Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  NICOLE VÉDRÈS had studied philosophy at Heidelberg, taken her doctorate, and after writing several novels, turned to film making. She had had a good deal of success with a film called Paris 1900, which she had made by taking bits of old films and running them together in a panorama of the period between 1900 and 1914. It was done with a good deal of wit, the script was excellent, and the music, composed by a friend of ours named Guy Bernard, added just the right accompaniment. Pablo went to see it and liked it very much. One day Nicole came to Vallauris to tell us she wanted to do another film, this one turned not toward the past but toward the future. She wanted to include in it a number of outstanding contemporary figures who might be considered to have importance for posterity, and to give some indication of what lay ahead. Among others, she had Joliot-Curie lined up for a discussion relating to nuclear physics, Jean Rostand for biology, Sartre for philosophy, and André Gide for literature. For painting she wanted Picasso. She had been friendly with Gide for a long time. Picasso and Gide, on the other hand, had not only always stayed away from each other, but had held to a certain mutual antipathy. Pablo reproached Gide with a complete lack of taste in painting, since Gide’s choice, based on his friendships, always ran to painters like Jacques-Emile Blanche. Gide, for his part, had felt that Pablo neither understood nor cared much about “things of the spirit.”

  In spite of his coolness toward Gide, Pablo agreed to take part in the film. Gide was then over eighty and Pablo was sixty-eight. Although each was perfectly satisfied that the other should be in the film, neither suspected that Nicole Védrès would bring them face to face. But that is what happened and the two Achilles came out of their tents and met on what was both more and less than neutral ground: the Musée d’Antibes. There was an entire sequence at the Musée d’Antibes in which Gide asked Pablo about the ceramics of his that were displayed there and Pablo explained to him the mysteries of the potter’s art. There was nothing very exciting about the script. What was historic was the meeting itself and the fact that each of them should have accepted it.

  Gide’s face looked like a Chinese theater mask, with a fixed grimace. The only animation was in the eyes, which were still exceptionally bright. We had lunch with him one day on the harbor at Antibes. He had with him Pierre Herbart, who was then collecting the material about Gide which soon after began appearing in print, and another young man, dark and very handsome. During the luncheon, Gide said to Pablo, “Both of us have reached the age of serenity,” adding, with a nod to his young man and then to me, “and we have also our charming Arcadian shepherds.”

  Naturally Pablo rejected that aesthetic interpretation of life. “There’s absolutely no serenity for me,” he said, “and furthermore, no face is charming.”

  Another day, Gide came to the house to visit us. Gide and I got along fine and that helped relax Pablo’s antagonism. As we walked down the steps from the house to the road, Gide turned to Pablo and said, “There’s one thing about Françoise I like very much. She’s the kind of person who may always have remorse, but will never have regrets.” Pablo said, “I haven’t any idea what that means. I suppose Françoise has no acquaintance with regrets but she knows even less about remorse.” Gide said, “It’s easy to see there’s a dimension to her inner life which has escaped you.” That was the end of the friendship, because Pablo could never admit that Gide had found something in me that he himself hadn’t seen. They never met again.

  During the filming, I had to go meet Pablo as he left the Musée d’Antibes, and perform other conventional banalities that were totally artificial. They had to shoot scenes like that a dozen times or more because both of us roared with laughter every time we had to go through them. Ordinarily we either stayed together all day long or we went our separate ways, but I had never been in the habit of running to meet him at the door of the museum, like the little woman who waits for her husband at the door of the factory or the office after his hard day’s work. There was another scene showing Pablo at work in the pottery. It was almost impossible to shoot that scene since there were at least fifteen people who had nothing to do that day and had come to watch. Jacques Prévert had us all in stitches because he kept picking up some of Pablo’s plates and holding them over his face as though he were wearing a mask. They had to do the scene over many times. Then the fuses kept blowing out and there was no more light. Everyone had a wonderful time except the technicians.

  There was a sequence on the beach in which the director insisted on showing us going through all the usual beach stunts. Everyone on the beach was watching us, plus all the film crew, plus all our friends who had dropped by for the occasion, so there wasn’t very much possibility of being natural. We romped into the water and out again and Pablo drew in the sand, just as though we were all alone on a desert island, although the beach had never been so full as it was that day. It was bad enough to have to go through all that nonsense, but to have to look at it from a seat in a movie house would have been too much; as a result I never saw the film.

  UNTIL THE SUMMER OF 1949, Pablo had been satisfied to spend two or three afternoons a week doing pottery at the Ramiés’, but now, suddenly, he had had enough of ceramics and he began to look for a place where he could paint. We looked first for a larger house so that he would have room to work at home, but we found nothing that seemed suitable at a price that Pablo didn’t consider exorbitant. Then he got the idea of taking an old factory in the Rue du Fournas that had once been a perfumery. It was L-shaped and had good north light. Above the large ground-floor rooms were some small ones we might have been able to live in if they hadn’t been in such bad shape. Pablo made the right-hand wing into his sculpture studio and the left-hand area he used for painting. In the little rooms above he stored pottery. It took us about two months to put things in shape and in October Pablo began to work there. He generally went there after lunch and worked late into the evening.

