Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  The other courtier who was troubled by Claude’s arrival was Sabartés. Sabartés was Catalan. He was, in fact, a distant cousin of Miró. Their point of encounter was Sabartés’s grandfather. The grandfather was completely illiterate but he had made a fortune, Pablo told me, first as a scrap-metal dealer and then, later on, in some more respectable business. He could neither read nor write nor even count beyond the most rudimentary level, but no one could ever cheat him. If he was to receive one hundred iron pots and only ninety-nine showed up, he knew it, even without being able to count that high. He took an interest in Sabartés from his very early childhood and decided to educate him, with the idea that when Sabartés knew how to read and write and especially to count, he would take him into the business and from then on have no worries about being robbed by wily competitors. By the time Sabartés was nine years old he was handling all his grandfather’s correspondence. Soon after, though, he had a very serious eye illness which resulted in his becoming nearly blind. That ended his usefulness to his grandfather.

  In 1899 he met Picasso, who also was living in Barcelona, as his father had become professor of painting at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts. At that time there was a kind of regional fervor in Barcelona. There was an active group interested in reviving the Catalan language, which up until then had had only an oral tradition, and making it the spearhead of a literary renaissance. They had put out a Catalan grammar and a number of young writers were beginning to write in Catalan. It was an intellectual surge that carried over into other domains. Sabartés was part of that group. Although he began as a poet, he once had ambitions of becoming a sculptor. He never did, though. He told me once, “When I discovered Egyptian sculpture, I knew that was what I would have wanted to do, but I could never have hoped to do it that well. So I gave up the idea.”

  From the beginning he was a kind of scapegoat for Pablo. Once when Pablo was annoyed with Sabartés, he told me the following story:

  Back in their early starvation period in Paris, Pablo and Max Jacob once gave Sabartés the last few coins they could scrape up and told him to go buy an egg and whatever else he could get the most of for that money. Sabartés shopped around and wound up with a piece of bread, two sausages and, of course, an egg. Since he saw very poorly, he fell on the stairs on his way back. The egg broke and ran in all directions. He picked up the other things and continued up to the room where Pablo and Max were waiting. They were planning to cook the egg over a candle, since there was no other heat. He told them what had happened. Pablo was furious. “You’ll never amount to anything,” he told him. “We give you our last penny and you can’t even get back here with a whole egg. You’ll be a failure all your life.” He grabbed up a fork and plunged it into one of the sausages. The sausage burst. He tried the other one. The same thing happened. Sabartés with his weak eyesight had bought two sausages so old and so rotten that they exploded like a pair of balloons as soon as the tines of the fork penetrated the skin. Pablo and Max divided between the two of them the bread Sabartés had bought. All Sabartés got for his trouble was the bawling-out.

  Sabartés went back to Barcelona not long after that and married a distant cousin of his. Pablo said that they had a child and a bit later they went to Guatemala, where Sabartés worked as a journalist. After twenty-five years they returned to Spain. At that point the thread grows tangled. I only know what Pablo told me about this period of Sabartés’s life and since Pablo had a rather malicious tongue at times, I never got a clear story on what happened to Sabartés’s wife and child. In any case, shortly after his return to Spain he married again and it was with his second wife, a childhood sweetheart, that he landed in Paris. Pablo was now separated from Olga and so he had Sabartés and his wife come to live with him in the Rue La Boétie. The wife supervised the household and Sabartés began his long service as Pablo’s secretary, front man, errand boy and, not least, scapegoat.

  Sabartés had exactly the right temperament to be useful to Pablo. To begin with, he had the kind of devotion for Pablo that a Trappist has for his God. Day after day and year after year he was subjected to the bad moods and the good, he was the butt of Pablo’s ribbing and the patient dupe of his practical jokes. He did all the legwork, the correspondence, the organization of exhibitions, and took the blame for anything that went wrong. There was Marcel, of course, but he was shrewd and thus knew how to protect himself in advance against any sudden squalls, and besides, he was only the chauffeur and could hardly be blamed for something he took no real part in. And so Sabartés held the honor of being the official whipping-boy. In all his life with Picasso he never made a decision on his own. Pablo didn’t allow him to. He carried out instructions to the best of his ability. If things went well, he heard no more; if they went wrong, he reaped all the blame.

