Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  The morning we were to move, Pablo was in a bad mood. “I don’t know why I should go through with this,” he said. “If I had had to move every time women started fighting over me, I wouldn’t have had time for much else in my life.” I told him I had no interest in fighting with anybody over him.

  “Maybe you should have,” he said. “I generally find that amusing. I remember one day while I was painting Guernica in the big studio in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, Dora Maar was with me. Marie-Thérèse dropped in and when she found Dora there, she grew angry and said to her, ‘I have a child by this man. It’s my place to be here with him. You can leave right now.’ Dora said, ‘I have as much reason as you have to be here. I haven’t borne him a child but I don’t see what difference that makes.’ I kept on painting and they kept on arguing. Finally Marie-Thérèse turned to me and said, ‘Make up your mind. Which one of us goes?’ It was a hard decision to make. I liked them both, for different reasons: Marie-Thérèse because she was sweet and gentle and did whatever I wanted her to, and Dora because she was intelligent. I decided I had no interest in making a decision. I was satisfied with things as they were. I told them they’d have to fight it out themselves. So they began to wrestle. It’s one of my choicest memories.” And to judge from the way he laughed, it was. I didn’t see anything funny in it. Finally he sobered down and we got back to the question of moving.

  “Look,” Pablo said, “I don’t want to be disturbed by this move. It breaks into my work. It may be unpleasant for you here at the Forts’ but it doesn’t bother me at all. So, if we have to move, we’re moving for you and it’s up to you to see that my life isn’t changed one bit. You can have Marcel and Paulo for the day but by tonight I want everything in order. Tomorrow I’ll go through all my things and if I see you’ve lost so much as one scrap of paper, you’ll hear from me. Anyway, you’ve got the day. Go to it.”

  Marcel, Paulo, and I spent the day going back and forth between the Forts’ house and the new place. La Galloise is set in a garden of about two acres but it is at the top of a hill which you reach by a long flight of steps. By the time we had struggled up and down, fully loaded, perhaps forty times, they had come to seem the steps to Calvary. By nighttime we were ready to collapse.

  Even though, from then on, we were living in Vallauris, we were often in Golfe-Juan. After a while, Olga again began to follow us in the street, but from a distance now, and without accosting us. Soon she came back onto the beach. One day I was sitting there, with my arms behind me, holding myself up that way, when Olga came up in back of me and with her high heels began walking over my hands. Pablo saw what she was up to and roared with laughter. Every time I put my hands back onto the sand, Olga would walk on them. Finally, when I had taken all I cared to, I grabbed Olga’s foot and gave it a twist and she went flat on her face in the sand. It was the only time I ever tried to pay her back in kind and it must have worked, for after that day I never saw her close to me again.

  The new house didn’t improve my disposition all at once, however. In one of the photographs taken of us sitting on the beach at that period, I have a long face—brooding, if not actually sulky. One day Pablo asked me what was the matter with me. “I’ve gone through all the annoyance of moving,” he said, “and nothing is changed.”

  That was true, I said, but the problems of moving were nothing compared with the difficulty of trying to shake off that heavy load of his far-from-dead past, which was beginning to seem like an albatross around my neck.

  “I know just what you need,” he told me. “The best prescription for a discontented female is to have a child.” I told him I wasn’t impressed by his reasoning.

  “There’s more logic to it than you think,” he said. “Having a child brings new problems and they take the focus off the old ones.” At first that remark sounded merely cynical, but as I thought about it, it began to make sense to me, although not at all for his reason. I had been an only child and I hadn’t liked it a bit; I wanted my son to have a brother or sister. And so I didn’t raise any objections to Pablo’s panacaea. As I began to think back on our life together, I realized that the only time I ever saw him in a sustained good mood—apart from the period between 1943 and 1946, before I went to live with him—was when I was carrying Claude. It was the only time he was cheerful, relaxed, and happy, with no problems. That had been very nice, I reflected, and I hoped it would work again, for both our sakes. I knew I couldn’t have ten children just to keep him that way, but I could try once more at least, and I did.

  PART V

  PABLO AND I WERE SEPARATED for the first time about three months after moving into La Galloise. The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote asking Pablo to take part in the Peace Congress to be held in Wroclaw, Poland. A few days later, people from the Polish embassy in Paris came to see him about it. Because of East-West cold-war tensions and Pablo’s particular passport problem, the trip had to be made by plane. Although Pablo was a Spanish subject, he had never asked the Franco government to issue him a passport. They would certainly have done so had he asked, but that would have been a way of recognizing their authority and he didn’t care to go that far. His movements in France were covered by a French carte de séjour of a “privileged resident,” but foreign travel was more complicated. The Poles, however, were quite willing to issue him a visa even without a passport but the trip had to be made direct from Paris to Warsaw in one of their planes. Pablo disliked travel in any form and had a great fear of flying. He had never been up in an airplane before but in accordance with his customary practice he said yes, thinking that would quiet them down and then later they would forget about it and he could, too.

