Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  And there are other fetishistic addictions which Pablo has followed in the most systematic manner. Even now, whenever Claude and Paloma have gone to spend their holidays with their father, Pablo has never let Claude return without taking at least one, sometimes more than one, article of clothing from his luggage. The first thing his father took was a new Tyrolean hat. After that there was a whole series of other hats. It could be argued that Pablo just liked hats. But he gave others to Claude afterwards, in exchange. Another time it was a light-blue poplin raincoat, very pretty on a young boy, less so on an old man. But Pablo insisted on taking it. Every time Claude returned from the Midi, I noticed that his father had taken his pajamas and very often one or more neckties.

  I finally became convinced that Pablo hoped by this method that some of Claude’s youth would enter into his own body. It was a metaphorical way of appropriating someone else’s substance, and in that way, I believe, he hoped to prolong his own life.

  BEFORE WE MOVED INTO La Galloise it had belonged to two very old ladies. Several years earlier they had rented the apartment up over the garage at the entrance to the property to an elderly woman named Madame Boissière. Madame Boissière was at least seventy-five herself and was officially listed as an artiste-peintre but she had other talents as well, such as teaching a class of young female dancers from Vallauris who performed their rites in the garden behind the garage, clad in billowing Isadora Duncan-style drapery. She was tiny, with the bluest eyes I have ever seen and with frizzy gray hair that hung in ringlets all around her face. She used to dress in 1925 high style, with broad-brimmed picture hats, the kind of slacks worn at that period with floppy bell bottoms, and a long jacket faced with dulled gold-lamé inserts, all very showy and quite dirty.

  The first day Pablo and I called to inspect La Galloise, Madame Boissière, in her faded finery, was sitting on her balcony facing the road. She greeted us effusively. She had heard, of course, who it was that was interested in buying the property and she said, “I’m so happy that artists are going to buy this place. I’m an artist, too, you know.” I was a little taken aback by her appearance and her theatrical manner but she was very cordial and kept repeating how delighted she was that someone was coming to live there.

  After we moved in, I noticed that Madame Boissière walked with great difficulty. I offered to find her a house in the town so she could get around easily to do her marketing without having to climb the narrow curving roads that led from the town up into the hills where La Galloise was situated. That would have been a convenience to us, too, because then we could have had Marcel, the chauffeur, living up over the garage rather than in a hotel down in Golfe-Juan. But Madame Boissière would have none of it. “I live here and I want to die here,” she kept repeating every time I brought up the subject. Once I took her in the car to show her a very comfortable, roomy place I had found for her overlooking the market place in Vallauris but she wasn’t in the least interested in its advantages. “You’ll never get me out,” she said. “I plan on dying right where I am.” I could see there was no point in going any further so I dropped the subject. From that day on she began to detest—not me, but Pablo. She tacked up signs on the front of the garage proclaiming, “This is where Madame Boissière lives. This is not where Monsieur Picasso lives. Furthermore, Monsieur Picasso is a terrible painter,” and other things of that kind. Everyone enjoyed them. Anyone who came to call on us was treated to a harangue from Madame Boissière. As soon as she saw someone reading the signs, she would come out onto the balcony and say something like, “Monsieur Picasso is a very bad painter. Don’t waste your time with him.”

  Her own painting was in a symbolic religious vein, influenced perhaps by Maurice Denis. She had made up her mind that Pablo was the Antichrist. Whenever he passed by, she made cabalistic signs to exorcise the evil spirit. That delighted Pablo. We both felt sorry for her so we let her have her fun and figured that sooner or later, as she apparently desired, she would die there. That’s just about what happened.

  Years later I drove down from Paris with a few friends to spend the Christmas holidays at La Galloise. We arrived around noon on the day before Christmas. When we drove into the garage I could hear noises coming from up above. By now Madame Boissière was about eighty-five and still lived there all alone in filth and disorder. I had tried to have the place cleaned up and painted for her but she wouldn’t allow anyone to come in. At first I thought from the noise that she was reviling Pablo, since she had never lost that habit, but as we listened it became clear that the noises were groans. She kept a vicious dog, an enormous mongrel, and I wasn’t at all eager to go into the house and have him bite me. I went across the street to fetch the gardener. We climbed up onto the balcony and looked inside. The dog was barking and clawing at the big bay window. Behind him I saw Madame Boissière lying on the floor. We climbed down again and I went up to the house to telephone the hospital at Antibes for an ambulance. When I warned them about the dog, they told me I’d have to arrange to have him taken care of; otherwise their men wouldn’t go in. I drove to the veterinarian’s in Cannes. He gave me double the usual quantity of pills to put the dog to sleep, I bought some ground beef to mix them into and drove back to La Galloise. I unlocked the garden door of the apartment and threw the meat in the dog’s direction. And sure enough, he soon went to sleep.

