Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  The next Tuesday morning Pablo was up very early for him, and by eleven o’clock we were ready for the Louvre. He seemed more serious than usual and talked little. Georges Salles took us high up in the Louvre to a huge storage room where Pablo’s paintings were being held. There was almost nothing else in the room except a large piece of dirty, worn-looking cloth that covered most of the floor. The guards picked up Pablo’s paintings, all except the two very large ones, and we set off across the cloth to try the experiment. All of a sudden, Georges Salles looked panic-stricken. “But you’re walking on my Delacroix ceiling,” he said. “Get off, for God’s sake.” Delacroix’s immense canvas had become damp-stained and had been taken down for drying and restoration. It was upside down so that the painting wasn’t visible.

  When we reached the picture galleries, Georges Salles asked Pablo what paintings he would like to see his own hung with.

  “First of all, with the Zurbarán,” Pablo said. We found our way to Saint Bonaventure on his Bier, which shows the dead saint surrounded by those who have come to pay their last respects. The saint’s body cuts across the painting from lower left to upper right. Pablo had always been fascinated by this bold diagonal composition and the way in which Zurbarán had been able to balance that with the other lines of force in the painting. He had often taken me to the Louvre to study it with him. He watched attentively as the guards lifted up three or four of his pictures and held them beside the Zurbarán but he said nothing. He then asked to see some of his paintings beside Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, The Massacre of Chios, and The Women of Algiers. He had often spoken to me of making his own version of The Women of Algiers and had taken me to the Louvre on an average of once a month to study it. After we had watched the guards parade his pictures among the Delacroix paintings, they held up one or two against Courbet’s The Studio and Burial at Ornans. Then Georges Salles asked Pablo if he wanted to see any of his paintings among the Italian School.

  He thought for a moment. “The only one that would interest me.” he said, “is the Uccello—The Rout of San Romano. And I’d like to see one of my Cubist paintings alongside that. Since we don’t have one handy, I guess that’s enough for today.” As we walked away, he made no comment of any kind. When we got home again, he said only that he’d been particularly interested to see a painting of his next to a Zurbarán. He seemed satisfied with the experiment.

  I asked him how he felt about the Delacroix. His eyes narrowed and he said, “That bastard. He’s really good.”

  WHEN WE WERE IN PARIS we often ate at the Brasserie Lipp at St.-Germain-des-Prés. If Pablo felt like relaxing, there were other artists who came there with whom we could sit and talk. The sculptor Giacometti was one of his favorites. Whenever we saw him at Lipp’s in the evening, clay seemed to be sticking to him, and his clothing and his hair were generally covered with a gray dust.

  “You ought to see Giacometti’s atelier,” Pablo said to me one evening. “We’ll go call on him.” As we were leaving, he asked Giacometti what would be a good time to find him in.

  “If you come anytime before one in the afternoon, you’ll be sure to find me,” he said. “I don’t get up much before then.” A few days after that, on our way to lunch, we went to Giacometti’s studio, in the Rue Hippolyte-Maindron, a pleasant little street in the Alésia district. It is a quiet, humble quarter with small bistros and craftsmen’s shops and an air of timelessness and bonhomie that has been lost in many parts of Paris. To get to Giacometti’s studio we passed through a door off the street into a little yard with small wooden ateliers up and down both sides. Pablo pointed out to me Giacometti’s two adjoining rooms and, on the other side of them, another atelier where Giacometti’s brother Diego was working. Diego, a very gifted artisan, devoted himself entirely to his brother’s work. Giacometti often worked late at night, making clay studies for sculpture. The next morning he might be inclined to destroy them if they didn’t satisfy him, but Diego would get up when his brother went to bed and start molding plaster casts and doing all the other technical jobs that his brother had little interest in, to advance and preserve the work. He was the intermediary between Giacometti and the bronze-caster.

  Giacometti was well known and respected for many years before he ever managed to make a decent living. Diego did the work that one or two assistants would normally have done—assistants that Giacometti was in no position to afford. Diego also made very handsome objects designed by his brother—table-lamp bases, floor lamps, doorknobs, and chandeliers—which helped support them. When Giacometti began to do as much painting as sculpture, Diego became one of his principal models—almost a full-time job in itself because Giacometti always worked tirelessly through sketches from life and when he did a portrait, his model had to be there.

