Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  But one way or the other, Vallauris has remained a boom town ever since. It was a pottery town even before Roman times, because of its deposits of red clay. Wooden galleys setting out from Golfe-Juan—the nearest harbor to Vallauris—used to furnish the whole Mediterranean basin with cooking utensils. The natives claimed that in the red clay there was a bit of gold; hence the town’s name, which means valley of gold. But nobody ever saw any of that gold; the chances are, the term was used in a metaphorical sense and referred to the thriving trade that resulted from the conversion of the local clays into pottery designed for some utilitarian purpose—what they call la culinaire, the sort of terracotta dishes that used to go into the ovens and onto the tables of most of the kitchens of France.

  During the German Occupation Vallauris had a bit of a boom because the shortage of aluminum forced people to make more use of the old-time earthenware casseroles. After the war, business slacked off and where there had been one hundred or more potteries in the town’s heyday, the number dwindled to about twenty and very few of those kept busy. The old business had fallen off to almost nothing as a result of technical advances in the field. That was the state of things when Pablo began working there. There were a few potters—no more than ten, perhaps—who had recently settled there, hoping to bring about some kind of artistic revival. Another ten, of the old guard, not knowing any other trade, continued to struggle along turning out the traditional cooking vessels. After Pablo had been working at the Madoura pottery for two years, there was such a revival of interest in the town and its industry that potters came from all over the country to set up shop there and Vallauris became one of the principal pottery centers of France. That brought in a good many changes, not all for the better. Before the boom all the potters had used wood-burning kilns, which limited the color range and based their effects on restraint and skill of handling. If they produced no great masterpieces, at least they produced no horrors either. The new crowd installed electric kilns, brought in the white clay from Provins instead of continuing to use the local red clay, and began turning out the horrors that line most streets in Vallauris today. Pablo’s presence brought the town prosperity but his examples served no use whatever. Vallauris is today a citadel of bad taste.

  “The thing that annoys me most,” Pablo said one day, as we returned to La Galloise after a walk through the center of the town, “is not that so many people try to imitate my pottery. It’s the fact that they feel called upon to do portraits of women that resemble you. It’s bad enough having to look at these horrors all over town without having them covered with portraits of you that don’t quite come off.”

  BY THE END OF OCTOBER, Pablo had become so interested in pottery that he kept on working long after he had intended to stop. With the exception of a short trip to Paris we spent nearly the entire winter of 1947–1948 in the Midi so he could keep at it. Almost the only change of pace he had during that period was the work he did for the illustration of two books. The first was an edition of twenty poems of Góngora, for a Monte Carlo publisher. Pablo wrote out by hand the Spanish text. This was reproduced on copper by his engraver, Roger Lacourière, and then Pablo illuminated the margins with small drawings and etched twenty full-page plates. The etching process he used is called sugar aquatint and is a particularly interesting one, I discovered, as I watched him working on the plates Lacourière had sent down from Paris. First he melted a lump of sugar in a little hot water, then mixed into it a tube of black gouache and two tubes of gamboge.

  “You’ve tried your hand at the ordinary etching process,” he said. “You’ve seen how it’s a fairly uniform procedure. You cover the copperplate with a layer of varnish. With your point you make furrows in the varnish in certain places, according to your composition, and then you submerge the plate in acid. The acid eats into the copperplate wherever it’s been uncovered by the point. The Metamorphoses of Ovid that I did for Skira was done in that way. Then, when the varnish is removed, you apply the ink and wipe it off but some of it remains in the furrows eaten by the acid. When you print from the plate, you get your impression from the areas beneath the surface where the ink has remained.

