Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  “We’re a Mediterranean country,” Pablo said. “We don’t have any cows; only bulls.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I miss those Norman cows,” Léger said. “They’re so much better than bulls. Besides, they give milk.”

  “Ah, yes,” Pablo said, “but a bull gives blood.” I could see he wasn’t in the mood to show his paintings that day but the Légers gave no sign of leaving. Finally we went inside, Pablo showed them his ateliers, and brought out a few pictures for them to look at. Nadia—Madame Léger—like all Soviet stalwarts, was interested in theorizing on “the new realism,” abstract versus figurative, the problem of how much of the image to bring into the painting, and so on. “Painting must return to some kind of realism,” she insisted. “Is absolutely necessary. The way of the future. I have the right to say that because I was pupil of Malevich,” and she turned to me as though I were a Hottentot and said, “Malevich, little white square in big white square.”

  Pablo and I were trying our best to keep a straight face. Pablo couldn’t resist the temptation to put in, “But it’s unbelievable that you should have been a pupil of Malevich. How old were you at the time?”

  Madame Léger thought over the implications carefully for a moment, then, realizing that from the point of view of age perhaps she had worked herself into a corner, replied, “I was child prodigy. Pupil of Malevich twelve years old.”

  IN HIS RELATIONS WITH HIS DEALERS, Pablo played a shrewd psychological game based on the idea, as he put it, that “the best calculation is the absence of calculation.”

  “Once you have attained a certain level of recognition,” he explained to me, “others generally figure that when you do something, it’s for a very intelligent reason. So it’s really foolish to plot out your movements too carefully in advance. You’re better off to act capriciously. It’s amazing how easy it was for me to get Paul Rosenberg upset. I had only to act annoyed or disgusted and say, ‘Oh, no, my friend, I’m not selling you a thing. It’s out of the question for the moment.’ Rosenberg would spend the next forty-eight hours trying to figure out why. Was I reserving things for some other dealer who had made overtures to me? I’d go on working and sleeping and Rosenberg would spend his time figuring. In two days he’d come back, nerves jangled, anxious, saying, ‘After all, dear friend, you wouldn’t turn me down if I offered you this much’—naming a substantially higher figure—‘for those paintings rather than the price I’ve been accustomed to paying you, would you?’ ”

  Pablo had been much impressed by the technique of Ambroise Vollard. A couple would come into Vollard’s shop to see some Cézannes. Vollard would show them three paintings and pretend to fall asleep in his chair, so he could listen to the couple discuss the pictures and their preferences without being obviously interested. Up to that time, nothing had been said about price. Finally Vollard would stir in his chair and ask them which one they preferred. “It’s so hard to decide,” they would say. “We’ll come back tomorrow.” The next day they’d return and say, “We’ve come to make a decision about the picture, but first we’d like to have you show us a few others.” Vollard would bring out three others and go back to his nap in the armchair. After the same little routine they would ask to see the first three. Then Vollard would tell them either that he couldn’t find them, or that they had been sold, or perhaps even that he didn’t remember anything about three others; he was old and tired, he’d say, and they’d have to forgive him. Each day this went on, the pictures got less and less interesting. Finally the couple would realize they’d better buy something—anything—quickly before things got even worse. And if they hadn’t yet talked price, they discovered in the end that they had paid more than they ought to have for something a lot less interesting than what they had seen the first day. Pablo considered that the height of wisdom and always based his own maneuvers on Vollard’s tactics.