  When we went into Giacometti’s atelier, I was struck by the degree to which the physical aspect of the place recalled Giacometti’s painting. The wooden walls seemed impregnated with the color of clay, almost to the point of being made out of clay. We were at the center of a world completely created by Giacometti, a world composed of clay and peopled by the statues he had made, some very elongated, others so tiny as to be hardly visible. There was never the slightest color accent anywhere to interfere with the endless uniform gray that covered everything. Seeing Giacometti now on his home ground, I realized that since every object in his atelier—brushes, armatures, bottles of turpentine—had taken on that coloration, there was no way he could have escaped the same fate. The little room adjacent to the atelier was just like it, with the addition of a gray divan, gray because all its color had been drained out of it.

  About a year after that first visit, a sweet young Swiss girl named Annette came to see us one day because she wanted to be Pablo’s secretary. Pablo turned her request into a pun. “To be a good secretary you have to know how to keep people’s secrets,” he told her. “But why should anyone be foolish enough to tell his secrets? On the other hand, if he has no secrets, he doesn’t need a secretary.” He had no work for her and took that way to tell her. Not long after, she became Giacometti’s wife. She fitted in beautifully with the tonalities of his atelier. Her face, which was already very white, became even whiter. But two features added black touches to the background: Annette’s eyes and hair. With Annette, Giacometti acquired a second shadow. She became a second untiring model, capable, like Diego, of working all night if Giacometti felt like working, and then sleeping in the daytime to make up for it.

  With some couples one notices that after a number of years the partners begin to resemble each other. Physically Annette did not resemble Giacometti at all. She was slender and pale with regular features; he had a large head and a deeply furrowed face, with the strength and nobility of the head of a lion. But in spite of Annette’s frail body she came to take on a rugged leonine quality in her bearing, along with the same proportions that Giacometti was giving to his delicate and slender statues: the perfect canon that Giacometti had imagined in his sculpture.

  One of Giacometti’s chief preoccupations, he explained to us, was to discover the particular accent or relationship that enables us to identify a person we know off in the distance—to realize that it isn’t just a man or a woman, but one particular man or woman.

  “A man far away has no more individuality than a pin if we don’t know him,” he said. “If he’s someone we know, we recognize him and he assumes an identity for us. Why? It’s the relationship between his masses and quantities. If he’s hollow-eyed, the shadows on his cheeks are longer. If he has a large, bold nose, there’s a stronger patch of light in that spot, and he’s no longer the anonymous pin. So it’s the sculptor’s job to make those humps and hollows create an identity by highlighting the essential points that tell us this is one person rather than another.”

  Giacometti’s statues are generally quite static, in the sense that their arms are alongside the body and the legs touch without a suggestion of walking, as a rule. But whenever I saw them there, in that clay-gr
ay studio, perhaps because of their widely varying dimensions, I had the impression that they were all in movement, all coming toward me or going away from me. A little later on, Giacometti began to think more of the street, he told us, and to make statues of a man on a bronze plaque seeming to walk forward between two other bronze plaques representing houses. One can’t speak of arrested movement in connection with those pieces because it is really the contrary. It is almost something static in process of becoming dynamic through its intention. One gets the feeling of life or movement because of the exceptional acuity of Giacometti’s sense of proportion. He makes us feel that his people are in motion, not by imitating any kind of gesture, but by the proportion itself and by the elongation of the material. One of his sculptures portrayed a person entirely static but on a chariot with wheels. It was movement and at the same time the opposite of movement.

  Whenever Giacometti came to the Rue des Grands-Augustins to see Pablo, they would discuss in the minutest detail whatever sculpture Pablo might be working on at the moment. One day Pablo seemed particularly pleased with a sculpture he had completed by incorporating in it a separate object with a life and identity of its own: the five-foot-four-inch female figure, one of whose forearms had been formed by the addition of an Easter Island sculpture ending in a hand. Giacometti studied it and said, “Well, the head is good, but perhaps you shouldn’t leave the rest of it like that. Is that really what you intended to do? It seems to me it’s more important for the work to exemplify the principle that’s behind it than to benefit from some lucky accident. Better to get rid of the lucky accident, which is nothing more than that, and work up to the point where you can see that you’ve finished the thing in accordance with its generating force.”

