Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  When Kootz had gone, Pablo decided to use his offer as a lever with Kahnweiler. He told him, “Now I’ve got a dealer who’s happy to pay my prices, even if you’re not.” Kahnweiler said, “That’s all right with me. Maybe he can afford to. I can’t.” And he remained adamant. He did, however, arrange with Pablo to handle all the lithographs he was making at Mourlot’s. Until now Pablo had pulled only a few artist’s proofs of each zinc or stone. The print market was beginning to boom, especially in America, and under the terms of their contract Kahnweiler agreed to purchase the entire edition of fifty proofs of each of Pablo’s lithographs. That represented a lot of prints and a lot of money. As a result, Pablo had less reason to think about selling paintings. He quite forgot about Kootz, in fact. But Kootz returned in June, as Pablo had suggested, and came to the Rue des Grands-Augustins. He saw a number of canvases that appealed to him. Pablo told him, in a general way, the new price structure—so much per point, according to size. Kootz was agreeable and would have liked to close a deal on the spot, but Pablo was in no hurry. He said, “You come see us in the Midi a little later on and we’ll talk about pictures down there. There’s plenty of time.” Soon after that, Kootz and his wife came to Golfe-Juan. He wanted to buy pictures, but Pablo was more interested in swimming. After a week or so, when Kootz must have begun to think he had come on a wild goose chase, Pablo said to him, “You go back to Paris and see Sabartés at my studio. He’ll show you some canvases and you pick out the ones you want.” Pablo then wrote to Sabartés, authorizing him to let Kootz into the atelier for the purpose of selecting the pictures he was interested in buying. Kootz went there and picked out a portrait of Dora Maar, rather tortured in form, from 1943; a very appealing still life with a teapot and some cherries, done in May 1943, just at the time Pablo and I met; another still life with a glass and a lemon; one of the series of the Bridges of Paris; a small, very graphic portrait of the daughter of the concierge at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, and two portraits of me, one of them in the spirit of La Femme-Fleur, but showing only the head.

  Since Pablo’s instructions were not very precise, Sabartés returned to Golfe-Juan with the Kootzes in their car and with the canvases. When they reached the house and Pablo saw the Kootzes with the canvases under their arms, he said to Sabartés, “But I didn’t tell you to bring back the paintings. I meant that they could look at them and pick out what they liked—nothing more than that. The deal hasn’t been completed. What are you trying to do, anyway?” All this in front of the Kootzes, whom we hardly knew. He went on to say things like, “My God, those pictures aren’t even insured. Suppose they’d been stolen en route or you’d been in a smashup and they were ruined.” And he continued to rave for what seemed a very long time, saying any number of mean and humiliating things.

  Pablo had it figured out that Kootz would see the pictures, then come back to Golfe-Juan and discuss the price more in detail with him. Also, having seen Pablo operate with other dealers, I knew he would have preferred to hold out one or two of the pictures until the very end in order to make the transaction as difficult as possible. To have the Kootzes return with the pictures made it look as though the affair were practically sealed. Pablo didn’t care to be put in that position; so for the time being, he refused to sell the paintings and kept them in Golfe-Juan.

  In front of the Kootzes I kept silent, but after they left, while Pablo and Sabartés and I were eating I told Pablo I thought he had acted badly. By way of answering, he told this story:

  “Max Jacob once asked me why I was so nice with people who didn’t really matter and so hard on my friends. I told him I didn’t care about the first group, but since I cared very much about my friends, it seemed to me I ought to put our friendship to the test every once in a while, just to make sure it was as strong as it needed to be.”

  Sabartés was not comforted. He left for Paris soon afterward. I don’t think that ever in his life he was as badly treated as he was that day.

  Later on, Pablo finally did sell some paintings to Kootz, and he crowed about it to Kahnweiler. That got Kahnweiler off the fence. He decided to start buying again and drew up a contract—at Pablo’s price—by which Pablo agreed not to sell direct to any dealer other than Kahnweiler. But Pablo had grown rather fond of Kootz and from time to time he would say, “I’d like Kootz to have that painting.” When Kootz came to call, Pablo would tell him to go to Kahnweiler and pick up the painting he had earmarked for him. He even made him a special price.