  It seemed to be working out just that way until about three days before the date scheduled for leaving, when the Polish embassy sent a woman down from Paris to Golfe-Juan. She kept after him morning, noon, and night until, from sheer desperation, he began actively preparing to leave.

  “If I don’t go, I’ll never be able to get rid of her,” he said. He had Marcel drive him to Paris and took the plane from there, along with Paul Eluard. Eluard had heart trouble and the trip was a rough one for both of them. To ease the shocks, Pablo took Marcel along. He had nothing to drive but he served as a kind of charm. Marcel’s last name was Boudin, which means “pork sausage,” and Marcel was just that kind of fellow. Pablo wasn’t sure what he was heading into but with Marcel along, he carried with him a little bit of French soil; that way he didn’t feel completely uprooted. They expected to be gone no more than three or four days but they had such a good time, they stayed away three weeks, with nearly a week in Paris after returning from Warsaw.

  By the time Pablo got back to Vallauris I was thoroughly put out with him. Not only was it the first time we had been separated, but I was in my first month of pregnancy when he left and although he had promised to write to me every day, in all that time he hadn’t written once. Every day I had received a telegram, but the messages were very strange indeed. In the first place they were never signed “Pablo” but always “Picasso.” My name, on the other hand, had great variety. One day it was “Gillot,” the next “Gilot,” and after that, “Gillo.” One thing remained constant. They all ended with the salutation “Bons baisers,” an expression used mostly by concierges, street-sweepers, and people of similar background. It certainly was not in Pablo’s repertoire; even less in Eluard’s. That left only Marcel. I realized that Pablo was not only not finding time to write, but that he had given Marcel the job of composing, as well as sending, the pacifying daily telegrams. When he returned, I was in a black mood.

  When he arrived at La Galloise, I was standing on the terrace. He climbed the long stairway, smiling broadly.

  “Well,” he said, still grinning. “Glad to see me?” I slapped his face.

  “That’s for the Bons baisers,” I told him. And the next time he left for three days and returned in three weeks without writing a single letter, I wouldn’t be there to greet him, I said. I ran into Claude’s
room and locked the door.

  The next morning Pablo banged on the door until I opened it. When I came out, he inquired very solicitously for Claude. He had brought me a coat from Poland. It was brown leather decorated with peasant embroidery in red, blue, and yellow and was lined with black sheep’s wool. There was a similar one, lined with white wool, for Claude. Neither of us mentioned the previous evening’s scene, but after that, whenever Pablo went away, he made it a point to write to me at least once a day.

  The slap certainly had a salutary effect. Pablo trotted out rather often his formula about there being only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats—and it was clear that, for the moment at least, I was a goddess.

  One of the things Pablo had enjoyed most was meeting in Warsaw the five or six architects in charge of rebuilding the city and hearing them explain their plans and methods. Building materials were scarce. What particularly pleased him was the fact that nothing was lost: all the rubble was collected and crushed and mixed with cement and other materials to form the material out of which the new Warsaw was built. And just as when concrete is reinforced with small stones it gains strength, amalgamating the old materials with the new strengthened the whole.

  The Congress itself included people from all over the world, and the atmosphere, Pablo told me, was warm and friendly.

  “There was just one incident, an embassy dinner, that was a catastrophe,” he said. “The Poles have always been broad-minded and independent and it didn’t occur to them that anyone would attempt to criticize my painting for political reasons. At the end of the dinner, when toasts were being proposed, one of the Russian delegation stood up and said he was pleased to see I had come to the Congress but he went right on to say it was unfortunate that I continued to paint in such a decadent manner representative of the worst in the bourgeois culture of the West. He referred to my ‘impressionist-surrealist style.’ As soon as he sat down I stood up and told them I didn’t care to be talked to like that by some party hack and that in any case his description of me as an ‘impressionist-surrealist’ painter was not very impressive. If he wanted to insult me, at least he should get his terminology straight and damn me for being the inventor of Cubism. I told him that I had been reviled in Germany by the Nazis and in France during the German Occupation as a Judeo-Marxist painter, and that that kind of talk, whatever the exact terms, always cropped up at bad moments in history and came from people nobody had much respect for. Then everybody began to get excited and protest in one direction or the other. The Poles tried to calm down the Soviets by agreeing that perhaps some of my painting was decadent, but in any case, they said, the Russians couldn’t be allowed to insult their guests.”

  AFTER HIS RETURN FROM POLAND, Pablo went back to work at the Ramiés’ pottery but that didn’t satisfy him. He was beginning to be tired of ceramics. In his lithography he had made a tremendous effort and had renewed the whole lithographic process. He had discovered new technical possibilities that no one had hit on before him which resulted in work of really unique quality. Even in the sculpture that he created out of bits and pieces of next to nothing, once the whole was cast in bronze, it had an identity and a permanence that he found very satisfying. But he felt that the basic materials of pottery limited its possibilities for him and that it never quite gave him what he was looking for.