  Of all those who came to the Rue des Grands-Augustins I think Giacometti was the one with whom Pablo felt most inclined to discuss such matters, because Giacometti’s preoccupations were never exclusively aesthetic. As Pablo pointed out, Giacometti was always asking himself fundamental questions to clarify the real point of what he was doing.

  “Most sculptors are concerned with questions of style,” Pablo said, “something that doesn’t change radically the heart of the problem.” Giacometti, he felt, often did succeed in changing something at the heart of the problem, something basic to sculpture as a whole, and that gave his work the unity Pablo admired in it.

  “When he makes those sculptures like people crossing the street, going from one house to another, you can’t help saying that these are people who are walking in the street and that you’re at a certain distance from them,” Pablo said. “Sculpture with Giacometti is the residual part, what remains when the mind has forgotten all the details. He’s concerned with a certain illusion of space that is far from my own approach but it’s something no one ever thought of before in just that way. It’s really a new spirit in sculpture.”

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1947, I had a new view at first hand of Pablo’s wife, Olga. I had met Olga for the first time about a month after I went to live with Pablo in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, shortly before we left Paris for Ménerbes. He and I had gone to see an exhibition of Dora Maar’s paintings at Pierre Loeb’s gallery. We had just left the gallery and were turning from the Rue de Seine into the Rue Mazarine when a small, middle-aged woman with red hair and a thin, tight mouth, walked up to us. It was Olga. Pablo introduced me to her. I had noticed, as she approached, that she walked with short, stiff steps like a little circus pony. Her face was freckled and crinkly and her bright brownish-green eyes darted everywhere as she spoke but never looked at you directly. She repeated everything she said, like a broken record, and when she paused, you realized she hadn’t really said anything. As soon as I saw her, I could tell she was extremely neurotic, at the very least.

  I didn’t figure out until later that she must have been waiting outside the gallery, angry at the idea that Dora Maar, whom she still considered her most serious rival—although Pablo had left Olga more than ten years before and not because of Dora Maar but for Marie-Thérèse Walter—was having an exhibition and that Pablo was probably there. When she saw him leaving the gallery with someone other than Dora Maar, she must have felt relieved, because she made a certain amount of small talk with us, was fairly pleasant, and gave little indication of living up to Pablo’s descriptions of her. But once she had had a chance to make inquiries about me and learned that I was, in fact, the one who had taken Dora Maar’s place, she changed her tactics radically. The obsessive hatred she had been bearing Dora Maar quite unjustly, she transferred to me.

  Although she hadn’t lived with Pablo since 1935, she had formed the habit of moving around France in his wake. When he was in Paris, she came to Paris. When he went to the Midi, she followed him there, always living in a hotel not very far from wherever he might be staying. I didn’t see her in the Midi in the summer of 1946. I think that she was not yet aware of my role. But as soon as Claude was born she became very familiar with all the details of our life together and from then on she didn’t let us rest for a minute. In the summer of 1947, whenever we went to the beach—and Paulo, her son, was often with us—she would come sit down close by. First she would start talking to Pablo. He would ignore her or even turn his back. Then she would start in on Paulo: “Well, Paulo, you see that I’m here and I want to talk to your father. I must talk to him. I have something of the highest importance to tell him. I don’t know how he can go on pretending I’m not here because I am here. For God’s sake, get up and go tell your father I’m here and I must talk to him.” Paulo would ignore her. Then she would move closer to Pablo and say, “I must speak to you about your son.” Getting no reply, she would turn again to Paulo and say, “I have to talk to you about your father. It’s very urgent.” Often it was that her hotel bill hadn’t been paid and she would threaten Pablo with bodily harm if he didn’t take care of it at once.