  Occasionally Pablo even gave Kootz pictures directly, in return for some favor. One year he had Kootz ship to him, just before coming to France in June, a white Oldsmobile convertible, in exchange for a painting. That way he was able to tell Kahnweiler, “Oh, I gave him a picture because he sent me an automobile.” I remember the Oldsmobile was exchanged for a large still life with a table on which lay a cock whose throat had been cut, the knife that did him in, and a dish containing the blood.

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1946, while we were sitting on the beach at Golfe-Juan one day with a group of people, someone had suggested to Pablo that he try his hand at ceramics, and told us about a pottery called Madoura, in Vallauris, run by a couple named Ramié. I don’t remember whose idea it was. It was almost an anonymous suggestion, dropped on the sand during a conversation with a number of people, none of them particularly intimate friends. More out of curiosity than for any other reason, we drove over to the pottery one afternoon, and Pablo decorated two or three plates made of red clay that had already been fired—what is called biscuit—with a few drawings of fish, eels and sea urchins. He didn’t take much of an interest in it because he didn’t find the forms and materials they gave him to work with that day very appealing. He spent the afternoon there, just fooling around, and then we left. It was all very casual, almost like making a drawing on a table-cloth in a restaurant and then walking off and leaving it. He thought no more about it.

  The following summer, 1947, we were again living at Monsieur Fort’s house in Golfe-Juan, but this time, with a baby and a nursemaid under foot, Pablo was even less able than he had been the year before to settle down to any sustained work. He went back to the Musée d’Antibes for three or four days to make the triptych, Ulysses and the Sirens. But now that it was full of his work and beginning to function as a kind of Picasso museum, he couldn’t very well go on working there any more; that chapter was finished. He went to all the bullfights within reach—always a sign of restlessness with him. Then, in August, Monsieur and Madame Ramié came onto the beach one day and asked him to drop over to the pottery and see the results of what he had done the year before. We went—again, mostly out of curiosity—and Pablo wasn’t greatly impressed by what he saw. But he was so bored with his lack of consequential activity that before we left that afternoon he told the Ramiés, “If you’ll give me a workman to help out with the technical side, I’ll come back and work seriously.” They were delighted.

  The Ramiés were about forty and had come to Vallauris from Lyons. They had worked in one of the silk factories there, she as a designer, until the war finished off the silk industry. Life in Lyons was hard after that and food was scarce. Marshal Pétain’s government had been encouraging urban people in such situations to go back to the land or into small trades or handcrafts. When the Ramiés came to Vallauris and opened their pottery, Madame Ramié applied her design experience to the new field and Monsieur Ramié handled the business details and worked on production with the help of three or four local people.

  Monsieur Ramié was a quiet man, tall but slightly stooped. Madame Ramié was thin, of medium height, with chestnut hair and brown eyes. Monsieur Ramié seemed to fade into the background, content to let his wife run things. Although he was by no means unfriendly, he didn’t appear to be making the slightest effort to influence or impress Pablo. Madame Ramié, on the other hand, seemed very enterprising. On our way home that day, Pablo asked me what I thought of them. I told him that I had no opinion of Monsieur Ramié—he was quiet an
d inoffensive—but that I didn’t feel at all attracted to his wife.

  The next day Pablo went to the L’Hospied chemical works in Golfe-Juan and talked with Mr. Cox, the head chemist, and found out all he needed to know about the properties of the enamels he was going to use. The next time he went to the Madoura pottery, he undertook his work in the medium as an artistic experiment.

