Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  So one morning that fall, just before noon, we went to Braque’s house—without any advance warning, of course. One of Braque’s nephews was there, a tall man of about forty who was even more reserved than Braque. The house was filled with the aromatic bouquet of roasting lamb. I could see Pablo mentally adding up the presence of the nephew plus the very appetizing kitchen odors plus his lifelong friendship with Braque to get the desired result: an invitation to lunch. But if Pablo knew his Braque by heart, Braque knew his Picasso just as well. And I am sure—since I came to know Braque much better after that—that for Braque, Pablo’s black plot was sewn with white thread. Had he made the gesture and invited us for lunch, he could well imagine Pablo having a good laugh about it later, telling everyone, “Oh, you know Braque has no mind of his own. I get there at noon, he knows I want lunch so he sits me down and serves me. I push him around and he only smiles.” The only course open to a man like Braque, who had a mind of his own, was to demonstrate the fact. Especially inasmuch as Pablo was very fond of saying, when Braque’s name came up, “Oh, Braque is only Madame Picasso.” Somewhere along the line someone must have reported that mot of Pablo’s to Braque.

  We went up to the atelier, and Mariette, Braque’s secretary, pulled out his latest things and showed them to us. There were some large sunflowers, beach scenes at Varengeville, wheatfields, and one canvas that showed a bench with just a spot of sun over it. In all these paintings, form seemed to count a good deal less for Braque than it had in his earlier work and it was clear that his main interest now was in the study of the effects of light. There was no deformation or transposition of form; the essential feeling was of a desire to find an atmosphere that could express his thought. The paintings were very handsome.

  “Well,” Pablo said, “I see you’re returning to French painting. But you know, I never would have thought you would turn out to be the Vuillard of Cubism.” Braque looked as though he thought Pablo might have been more flattering but he continued to show us his work good-naturedly.

  Near one o’clock, Pablo started to sniff very loud and said, “Oh, that smells good, that roast lamb.”

  Braque paid no attention. “I’d like to show you my sculpture, too,” he said.

  “Please do,” Pablo said. “Françoise will enjoy that.” Braque showed us some bas-reliefs he had done of horses’ heads, one of them very large, and some small reliefs of a woman driving a chariot. I found them all very interesting, but finally we came to the end of the sculpture.

  “That lamb smells to me as though it were done,” Pablo said. “Overdone, in fact.”

  Braque said, “I think Françoise might like to see my new lithographs.” He began to show me his lithographs and a number of drawings. From time to time, Marcelle, Braque’s wife, came into the atelier, smiled, then went downstairs again without having said a word. After her third trip, Pablo said, “You know, you’ve never shown your paintings of the Fauve period to Françoise.” The Fauve paintings, as he knew, were hung in the dining room. We went downstairs, first into the large room before the dining room, where Braque showed us a few paintings, and then into the dining room. The table was laid for three: Braque, Madame Braque, and Braque’s nephew, obviously. I began to admire Braque’s Fauve paintings.

  “That lamb smells burnt to me now,” Pablo said. “It’s a shame.” Braque said nothing. I continued to admire the Fauve paintings, but there were only six of them and that couldn’t go on forever, so at the end of a half hour Pablo said, “There’s one of your recent paintings up in the atelier that I didn’t really get a good look at. I’d like to go upstairs and see it again.” At this point Braque’s nephew said good-bye. He had to get back to work. We went upstairs and spent the next hour reviewing the new paintings we had already seen. Pablo discovered one we hadn’t seen and Braque brought out several others he hadn’t shown us earlier. Finally we left. It was 4:30. Pablo was bristling. But after he cooled off, it became very clear that Braque had risen considerably in his esteem. And it was only a day or two later that I noticed that the Braque still life with teapot, lemons, and apples had mysteriously reappeared and was once more in its usual place in Pablo’s atelier. I was amazed at the number of times, from then on, that I heard Pablo say, “You know, I like Braque.”