  Aside from his devotion to Pablo, Sabartés’s only interest was his wife. His whole life was built around those two figures. I saw her once or twice but it was only because I went to call on her in their tiny apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement. Otherwise I would never have met her. She never set foot in the atelier of the Rue des Grands-Augustins during the years I was there.

  Sabartés was very fussy and cautious in everything he did and quick to take offense. But he was totally disinterested. He certainly had no selfish or ulterior motive in anything he did, and for all his devotion he was repaid by the skimpiest of livings. During the eleven years I knew him, his pay—like that of Inès, the chambermaid, and Marcel, the chauffeur—never exceeded eighty-five dollars a month, and for a long time it was less. He and his wife lived in a noisy, tiny flatlet not much bigger than a monk’s cell, situated on top of an ugly block of worker’s flats. One took the elevator as far as it went and climbed the rest of the way on foot.

  Sabartés was a curious combination of pride and self-abnegation. People sometimes got into difficulty in their relations with him because either they thought he was completely negligible, in which case he would go to great pains to prove to them that this was not so by refusing their request for whatever it was they wanted; or else they buttressed their requests with the assurance that they knew he had great influence over Picasso. These were met with a cold, “I carry out only what he tells me to do.” Almost no one found favor in his eyes. He always disliked Claude because when Claude was a baby he was frightened of anyone who was strange-looking. Whenever Sabartés tried to pick him up or play with him, he began to howl. Sabartés never forgave him. Years later he asked me if Claude still had the same bad disposition. “Is he as odious as ever?” he wanted to know. In plain fact, Claude was never “odious” with anyone but he was terrified, as a baby, of Sabartés, and since Sabartés had no understanding of children, he took it badly.

  •

  Sabartés had the Spanish habit of affecting sadness to a far greater degree than he really felt. One might almost say that the Spanish are a nation in mourning. Ever since the time of Philip II they have never gotten over the fact that at court one always dressed in black. However little royal blood he may have in him, once be begins to feel himself in any degree a personage, the Spaniard will dress in black, at least metaphorically, for the rest of his days. And in my mind’s eye that is the way I always see Sabartés. He loved mystery, even where there was none. He had a cloak-and-dagger imagination, and mentally shadowed everyone who came near him. He never talked of anything in plain terms like everyone else. He would never pronounce anyone’s name in front of an outsider for fear of giving away a secret. Of course Pablo loved that. When I first went to live there, with my uninhibited free-speech temperament I shocked both of them terribly. “How do you dare say such a thing right out? Everyone will understand,” Sabartés would whisper, and Pablo would look daggers at me. Once when Brassaï came in, I said to him, “Ah, you’ve come to photograph all the sculptures?” Sabartés whispered to me later, “It’s nobody’s business how long he’s here or what he’s doing.” I said I had known Brassaï long before I came there. “Then see him outside and ask him,”
Sabartés answered.

  Before the Liberation he was always certain that the Germans were all spies. After the war, it was the English: he was sure they were all from the Secret Service. When the GI’s began to come see Pablo after the Liberation, and occasionally I would do something to make them comfortable, Sabartés would say, “Americans are puppies. Let them sleep on the floor and use the threshold for a pillow.” One day he noticed a GI with an unfamiliar shoulder patch. He decided he was a member of the Intelligence Service. He warned Pablo not to say anything to him. “He might understand something,” he said. Pablo pooh-poohed him. “Since Americans are like puppies,” he said, “why worry about them?”