  He decided first of all that the forms of the vessels needed renewing and he set about redesigning them. He tried to create form by taking the amphora as his point of departure. Whenever you turn a form in pottery, that form is cylindrical. It can be made into an amphora, with convex and concave forms, but it is always symmetrical and each cut is a circular one. If you want to come up with forms that are not circular, that first form must be cut in some way other than parallel to its base. Either that or you have to make incisions on each side and afterwards fold them over. At first the potter who was helping Pablo made the folds but Pablo wasn’t satisfied with them. He realized that the complex forms he wanted were difficult to achieve. The potter didn’t know exactly what proportions to give them in order to execute Pablo’s idea, which even Pablo could not always explain very well. After Pablo had had more experience, he decided to do the folds himself. When he did, the most wonderful things began to take shape in his hands. He would let the amphorae prepared for him by the potter dry overnight. The next morning the clay was still very plastic and could be twisted in every direction without being broken. With it Pablo began doing little statuettes of women as delicate as Tanagra. One didn’t have the impression that these were water jars with arms added to make them look like women. He rekneaded the amphora completely and molded that hollow form, with its thickness of three millimeters, until it had been reinvented and emerged as one of his sculptures. He worked along with his material as far as its possibilities allowed him and then invented his own means from that point on. He then painted and partially glazed a number of pieces. Some of them are at the Musée d’Antibes. Many of them have the refinement of Chinese figurines.

  At the beginning Pablo worked mostly with the forms before they had hardened, just as they came freshly molded or turned from the form or wheel. In that way he was able to incise them and paint them before they were fired at all—at least when he used engobes. An engobe is a clay of a different color from that of the form to which it is applied. It is thinned down with water and a kind of gum and then painted on. It always looks mat but it can be covered with a transparent or a colored glaze. But engobes limit the palette, as compared to enamels. The engobe is generally applied the day after the supporting form is made. In any case it can’t be done after that form has dried. The drying, as a rule, takes from three to four weeks.

  Enamels, on the other hand can only be applied to clay that has already been fired—biscuit. Enamels are powdered colored glass reduced to the consistency of a paste. When they are fired, they become glass again; therefore, they don’t need a transparent glaze over them.

  Before firing, none of the colors has the appearance it will have afterward. The local red clay, as you work it before the firing, is very dark; white clay, which the Ramiés had to order from Provins, is grayish. The colors as you apply them are gray, too. You know in an abstract sense what you are doing but you have no visual evidence of it. Mixtures of colors are just not done in pottery but Pablo, naturally, wanted to mix his. And in mixing colors, you have even less of a guide to the outcome than with pure colors. Also, he asked Mr. Cox at the chemical works if he could make him other colors beyond the range of those in common use. They experimented and Pablo wound up with a broader palette than had ever been used before. Some turned out well; others, not so well.

  During the first two or three months Pablo worked every day, late morning and all afternoon, at the Ramiés. All during this period he worked on raw clay, without seeing any of the results. At the end of a month they were able to fire the first lot, to produce the biscuit, but that didn’t show him very much because the true color doesn’t appear until the transparent enamel—the glaze—has been added. The second firing, for the glaze, has to be done in an electric kiln, since the glazes are much more demanding than the clay. At that time the Ramiés had, I believe, only one electric kiln, about three feet square, and it couldn’t accommodate many pieces at a time. It took about six weeks before Pablo was able to see for the first time the things he had done the very first day. Naturally he was disappointed. “Is that it?” he said. “That isn’t at all what I was hoping for.” He kept on experimenting but the results continued to disappoint him for about six months, until, working almost like a blind man feeling his way around, he found himself in the new medium.