  It would be a mistake to think that Braque was insensitive to the nuances of this situation. He realized how important it was, in all one’s relations with Pablo, to be constantly on guard, because life for Pablo was always a game one played with no holds barred. When I first saw them together I realized that Braque was very fond of Pablo but that he didn’t trust him, knowing that Pablo was capable of any ruse or wile in order to come out on top. His lowest tricks were reserved for those he liked best, and he never passed up an opportunity to play one if you gave him the chance. And if you did give him the chance, he had no respect for you. And so I learned very early that no matter how fond you might be of Pablo, the only way to keep his respect was to be prepared for the worst and take action before he did.

  Braque had a great deal of affection for Pablo and he wanted Pablo to think well of him, at least; therefore, he felt obliged to be rather austere in all his dealings with him, knowing that if he dropped his guard even for a moment, Pablo would take full advantage of it in some way that would make Braque feel or look ridiculous, and then crow about it to all their mutual friends. At first I thought Braque acted like that because it was his nature: stiff, aloof, unbending. As time went on, I was able to see that he was especially that way when he was with Pablo, less so when Pablo was not around. And finally, when I came to know him better and saw him alone or with his wife, I realized he was not at all on guard when he felt he had no reason to be, and that he often talked a great deal. But when Pablo was around, Braque would say next to nothing. Later Pablo would say to me, “You see he never says a word. He’s probably afraid I’ll pick up one of his lines and try to pass it off as my own. Actually, it’s more likely to be the other way around. He picks up my pearls and tries to peddle them as his.”

  After he had put Pablo in his place the day of the roast lamb, Braque seemed a lot freer. Several times while we were in the Midi, he came to St.-Paul-de-Vence and wasn’t at all backward about coming to call on us first, even though he doubtless knew that the result would be—as indeed it was—that Pablo would strut around afterward saying, “You see, Braque came to me first; he realizes I’m more important than he is.” And yet, if Braque hadn’t come to us, Pablo would have fussed about it for days, saying that Braque needn’t think that by staying away he would induce Pablo to make the first call.

  That intense spirit of competition did not come out in the presence of Matisse, who was twelve years older than Pablo. Pablo did not, oddly enough, consider him a painter of his generation, and therefore a direct rival. But with Braque, it was always like two brothers, within a year of each other’s age and with the same background, each striving to demonstrate his independence and autonomy and—in Pablo’s case, at least—superiority. The rivalry was all the stronger because underneath it they were linked by a real bond of affection and their consciousness of having worked almost as one during the Cubist period before going their separate ways.

  That sense of rivalry came out in other ways, too. Naturally, Braque and Pablo had many friends in common. They were both very fond of the poet Pierre Reverdy, for example, and Reverdy used to see them both. But if he had ever said to Pablo, “I’ll have to leave now because I have a date with Braque,” even though that was often the case, he would have made Pablo very unhappy. If Pablo arrived at Braque’s house and found Reverdy there, trouble was brewing. After we got home, he would storm, “Reverdy doesn’t give a damn about me any more. He prefers Braque.” That made things very difficult for Reverdy.

  Toward the end of his life Reverdy published Le Chant des Morts, which Pablo illustrated, and another book, illustrated by Braque. When the Reverdy-Braque book came out, there was a lot of sulking in Pablo’s tent. Pablo went to incredible
lengths, whenever Reverdy came to Paris, to find out, after he had left, whether he had spent more time at Braque’s house than at his. If it turned out he had, Pablo would tell everybody, “I don’t like Reverdy any more. Besides, he’s Braque’s best friend, so he’s no friend of mine.”