  “But with sugar aquatint everything is more direct and at the same time more sensitive. In the first place you paint with the brush directly on the copperplate. It’s a tremendous advantage in that it brings you a richer, more pictorial effect with a good deal more variety to the touch. The important thing is to use a new brush, washed thoroughly with soap and water first. This process gives you more freedom too. You can even use fingers.” And when he came to do portraits of the poet and of one of the women, his thumb went in, right behind the brush, to finish them off. One of the plates was a woman with a veil-like scarf around her neck. Pablo took a bit of lace, dipped it into his solution, and impressed it directly onto the copperplate to achieve that effect. From time to time the mixture ran out of bounds, and he had to clean it away with alcohol and Spanish white, followed by a bit of the sugar and water. He worked on several plates at a time and when he had finished his drawing, he set them aside to dry.

  “That’s only the first stage,” he said. “If we were in Paris, once the drawing was thoroughly dry, let’s say in a couple of hours, I would varnish the plates and when the varnish dried, put each one into the acid. Here I don’t have all the equipment I need, so I’ll let Lacourière take care of that. If I had varnished them, you would have noticed that the sugar prevents the varnish from adhering; so wherever the sugar has passed, those areas are exposed and the acid eats into them. Then when you ink the plate and print, you get that impression in black, just as in any other kind of etching. That’s the second step. After that, I sometimes find that here and there I haven’t produced the effect I wanted. In that case, I sprinkle on resin in powdered form and, holding the plate with pincers and applying a candle under the surface, heat it until the little grains of resin burst.

  “You can hold it over a little gas fire or an electric heater,” he said, “but with a candle you can vary your effect from area to area much better. When you dip the plate into the acid bath again, all the little burst bubbles of resin protect those areas and the acid eats in between them where there is no resin. In that way you can bring out certain areas more clearly, and cause others to fall back into shadow, just as you protect others with varnish so that the acid doesn’t penetrate. This technique has a far wider range of subtlety than ordinary etching. This is how Goya, in his Desastres de la Guerra, obtained those marvelous blacks which are never opaque. He used a great deal of acid, but each time he applied his resin. As a result, the black has a granulated, speckled effect, never flat and uniform but full of tiny white holes. This, you see, is why they refer to the engraver’s cuisine. Etching is a lot of fun if you get deep enough into it. There are a thousand little ways of varying your effects. For example, you don’t have to plunge the plate into an acid bath; you can brush in the acid where you want it and control it even more subtly that way.”

  He finished sliding his plates back into their carrying case. “I mentioned my illustrations for The Metamorphoses of Ovid a minute ago. I guess I never told you how that book came about, did I?” I said no, he hadn’t. Pablo laughed. “When Skira was a young fellow he made his mother rather unhappy because he hadn’t done very well in school. By the time he was twenty-two or twenty-three he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere and his mother, who was a widow, didn’t know what to do with him. He grew tired of having her ask him constantly what he was going to do with his life, so one day he blithely told her he was going to be a publisher. She was surprised and asked him what he was going to publish. To quiet her down he said, ‘I’m going to publish a book illustrated by Picasso.’ Apparently that impressed his mother, especially since it was the first inkling she had had of his intention of doing any kind of work at all. She didn’t want to discourage him so she suggested he go talk to me. He came to the Rue La Boétie and introduced himself. I asked him what he wanted. ‘I want to publish a book w
ith you,’ he told me. ‘What book?’ I asked him. Apparently he hadn’t reached that point and for the moment, in addition to Picasso, he could think of only one name. ‘A book about Napoleon,’ he said. I said, ‘Look, I appreciate your good intentions, and I’m reasonably well disposed toward you, but I’ll never illustrate a book about Napoleon because he’s one person I have absolutely no use for. I might go along with you and illustrate some book—provided you’ve got enough money to foot the bills—but I won’t go so far as to illustrate a book about Napoleon. Furthermore,’ I told him, ‘it sounds to me as though you know nothing about the publishing business. It might be a good idea for you to pick up a few notions of how such things are done. When you have, come back and see me.’