  “I never calculate,” he told me. “That’s why the others who do, calculate so much less accurately than I do.” In a certain paradoxical sense he was telling the truth, and yet the whole truth was much more complex than that. He didn’t make any calculations in the sense that if a picture dealer was to come see him the next morning he said to himself the night before, “I’m going to sell him such and such a canvas at such and such a price.” He would think of the psychology of the meeting in terms of the amusement or the boredom it represented for him. And it was for that reason that the picture dealer was always at a loss, because he didn’t know how to approach Pablo; he couldn’t find out whether Pablo wanted a certain thing or not because Pablo hadn’t figured it out for himself yet. What Pablo did do was to imagine in advance how the interview was going to go in general. Sometimes he would have us act out little playlets which prepared the routine of the next day if Rosenberg or Kahnweiler or, a little bit before their day, Louis Carré, was coming. Sometimes Pablo kept his own role and I would take the part of the dealer, or I would be Pablo and Pablo would be the dealer. Each question and each reply, even though it was slightly burlesqued and often turned into farce, still had to be a prefiguration of what was going to take place the next day. Each of us had to respect the psychology of the character he played even where the humor was exaggerated far beyond the actual facts. If Pablo played himself, he asked the most pointed and embarrassing questions of the “dealer.” If I answered something which wasn’t in character, Pablo would correct me and I had to find something else. The next day I was in on the meeting as a neutral observer. At certain moments I would have a little wink from Pablo because the dealer had given a reply which duplicated exactly one I had given for him the night before. This sort of playlet had its practical uses but it was put on principally, I think, for fun. In general it had to end with the triumph of Pablo. He had the last word because he had more wit, more fantasy, more imagination, more arms of all kinds, than his opponent.

  There was one exception to this. Those whose triumph over him he was able to foresee were the ones who would bore him to defeat. Kahnweiler was a master of that technique. Pablo would say, “Oh, that Kahnweiler. He’s terrible. He’s my friend and I’m very fond of him, but you’ll see, he’s going to take me over because he’ll bore me night and day. I’ll say, ‘No’ and he’ll go on boring me for another day. I’ll still say ‘No’ and he’ll go on boring me for a third day. And I’ll say to myself, ‘When is he going to leave? I can’t stand having him bore me a fourth day,’ and he’ll have such a terribly sad look on his face, look so bored himself, that I’ll say, ‘I can’t bear it. I must get rid of him.’ And in the end, since I know what he wants, I’ll give him some pictures just to get him to go away.”

  In Paris when Kahnweiler wanted pictures, he would come and go and come again until he got them, but if we were in the Midi it was much more serious because in that case he would camp on our doorstep until he won out. Pablo would say, “Of course, he’s a friend. I can’t be too unpleasant with him. But even if I say the most insulting things to him, he won’t go away.” Sometimes Pablo would say dreadful things, hoping that Kahnweiler would get angry and react vigorously, but Kahnweiler wouldn’t, because he knew that his strength lay in his inertia. Pablo could be pretty inert when he wanted to be, so the only way for Kahnweiler to triumph was to be still more inert than Pablo, to let Pablo say the most absurd things to him, such as, “You’ve never given a damn about me,” or “When I think of how, in my early days, you exploited me in the most shameless fashion,” and just reply, “No, no,” but very calmly, without protesting too much, because if he did, then Pablo would come back at him more angrily, perhaps. Pablo sometimes continued by attributing to him all sorts of shameful activities, although Kahnweiler was, of course, a very gentle and virtuous man. Kahnweiler would say, “No, no, not at all,” but not too excitedly. He knew enough not to allow himself to lock horns with Pablo on that ground, because there Pablo was a past master. And so he would come, armed with a will that was ready for any test, determined not to leave until he had the paintings.
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br />   Since Kahnweiler was a very intelligent man, Pablo would often begin to argue philosophy or literature with him. Whenever Kahnweiler answered, he would always leave the advantage to Pablo, because what counted was to get the pictures. If things became tense, he would go to sleep, or pretend to, because he didn’t want to anger Pablo by giving an indication of any kind of superiority. If he had wished, he could have triumphed intellectually over Pablo during these conversations, but he knew that Pablo never would have given him the paintings. He would have said, “Ah, well, my friend, you’ve been victorious in our little arguments. You certainly don’t expect to be victorious in our business dealings, too; you might as well forget about paintings.”