  Braque never called on Pablo in Paris and he didn’t like to have Pablo call on him without warning. If Pablo phoned in advance to say he was coming, then Braque would see to it that none of Pablo’s friends were there when he arrived. One day we went to Braque’s without having phoned first and found Zervos, René Char, and the Catalan sculptor Fenosa, all looking very embarrassed. If, the day before, they had been at Pablo’s, Pablo wouldn’t have taken it so badly, but it had been at least two weeks, if not a month, since any of them had called at the Rue des Grands-Augustins. When we got outside, Pablo said, “You see how it is, don’t you? I drop in, just by chance, to see Braque, and what do I find? My best friends. It’s obvious they spend their life there. But they never come to see me.” The next day he was telling everyone who came to see him, “You know, Braque is really a bastard. He finds ways of getting all my friends away from me. I don’t know what he does for them, but he must do something—something I can’t do. The result is, I don’t have any friends any more. The only people who come to see me are a bunch of imbeciles who want something from me. Oh, well, that’s life.” Which wasn’t very flattering to the caller to whom Pablo was unburdening himself. And if Zervos came to call the next day, Pablo would have Sabartés tell him he was out, and would repeat the process the next two or three times Zervos called. Pablo even went so far as to send spies to call on Braque periodically and report back to him who was there. And when the reports included repeatedly the names of people like Zervos, Reverdy, or René Char, he would go into a rage that would last for a whole day. I used to try to calm him down by saying that he chased people away and did his best to discourage visitors, so he had no right to complain if he was alone and only those who had something definite to ask him for dared brave his wrath by coming.

  “If they really loved me,” he said, “they’d come anyway, even if they had to wait at the door for three days until I felt like letting them in.”

  PABLO LOVED TO SURROUND HIMSELF with birds and animals. In general they were exempt from the suspicion with which he regarded his other friends. While Pablo was still working at the Musée d’Antibes, Sima had come to us one day with a little owl he had found in a corner of the museum. One of his claws had been injured. We bandaged it and gradually it healed. We bought a cage for him and when we returned to Paris we brought him back with us and put him in the kitchen with the canaries, the pigeons, and the turtledoves. We were very nice to him but he only glared at us. Any time we went into the kitchen, the canaries chirped, the pigeons cooed and the turtledoves laughed but the owl remained stolidly silent or, at best, snorted. He smelled awful and ate nothing but mice. Since Pablo’s atelier was overrun with them, I set several traps. Whenever I caught one, I brought it to the owl. As long as I was in the kitchen he ignored the mouse and me. He saw perfectly well in the daytime, of course, in spite of the popular legend about owls, but he apparently preferred to remain aloof. As soon as I left the kitchen, even if only for a minute, the mouse disappeared. The only trace would be a little ball of hair which the owl would regurgitate hours later.

  Every time the owl snorted at Pablo he would shout, “Cochon, Merde,” and a few other obscenities, just to show the owl that he was even worse mannered than he was. He used to stick his fingers between the bars of the cage and the owl would bite him, but Pablo’s fingers, though small, were tough and the owl didn’t hurt him. Finally the owl would let him scratch his head and gradually he came to perch on his finger instead of biting it, but even so, he still looked very unhappy. Pablo did a number of drawings and paintings of him and several lithographs as well.

  The pigeons cooed but the two turtledoves really laughed. They were small and grayish-pink with a darker ruff around the neck. Every time we went into the kitchen to eat and Pablo launched into one of his characteristic long semiphilosophical monologues, the turtledoves would be all attention. Just at the moment he made his point, they would start to laugh.

  “These are really birds for a philosopher,” Pablo said. “All human utterance has its stupid side. Fortunately I have the turtledoves to make fun of me. Each time I think I’m saying something particularly intelligent, they remind me of the vanity of it all.”

  The two turtledoves were in the same cage and they often went through what seemed to be the act of mating but there was never any egg as a result. Finally Pablo decided there had been a mistake and they were both males.

  “Everyone speaks so well of animals,” he said. “Nature in its purest state, and all that. What nonsense! Just look at those turtledoves: as wholeheartedly pederast as any two bad boys.”

  He made two lithographs of them in action, one printed in purplish red, the other in yellow. Then he made a third by superimposing one lithograph on the other to give the effect of the shaking and fluttering they went through while they were, more or less, mating.

  ONE MORNING THAT WINTER, when the sun was shining into the bedroom and making me feel as though it might be possible, after all, to hold on until spring in spite of the chill of Paris and the dampness of the studio and the uneasy moments of my pregnancy, Pablo said to me, “Now that you’re part of my life, I want you to know all about it. You’ve already seen the Rue Ravignan and the Bateau Lavoir. I took you there first because that is the most poetic memory I have and you were already part of my poetry of the present. Now you’re part of my reality so I want you to see the rest. Today I have an errand at the bank. We’ll start there.”

