Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  Pablo laughed. “If you went on seeing Miró every day for the next two years, you wouldn’t know any more about him then than you do now,” he said. “Like all Catalans, Miró is the most cautious of men. At the height of the surrealist movement, when the big demonstrations were going on, everyone was supposed to do something scandalous, to throw mud in the collective bourgeois eye. It was considered a major achievement to do something outrageous right out on the street, in sight of everyone and, as a result, be arrested and perhaps spend a day or two in jail for having committed an affront to the established order. Everybody was cudgeling his brain for some original way of setting himself up in opposition to the reign of triumphant bourgeoisie. Some of the group hit on the idea of having people go out onto the street with various kinds of subversive utterances. Robert Desnos, for example, was supposed to say, ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ to a priest down in the subway within hearing of as many people as possible. Michel Leiris, whose father or uncle or cousin was an official at the Prefecture of Police, was assigned to insult policemen until he succeeded in provoking one into arresting him. He got drunk first, then started out on his bicycle and when he came across a policeman on duty he shouted abusive names at him. He was soon taken to a police station and there he kept it up so courageously that he was given a thorough beating and held for forty-eight hours. Since he’s rather frail, when he came out after his two days he was in terrible shape, but quite a hero. Eluard went around shouting. ‘Down with the Army! Down with France!’ in some public square. He got roughed up, too, and then dragged away to cool off in jail. Everyone carried out his assignment with exemplary zeal. Miró, too, was expected to justify his presence in the group in some manner. So what did he do? He went around declaiming politely, ‘Down with the Mediterranean.’ The Mediterranean is a pretty big, indefinite area, with so many countries along its shores that no one of them could take it very much to heart if the Mediterranean itself was being attacked, and so politely, at that. As a result nobody rose to its defense and ‘Down with the Mediterranean’ was the only outrage that went unpunished. Everyone else in the group was pretty disgusted with Miró when the results were all in. ‘Why did you say that?’ he was asked. ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

  “ ‘Oh, yes, it does,’ he said. ‘The Mediterranean was the cradle of our whole Greco-Roman culture. When I shouted “Down with the Mediterranean.” I was saying, “Down with everything we are today.” ’ ”

  Pablo had shown me several early Mirós the day we visited his vaults at the B.N.C.I.—the self-portrait that everyone knows, one version of The Farm (of which Hemingway had another), and a Catalan Peasant Woman. I told him that up to a certain point I admired Miró’s work, especially what he had done between 1932 and 1940 but after that, his inspiration had seemed to me to run out. I said that even if one liked Miró, one couldn’t pretend that his was the painting of a seer, like Klee’s, for example.

  Pablo laughed. “Miró’s been running after a hoop, dressed up like a little boy, for too long now.”

  ONE MORNING, SOON AFTER Miró had left, a special-delivery letter arrived from Kahnweiler in Paris. Enclosed with Kahnweiler’s letter was a cable from New York.

  We had been hearing wildly fantastic stories about American congressmen fulminating against modern art as politically subversive—the kind of rabble-rousing speech that Hitler used to make in the thirties and that the Russians go in for now—the only difference being that the American congressmen saw it all as part of a Communist plot and the Russians call it “bourgeois decadence.” The resistance to the lunatic fringe on this American subcultural front apparently centered about the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the cable was a real cri du coeur from the stoutly pumping heart of that center of resistance. It was signed by the painter Stuart Davis, the sculptor Lipchitz, and James Johnson Sweeney, at that period director of painting and sculpture at the museum. It was addressed to Pablo in care of Kahnweiler’s gallery and read:

