Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  Escape from Ménerbes came sooner that I had expected. Marie Cuttoli asked us to come down to her place and stay for a few days. Pablo didn’t say no, so I said we’d go for three days and then come back, but my mind was made up not to come back, ever. We left for Cap d’Antibes, and stayed three or four days with the Cuttolis. While we were there we went over to visit Monsieur Fort at his little house in Golfe-Juan. I told Pablo I liked the sea much better than the country and I wanted to do some swimming. Presented in that fashion the idea was acceptable, so Pablo rented the two upper floors of Monsieur Fort’s house and sent Marcel back to fetch the things we had left at Dora Maar’s. In a few weeks I knew I was pregnant.

  NOWADAYS AT GOLFE-JUAN there are private beaches, parasols by the score, and tourists by the thousands, including parts of the United States Sixth Fleet, but in August 1946 it was almost deserted, and when Pablo and I left Monsieur Fort’s villa Pour Toi mornings and walked across the street for a swim, we were nearly always alone.

  Since Monsieur Fort’s house was small and we had only the upper two floors, which were very cramped, there was little room to work in. Pablo was beginning to be restless without a place to paint. He was enough of a Mediterranean, though, to enjoy lying on the beach and doing nothing all morning, and that was the position we were in one day when the sculptor and photographer Sima came along to tell us about a place where he thought Pablo might like to work. It was the Château Grimaldi, up on the ramparts overlooking the harbor at Antibes. It had been a museum of sorts, called the Musée d’Antibes, since 1928. The curator, Monsieur Dor de la Souchère, a teacher of Latin and Greek at the Lycée Carnot in Cannes, had not been able to fill the museum adequately; it had very few art objects and a minuscule budget. At the moment its chief asset was a collection of documents relating to Napoleon, kept there, perhaps, because Napoleon had landed at Golfe-Juan when he returned from Elba. That was about all there was to the museum except for some large, high, empty rooms on the second floor not being used for anything, Sima said.

  Pablo perked up. “All right,” he said. “If you want to bring the curator here to see me one morning and he really wants me to work there, I’d be delighted, because I don’t have any room where I am now.” After Sima had left, Pablo began to dance up and down for joy.

  “I almost bought that place about twenty years ago,” he told me. “It belonged to the Army and had been lying empty for a long time. The Army offered to sell it for eighty thousand francs. I was on the point of buying it when the town of Antibes got interested. The Army preferred to sell it to the town rather than to a private buyer since it was part of the national patrimony.”

  Very soon after Sima’s visit, Monsieur Jules-César Romuald Dor de la Souchère came to the beach one morning and said he would be very happy to have Pablo work at the Musée d’Antibes and would turn over to him one of the large rooms upstairs for his atelier. The next morning Pablo and I went to look at it. He decided it would work out fine for him and said, “While I’m here I’m not just going to paint some pictures. I’m going to decorate your museum for you.” Dor de la Souchère was thrilled.

  After we had walked around the museum that day, we came to the little church next to it, on a lower level. Pablo started to steer me toward it. I asked him why he wanted to take me there. “You’ll see,” he said. He guided me around the interior and when he got to the back, near the holy-water stoup, he pulled me into a dark corner and said, “You’re going to swear here that you’ll love me forever.” I was a little surprised. “I can swear that anywhere, if I want to commit myself to that extent,” I said. “But why here?”

  “I think it’s better done here than just anywhere,” Pablo answered.

  “Here or somewhere else, it’s all the same,” I said.

  “No, no,” Pablo said. “Well, yes, of course, it is all the same, but it’s one of those things. You never know. There may be something to all that stuff about churches. It might make the whole thing a little surer. Who knows? I don’t think we should throw away the chance. It might help.” So I swore and he swore and he seemed satisfied.

