Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  One of the most absurd examples of this came up just after the death of Stalin. One morning in Vallauris I received a telegram from Aragon asking me to telephone him; he wanted Pablo to do a portrait of Stalin. It was very urgent because Aragon’s paper, Les Lettres Françaises, was a weekly and the portrait had to be ready by the next day in order to be in time for the next issue. I telephoned Aragon and told him it was impossible. Pablo had just left for his studio and I didn’t want to disturb him by telling him that during the afternoon he must turn out a portrait of Stalin, which I felt sure he had no desire to do. Under those conditions he might not do a good job, I pointed out, and then what would Aragon do?

  “That’s all right,” Aragon said. “Let him do a portrait of Stalin just the way he wants to do it and we’ll publish it. It’s an emergency. It’s better to do it somehow than not to do it at all.” I went off to Pablo’s studio and explained the situation to him. Pablo’s reaction was just what I had foreseen.

  “How do you expect me to do a portrait of Stalin?” he said, irritably. “In the first place I’ve never seen him and I don’t remember at all how he looks, except that he wears a uniform with big buttons down the front, has a military cap, and a large mustache.” I had already looked around the studio and found an old newspaper photograph that might have been a picture of Stalin at the age of about forty. I gave it to Pablo.

  “Oh, all right,” he said. “Since it’s Aragon and he needs it, I’ll try to do it.” Very resignedly he got down to work and tried to make a portrait of Stalin. But when he had finished, it looked like my father. Pablo had never seen him, either, but the harder he tried to make it look like Stalin, the more it resembled my father. We laughed until Pablo began to hiccough.

  “Maybe if I tried to do a portrait of your father, it might look more like Stalin,” he said. We studied the photo a little more, then studied the drawings he had made, and finally he came up with one that was, more or less, Stalin at the age of forty.

  “What do you think?” he asked me. I said I thought it was an interesting drawing in its own right and did resemble Stalin a little bit. Since neither one of us had seen him we couldn’t say it didn’t resemble him, anyway.

  “But do you think I should send it?” Pablo asked. I said I did. Aragon knew his business. If he didn’t think it proper he wouldn’t publish it. I mailed the portrait and forgot all about it. Two or three days later, at the end of the morning, as we were leaving the house to go to the studio, we passed a group of journalists at the entrance to La Galloise. One of them asked Pablo, “Is it true that in doing the portrait of Stalin you wanted to make fun of him?” We didn’t know what he was talking about. He explained that a great controversy had grown up around it within the Communist Party and that the Party had condemned Pablo for having drawn the portrait and Aragon for having published it.

  Pablo took it philosophically. “I suppose it was the Party’s right to condemn me,” he said, “but it’s certainly the result of a misunderstanding, because I had no bad intention. If my drawing shocked or displeased anybody, that’s something else again. It’s an aesthetic matter, which can’t be judged from a political point of view.” He shrugged. “You’ve got the same situation in the Party as in any big family: there’s always some damn fool ready to stir up trouble, but you have to put up with him.”

  Later on, Aragon told us that when he opened the package the next morning he thought the drawing very interesting, just as I did. But as a result of all the protests from the literal-minded rank and file, he was obliged to open the columns of Les Lettres Françaises to those readers who felt it didn’t resemble Stalin enough. That was absurd because if what they wanted was a speaking likeness, then all they had to do was publish a photograph. Since they had asked a painter for a drawing, they should have accepted a painter’s interpretation.

  The Party condemnation was published but at the end of a few days, when the whole world had begun to laugh, the Party leaders realized they had made fools of themselves. Laurent Casanova, who had been out of the country, returned to France and came to see us about it and everything quieted down. Pablo never said he was wrong to have made the drawing; that was unthinkable. All he said was, “I made a drawing. My drawing was good or not so good. Maybe it was bad. That’s an affair between me and myself. My intention was very simple: to do what somebody had asked me to do.” Two weeks later we were in Paris, and under Casanova’s influence, the Party modified its original position by saying that the drawing had been done with the best of intentions. The only one who had to do public penance was Aragon, who was completely innocent. In the end, Thorez and several other Party bigwigs apologized to Pablo, but nobody apologized to Aragon. In addition they obliged him to make an autocritique. And that’s the fate that tracks Aragon: a saint who follows the Party line right down to the point of being martyrized.