  SERIOUS WAVE OF ANIMOSITY TOWARDS FREE EXPRESSION PAINTING SCULPTURE MOUNTING IN AMERICAN PRESS AND MUSEUMS STOP GRAVE RENEWED PRESSURE FAVORING MEDIOCRE AND UTILITARIAN STOP ARTISTS WRITERS REAFFIRMING RIGHTS HOLD MEETING MUSEUM MODERN ART MAY FIFTH STOP YOUR SUPPORT WOULD MEAN MUCH TO ISSUE COULD YOU CABLE STATEMENT EMPHASIZING NECESSITY FOR TOLERATION OF INNOVATION IN ART TO SWEENEY 1775 BROADWAY

  Attached to the message was a prepaid reply voucher. I translated the cable for Pablo and then read him Kahnweiler’s letter. Kahnweiler had read the cable before forwarding it—“delirious” was his word for it. As far as the mounting wave of animosity toward free expression in art was concerned, Who cares? Kahnweiler asked; nobody worries about people like that, he said. On the other hand, maybe he was wrong and Pablo would feel it was necessary to emphasize the necessity for the toleration of innovation in art.

  Pablo shook his head. “Kahnweiler’s right,” he said. “The point is, art is something subversive. It’s something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official and open to everyone, then it becomes the new academicism.” He tossed the cablegram down onto the table. “How can I support an idea like that? If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it’s been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it’s not worth fighting for.”

  I reminded him that Malherbe had said a poet is of no more use to the state than a man who spends his time playing ninepins. “Of course,” Pablo said. “And why did Plato say poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an anti-social being. He’s not that way because he wants to be; he can’t be any other way. Of course the state has the right to chase him away—from its point of view—and if he is really an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat—worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can’t be recognized. People just don’t have that much vision. So this business about defending and freeing culture is absurd. One can defend culture in a broad, general sense, if you mean by that the heritage of the past, but the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given. It isn’t a principle one can lay down as something that should exist. The only principle involved is that if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order. Only the Russians are naïve enough to think that an artist can fit into society. That’s because they don’t know what an artist is. What can the state do with the real artists, the seers? Rimbaud in Russia is unthinkable. Even Mayakowsky committed suicide. There is absolute opposition between the creator and the state. So there’s only one tactic for the state—kill the seers. If the idea of society is to dominate the idea of the individual, the individual must perish. Furthermore, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a seer if there weren’t a state trying to suppress him. It’s only at that moment, under that pressure, that he becomes one. People reach the status of artist only after crossing the maximum number of barriers. So the arts should be discouraged, not encouraged.

  “The thing that’s wrong with modern art right now,” he said, “and we might as well say it—it’s dying—is the fact that there isn’t any longer a strong, powerful academic art worth fighting against. There has to be a rule even if it’s a bad one because the evidence of art’s power is in breaking down the barriers. But to do away with obstacles—that serves no purpose other than to make things completely wishy-washy, spineless, shapeless, meaningless—zero.”

  Pablo studied the prepaid answer form. “Well,” he said, “they wasted their nine hundred and thirty-eight francs on me.” He tossed it into the basket.

  IN THE FALL OF 1944, at the time of the big Picasso retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, Jean Cassou, the museum’s chief curator, had dropped several broad hints to Pablo that were obviously designed to stir him to an act of generosity. French museums had almo
st no Picassos, Cassou pointed out, whereas the Museum of Modern Art in New York had quite a few of his major works, including Guernica, which had been sent there originally for a temporary exhibition but now, years later, were still there. Pablo brushed him aside by saying that when war broke out, he had felt those paintings would be safer in New York than in Paris, and since then he just hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about them.

  He wasn’t in a giving mood, to begin with. Then, too, whenever anyone tried to influence him directly to do something, he generally preferred not to do it. And in that frame of mind he was just perverse enough to consider Cassou’s left-wing political sympathies as one more strike against him, even though he himself had just joined the Communist Party. So nothing happened.

  After Pablo had finished his work at the Musée d’Antibes, in the fall of 1946, and just walked away leaving it there behind him, the museum’s curator, Dor de la Souchère, and Marie Cuttoli talked of organizing a fund-raising campaign to pay for restorations which would make the museum a more fitting home for its new treasures. As their plans advanced, they were told it would be easier to raise the money if Pablo would officially donate to the museum the works he had so ambiguously left there.