  Occasionally Pablo would ask Kahnweiler, “Have you made up your mind to join the Communist Party? That would make me very happy, you know.” The question had a double edge and Kahnweiler knew it. If he had said yes, Pablo would have been unhappy because he would have known that Kahnweiler could not have done such a thing with any sincerity. If he had said no, Pablo would have been unhappy, also, to have his old friend turn him down flat. Since Kahnweiler didn’t want to lose out on his paintings, he was generally very careful to make a reply that was neither yes nor no. But one time he answered quite wittily, “No, my dear friend, I don’t believe I will join the Communist Party, because since the death of Stalin and the discovery of all his crimes. . . .”

  “Ah,” said Pablo, “I see what you’re coming at. That gives you an easy out, doesn’t it? You’re going to claim you’re disgusted with Stalin and that solves everything.”

  “Not at all,” said Kahnweiler. “I’ve just come to realize something I never understood before, and that is, Stalin was a pessimist.”

  “What are you getting at?” Pablo asked him suspiciously.

  “Just that,” said Kahnweiler. “A pessimist. I suppose he must have picked it up in his early years at the seminary, when he was studying theology. Developed a kind of Manichaean dualism, apparently. He must have decided that evil is so well rooted in human nature that he could only eliminate it by wiping out human life. So, after studying the question very carefully, I have come to the conclusion that there’s just too much of a contradiction there. On one hand, Marxism preaches the doctrine of endless possibilities of human progress: in other words, a doctrine based on optimism. Yet Stalin gives us the proof of just how false he thought that doctrine was. He was better placed than anyone to know whether optimism in that matter was possible, and he answered with a thumping negative by killing everyone within reach, apparently on the grounds that human nature was so bad, there was no other way of settling affairs. Under those conditions, how can you expect an intelligent man to become a Communist?”

  I think Pablo rather admired the skill of that answer but he felt obliged to say that Kahnweiler had got out of his hole by “typical bourgeois sophistry.” A little bit later on, in answer to the same question, Kahnweiler said, “You wouldn’t like me to have painters who are nothing more than Party hacks under contract at my gallery, would you? But that’s probably what I’d be obliged to do if I ever joined the Party.”

  Pablo never asked him again—at least, not within my hearing.

  KAHNWEILER HAD LOOKED at the first drawings I had done after I went to live with Pablo in 1946 and had been very much interested by what he called the “severity” of my research. He told me at the time that he saw in my work a state of mind very close to the one which had guided Juan Gris. After that, from time to time he would take a look at what I was doing when he came to call on us in the Midi or in Paris. In the spring of 1949 he came down to Vallauris to see Pablo and buy some paintings from him. He installed himself at a nearby hotel and we had him for lunch and dinner and the greater part of each day until the whole affair was ironed out. He stayed with Pablo if Pablo felt like tolerating his presence in the atelier; with me, if Pablo was in a bad mood and didn’t want him around. One afternoon while he was waiting for Pablo, he asked me to show him what I had done that winter. He looked over everything I brought out and seemed to like it. After he had finished, he told me he wanted to give me a contract. He would take all I had done during that winter and agree to buy, from then on, twice a year, everything done in the previous six months. But I was not to sell to anyone else. I was very pleased but quite astonished because I had never imagined he would offer to place me under contract. I told him I would discuss it with Pablo and if Pablo agreed, I would accept. When I told Pablo that evening, he was as surprised as I had been. He told me he had once asked Kahnweiler to take Dora Maar on contract to his gallery and that Kahnweiler had not wanted to. As a result he had never thought of suggesting that he take me on. But since Kahnweiler had suggested it himself, Pablo was all for it, so I said yes to Kahnweiler’s proposition.