  All this puzzled me. I asked Pablo, “What is there to understand—except your painting?” Sabartés grew very excited. “That’s just the point,” he said. “There are things in that painting that you don’t understand. Perhaps most Americans don’t, either. But this man, just like the English, might see through it. You know, the British Secret Service collects all possible information on intellectual activities; up until now, they probably don’t know what to do with it, but if they ever find out, you’ll see the trouble they’ll make.” When I began to roll my eyes skyward, Sabartés said, “You don’t believe me? You want proof? Go one day to the British chancellery. Look at all the people they have working there. What do you think they all do?” He nodded ominously.

  Finally I learned the secret code of the palace guard. One never mentioned a proper name. One never referred directly to an event or a situation; one spoke of it only by allusion to something else. Pablo and Sabartés wrote to each other almost every day to impart information of no value and even less interest, but to impart it in the most artfully recondite fashion imaginable. It would have taken an outsider days, weeks, to fathom one of their arcane notes. It might be something relating to Monsieur Pellequer, who handled Pablo’s business affairs. Pablo would write (since Monsieur Pellequer had a country house in Touraine) of the man in the tower (tour) of the château having suffered a wound in the groin (aine) and so on and on, playing on words, splitting them up, recombining them into unlikely and suspicious-looking neologisms, like the pirates’ torn map that must be pieced together to show the location of the treasure. He would sometimes use up three pages writing about a spade in such a way as not to be obliged to refer to it as a spade, lest the letter fall into the hands of Inès or Madame Sabartés and reveal something to one or the other. He worked so hard at being hermetic that sometimes even Sabartés didn’t understand and they would have to exchange several more letters to untangle the mystery.

  Of course, there was a feeling for the theatrical mixed up in all this, too. Whenever Sabartés admitted callers to the waiting room, some part of his sad, lugubrious air was certainly laid on to give added importance to the whole procedure. It was part of the stage setting. And since the building in the Rue des Grands-Augustins had once been—at least according to Pablo—part of the Spanish Embassy, I’m sure that whenever Pablo or Sabartés thought of that, they redoubled their private security measures. In the big reception room Pablo had even arranged some Spanish chairs and a large divan dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century and covered in very dusty crimson and yellow velvet, on which reposed a few guitars, all carefully contrived to make you realize that there you were in Spain. Then there are the portraits he has done of Sabartés in the habit of a Dominican of the time of Philip II or dressed as an alguacil. So in spite of his deliberate self-effacement, Sabartés played to the hilt his role of Minister of the Interior.

  At the beginning I understood why Sabartés accepted me so grudgingly. In the same way that he opened the door, the first time I called, just a crack, so every time after that he seemed to want to shut me out; but since Pablo was very frank about the pleasure it gave him to see me, Sabartés was obliged to go along. He was extremely severe and aloof but no more so with me than with others. In fact less so than with many. Later, when he saw that I was coming much more frequently, he began to predict doom, not only to me but to Pablo as well. “You’ll see,” he warned us. “This will end badly. It’s madness. It will bring you to the edge of catastrophe.”

  Sabartés simply couldn’t stand the idea that Pablo should have a new woman in his life. He thought Pablo was already overloaded, with Olga, with Marie-Thérèse Walter and her daughter, and with Dora Maar. But he was rather fond of Marie-Thérèse and hence had no use for Dora Maar. So after his first negative reaction, he put up no great objection to my presence, on the grounds, no doubt, that he felt I might be useful in getting rid of Dora. By that time, he must have assumed, Pablo would have lost interest in me as well. But after putting up with me for three years, instead of finding me gone he found me living there.

  After I went to live with Pablo, Sabartés soon saw that I lightened the workload for him and I carried out my duties conscientiously enough to satisfy him. Gradually he began to lose his pessimism concerning my presence and decided that after all, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing. He felt I had brought stability to Pablo’s life and since he was the seismograph that recorded all the quakes and tremors from Pablo’s direction, he could only benefit from the new equilibrium. He even went so far as to say it was nice to have someone so young around the place, that it had made Pablo more lighthearted.