  One evening the next summer as Pablo and I were dining with the Cuttolis at the restaurant Chez Marcel in Golfe-Juan, Monsieur Cuttoli explained the situation and suggested that Pablo make the gift official. Unfortunately he didn’t stop there. “Furthermore,” he said, “you’ve lived here so long now, you ought to take out French citizenship. If you did, you could get your divorce and marry Françoise. After all, you’ve got a child now.”

  Pablo exploded, “I invite you here as my guest and you dare say such things to me! Of course I left those paintings at the museum; but what gives anybody the right to start talking about gifts and donations? Since everybody is so fond of quoting that remark of mine, ‘I don’t seek; I find,’ I’ll give you a new one to put in circulation: ‘I don’t give; I take.’ And as for your idea about changing my nationality, I represent Spain in exile. I’m sure Françoise wouldn’t approve of my changing that any more than I do. I think she understands that she and our son come after republican Spain in my scale of values. And you ought to understand right now that I have no intention of submitting my life to the laws that govern the miserable little lives of you petits bourgeois.”

  The food we were eating seemed to have stuck in our throats. No one spoke. Pablo glared first at one, then at another.

  “Well, why don’t you eat?” he shouted. “This food isn’t good enough for you? My God, the stuff I get at your house sometimes! But I eat it anyway, for friendship’s sake. You’ll have to do the same. You’re my guest.” Pablo was all out of control now, beating his feet up and down on the floor and rolling his eyes like a hysterical woman. No one answered him. He stood up, picked up his plate, and hurled it into the sea.

  Marie Cuttoli may have seen him perform that way before, but her husband certainly had not. He was a Corsican lawyer, a French senator and, for all that, almost an English gentleman. Whereas Pablo was dressed in shorts and the usual sailor’s jersey, Monsieur Cuttoli, in spite of the oppressive heat and his great bulk, was wearing an impeccable starched white suit. I think Marie feared that if Pablo was allowed to go on in that vein, her husband’s collar—perhaps even a blood vessel—would suddenly pop. She reached over to Pablo and laid her hand on his arm.

  “Cher ami,” she said soothingly, “you mustn’t let yourself get into such a state. We’re all your friends—remember that.” She pulled him down into his seat, leaned over, and kissed him. I knew that she didn’t really feel all that tender toward him in the face of that kind of behavior but that she realized things would go from bad to worse if she didn’t act quickly. And so for the same reason, I went over and kissed him, too. Pablo kissed us both perfunctorily and made an effort to smile. He got up, calmer now, and kissed Monsieur Cuttoli, who, fat and bald, had been growing redder and redder and looked about ready to explode, himself. Pablo’s kiss slowed him down and we finished the dinner talking of other things than donations and divorce.

  But Marie did not give up her plan that easily. She was a good friend of Georges Salles, the Director of French National Museums. He used to come see us fairly often and one day, primed by Marie, he came to talk with Pablo about formalizing his “gift” to the Musée d’Antibes. Pablo was very polite to him but just as categorical in his refusal. A little later on, Dor de la Souchère made an attempt to revive the discussion. Pablo closed it promptly.

  Monsieur Cuttoli, being a lawyer, was finally able to satisfy the authorities and Pablo, too, by saying that since Pablo had left his works in situ and had even gone so far as to add to them a certain number of drawings and ceramics done later and elsewhere, he had “clearly manifested his intention” of making a gift. Pablo, always a good Jesuit, found that phrasing adequately ambiguous and agreed, orally only, that it stand as a statement of the case. Marie’s out-and-out gift to the Musée d’Antibes of Picasso etchings, lithographs, and tapestries doubtless helped reinforce the general impression that everything had been given.