  The traditional wood-burning kilns require careful supervision. You have to begin with a small fire, heating the objects bit by bit, because if they lose too much moisture all at once, their forms become distorted, or even break. The low fire goes on for about twelve hours, followed by twenty-four hours of high fire. The experienced workers can tell the temperature by the color of the flame. The kiln, which is as big as an average-sized room, is filled with the pieces to be fired, arranged on shelves one above another, and then the door is blocked with large earthenware pots, which, being hollow, provide a double wall. There are evenly spaced holes top and bottom. The flame comes up from beneath, is sucked through the holes, licks the pottery as it goes through, and moves out as smoke through the holes in the top. The flame is quite beautiful to watch. It moves like a person’s breathing. The workers throw in four-foot boards to feed the fire through a small opening in the bottom. When the high fire takes over, the draft sets up a respiration that belches out flame through the little hole and then sucks it back inside again. The fire is red at first, then it turns orange and finally, at its maximum, it becomes white. When it has held its top heat for about twenty-four hours, the workers feed it less and gradually the temperature falls back. With the electric kilns, which are much smaller, the firing takes less time but they, too, have to be watched carefully, often all during the night.

  The engobe doesn’t run, in firing, but enamels do, of course; as a result, the forms the enamel will take can’t be clearly foreseen. Each of the two techniques has its own advantages and drawbacks so Pablo combined them in order to draw the best from each of them and, insofar as possible, eliminate the disadvantages. He decided that when he put a glaze over the whole form or plate, it gave the work a very impersonal appearance and cheapened the composition beneath it, just as though you placed a handsome drawing under a sheet of glistening plastic. He tried to find glazes that would be more mat but when he did, they were less transparent. Then he tried putting the glaze on more thinly but that made it look as though something were missing, so he finally decided to put it on in some places and not in others. He made his drawings on the forms in such a way that they didn’t cover the whole surface of the objects and he began to apply his glaze in a manner that gave added form to certain parts of the piece but not to others. The parts underneath the glaze were protected by it and at the same time it gave them added form. The other parts remained nude. When the plate was fired a second time, he colored the nude parts with black and earth tones and waxed the mat area. You can’t wash pottery treated in that way but the results were a lot more pleasing than the standardized appearance of the all-over glazes. Since then a great many potters have taken up that method.

  It occurred to me one day that it might be a good idea to polish the pottery with milk. Pablo dipped a rag in milk and rubbed some of his unglazed plates for hours until he finally got the effect he was after, the casein in the milk taking the place of the wax. Time and patience play such a large role in pottery that finally Pablo grew impatient with it. His main interest was in enlarging its borders and inventing what he needed in order to make it work for him. If he had had artisans of high competence at his disposal, he could have made pottery more beautiful than any we know but, unfortunately, he did not.

  Then, too, the materials he had to work with
were not really worthy of the decoration he was adding. After all, those clays were the ones that up until then had been used for ordinary, low-priced kitchen dishes. In China and Japan, pottery has always been considered one of the high arts; elsewhere, too. But to produce such pottery requires noble materials. There was nothing wrong with the clay itself, but it hadn’t been given the treatment it should have had. Not only in China but even in the Midi a generation or two earlier, potters wouldn’t have made so much as a casserole without—as they call it—“rotting” their clay for at least three years before using it. “Rotting” clay means exposing it to the open sky. Falling rain, running through the clay, drains any impurities toward the bottom, including the bits of limestone that are mixed in with raw clay. It is especially important to eliminate limestone because, once the pottery is fired, the clay doesn’t expand further but whatever limestone remains in it does and, as a result, the pottery cracks after a few years. The tiny bits of limestone can’t always be seen with the naked eye, and the only way to get rid of them is to expose the clay to the elements for at least three years. Ten years would be even better. The longer it is treated in that way, the finer it is. And not only porcelain is fine; ordinary pottery can be fine too. Instead of having four millimeters of thickness, it can have only two if it is properly made. But it can be worked in such thin forms only if it has lost all its impurities. Potters have to knead the clay, too, just as bakers knead their bread, and there again one must have time and patience. I wonder whether collectors will ever take to Pablo’s pottery in the same measure that they have taken to his work in other media. After all, if he paints on a bad piece of canvas, it can always be rebacked. Even a fresco that is beginning to come away from its wall because of dampness can be applied to another surface. But with pottery there is no way of separating the decoration from the form to which it is applied. Many people have told me that although they admired the forms of some of his pottery, they have refrained from buying it for this reason.