  During my first year there, Sabartés was a good friend to me. What broke down our good entente was the birth of Claude. It quite clearly put an end to his illusions that I would be a temporary preoccupation of Pablo’s. After 1947 Pablo and I spent less and less time in Paris and when we came back we were all there together, as a family. And Sabartés’s great decorum was sadly undermined by the presence of an active, exuberant child. Sabartès might have just finished impressing those who had come to seek audience with Pablo that their chances were very slim, that the Master was hard at work, really too busy to see anybody, when Claude would toddle in, say hello to everybody, climb up into a few laps, and announce, “My daddy’s going to see you very soon. Just as soon as he gets out of bed and gets dressed.” Everybody would begin to laugh and all Sabartés’s stage-setting had gone for naught. Claude had turned a Greek tragedy into a film by René Clair.

  Later Claude got into the habit of hiding himself in some out-of-the-way place in the big atelier just before eleven o’clock, when the pilgrims began to file in. He was waiting for Mourlot, for whom he had developed an abiding affection. He called Mourlot “Colombe.” He knew that it was in Mourlot’s shop that his father had done the lithograph of the dove, and since the French word for dove is colombe, he had made up his mind that must be Mourlot’s name. Mourlot came often, though not every day. As soon as he arrived, Claude would pop out of his hiding place, saying, “I’m looking for Colombe. I want to see Colombe.” He made straight for Mourlot, saying, “Well, at last, here you are. Wonderful! Come give me a kiss. My daddy’s going to see you right away. He won’t make you sit around and wait like the rest of these people.” By that time Sabartés’s protocol was sagging badly. He would call for Inès and have Claude carried offstage but he could not undo the damage Claude had done. In addition to that, the presence of a child made it obvious that somewhere there was a woman, and for one reason or another, Sabartés would have preferred to keep that fact quiet.

  The only time I ever saw Sabartés come close to doing anything on his own initiative he got his fingers so badly burned I doubt that he ever felt tempted to try again. It was the summer after Claude was born. The innocent cause of the trouble was the New York picture dealer Sam Kootz. But the story really begins before Claude was born and before Kootz arrived on the scene.

  For quite a time Pablo had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get Kahnweiler to raise the unit price—the purchase as well as the selling price—of his paintings. Many American collectors were still being put off by Pablo’s having joined the Communist Party and Kahnweiler told Pablo that he was having enough difficulty selling Picassos at the old price without worrying about trying to sell t
hem at the price Pablo was suggesting. He refused to go higher. It wasn’t so much greed that kept Pablo after Kahnweiler as it was pride. He had recently heard reports that canvases of Braque’s had changed hands for sums higher than what Kahnweiler was asking for paintings of his that could be considered comparable in size, period, and so on, and Pablo had great difficulty in accepting that. Of course, Braque painted far fewer pictures in a year than Pablo and for that reason alone there was a certain logical basis for a canvas of Braque’s to sell at a higher price. But every time Pablo heard about such a sale, there was always a storm. He kept at Kahnweiler but Kahnweiler wouldn’t budge, and since Pablo had made up his mind not to sell at the old price, no paintings were sold.

  Louis Carré had bought a good many paintings in the years just preceding and had started a gallery in New York but it didn’t seem to be thriving at the moment. As a result he was oversaturated with Picassos of recent vintage and hence, temporarily at least, out of the market. And if Kahnweiler wasn’t willing to pay Pablo’s price, Paul Rosenberg certainly wasn’t going to.

  It was at this point that Kootz showed up for the first time. He had been dealing in the works of some of the avant-garde American painters—Gottlieb, Motherwell, Baziotes, and others—and Gottlieb, he told us, had given him the idea that his position would be strengthened if he had paintings by Picasso along with those of his regular painters. He had been making enough money so that he felt he could take that step. So Kootz came along as an outsider, but an outsider with a completely different motivation for buying: unlike the other dealers Pablo was in the habit of doing business with, he had no stock of Picassos, and he wanted Picasso as a kind of moral backing for his Americans. And so for both those reasons he could afford to pay Pablo’s price. But Pablo didn’t sell him a thing at the moment. He told him to come back in June and in the meantime he would think over what he wanted him to have.