  We were martyrized, too, occasionally—every time the Communists came to eat with us. Each one ate enough for four. Even old Marcel Cachin, dean of the Party hierarchy, scrawny as he was, would put away all kinds of appetizers, a fish, steak, salad, cheeses, a fancy dessert, and coffee, washed down with plenty of good wine. Pablo and I ate little and never lingered over a meal, so those banquets, which, together with the conversation, lasted for hours, were always an ordeal for us.

  “What appetites those people have,” Pablo said to me after one of their visits. “I suppose it’s because they’re materialists. But they’re in more danger from their arteries than from the inequities inherent in the capitalistic system.”

  Maurice Thorez, the Party chief, was such a bore: he never knew what to say. The only civilized member of the Party politburo was Casanova. During the winter of 1949 he often came to see us. Once Pablo arranged for us to eat at the Colombe d’Or, a very worldly and expensive place in St.-Paul-de-Vence, just to see if Casanova would protest. While we were eating, we were photographed by a Match photographer. After that, Casanova said he didn’t think we ought to put ourselves in that position again. “It’s bad publicity for Communists,” he said.

  That annoyed Pablo. “You’re above that,” he said. “You’re not a Boy Scout.”

  “You don’t understand how people’s minds work,” Casanova said. “I don’t mean just our people, but the general public. When Thorez was a cabinet minister he had a car at his disposal. He was criticized in all the papers for not using a bicycle and, on another occasion, for drinking champagne instead of plain red wine.”

  Sure enough, when the photograph was printed, Casanova had his knuckles rapped by some of the Party puritans.

  MOST OF THE WRITERS AND PAINTERS who had left Paris to spend the war years in America returned to France as soon as they could after the Liberation. Chagall was one of the last to come back. Bella, his wife, had died in New York in 1944 and some time later he met an English girl named Virginia and had a son by her, born just a few months after Claude. Chagall wrote to Pablo from America saying that in a few months he would be back in Europe and was looking forward to seeing him, and he sent Pablo a picture of his son. Pablo was rather touched, I remember, because he pinned up the photograph of Chagall’s son in our bedroom.

  One day Tériade came to see Pablo about the illustrations for his edition of Reverdy’s Chant des Morts, and Pablo mentioned Chagall’s letter to him. “I’ll be happy to see him,” Pablo said. “It’s been a long time.” Tériade said that Chagall’s daughter, Ida, was over at his place at the moment and that she would enjoy seeing Pablo. So a week later, along with Michel and Zette Leiris, we went over to Tériade’s place in St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat for lunch and there was Ida, who had prepared a sumptuous Russian meal for us. She knew Pablo’s wife, Olga, was Russian and she must have thought he had a taste for Russian food. She put on all her charm for Pablo, and told him how much his work meant to her. That was music to his ears, of course. She was rather well set up, with curves everywhere, and she hung over Pablo almost adoringly. By the time she had finished, Pablo was in the palm of her hand,
and he began telling her how much he liked Chagall. So Ida finished off what her father had begun: she made Pablo want to see Chagall even before he had returned.

  Several months later, Chagall arrived in the Midi. One of the first things he did was send word that he wanted to make pottery at the Ramiés’ and he came over, prepared to go to work. That was too much for Pablo. His fondness for Chagall wasn’t built to withstand that and he showed it. Finally Chagall stopped coming. There was no quarrel; it was just that Pablo was much less enthusiastic once Chagall was back. But officially they were good friends.

  About a year after that, Tériade invited us to lunch again. This time Chagall and Virginia were there. Virginia had a very pretty face, but was exceedingly thin and so tall as to tower over Chagall and Pablo and everyone else. Pablo, I could see, was aghast at her thinness. In addition she was, I believe, a theosophist and her principles prevented her from eating meat and about three-quarters of the rest of the food on the table. Her daughter, about ten, was there too, and followed the same dietary laws. Pablo found that so repugnant he could hardly bear to eat, either. I, too, was at the absolute limit of thinness for Pablo at that moment. Surrounded by skinny women he was in a bad mood and he decided to put it to good use. He started in on Chagall, very sarcastically.

  “My dear friend,” he said, “I can’t understand why, as a loyal, even devoted, Russian, you never set foot in your own country any more. You go everywhere else. Even to America. But now that you’re back again and since you’ve come this far, why not go a little farther and see what your own country is like after all these years?”