  Pablo had to order some of his painting equipment from Paris, because things like that were in very short supply at the moment. Mean-while he went down to the harbor with Sima and laid in a supply of boat paint because, he said, that would stand up better in the environment in which it was going to live. Since boat paint is generally applied to wood, he decided he should paint on plywood. Then he ordered some large panels in fibrocement, saying that the boat paint would go well on that too. He bought some house-painter’s brushes and started in to work the following day, when the things were delivered to the museum. He stayed there, working, during September and October and did almost all the paintings that are there now: all the fibrocement and plywood panels except the one called Ulysses and the Sirens, which was done a year later. The series of drawings surrounding the painting that is called La Joie de Vivre was not done at the museum but a month earlier at Monsieur Fort’s. The pottery was done later and the tapestries and the lithographs were given by Madame Cuttoli.

  Near the restaurant Chez Marcel, in Golfe-Juan, where we ate nearly every day, was a tiny café that specialized in local seafood. There was a stand outside displaying the different varieties to tempt people into buying, but it was October and almost everyone had left. The only person who was tempted by the display was the woman who ran the place. She was so wide and her café so narrow there was hardly room enough inside for her, so she stood outside trying to drum up trade. Since there was almost no one to buy from her, she kept dipping into the stock all day long. She was not quite five feet, a very sturdy little body as broad as she was tall, about forty-five or fifty years old with one of the coarsest faces imaginable, framed by a mass of corkscrew curls dyed mahogany and ending in a funny little pug nose that stuck out from under the visor of an outsize man’s cap. Often as we were having our lunch, we saw her walking back and forth with a basket of sea urchins in front of her and a sharp, pointed knife, looking for a stray customer. Since almost no one ever showed up to lighten her load, from time to time she would dip into the basket, open up one of the sea urchins and suck in the contents so greedily that we would watch her, fascinated by the contrast between her soft, round, red face and the spiny, green-violet sea urchins she kept bringing up to it. Four of the paintings in the Musée d’Antibes were built around the figure of this woman and the sailors that hung around the harbor. There is a portrait of the woman herself, one of a sailor eating sea urchins and two other portraits of sailors, one dozing and the other yawning.

  The Woman Eating Sea Urchins was begun one afternoon in a realistic manner. Everything about the portrait was a recognizable representation of the woman as we knew her: pug nose, corkscrew curls, man’s cap, and the dirty apron in which she enveloped herself. Then, when it was finished, each day Pablo eliminated a few more naturalistic details until there remained only a very simplified form, almost vertical, with just the plate of sea urchins in the middle to remind one of what she looked like.

  In the painting of the pale sailor eating sea urchins, since the sailor’s eyes are lowered, there is only an indication of the lower eyelid and the shape of the eyeball covered by the upper lid. I noticed about three years ago when I visited the museum that someone had taken a blue crayon and drawn in the iris of the eyes in a particularly unpleasant shade of sky-blue. No one else appears to have noticed the addition. At least nothing had been done about it when I looked in on it again recently.

  I noticed other changes, too, on my recent visit. In Ulysses and the Sirens, the blues had darkened and other surface painting had faded. The underpainting stood out more noticeably, perhaps because of the humidity. Some of the heads, which had been painted in bister, had paled down and the brown in the lower part of the painting was stronger and less grayish than it had been originally. The fauns in one of the small rooms, which had at first been very shiny, had dulled down and their blues and greens were paler. Pablo ha
d done a portrait of Sabartés as a faun, painted on paper. The paper had yellowed and become foxed, I noticed, and the colors had grown flatter and more pale.

  One day in 1948, Matisse came over with his secretary, Lydia, to look at the museum. He was particularly puzzled by the long plywood panel of the Reclining Woman. “I understand the way you’ve done the head,” Matisse said, “but not what you’ve done with her bottom. The two parts of it turn in a strange way. They don’t follow the other planes of the body.” It seemed to bother him. He took out a notebook and made a sketch of the painting to take home with him for further study and then sketched nine or ten others in a quick, approximate manner.

  PABLO HAD ALWAYS LIKED to surround himself with writers and poets, beginning with the days of Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. That is one reason, I think, why he was always able to talk very articulately about his painting. At each period the poets created around him the language of painting. Afterwards Pablo, who—for things like that—was an extremely adaptable, supple person, always talked very perceptively about his painting because of his intimacy with those who had been able to discover the right words.

