never the connoisseur of painting,” he said. “The connoisseur gives
only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself. Of course, when one paints, one must utilize, along with his own inspiration, all the conscious deductions one might make. But between using a conscious and relatively dialectical thought and having a rational thought, there’s an enormous difference. It is because I am antirationalist that I have decided I have no reason to be the judge of my own work. I leave that to time and to the others. What is important for me now is to be, and to leave the trace of my footsteps, and let others judge if this or that step was in accord with or divergent from my general evolution. I sometimes feel it’s a mistake on my part even to bend over and pick up a piece of paper on which I had done something that didn’t please me completely and rework it somewhat, rather than to do a second drawing more in accord with my thought.

  “There’s also the question of fatalism. I have long since come to an agreement with destiny: that is, I have, myself, become destiny—destiny in action. I’m in complete disagreement with Cézanne’s idea about making over Poussin in accordance with nature. In order to work that way I’d have to choose in nature those branches of the tree that would fit into a painting in a way that Poussin might have conceived it. But I don’t choose anything; I take what comes. My trees aren’t made up of structures I have chosen but structures which the chance of my own dynamism imposes on me. Cézanne meant that in looking at nature, to receive the sensation of an object outside himself, he sought what corresponded to a certain aesthetic demand that pre-existed in him. When I make a tree, I don’t choose the tree; I don’t even look at one. The problem doesn’t present itself on that basis for me. I have no pre-established aesthetic basis on which to make a choice. I have no pre-determined tree, either. My tree is one that doesn’t exist, and I use my own psycho-physiological dynamism in my movement toward its branches. It’s not really an aesthetic attitude at all.”