  He bought my paintings on the basis of eighteen hundred francs a point; the drawings at eighteen hundred francs each; those in color, at twenty-five hundred. He sold them, in general, as he did those of several other painters of his gallery, at three times what he paid for them. For example, a size-twenty canvas, which measures about two feet by two and a half, he bought for thirty-six thousand francs, about one hundred dollars at the time, and sold for one hundred thousand francs, or three hundred dollars. As André Beaudin remarked wryly one day when we were discussing Kahnweiler: “The Galerie Leiris is the Temple of Art—and one of the best places for a painter to starve to death.”

  Dealers in other countries who wanted Picassos were obliged to take a certain number of the gallery’s other painters—Masson, Beaudin, and others, including now, me. In that way, Kahnweiler moved the production of all his painters in and out with the rhythm and regularity of a Ford assembly line.

  As it turned out, he did rather well with my work, and two years later he doubled the amount he was paying me. With painters who didn’t produce a great deal, he took everything on the basis of so much a point. With those who turned out a lot, he took all they produced and paid them a fixed stipend of so much a month. At that time I was doing a lot of drawings but perhaps no more than twenty or twenty-five paintings a year, so he wasn’t taking much of a risk in contracting for my entire production.

  In the fall of 1951 I had a show of drawings at the La Hune Gallery in Paris, and the following spring, a full-scale exhibition at Kahnweiler’s. The night before the Kahnweiler vernissage Pablo and I went to the gallery, then situated in the Rue d’Astorg, to watch them hang the pictures. Pablo was in a good mood. In addition to Kahnweiler and the Leirises, there were a few painters who were attached to the gallery, such as Masson and Beaudin, Marie-Laure de Noailles, and some other friends. When we left, Pablo said, “There’s no point in my going tomorrow. In the first place I’ve seen it, and besides, if I’m there, that will take the attention away from you. People will come around asking my opinion on all sorts of things, so you’ll be better off to go alone.” But the next day, he couldn’t quite make up his mind. He stalled and stalled to avoid having to make a decision. The vernissage was scheduled for four o’clock. He always hated to go to the movies, but he said, “You can’t go to the gallery so early. Not before six, anyway. We’ll go to a movie.” He took me to see a film about the Flying Dutchman. There were some bullfight scenes in it, and that made him happy enough to make a decision. Around five-thirty he drove me to the gallery and left me there. Some of my friends said they thought it wasn’t very nice of him to stay away the day of my vernissage but I thought, on the contrary, it was very thoughtful of him.

  WHEN WE WERE STILL LIVING in Golfe-Juan at Monsieur Fort’s, I had a nurse that I had brought from Paris to take care of Claude, and a local woman named Marcelle to do the cooking. Marcelle found it humiliating, in accordance with local standards, to have to serve the nurse, who ate with us. I had a good deal of trouble with these two, and one day came back to find them chasing each other around the house, the nurse armed with a frying-pan, and the cook with a heavy metal lid and a long-handled, two-tined fork. When I tried to separate the
two furies I got both the frying-pan and the lid on my head.

  After that, I decided to try to take care of Claude myself and let the nurse go back to Paris before any blood was shed. But as soon as the nurse had left, it developed that Marcelle wouldn’t stand for any interference from anyone: she would take care of Claude, preside over the kitchen, and let no one, least of all me, interfere in her domain. So I desisted. Mornings I was busy with Pablo’s work and afternoons with my own and I left Marcelle pretty much to herself. After a while, though, I began to pick up disturbing rumors that were circulating around Golfe-Juan. Pablo’s son Paulo, when he wasn’t racing his Norton motorcycle, spent a good deal of his time relaxing in the local cafés and bars. Whenever he showed up at one of his usual haunts, the bartender or a waitress would call out, “Here’s Claude’s brother,” he told me. Since Claude was a youngster at the time, it struck me as odd that Paulo, a fully grown young man and well known around town for his exploits of various kinds, should have to be identified as “Claude’s brother.” On investigation it turned out that Marcelle, instead of taking Claude to the beach, was spending most of her afternoons in one or another of the local bistros. Having no other place to leave Claude, she was in the habit of sitting him up on the bar alongside her glass, I learned.