  The building was of very rudimentary construction. There was no central heating and we had to install a huge stove in each room. The sculpture studio was large and high-vaulted, about thirty-five feet by twenty-five. It required a stove to match, with pipes running all around. And since the tile roof was far from tight, the heat kept moving on up and out, so the fire had to be pushed all morning long. Then there were the two painting ateliers, each with its big stove. All these stoves had to be started by eight in the morning; otherwise it wasn’t warm enough for Pablo to work there in the afternoon.

  He had very suavely made the point that it was only when I built the fires that the place ever got warm enough to work in over the long hours he kept, so after I got through coaxing the heating system back to life at La Galloise in the morning, I would pedal down to the atelier and start the stoves there. Of course, they all had to be cleared of yesterday’s debris before new fires could be built. That was my setting-up exercise every morning from the beginning of November to the end of April.

  I wouldn’t have minded this routine, even in the winter, except that, as usual, I was generally up with Pablo until very late and I didn’t get much sleep: never more than five or six hours a night. Pablo slept until noon, as a rule, but I had to get the household and his day organized. Stoking the furnace at La Galloise and building the fires at the atelier were only the prelude. I went through the mail, sorting out the things that required immediate action. Since Pablo never answered letters, that meant letters for me to write. And then, since we had no telephone at La Galloise, I had to go to the pottery to see what needed taking care of there. Sometimes I had to show people the work he was doing at the pottery. But before any of that, there were the children to be dressed, washed, and, as soon as they were old enough, gotten ready for Marcel to drive to the école maternelle. And both of them gave Pablo reason to cut my ration of sleep even further. After Claude was born, Pablo began to make a Freudian slip that was quite amusing: whenever he wanted to speak of the child, l’enfant, he would say l’argent, the money. At the Rue des Grands-Augustins Claude slept in
the room next to ours. We went to bed about one or two in the morning, after Pablo had finished his work. One morning about three o’clock Pablo suddenly sat up in bed and said, “The money is dead. I don’t hear him breathing any more.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I saw he was awake, not dreaming, so I asked him what he meant.

  “You know very well what I mean. I mean the child,” he said. I told him that was the most peculiar mix-up I’d ever heard.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “It’s the most natural thing in the world. Freud even says so. After all, the child is his mother’s riches. Money is another form of riches. You just don’t understand those things.” I told him I could hear breathing sounds very clearly from the next room.

  “That’s the wind,” he said. “My money is dead. You go see.” I went in to look at Claude. He was sleeping peacefully. I returned to our bedroom and reported to Pablo that the child was not dead. That happened about twice a week. Often Claude would wake up while I attended to him; that meant a half-hour or so before he got back to sleep again. Of course, looking after him like that gave him the habit of repeating his demands.

  Later on, when we were living mostly in Vallauris and Claude slept farther away from us, I had to go through the same routine almost every night, because Pablo would begin to worry, about three in the morning, whether Claude hadn’t smothered in his pillow. Sometimes, after my first inspection, he would be satisfied. Other times, in ten minutes he would begin again. And some nights, depending on the state of his anxiety, I would have to get up half a dozen times. It happened rarely in the summer, when he had plenty of activity at the beach, but in winter, without it, that became his favorite distraction. After Paloma was born, he swung into another cycle of the same, just as seriously and insistently as though we hadn’t gone through it all before. And he was very thorough: all doors between all rooms had to be left open so that he could hear. Since there was a lot of wind in the winter, we slept in very drafty bedrooms and we all had plenty of colds.

  During the day his anxiety continued. Often when he got home he would say, “Where’s the money?” Sometimes I would say, “In the trunk,” because Pablo always carried around with him an old red-leather trunk from Hermès in which he kept five or six million francs so that he’d always “have the price of a package of cigarettes,” as he put it. But if I assumed he was referring to one of the children and said, “In the garden,” then he would often say, “No, I mean the money in the trunk. I want to count it.” There was never any real point in counting it because the trunk was always locked, Pablo had the only key and he kept it with him at all times. “You’re going to count it,” he’d say, “and I’ll help you.” He’d pull out all the money, pinned together at the bank in small sheaves of ten bills, and make little piles of it. He’d count one sheaf and it might turn out to be eleven. He’d pass it over to me and I’d count ten. So he’d try it again and this time come up with nine. This made him very suspicious, so each of us had to check again all the sheaves. He had much admired the way Chaplin had counted money in Monsieur Verdoux and he tried to do it fast like that. As a result, he made more and more mistakes and there were more and more recounts. Sometimes we spent as much as an hour on this ritual. Finally, when Pablo was tired of playing with the bills, he would give up and say he was satisfied, whether the books balanced or not.

  BETWEEN AND AROUND MY VARIOUS JOBS, I managed to find time to paint on my own. When I went to live in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, I had stopped painting for about three years and spent whatever free time I had drawing. It had seemed to me that if I were to go on painting, it would be impossible to work next to Pablo without reflecting his presence. I felt, though, that if I concentrated on the structural qualities in my drawing, I would be more likely to make progress in line with my own natural development, and that if I was being influenced by Pablo’s work, I would become aware of it more easily since fewer elements were involved than there would be in painting. In 1948 I began working in gouache and in 1949 I went back to oil painting.

