Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  Paul and Dominique settled down to married life in a pleasant apartment that Dominique had in St.-Tropez, up over a café called Le Gorille whose owner, a hairy, gorillalike fellow, served at his bar stripped to the waist. Paul would have liked us to visit them often at St.-Tropez, since we were rarely in Paris when they were. Their apartment was fairly good-sized and we could have stayed there if we had left the children in Vallauris, but Pablo never wanted to leave them alone, even for a day, so the only way we could get together was to invite Paul and Dominique to Vallauris. But at La Galloise there wasn’t room to accommodate them properly so they had to stay at the hotel in Golfe-Juan.

  On one of their visits, Dominique came down with a virus infection almost as soon as they reached the house. I had to put her to bed in a room on the garden level. She used to say afterward that she had understood from that point on that Pablo didn’t like her because it seemed to her he was only too happy to see her ill in that damp, dark room, where no one would choose to be, even in the best of health.

  They had brought their dog with them and before they left, the dog went mad. He kept running around in circles trying to catch his tail and was uncontrollable. That annoyed Pablo so much, we had to have the dog put out of the way. Paul took it rather hard, and Pablo made things no easier when he said to him, “You get married and your wife falls sick. You buy a dog and he goes mad. Everything you touch turns sour.”

  Dominique was a large woman with sculptural proportions—just the kind Pablo liked. He thought she would have made a good wife for him, but that she wasn’t quite right for Paul, and that annoyed him.

  “When I don’t like the wife of a friend, that takes away all the pleasure I get out of seeing that friend,” he said. “She’s all right by herself, but the combination, no. She’s not the wife Paul should have.”

  “She’d make a good wife for a sculptor,” he told Paul one day, “but, my poor friend, she’s much too solid for you. Besides, you’re a poet. The best thing for a poet is absence. A woman who is there, under foot, looking as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, isn’t very appropriate for a poet. You’ll wind up not being able to write a line. You should be sighing and suffering for a pale young girl, and one who isn’t here, to boot.”

  “I get the idea,” Paul said. “You’re the only one who has a right to be happy. You want everybody else to be unhappy, is that it?”

  “Naturally,” Pablo said. “A painter shouldn’t suffer. Not in that way, at least. I suffer from people’s presence, not from their absence.”

  When Dominique was better, both she and Paul would have preferred to return to St.-Tropez, but Pablo refused to allow them to leave. Staying there was a test of their love. “There’s no such thing as love,” Pablo was fond of saying. “There are only proofs of love.” It wasn’t enough for Dominique to love her husband; she must love Pablo too. And it couldn’t be in the abstract. It had to be shown in a concrete way, and so if she had to suffer above and beyond the call of her illness by being confined to a dungeon—well, that proved that she did love Pablo, in the same perverse way that those who mortify the flesh prove their love for God.

  That was the way Pablo figured things out. The first dress he ever bought for me after I went to live in the Rue des Grands-Augustins was bought quite by chance one day in a street market, and it would be hard to find an uglier one. But by my willingness to wear it, I proved, in Pablo’s view, that I was above such petty considerations of feminine vanity as wanting to be well dressed or being afraid of ridicule. From time to time Pablo subjected all his friends to that kind of testing. Occasionally he made jewelry in gold and silver by the lost-wax process, with the help of a Vallauris dentist, Doctor Chatagnier. In that way he had made several necklaces. Dominique would have loved to have one of them. Realizing that, I suggested to Pablo that he give her one. He thought about it and finally decided he would.

  “But first,” he said, “I’ll put her to the test.” He went into one of the little shops in Vallauris that sell ceramic necklaces in the worst possible taste and bought two of the most hideous, made of three pieces of black ceramic with little green Buddhas painted on them. He gave one to me and one to Dominique. I put mine on and kept it on all day long. Dominique, on the other hand, was greatly disappointed and decided that this proved Pablo had no taste whatever. She put the necklace away without wearing it for as much as five minutes. The next day Pablo gave one of the silver necklaces to me, but none to Dominique.

  In all, Pablo made about ten necklaces with the help of Doctor Chatagnier. Some of them were in hammered gold. Two of the others bore portraits of Claude and Paloma on silver and one was a sun in silver. One was a very striking woman’s head surrounded by a dove. I thought they were all very nice except one, a rather heavy head of a satyr, in silver. Pablo wanted to give them all to me, but I didn’t like the satyr’s head at all and I told him so.