  Pablo’s most intimate friend among the poets of our time was Paul Eluard. I had met Eluard once or twice, but the first time I had a chance to see him at close range over an extended period was the week in 1946, at the time of the Cannes Film Festival, when he and his wife, Nusch, came to Golfe-Juan to see us and to watch the work-in-progress at the Musée d’Antibes. There was a complex kind of relationship between Paul and Pablo, because Nusch had been for some time one of Pablo’s favorite models. Beginning in the mid-1930s he had done many drawings and portraits of her. In some of his paintings she was deformed in the manner of the portraits of Dora Maar. In others she was very close in spirit to the Blue Period. And Nusch was, essentially, a personage of the Blue Period. She was German and she and her father were wandering acrobats. Paul had met her one day as he was out walking with the poet René Char. He was captivated by the sight of this fragile seventeen-year-old girl going through her circus contortions right on the sidewalk. He fell in love with her and they were married very soon. There was a nostalgic element in that encounter that had touched Pablo, too, and recalled his Saltimbanques period of the early 1900s. That sort of evocation combined with her physical frailness made Nusch a very sensitive, poetic figure.

  Paul and Pablo were at opposite poles in their personalities: Pablo basically aggressive and changeable, and Paul a very harmonious being. I could see from the start that Paul was the kind of person who, without demanding anything of anyone, obtained the best from everyone. He brought into any group he frequented a kind of over-all harmony, not so much by what he said as by his simple presence. When Paul and Nusch left for Paris after the festival, we never saw Nusch again. Paul went to Switzerland and while he was there, Nusch died suddenly one night. Paul was shattered by her death. The poems he wrote about her later, under another name, are among the most moving in all modern French literature.

  The following winter we saw Paul often. He lived meagerly from his poetry, but he was such a fine bibliophile that by buying and selling certain types of books that he knew so well he was able to fill in the gaps. But he always lived on a very modest scale. From time to time Pablo would give him a drawing or a painting or decorate his copy of an illustrated book so that when times were too difficult, Paul could sell something and resolve the crisis.

  Paul and Nusch had “discovered” Mougins in the thirties and induced Pablo, he told me, to spend a part of his vacation there in 1936, 1937 and 1938. From that period date Pablo’s studies of Nusch. Pablo had had a vague affair with Nusch at that period, he told me, and Paul—he was certain—had turned a blind eye to it: the ultimate test of friendship.

  “But it was a gesture of friendship on my part, too,” Pablo said. “I only did it to make him happy. I didn’t want him to think I didn’t like his wife.” Pablo had tender memories, too, of a girl named Rosemarie, who, he said, had a “magnificent” bosom and used to drive them all to the beach, bare from the waist up. Dora Maar was there, too. It was their first summer together.

  ANOTHER POET who had been a good friend of Pablo’s, André Breton, had spent the Occupation years in America and arrived back in France in June 1946, very shortly after I went to live with Pablo. We had heard that he was back in Paris but he didn’t come to see Pablo. One morning in August, as we were leaning over the balcony of the Villa Pour Toi in Golfe-Juan, Pablo pointed down toward Chez Marcel and said, “Look, there’s André Breton.” We went right downstairs since Pablo assumed that Breton was probably trying to find out where we lived. When Breton saw us approaching, he turned aside and it was obvious that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to see Pablo or not. Our going out to meet him apparently had jarred somewhat the timing and presentation he had been planning to give to their first postwar meeting.

  Pablo stretched out his hand in a spontaneous, friendly way, since he had been Breton’s friend almost as much as Eluard’s. Breton hesitated, then said, “I don’t know whether I’m going to shake hands with you or not.”

  “Why not?” Pablo asked him. Breton, with his characteristic dogmatic manner, said, “Because I’m not at all in agreement with your politics since the Occupation. I don’t approve of your joining the Communist Party nor with the stand you have taken concerning the purges of intellectuals after the Liberation.”