  “It’s always an object but not always an objet d’art,” he said. “I have the feeling that the material itself can’t carry the weight of the creative effort I put into it. It’s a little as though I’d made a whole series of drawings on cheap wrapping paper and then realized that’s the kind of paper that frays to pieces if it’s exposed to the air very long and that those things are destined to be lost, sooner rather than later.” He came back to pottery later on, for a number of reasons, but that was his reason for stopping at that period.

  We returned to Paris in October and Pablo exhibited at Kahnweiler’s a group of drawings he had done in the summer of 1946 while we were living at Monsieur Fort’s, similar in theme to the ones now in the Musée d’Antibes. At the end of the year he held his first exhibition of pottery, at the Maison de la Pensée Française. Artistically it made something of a sensation because it was the first time this new aspect of his creativity had been shown. That series was the finest—at least the most inventive—of all his pottery because that was the time of discovery, the period of the amphora in the form of a woman and the combined forms he put together in the first surge of his inspiration. Later on his pottery was often more anecdotal or, at best, the mastery of a style he had experimented with and knew well.

  The preparation for the exhibition was chaotic right up to the last minute. Trucks had been sent down to Vallauris to bring the pottery but they were late in arriving in Paris. The glass cases weren’t ready on time, either. Everything arrived just a few hours before the vernissage. We had selected for the exhibition only those pieces which seemed completely successful artistically and technically. When we saw them at the Maison de la Pensée Française, we ourselves were surprised at the effect they made. Those who understood to what degree Pablo had renewed the potter’s art were very excited by what they saw but people in general took it rather mildly. It wasn’t really what they expected of him.

  “They expect to be shocked and terrorized,” Pablo said wryly. “If the monster only smiles, then they’re disappointed.”

  After the exhibition Pablo started painting again and the winter was a busy one. He worked often at Mourlot’s, drawing on the lithographic stone, and he was always in a good mood. And since he could never stand skinny women, even slender ones, and at that period I was beginning—for the second time—to be less slender that usual, I found added grace in his eyes. It was a happy and idyllic period. Pablo was very attentive and, most of the time, quite calm.

  He did the series of lithographs of me called Portrait with the Polish Coat and many portraits in oils. None of them were very naturalistic and some seemed a continuation of the rhythms he had explored in his illustration of Reverdy’s Chant des Morts: long, linear signs, rounded at the ends. In the paintings the face often appeared as a kind of papiér collé in black and white in a completely different manner from the rest of the painting, which was rhythmical with broad areas of very free color crossed by lines of rhythm and stress, indications of movement, rather than the more usual contour lines.

  One day while Pablo was painting my breasts in one of those portraits, he said to me, “If one occupies oneself with what is full: that is, the object as positive form, the space around it is reduced to almost nothing. If one occupies oneself primarily with the space that surrounds the object, the object is reduced to almost nothing. What interests us most—what is outside or what is inside a form? When you look at Cézanne’s apples, you see that he hasn’t really painted apples, as such. What he did was to paint terribly well the weight of space on that circular form. The form itself is only a hollow area with sufficient pressure applied to it by the space surrounding it to make the apple seem to appear, even though in reality it doesn’t exist. It’s the rhythmic thrust of space on the form that counts.”

  With that in mind, Pablo made a first version of a large painting he called La Cuisine. It was based on the kitchen in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, where we sometimes ate our evening meal. The kitchen was painted white, and in addition to the usual equipment there were the birdcages. Aside from the birds the only touches of color were three Spanish plates on the wall. So, essentially, the kitchen was an empty white cube, with only the birds and the three Spanish plates to stand out from the whiteness. One night Pablo said, “I’m going to make a canvas out of that—that is, out of nothing.” And that is exactly what he did. He put into it all the lines of force that build the space, and a few concentric circles that look like targets—the Spanish plates. In the background, vaguely, are the owl and the turtledoves.

  After he had finished it, he looked it over and said, “Now I see two possible directions for this canvas. I want an
other one just like it, to start from. You make a second version up to this point and I’ll work on it from there. I want it tomorrow.” I started to grumble about the rush but he said, “That’s all right. Just do it in charcoal. Since this is all in black and white, it will make things simpler for you.” I pointed out to him that it was too big for me to be able to trace out a copy but that didn’t discourage him, either. “Any way you want to do it is all right,” he said. “Square it and work it that way; I don’t care. But I don’t want it to be one millimeter off from the original. And I want it tomorrow night.”

  I knew I could never get it done by the next night working by myself—it was over eight feet long and nearly six feet high—so the next morning I called Pablo’s nephew Javier Vilato, who was also a painter, and asked him to help me. We worked from lunchtime until eight in the evening and then we went to fetch Pablo. He took one look, drew back, and started to roar.