  Chagall had been in Russia during the revolution, and had been a commissar of fine arts in Vitebsk at the beginning of the new regime. Later, things went sour and he returned to Paris. In the light of that experience, he never had any desire either to return to his country or to see the regime flourish anywhere else.

  He gave Pablo a broad smile and said, “My dear Pablo, after you. But you must go first. According to all I hear, you are greatly beloved in Russia, but not your painting. But once you get there and try it a while, perhaps I could follow along after. I don’t know; we’ll see how you make out.”

  Then suddenly Pablo got nasty and said, “With you I suppose it’s a question of business. There’s no money to be made there.” That finished the friendship, right there. The smiles stayed wide and bright but the innuendos got clearer and clearer and by the time we left, there were two corpses under the table. From that day on Pablo and Chagall never set eyes on each other again. When I saw Chagall quite recently, he was still smarting over that luncheon. “A bloody affair,” he called it.

  Not long after that visit at Tériade’s, Virginia left Chagall. One evening soon after that, we were at the ballet and met Chagall’s daughter, Ida. She was very upset about Virginia’s leaving. “Papa is so unhappy,” she said. Pablo started to laugh. “Don’t laugh,” Ida said. “It could happen to you.” Pablo laughed even louder. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

  But in spite of his personal differences with Chagall, Pablo continued to have a great deal of respect for him as a painter. Once when we were discussing Chagall, Pablo said, “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I’m not crazy about those cocks and asses and flying violinists and all the folklore, but his canvases are really painted, not just thrown together. Some of the last things he’s done in Vence convince me that there’s never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.”

  Long after that, Chagall gave me his opinion of Pablo. “What a genius, that Picasso,” he said. “It’s a pity he doesn’t paint.”

  PABLO HAD A GREAT DEAL LESS enthusiasm for the work of Fernand Léger, even though one might have thought that as ex-Cubists they had more in common. In 1951 Léger began coming to the Midi in the winter and spring because one of his pupils had set up a ceramics studio at Biot with the idea of bringing out editions of ceramic plaques designed by Léger, including some large pieces in bas-relief which could be joined together to form vast expanses of polychrome mural decoration.

  Pablo would never have taken the trouble to go see Léger. Even in Paris they had almost no contact except for an occasional chance meeting at the Galerie Leiris if both of them happened to have dropped in to see a new exhibition or to chat with Kahnweiler. Pablo liked Léger’s early painting, the more rigorously constructed canvases of his Cubist period, and to a lesser extent, what he did up to about 1930. But he liked much less what Léger had been doing since then.

  Léger always considered himself one of the musketeers of Cubism, but it was not an opinion that was shared by Pablo or, according to what Pablo told me, by Braque or Juan Gris either. They were the Three Musketeers of Cubism, and Léger, as far as they were concerned, was just Léger. The three of them were originally Montmartre painters in the heroic period. Pablo and Juan Gris lived and worked at the Bateau Lavoir and Braque worked nearby in the Boulevard de Clichy. If there was a fourth Musketeer at the time, it would have been Derain, who was very friendly with Braque. Léger came later, brought over from Montparnasse by Max Jacob. Max was an insomniac and often spent his nights wandering from one end of Paris to the other; often he didn’t have the price of a métro ticket. At that time Léger lived at La Ruche, a crumbling beehive of artists’ studios near the Vaugirard abattoirs. In 1912, when Pablo went to live in Montparnasse, they saw a bit more of each other. But whenever Pablo and I went to the Galerie Leiris and Léger’s paintings were on view, he always found them a bit outside the domain of great painting.

  “There’s not enough there for me,” he told me. “It’s open and frank, but it doesn’t go beyond what it shows you at first glance. The harmony of two colors in a painting by Matisse or one by Braque covers an infinite distance, full of nuances. Léger puts down his colors in the required amounts and they all have the same degree of radiation. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that, but you can stand in front of one of his paintings for an hour and nothing happens beyond the shock you register during the first two minutes. In Matisse’s work the vibrations set up by a certain mauve and a certain green create a third color. That’s painting. When Matisse draws a line on a piece of white paper, he draws so perceptively, it doesn’t remain just that; it becomes something more. There’s always a kind of metamorphosis of each part that creates the whole. If Léger draws a line, it does remain just that—a line on white paper.”