  It would not have been feasible for me to work at Pablo’s atelier, even though he had ample room. Working at home I was more subject to interruptions but I could keep an eye on other things—the children, for example. Paloma rarely bothered me. She was, as Pablo often pointed out, an ideal girl-child. She slept almost around the clock, ate everything she was supposed to and behaved like a model for her kind.

  “She’ll be a perfect woman,” Pablo said. “Passive and submissive. That’s the way all girls should be. They ought to stay asleep just like that until they’re twenty-one.” He spent many hours sketching and painting her as she slept. She was so passive, in fact, that she rarely talked to either one of us. And yet during some of her waking periods, we used to hear her chattering endlessly to Claude. Afterward Claude would speak to us for both of them. She seemed to want to remain a baby. She would bring us flowers and present them, in baby talk, long after she was talking normally to Claude. She was never rebellious, but she never obeyed. Claude, on the other hand, argued about everything. After one drawn-out session with him, Pablo told him, “You’re the son of the woman who says ‘no.’ There’s no doubt about that.”

  It must have been lonely for them much of the time: they almost never saw their father, and their mother barricaded herself behind her studio door whenever she could see a spare hour or two before her.

  Once as I was working at a painting that had been giving me a great deal of trouble, I heard a small, timid knock at the door.

  “Yes,” I called out and kept on working. I heard Claude’s voice, softly, from the other side of the door.

  “Mama, I love you.”

  I wanted to go out, but I couldn’t put down my brushes, not just then. “I love you too, my darling,” I said, and kept at my work.

  A few minutes passed. Then I heard him again, “Mama, I like your painting.”

  “Thank you, darling,” I said. “You’re an angel.”

  In another minute, he spoke out again. “Mama, what you do is very nice. It’s got fantasy in it but it’s not fantastic.”

  That stayed my hand, but I said nothing. He must have felt me hesitate. He spoke up, louder now. “It’s better than Papa’s,” he said.

  I went to the door and let him in.

  PART VI

  OF ALL THE ARTISTS Pablo knew and visited during the years I spent with him, no one meant quite as much to him as Matisse. At the time we made our first call on Matisse in February 1946 (when Pablo came to visit me at Monsieur Fort’s house in Golfe-Juan), he was living in a villa called Le Rêve in Vence. He had moved there from Cimiez, up in the hills above Nice, where he had gone to convalesce following two very serious operations he had undergone in Lyons in the spring of 1941. The nurse who took care of him in Cimiez had her heart set on becoming a nun. She was young and pretty and it was she who posed for all the drawings he made to illustrate Tériade’s edition of Letters of a Portuguese Nun. In 1943 Matisse moved to Vence. Across the street from his villa was a Dominican convent. Later on, his former nurse—now Soeur Jacques—came there as a novice, and often visited him. On one of her calls she brought him a design she had made for a stained-glass window to decorate a new oratory the order was planning to build. As a result of their discussions and of others Matisse had with a Dominican novice named Brother Raysséguier and with Father Couturier, also a Dominican and the leading exponent of modern art in religious circles, Matisse found himself a prime mover in the construction and decoration of the Dominican chapel in Vence.

  Matisse was confined to his bed for three-quarters of the day but that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the project. He had paper fixed to the ceiling over his bed, and at night, since he didn’t sleep much, he would draw on it with a piece of charcoal attached to the end of a long bamboo stick, sketching out the portrait of St. Dominic and other elements of the decoration. Later, he would roll around in his wheel-chair and transfer his drawings to large cera
mic squares covered with a semi-mat enamel on which he could draw in black.

  Matisse’s idea was that there should be no color inside the chapel, other than what came in with the light shining through the stained-glass windows. He laid out the maquettes for the glass in much the same manner he used for the papiers découpés on which he spent a good part of his last years. He had Lydia paint large pieces of paper in various tones for background and pin them against the wall in the areas he indicated to her. He then showed her, with his stick, where to place the cut-out pieces in other colors with which he formed his composition. He did three series of maquettes. The first was extremely geometric and very successful on its own terms but he decided not to use it because it did not create just the effect he wanted. The next was very much in the spirit of Tahitian foliage, akin to the one he finally used, but with different proportions. The color range he was working with included ultramarine, a deep yellow, and a green. He wanted each element to have about the same dimensions as the others so that the light entering through them would be uniformly divided. And so he asked for something that had not been done until then: that the glass should be frosted on the outside. He reasoned that if it were not frosted, the blue, for example, would give a great deal less luminosity than the yellow and wouldn’t remain on the same plane. With the glass frosted, the luminosity would be uniform throughout. But once the windows were placed in the chapel, they gave a kind of uniform pink-mauve light. And when it reflected on the forty ceramic squares which Matisse had ordered to be semi-mat but which were actually rather shiny, it left a mauve reflection, which wasn’t a very pleasing effect; certainly not what he had intended.