  He was shocked. “You dare find something I did ugly?” he said. I told him it wasn’t that I thought it ugly; it was just that I liked it less than the others. Since I didn’t have any desire to wear it, I suggested he give to it someone else. Zette Leiris was there at the moment and she said she’d be delighted to have it. So Pablo gave it to her.

  A little while after that, Pablo’s and Marie-Thérèse’s daughter, Maya, came to visit and I let her try on the necklaces. I could see she wanted one badly, so I suggested to Pablo that he go back to Chatagnier’s and make one for her.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to do any more of that. I’ve had enough.” I asked him if he objected, in that case, to my giving one of mine to Maya. He was aghast.

  “You mean you’d give away something that I gave you? I find that monstrous.” I told him it was all in the family; I ought to be able to give his daughter one of mine without offending him.

  “Is there another one you don’t like?” he asked me, sarcastically. On the contrary, I told him. I had thought of giving her the one I liked best—the woman and the dove—so that she would have something really nice. Maya was thrilled but her father stayed angry for a long time.

  Occasionally when we were at St.-Tropez visiting Paul Eluard and Dominique, we would run into Jean Cocteau. Usually he stayed with Madame Weisweiller. Sometimes as the four of us were sitting at the café Chez Sénéquié, the Weisweiller yacht would cruise by, and Cocteau, seeing us there, would seek us out. Eluard had never liked Cocteau and would try to avoid him, but Cocteau generally wound up by pressing his hand into Paul’s, whether Paul liked it or not. A little of Paul’s coolness rubbed off on Pablo, and he was inclined to be rather short with Cocteau when Paul was around. Cocteau was always looking for reasons to come visit us but, since Paul disliked him so and Pablo was much more interested in Paul than he was in Cocteau, it wasn’t until after Paul’s death in November 1952 that Cocteau began to make much headway. He knew he wasn’t very welcome all by himself so he often made it a point to attach himself to a group that was coming for some specific purpose. Just before Pablo’s big exhibitions in Milan and Rome, we were over-run with Italians of all kinds. One of them was Luciano Emmer, who wanted to make a film about Picasso. Cocteau knew Emmer because Emmer had made a film on Carpaccio for which Cocteau had written the script. Cocteau came along with that group and since Italians are great talkers, he was in his element. They had brought a book which seemed to show that through his mother, whose family was from Genoa, Picasso was actually half-Italian; that further back there had been another Picasso, who was a painter and a full-blooded Italian, and, by some miraculous heraldic sleight-of-hand, at a given point the Picasso family merged with that of Christopher Columbus. They were ready to make Pablo an honorary Italian citizen. They even brought the mayor of Genoa along with them to tell the story, and Pietro Nenni carried the big book under his arm. No one really believed all this but it made a nice story and built up good will and smoothed the path for the business in hand—the exhibitions in Rome and Milan.

  Cocteau got into the spirit of the occas
ion by inventing wild tales about a mythical Madame Favini, the widow of a rich shoe manufacturer from Milan. According to Cocteau, she was a great art collector and lived the most exciting and improbable adventures. He wrote me letters about her, which I read to Pablo and which amused him greatly. She listened only to Schönberg and read only Rilke. She was so far left of left that after Stalin died, she went on a hunger strike until her daughter brought her back to her senses by squirting her with Fly-Tox. He once sent snapshots of her and her lover, a Milanese lawyer, so that Pablo would recognize them if they ever came to call on us. Later, when Pablo went to Italy for the exhibition, the Italians even produced some of these make-believe characters and introduced them to him.

  But even without Cocteau, Paul and Pablo had a great deal of fun together much of the time. Paul always seemed to me a very harmonious person. One day when I said something to that effect to Pablo, he said, “Oh, you don’t know him at all. He’s terribly violent behind that gentle exterior. Some of his outbursts of temper I’ll never forget. You remember that time I told you about, when Dora Maar got sick, how he became so angry he smashed a chair to bits?” I did remember but it had sounded so little like the Paul I knew, I had always wondered if Pablo hadn’t exaggerated when he told me that story. One day in Antibes I had a chance to see for myself. Pablo and I were having lunch at the writer René Laporte’s house, with Paul Eluard and Dominique and the writer Claude Roy and his wife. We had been talking of the way Fougeron, the painter of socialist realism, was being puffed by the French Communist Party as a great artist. Pablo wasn’t at all pleased with that. In the beginning he had found it funny, then ridiculous, later absurd, and finally very unpleasant. Paul, in his normal state of good humor, could agree that Fougeron was a bad painter but that day he seemed politically very committed, and had ready-made arbitrary opinions that he was handing out with a certain amount of sharpness. He said he had heard that Frédéric Rossif—who recently made that very fine film Mourir à Madrid, but who was on the staff of the French national film center in those days—might make a short film about Picasso and that Pablo and I had been seeing him from time to time in connection with the project.