  She began to follow us in the street. One day she became so violent in her language as she pulled at Pablo’s arm for attention that he turned around and slapped her face. At that she began to scream. The only way he could get her to calm down was to say, “If you keep this up, I’m going for the police.” Then she quieted down and dropped back to a distance of three or four yards but kept on following us wherever we went. I found her behavior most unpleasant but I could never feel antagonistic toward her. She was a very unhappy, unfortunate creature, incapable of coping with the situation in which she found herself. I have never seen a more solitary person than she. Everyone avoided her. People were afraid to stop and speak to her, knowing what they would be letting themselves in for.

  The first year or so, Olga made no direct attack on me. She limited herself to following us wherever we went and threatening Pablo with whatever came into her head. She wrote him daily letters, mostly in Spanish, thinking I wouldn’t understand, but her Spanish was pretty elementary and therefore easy to decipher: “You aren’t any longer what you used to be. Your son doesn’t amount to much, either, and he’s going from bad to worse. Like you.” As long as we were in Paris, we were relatively free from her attentions, other than the daily threats by mail. But when we were in the Midi, we spent more time outdoors than in and we couldn’t step outside without having her attach herself to us.

  In the winter of 1947–1948, we returned to Paris in December. When we went back to the Midi in February, I left the nurse in Paris and whenever I took Claude out in his carriage, Olga followed me. My grandmother had come down to the Midi and was staying three or four houses away from Monsieur Fort’s. Sometimes she would accompany me when I took Claude out for his airing. Olga was never far behind, shouting her threats and accusing me of stealing her husband away from her. I never answered her because I felt that would only enrage her more. My grandmother’s hearing was not good, but she would say, occasionally, “I don’t understand why that woman keeps following us.” She wasn’t at all happy about the situation I was in, so I couldn’t very well explain that this was Pablo’s wife.

 
The weeks went on and Olga’s fury showed no sign of diminishing. If I was out with Claude and she hadn’t followed me, she would wait outside Monsieur Fort’s house until I returned. While I was finding my keys and unlocking the door, all the while holding Claude in my arms, Olga would come up behind me and start to pinch, scratch, and pull, and finally squeeze into the house before me, saying, “This is my house. My husband lives here,” and pushing at me so that I couldn’t go in. Even if I had wanted to struggle against her, I couldn’t very well do so with a baby in my arms.

  Monsieur Fort, the old printer in whose house we were staying, was about eighty-five at the time. His wife was about fifty. She had never been very nice to me and one day when she heard that scene going on at the door, she came to the window and called out to Olga, “I remember you. You’re Picasso’s wife, aren’t you? We met years ago when my husband was Vollard’s printer.”

  Olga, delighted by this windfall, said, “Of course. And I’m coming in to have tea with you.” From that day on, Olga came every day to call on Madame Fort. She would sit at the window and whenever anyone came looking for Pablo, call out, “No, my husband isn’t here. He’s away for the afternoon. And I’m back living with him, as you see.”

  I told Pablo this couldn’t go on, that we must find another house immediately. He wasn’t very stirred up about it because he went to Vallauris to make pottery every afternoon and I was the one who was left to handle Olga. Every time I met her in the hall or on the stairway she would slap me. I didn’t have the heart to fight with her but I didn’t intend to put up with the situation any longer. I told Pablo I thought we should rent another place temporarily and then look around for something more permanent. He asked the Ramiés to find something for us.

  Meanwhile the Cuttolis came down to the Midi and I spoke to Monsieur Cuttoli to see if, as a senator, he could do something about Olga. I thought that if he wrote her a letter on official stationery, full of official-sounding phrases, that might slow her down, even if it had no real authority behind it. He had the police commissioner of the district call on her and tell her that if she continued she would find herself in a very unpleasant situation. That made her more cautious. But she had been carrying on for two months by then and although after that she no longer came to the house, I had had quite enough of Madame Fort and her house. It was clear, however, that Pablo would do nothing unless he was forced and so I drummed into him, day after day, my dissatisfaction. Finally, in May, he announced that the Ramiés had told him about a place in Vallauris that we could buy and get into at once, called La Galloise. We went to look at it. It was a rather ugly little villa with almost nothing to recommend it, but rather than stay any longer with the Forts I would have settled for less than that, bad as it was. Within a week we had whitewashed the interior, brought in two beds, two unpainted tables, two unpainted chairs and four stools, and we were ready to move in.