  “I didn’t see him again for a long time. I figured I had frightened him away. The next thing I heard from his direction came while I was spending the summer in Juan-les-Pins. One morning when I went outside the villa to take a walk, an old lady sitting on a bench across the street came over and introduced herself to me. It was Skira’s mother. She said, ‘Monsieur, my son has his heart set on becoming a publisher and he’s made up his mind to publish a book illustrated by you. You’ve got to say yes.’ I asked her what he had done since the last time I saw him. ‘He hasn’t done anything,’ she said. ‘He’s only twenty-three.’ I couldn’t feel very optimistic about her son’s prospects so I put her off but she kept up the vigil and finally she wore down my resistance. I began to feel sorry for that naïve old woman lying in wait for me to broach such a ridiculous idea. Finally I told her to send her son around and I’d talk with him again. But I warned her I didn’t want to hear any more about Napoleon. I told her he should try a classical author—perhaps something mythological.

  “The next time Skira showed up at the Rue La Boétie, he had the money to launch his affair and had set about familiarizing himself with what was involved in it. He said he had just the text for me—The Metamorphoses of Ovid. I said I thought he was right. So I did it. And that was the beginning of Skira.”

  That was Pablo’s version of it, at any rate.

  TOWARD THE END of the year Pablo had finished his Góngora and we returned to Paris, to stay a few weeks. One day he said, “Matisse has come back from Vence for a few days. We’ll go see him.” When we reached Matisse’s apartment in the Boulevard Montparnasse, we found the door leading from the hall into the apartment partly open. It looked as though Lydia, Matisse’s secretary, had gone to the floor above to fetch something and left the door open, perhaps planning to return almost immediately. We walked into the apartment. The first room, a kind of entrance hall, was rather dark. As we walked from there into the salon, out from behind a wall hanging popped Matisse, shouting, “Coo coo!” When he saw it wasn’t Lydia, he looked so embarrassed that I felt sorry for him. Not Pablo, though. He looked Matisse up and down with a satisfied smile and said, “Well, I didn’t know you played hide-and-seek with Lydia. We’re used to hearing Lydia call you Monsieur Matisse.” Matisse tried a laugh, rather weakly. Pablo didn’t let him off that easily.

  “The last time we saw you, in the Midi, you were so taken with the fact that Françoise’s eyebrows reminded you of circumflex accents, you wanted her to pose for you,” he said. “It looks to me as though you were doing all right with Lydia’s.” It seemed hardly the moment to make an extended visit so in a few minutes we left. Going down in the elevator Pablo said, “It’s unbelievable, catching Matisse at a thing like that.”

  Lydia, according to Pablo, had first come to Matisse in 1932 or 1933. “Matisse didn’t need anyone full-time,” he said, “but she told him she’d make herself useful by sharpening his pencils. He found that a practical suggestion so he told her she could stay, for a while anyway, on that basis. Finally Madame Matisse found it a little tiresome to have that young girl coming around every day. She gave him his choice: ‘Choose between that girl and me.’ Matisse thought it over carefully and after two days of sober reflection told Madame Matisse, ‘I’ve decided to keep her. She’s a big help to me in preparing my income-tax returns.’

  “After a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth, Lydia was installed as the official secretary.” Pablo shook his head. “There’s a Frenchman for you—always practical.”

  ABOUT TWO YEARS EARLIER Tériade had asked Pablo to illustrate Pierre Reverdy’s poem Le Chant des Morts. Tériade knew that, in general, bibliophiles don’t care much for the kind of book that is a facsimile of the author’s manuscript, but Reverdy’s handwriting was so distinctive they had decided to do it in that form anyway. Tériade submitted the idea to Pablo and asked him what kind of illustration would be most appropriate. Pablo asked him to send along some samples of Reverdy’s handwriting. Studying them, he decided that he couldn’t do any kind of figurative illustration because the handwriting was too curved and rhythmical. “It’s almost a drawing in itself,” he said. His idea then became to decorate that drawing—Reverdy’s manuscript—in some appropriate manner. “In that way the illustration will be organic and the unity of the book that much more complete,” he explained.