  Pablo said, “You didn’t choose to stay on in France with us during the Occupation. And you haven’t lived through the events we lived through here. My stand is based on those experiences. I don’t criticize your position since your understanding of those events was acquired at a different angle from mine. My friendship for you is unchanged. Your friendship for me, I think, should remain on the same basis. After all, friendship should be above any differences in our ways of understanding historical reality,” and he put out his hand again.

  Breton apparently couldn’t see his way clear to retracting what he had just said. “No,” he said, “there are principles that have no room for compromise. I stand on mine and I don’t imagine you plan to change yours, either.”

  “No, I don’t,” Pablo said. “If I hold those opinions, it is because my experience has brought me to them. I can’t very well change that. But I’m not asking you to change yours, either. And I don’t see why we can’t shake hands and remain friends.”

  Breton shook his head. “As long as you defend those opinions, I won’t shake your hand,” he said.

  “That’s too bad,” Pablo said, “because I place friendship above any differences of political opinion. In Spain during the 1930s, there was quite a group of us that used to meet in the same café even though we held diametrically opposed political views. Sometimes we had very stormy discussions and we knew that on the day war broke out we would find ourselves in different camps, but no one saw any reason to stop being friends just because of that. All the more reason, if we don’t think alike, for keeping the discussion open.”

  Breton shook his head again. “It’s too bad you ever allowed yourself to be drawn into that political alliance by Eluard.”

  “I’m an adult,” Pablo said. “I’m afraid those are my own opinions, not Eluard’s.”

  “Well, then,” Breton said, “I’m afraid you’ve lost a friend, because I’ll never see you again.”

  ONE OF PABLO’S OLDEST FRIENDS was the painter Georges Braque. A few weeks after I went to live with Pablo, he had decided it would be pleasant for me to meet Braque and see his atelier. Also, he had let me understand that he wanted to see Braque’s reaction to me. When we arrived one morning at Braque’s house in the Rue du Douanier, across from the Parc Montsouris, Braque was very courteous. He showed us the paintings he had been doing recently, and after a brief visit we left. When we got outside I could see that Pablo was upset.

  “Now you see the difference between Braque and Matisse,” he said. “When we went to call on Matisse he was very warm-hearted and kind and call
ed you Françoise right from the start. He even wanted to paint your portrait. I introduced you to Braque in such a way as to make him understand you weren’t somebody I just happened to bring by chance, but he called you Mademoiselle all along. I don’t know whether that was directed against you or against me but he acted as though he didn’t get the point at all.” Pablo began to sulk, then burst out with, “Besides, he didn’t even invite us to stay for lunch.”

  At that period Pablo and Braque exchanged pictures from time to time. One of the fruits of those exchanges was a still life of Braque’s, with a teapot, lemons, and apples, a handsome wide picture that Pablo was very fond of and used to keep prominently displayed in the atelier among the canvases of Matisse and others whose work he particularly liked. I noticed that the day we returned from our first visit to Braque, the still life disappeared.

  The relationship between Pablo and Braque had been exceedingly intimate when they were young painters. The fact that their intimacy was no longer as close troubled Pablo from time to time. He felt that this situation was partly attributable to Braque’s reserve but not wholly. He would try to rationalize it, get nowhere, and often wind up with the announcement, “I don’t like my old friends.” Once when I pressed him for an explanation he told me, “All they do is reproach you for things they don’t approve of. They have no indulgence.” He didn’t make it any clearer than that, but it was evident that for Pablo friendship had no value unless it was being actively demonstrated.

  Soon after that first visit we left for Ménerbes and the Midi but when we got back to Paris late in the fall, Pablo suddenly thought one day of that meeting with Braque.

  “I’m going to give Braque one more chance,” he said. “I’m going to take you back there and we’re going to arrive a little before noon. If this time he doesn’t invite us to stay for lunch I’ll understand that he doesn’t like me any more and I’ll have nothing further to do with him.”