  Pablo’s bank was the main office of the B.N.C.I. on the Boulevard des Italiens and it was in their subterranean vaults that he kept many of his paintings. I found the place rather ugly from the outside, in a 1930-ish Arts Décoratifs style, massive and heavy. We went inside and took the elevator down into the depths. There were two circular levels, one below the other, arranged around an interior gallery so that the guards could survey easily up and down as they patrolled around a big hole like a snake pit in the center. I was pale that day and not feeling my best. I said it corresponded to my idea of what Sing Sing must look like.

  “I guess you don’t like it here,” Pablo said. I told him I was allergic to banks.

  “Fine,” he said. “If you dislike that sort of thing, I’m going to have you handle my papers and money matters. People who don’t like things like that generally do them very well. Since they’re never sure of doing the job properly, they pay more attention to what they do.” I protested but he remained firm and from the moment we went to live much of the time in the Midi a little later on, I replaced Sabartés in handling a good deal of the paperwork, much against my will.

  That day, the guard looked us over when we came in and smiled broadly. “What’s the joke?” Pablo asked him. The guard said, “You’re lucky. Most of the customers I’ve seen here in my time come in year after year with the same woman, always looking a little older. Every time you come in, you have a different woman and each one is younger than the last.”

  Pablo’s vaults were two good-sized rooms. He showed me first, in one of them, paintings by Renoir, the Douanier Rousseau, Cézanne, Matisse, Miró, Derain and others. His own work was divided into two groups: in one room, everything up to about 1935, and in the other, the work of the past ten years. All his pictures were signed. I had noticed that he kept only unsigned canvases in the atelier. I asked him about that. “As long as a picture isn’t signed,” he said, “it’s harder to dispose of if it’s stolen. And there are other reasons, too. A signature is often an ugly blob that distracts from the composition once it’s there. That’s why I generally sign a picture only when it’s sold. Some of these are paintings that I sold years ago and have bought back. The rest—well, as long as a painting hangs around the atelier unsigned, I feel I can always do something ab
out it if I’m not completely satisfied. But when I’ve said everything I had to say in it and it’s ready to start a life of its own, then I sign it and send it over here.”

  Several of the pictures he showed me that day had been painted either at Boisgeloup, an eighteenth-century château he had bought about fifteen years earlier when he was living with Olga, or in the Paris apartment they had occupied in the Rue La Boétie.

  He had already told me the story of their difficult life together. He had married her in 1918, when she was a dancer with the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev. She wasn’t one of the better dancers in the troupe, he said, but she was pretty and she had another asset that he had found very appealing: she came from a family that belonged to the lower echelons of Russian nobility. Diaghilev, Pablo said, had an original way of choosing his dancers: half of them had to be very good dancers; the other half, pretty girls of good social background. The first group drew people to the ballet because of their dancing. The others attracted people from their own social set or because of their looks.

  The Ballets Russes had become a kind of diversion for Pablo during World War I, when many of his friends, such as Apollinaire and Braque, had been mobilized. While he was alone one day in his atelier, Jean Cocteau, dressed as Harlequin, had come to tell him he felt it was time Pablo came down out of his ivory tower and took Cubism out onto the street, or at least into the theater, by designing sets and costumes for a ballet. That was the basis for his collaboration in the ballet Parade. He went first to Rome, then to Madrid and Barcelona, and later on to London with the Ballets. He worked with Larionov and Gontcharova and with Bakst and Benois.

  “Of course, what they did had nothing to do with what I was trying to work out,” he told me, “but at that time I had had no experience of the theater. For example, there are some colors that look very nice in a maquette but amount to nothing transferred to the stage. That was something that Bakst and Benois, on the other hand, had had a lot of experience with. So in that sense I learned much from them. They were good friends and gave me many pointers. They didn’t influence my conceptions in any way but they gave practical advice when it came to translating those conceptions into working theater.”