  Madame Boissière was happier to see me than I, or no doubt she, had ever imagined she could be. She had fallen only that morning as she got out of bed and had broken her thigh bone. But now that I was there she could die happy in my arms, she told me. She made me promise to see that her dog got a good home and was not put out of the way. After the ambulance had left, I called the local S.P.C.A. and they came for the dog, still sleeping peacefully. Madame Boissière died at the hospital about three weeks later. I paid to have the dog taken care of for several weeks until they found a home for him that I felt Madame Boissière would have been satisfied with. I quieted my conscience about the bad turn I might be doing the new owner by reflecting that at least I was honoring Madame Boissière’s last request.

  AFTER THE MOVE TO La Galloise I tried to keep my thought from dwelling too much on Pablo’s “other women” and their present condition but it wasn’t always easy. There were occasional bulletins from Dora Maar, but on the whole she seemed rather remote. Olga, too, had been removed from the scene, but her barrage of vituperation continued to show up in the mailbox. Marie-Thérèse was an equally untiring correspondent but her letters, of course, were written in an entirely different vein from Olga’s. Pablo found them gratifying; I didn’t. For their holidays Marie-Thérèse and Maya came to Juan-les-Pins, less than ten miles from La Galloise, and so, in spite of their theoretical and historical distance they continued to seem very much a part of our life together. Pablo talked often about all my predecessors and, as a result, by the summer of 1949 I had come to understand Marie-Thérèse’s role much better than I had when I first went to live with him in May 1946.

  He had met Marie-Thérèse on the street one day near the Galeries Lafayette when she was seventeen, he told me. She became the luminous dream of youth, always in the background but always within reach, that nourished his work. She was interested only in sports and didn’t enter in any way into his public or intellectual life. When he went out socially it was with Olga; when he came back bored and exasperated, Marie-Thérèse was always available as a solace. Often when he was at Boisgeloup with Olga and family friends, he pictured Marie-Thérèse bathing in the Seine near Paris. The next day he might return to Paris to see her, only to learn that she had bicycled out to Gisors to be near where he was. She haunted his life, just out of reach poetically, but available in the practical sense whenever his dreams were troubled by her absence. She had no inconvenient reality; she was a reflection of the cosmos. If it was a beautiful day, the clear blue sky reminded him of her eyes. The flight of a bird symbolized for him the freedom of their relationship. And over a period of eight or nine years her image found i
ts way into a great body of his work in painting, drawing, sculpture, and engraving. Hers was the privileged body on which the light fell to perfection.

  Marie-Thérèse, then, was very important to him as long as he was living with Olga because she was the dream when the reality was someone else. He continued to love her because he hadn’t really taken possession of her: she lived somewhere else and was the escape hatch from a reality he found unpleasant. But once he had, in order to take fuller possession of that form of hers for which he had such an insistent desire, sent Olga away, then reality suddenly changed sides. What had been fantasy and dream became reality, and absence became presence—a double presence, since Marie-Thérèse was expecting a child. Then Marie-Thérèse replaced Olga as the one to escape from, in accordance with Pablo’s form of logic. Along came Dora Maar to take photographs of Pablo, and Pablo became very interested in her.

  Pablo always told me that he had a great deal of affection for Marie-Thérèse, and that he didn’t care so much for Dora Maar but she was a very intelligent woman.

  “It wasn’t at all that I was so greatly attracted by Dora,” he said. “I just felt that finally, here was somebody I could carry on a conversation with.”

  Dora Maar wanted, apparently, to play a part in Pablo’s intellectual life and in that role she didn’t see Marie-Thérèse as a serious rival since Pablo never brought her among his friends. Pablo told me that every time he left on vacation, it was with Marie-Thérèse and Maya, not with Dora Maar. But Dora would sooner or later show up in the same general area, having understood that was what Pablo wanted her to do, and then Pablo would have the best of both worlds. He spent more time in Dora’s company because it was more amusing that way, but he always had Marie-Thérèse to return to when his mood changed.

  The constant drama that this conflict between Marie-Thérèse and Dora brought up didn’t bother Pablo at all. On the contrary, it was the source of a good deal of creative stimulation to him. The two women were completely opposite by nature and temperament. Marie-Thérèse was a sweet, gentle woman, very feminine, and very fully formed—all joy, light, and peace. Dora, by nature, was nervous, anxious, and tormented. Marie-Thérèse had no problems. With her, Pablo could throw off his intellectual life and follow his instinct. With Dora, he lived a life of the mind. This contrast crops up in a number of paintings and in many drawings of the period: one woman watching over another woman sleeping; two women of very contrasting types watching each other, and so on. His best work of those years is really a series of variants on two portraits: one very joyous, the other very dramatic. Marie-Thérèse and Dora were almost inseparable as plastic ingredients. Even though Marie-Thérèse entered his work before Dora, this phase of his painting, which seems to alternate between happiness and unhappiness, needed them both for completeness. In Guernica, for example, the woman whose large head leans out of the window and whose hand holds a lamp, is clearly based on Marie-Thérèse. The rest of the painting, together with its preparatory sketches, is focused about the figure of a weeping woman. And Pablo often told me that for him Dora Maar was essentially “the weeping woman.”