  After a discreet interval, Georges Salles brought up again the question of pictures for the Musée d’Art Moderne. He was sorry that Picasso was so poorly represented in their new galleries. Of course, since French museums had such tiny allotments for purchases, there wasn’t much he could do, he said. He didn’t come right out and ask for anything but what he wanted was obvious. “It was certainly generous of you to give all those things to the Musée d’Antibes,” he added.

  Pablo looked surprised. “Give? I didn’t give them anything. I just painted some things there, and I’m letting them use them, that’s all.”

  “No matter,” said Georges Salles. “The paintings are there. That’s what counts. And think how badly off we are in Paris, by comparison. We have that early portrait of Gustave Coquiot and not much more. It’s a pity but we just don’t have the means to do anything about it.”

  Georges Salles was the grandson of Gustave Eiffel, the man who built the tower, and for all Pablo’s railing against the petit bourgeois, he was generally very susceptible to the charm and class of a grand bourgeois. I could sense that his resistance was weakening. One day as he moved some things around in the atelier at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, he said, “I don’t know what to do with these big canvases. There are too many of them here. They clutter up the studio and they’re too big for the vault. Where can I put them?” He was particularly annoyed with a large painting of 1942 called Serenade, which he kept on a big easel. Its presence there prevented him from getting at a new large canvas that he wanted to work on at that easel. In the apartment in the Rue la Boétie he kept another very large painting, of 1926, called The Milliner’s Workshop, a rather abstract, rhythmical canvas, very baroque in its construction, situated almost at the frontier between the neo-Cubist period and the period which begins with the portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter.

  Pablo had heard rumors that his apartments in the Rue La Boétie might be requisitioned for nonoccupancy and he had been wondering what he would do with this large canvas in that event. I reminded him of Georges Salles’s visit, and asked him why he didn’t give at least those two big canvases to the museum. He was in a very receptive mood. He thought for a minute, then said, “I could give them those two, I suppose.” Then he thought a minute more. “On the other hand,” he said, “maybe what Georges Salles meant was that they would like to buy something if it wasn’t too expensive, but I can’t sell them things like that. They’re too big. They’d never have enough money to buy them.”

  I pointed out to him that Braque and Matisse would be well represented in the rooms the museum was planning to devote to them, and that he’d be far better off, while he was at it, to do a complete job for himself: select a group of paintings which showed enough different aspects of his work so that he, too, would be properly represented. Besides, I reminded him, we had heard that Braque had arrange
d a deal whereby he gave the museum some paintings and sold them others and in the end the tax collector had wound up with most of the cash involved, so wouldn’t it be better, I suggested, for Pablo to give all of his?

  “My, you’ve developed quite a head for business, haven’t you?” he said half-admiringly; then suspiciously, “But why are you so interested in getting these pictures into the museum?” I told him that since he had set me such a splendid example of patriotism at that dinner with the Cuttolis Chez Marcel, I thought I ought to show him how much I thought of my country.

  He pondered the idea over the next month and then decided he would give the museum ten paintings: the two large ones plus eight others. We went one day to his vault at the bank and selected the others.

  To go with The Milliner’s Workshop and Serenade, we picked out a gray-and-white seated figure from 1937–1938, the handsome Blue Enamelled Casserole of 1945, The Rocking-Chair of 1943, The Muse of 1935, a 1936 still life with a lemon and oranges, another still life, of 1943, with three glasses and a bowl of cherries, a 1944 portrait of Dora Maar in blue, and an earlier, very colorful portrait of her done in 1938.

  Although the pictures would eventually go to the Musée d’Art Moderne, Georges Salles had them taken first to the Louvre, where his offices were. One morning he called and suggested we come there on Tuesday, the day it is closed to the public. He had an amusing experiment he wanted to try. He said he would have some of the guards carry Pablo’s paintings around to various parts of the museum so that he could see how they looked next to some of the masterpieces of other times. “You’ll be the first living painter to have seen his work hung in the Louvre,” he said.