  Several years before, I had gone to see the illuminated manuscripts in the library of the Medical School at Montpellier. The oldest ones date from the eighth century and have large ornamental initial letters in red, beautifully refined in their abstract form. I described them to Pablo and suggested he pattern his illustrations after them. He made a number of drawings and three lithographs at the time, exploring the idea, then did nothing more about it. One day that winter, two years after those first experiments, Lucien Scheler, a rare-book dealer in the Rue de Tournon, brought Pablo three large illuminated manuscripts. Two of them were music books dating from the fifteenth century. The third volume, a folio like the others, was much older. The body of the text was written in the usual black Gothic script but the initials were very large ornamental letters painted in red and abstract in form. It showed a definite Arabic influence and reminded me very much of some of the manuscripts I had seen at Montpellier. Pablo was quite taken with it and bought it. He went back to work almost at once on Le Chant des Morts, with the idea of utilizing the margins of Reverdy’s manuscript for large abstract decorations in red, done in lithography.

  We returned to the Midi soon after and Mourlot brought down the required number of zinc plates. At such a distance transfer paper would have been simpler, but the results are never quite so good, so Pablo had decided to do the illustrations on zinc, since it would have been practically impossible to transport that many stones. Mourlot had indicated on the plates the area taken up by Reverdy’s text so Pablo could see exactly how much space remained for him to illuminate each page. Since Pablo still had no atelier, Mourlot brought the plates to the Ramiés’ and in the long room on the second floor which they used for drying the pottery, Pablo spread out all the plates on the floor and painted in lithographic ink directly on the zinc. All in all, it took him about two weeks. There were four plates left over and on those he drew a few fauns in black ink. Mourlot packed them all up and took them back to Paris.

  Reverdy was spending a few days with Tériade at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and he came to the pottery one day. The Ramiés prepared a few forms for him and he inscribed them with some of his poems. After he had left, Pablo told me that, in a way, Reverdy was responsible for Tériade’s fortune. Tériade was Greek, of course, and first of all he went to work for Zervos. He wrote art criticism for Zervos’s magazine, Cahiers d’Art, and did a book on Léger. Because Zervos was Greek, too, they didn’t get along very well, and Tériade was happy to leave Zervos and go with Skira at the time they founded the surrealist review Minotaure. He came to know all the surrealists, had much useful publishing experience and, in a measure, helped put the review across. Still, he wasn’t his own boss. Not long before the war, Reverdy, who was very friendly with Coco Chanel, met, through her, some Americans who wanted to launch a luxurious art review. They were looking for someone with enough taste to do it properly, someone who had good contacts wi
th the best poets and writers, painters and sculptors. Reverdy proposed Tériade. Through that contact Tériade found freedom of action and financial backing far greater than anything he had had until then. The result was Verve. He always felt very grateful to Reverdy. Le Chant des Morts was a kind of token of that gratitude; hence their indifference to its commercial handicaps.

  SOON AFTER PABLO HAD COMPLETED Le Chant des Morts, Miró came to spend two weeks at Vallauris. He wanted to see Pablo and also to investigate the possibilities of working at the Madoura pottery. He worked a little at the pottery and whenever he was there we had lunch or dinner with him. I have always noticed that in general painters are great talkers in their off hours but I was surprised to see that Miró, in spite of a constant angelic smile and a jovial, attentive manner, was so reserved as to appear almost mysterious. He said nothing about himself or his plans and gave out no clear-cut opinions about anything or anybody. Pablo talked very freely and Miró seemed quite happy to let him talk for both of them. He confined his own intervention to a sort of oral punctuation—“Yes?” “Oh?” “Is that so?” “Really?”—around which Pablo’s talk could flow, gently encouraged but totally unimpeded. After two weeks of visits, lunches, and dinners I knew no more about Miró than I had known on the day he arrived in Vallauris. I asked Pablo if Miró had always been that way or if he thought he had some particular reason now for not opening up, at least occasionally. It struck me as all the more puzzling, I told him, since Miró’s general attitude seemed one not only of cordiality but of the warmest kind of friendship.