  Pablo knew it meant a great deal to both Dora and Marie-Thérèse to be painted by him. They were both very conscious, he told me, of the fact that they were assuring their own immortality by becoming an integral part of his painting. That feeling intensified the rivalry between them but at the same time made each of them willing to overlook aspects of the situation that might otherwise have troubled them more.

  When Marie-Thérèse and Maya came to the Midi, Pablo continued to visit them twice a week. In the summer of 1949 I asked him, since they were at Juan-les-Pins, why he didn’t have them come to the house. I wasn’t being naïve in suggesting this. I saw no reason why Maya shouldn’t be brought together with her half-brothers, Paulo and Claude, and half-sister, Paloma. Since she saw her father only two days a week and Pablo never went anywhere with her and her mother, she had been brought up on the fiction that it was her father’s work that made him unavailable. Now, at the age of thirteen, all she had to do was pick up a copy of Match or one of the papers to see her father rolling around on the sand at Golfe-Juan with his present family. Also, I had an idea that Pablo was probably giving Marie-Thérèse to understand that if he couldn’t see her as often as she wanted him to, it was because I didn’t allow it.

  Pablo didn’t like my suggestion at first but a few weeks later he agreed to it. When he finally brought them to La Galloise, it seemed clear to me that I had indeed been a convenient scapegoat. But when Marie-Thérèse saw that I was glad to have her come with Maya from time to time, my relations with her became more relaxed. Pablo was a little owlish at first, but he got over it.

  I found Marie-Thérèse fascinating to look at. I could see that she was certainly the woman who had inspired Pablo plastically more than any other. She had a very arresting face with a Grecian profile. The whole series of portraits of blonde women Pablo painted between 1927 and 1935 are almost exact replicas of her. She might not have qualified as a fashion mannequin but since she was very athletic, she had that high-color look of glowing good health one sees often in Swedish women. Her forms were handsomely sculptural, with a fullness of volume and a purity of line that gave her body and her face an extraordinary perfection.

  To the extent that nature offers ideas or stimuli to an artist, there are some forms that are closer than others to any artist’s own aesthetic and thus serve as a springboard for his imagination. Marie-Thérèse brought a great deal to Pablo in the sense that her physical form demanded recognition. She was a magnificent model. Pablo didn’t work from the model in the usual sense of the term but the mere fact of seeing her gave him a part of nature that was particularly suited to him. Whether she was intelligent or not could only be a very secondary consideration to the artist inspired by her form.

  Maya was blonde with turquoise-blue eyes like her mother, and a physique like her father, whom she resembled strongly. The composition of her face was that of a man although she was very pretty. She was already well developed like her mother but her wrists were very small and her hands very feminine, like Pablo’s.

  During their first visit to La Galloise, while Pablo took Claude and Maya outside to show Maya a big turtle that lived in our garden, Marie-Thérèse said to me, coolly but not unpleasantly, “Don’t imagine you could ever take my place.” I told her I had never wanted to; I only wanted to occupy the one that was empty.

  Pablo’s many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar, as well as their continuing presence just off-stage in our own life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he had collected in his little private museum. But he didn’t cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill.

  I had seen how Pablo refused to throw away anything, even an old matchbox that had served its purpose. Gradually I came to understand that he pursued the same policy with human beings. Even though he no longer had any feeling for this one or that one, he could not bear the idea that any of his women should ever again have a life of her own. And so each had to be maintained, with the minimum gift of himself, inside his orbit and not outside.

  As I thought about it, I realized that in Pablo’s life things went on just about the way they do in a bullfight. Pablo was the toreador and he waved the red flag, the muleta. For a picture dealer, the muleta was another picture dealer; for a woman, another woman. The result was, the person playing the bull stuck his horns into the red flag instead of goring the real adversary—Pablo. An
d that is why Pablo was always able, at the right moment, to have his sword free to stick you where it hurt. I came to be very suspicious of this tactic and any time I saw a big red flag waving around me, I would look to one side of it. There, I always found Pablo.

  PABLO’S DEFINITION of a perfect Sunday, according to Spanish standards, was “mass in the morning, bullfight in the afternoon, whorehouse in the evening.” He had no trouble getting along without the first and the last of these, but one of the major joys of his life was the bullfight, and we went often, mostly to those at Nîmes and at Arles. Whenever we went we had to reserve our seats about a week in advance, generally through a friend of Pablo’s named Castel, in Nîmes, who had a passion for Spain and all things Spanish.

  Long before the first corrida of the season, which is around Eastertime, Pablo was full of good cheer, thinking of all the pleasures to come. That state lasted right up until the moment when we had to reserve the tickets by telephoning to Castel in Nîmes. On that day Paulo would come up from Golfe-Juan in the morning to play his role in the inevitable ritual. Since he didn’t want to face his father alone, he would make me go in first and he would follow me. Pablo would be sitting up in bed surrounded by the papers, the mail, and his boxer, Yan. “Well, it’s time to order the tickets for the corrida, Papa. How many of us will there be?” Paulo would ask.