  There’s an old story about Braque driving through Italy with his wife. In every town they came to, Braque would drive up in front of the museum, stop the car and say to his wife, “Marcelle, you go in and look around and then tell me what’s good in there.” He wouldn’t go in himself for fear of spoiling his eye with “old” painting. But Braque was a very cultivated man, and the point of the story is simply to illustrate a certain attitude on his part. With Léger, things weren’t quite the same. One day Kahnweiler came to see us in the Midi and said, in an awestruck voice, “Do you know what’s happened?” Pablo said no. Kahnweiler said, “I’ve been to see the Caravaggio exhibition in Milan, you know.”

  “Oh, Caravaggio,” Pablo said. “Very bad stuff. I don’t like it at all. It’s completely decadent and—”

  Kahnweiler interrupted him. “Yes, I know you feel that way, but that’s not the point. I’m not obliged to share your opinion and I don’t. But at any rate, you know what Caravaggio’s painting is like.”

  “Of course I do,” said Pablo. “If I didn’t I wouldn’t be talking about it.”

  “But you can’t imagine what I just heard in Paris,” Kahnweiler said.

  “Of course I can’t,” said Pablo. “So why don’t you tell me without wasting so much time.”

  “Well,” said Kahnweiler, “when I got back to Paris from Milan after seeing the Caravaggio exhibition, Léger came to the gallery one day and asked me where I’d been. I told him Milan. He asked me why I’d gone there. I told
him I’d gone to see the Caravaggio exhibition. ‘Oh,’ said Léger, ‘and what about it?’ I told him I found it very good. Léger thought awhile and then he said, ‘Tell me, Kahnweiler, did Caravaggio come before or after Velázquez?’ ”

  Of course Pablo was delighted with that. It even made him feel very benevolent to see Léger in such a position. “Well,” he said, “Léger always claimed, ‘Painting is like a glass of red table wine,’ and you know as well as I do that not all painters drink le gros rouge. And they paint their pictures with something other than that, too, fortunately. Leonardo came nearer the truth by saying that painting is something that takes place in your mind, but he was still only halfway there. Cézanne came closer than anybody else when he said, ‘Painting is something you do with your balls.’ I’m inclined to think it’s a question of Leonardo plus Cézanne. In any case, le gros rouge just won’t do.”

  Madame Léger, as Russian and as unsophisticated as could be, was very eager to have her “great man”—“Missié Léger,” as she called him—get together with the other great man—Picasso. Since she knew Pablo often saw Matisse and Braque and from time to time Chagall, she saw no reason why he shouldn’t see Léger too. And not at the gallery, but at home. She came to La Galloise to call on me. She explained her point of view in her picturesque French, winding up with “I hope you understand. Is absolutely necessary two great men get together.” I said nothing of this to Pablo because I knew it would only annoy him. I had thought no more about it when, two or three months later, Madame Léger returned to La Galloise. Bubbling over with goodwill, she held out a package to me. “You, little body, not very developed, but I make for you pretty sweaters with magnificent design here, Missié Léger. You wear them, very handsome, in name of peace.” She unwrapped her package and took out first one and then another heavy black sweater, each decorated across the chest with a full-blown white dove—a Léger dove—with highlights in several colors. I thanked her and invited her into the house. The sweaters were very well knitted but the doves—well, doves were not Missié Léger’s dish, really. I could see myself walking around Vallauris being taken for a bicycle racer or a prize fighter’s manager or perhaps a sandwichman heralding the arrival of the circus. She had hardly left when Pablo returned from the atelier. I showed him the sweaters. He burst out laughing. “You must wear them,” he said. “C’est trop beau.” So I wore them from time to time and at least once in the presence of Madame Léger, who beamed with pride when she saw me. That encouraged her in her project for a meeting at the summit between the great men, and finally she arranged with me for Missié Léger to call on Pablo. The Légers arrived toward the end of a May morning at Pablo’s atelier in the Rue du Fournas. It was a very warm day with a clear blue sky untroubled by anything other than the smoke from the wood-burning potteries. Léger looked up at the sky and said, “I certainly miss my Normandy. It’s so tiresome, this constant blue sky. There’s not an honest-to-God cloud up there. When you need clouds you have to send up smoke. There aren’t even any cows here.”