  “You haven’t the slightest notion what you’ve let yourself in for,” Paul said. “I don’t like that fellow at all, and I don’t want you to see him, either one of you.” That seemed hard to square with Paul’s usual moderate manner.

  “Why should it bother you?” Pablo asked him.

  “He has no use for me,” Paul said, “and I see no reason for you to make a friend of him. You know nothing about him or his background.”

  “Calm yourself,” Pablo said. “I think you’re a little overheated.”

  “I think you’re a bird-brain,” Paul snapped back.

  Pablo jumped up. “Nobody ever said that about me before.” Paul saw at once that he had gone too far but his pride wouldn’t let him apologize, so he kept talking in circles, trying to back down a bit without doing it directly. When he stopped, Pablo said, “I may be a bird-brain, but at least I paint a little better than Fougeron.” Paul was so upset by now that he wasn’t clear enough to realize that he couldn’t successfully defend Fougeron anywhere but at a Communist Party meeting—where he would never have thought of doing such a thing.

  “Well,” he said, “let me tell you that Fougeron isn’t such a bad painter as you think. If you want proof, I’ve just bought one of his drawings.”

  Pablo sat bolt upright. “You what? You bought a drawing by him?” Dominique decided it was time for somebody to step in between them. She explained to Pablo that Paul hadn’t really had much choice in the matter; it was one of those Communist Party charity bazaars and he had been put in a position where he couldn’t refuse. The drawing itself wasn’t terribly ugly, she said. It was just a flower, and after all a flower couldn’t be too ugly, no matter who drew it. But Paul was still boiling and wasn’t having any of that.

  “Not at all,” he shouted. “The trouble with all of you is you’re just a lot of bourgeois mentalities and you can’t appreciate good art. I like Fougeron’s painting.” I knew very well that he didn’t when he was in his right mind, and to hear him protesting that he did, at the top of his voice, set us all to laughing.

  Pablo was getting a great kick out of it by now, laughing and chanting, “I’m a bird-brain, I’m a bird-brain,” with the others chiming in, like a chorus, “bird-brain, bird-brain.” Poor Paul sat there, looking pale and tense and outraged, and every once in a while, when there was a temporary lull in the hooting, protesting “I like Fougeron,” which was an outright lie and which, each time he said it, sounded less convincing and more ridiculous. Finally he got into such a rage, he picked up a side chair and smashed it against the floor. He was never a very strong man, physically, but he was so carried away by his anger that the chair broke up like an assemblage of match sticks.

  WHEN PABLO’S LARGE SCULPTURE of the man carrying the sheep in his arms—L’Homme au Mouton—was finally cast in bronze six years after he had done it in clay, three casts were made. Pablo sold one, kept one in the atelier of the Rue des Grands-Augustins and, in a burst of generosity, decided to give the third one to the town of Vallauris.

  Up in the square of Vallauris, next to the town hall, stands an old building called the Château de Vallauris. Like the Musée d’Antibes, it had once belonged to the Grimaldi family. For a long time some of the more enterprising townspeople had wanted to turn it into a museum. The trouble was, there were quite a few people living in it and it was difficult to move them anywhere else. But the Château had a little Cistercian chapel and they decided to make a museum out of that. At first L’Homme au Mouton was placed in the chapel, but it was too crowded and badly lighted, so after a year they moved it out onto the market square. Right across the square is a monument to those who were killed in World War I—like most war memorials, a pretty ugly affair. Pablo didn’t like the juxtaposition but decided it was the lesser of two evils.

  On August 6, 1950, the town inaugurated the statue. Laurent Casanova spoke, André Verdet read a long and windy poem, and Eluard sat quietly next to us. There was a big crowd, including quite a few Americans, and the dedication had the informal gayety of a village fête. Cocteau stood on a second-story balcony of one of the houses about ten yards behind the speakers’ stand, over a little restaurant called the Café de la Renaissance. After each one of the official speeches, he declaimed his own appreciation of the statue. He hadn’t been invited to speak, but he wanted to be heard and took the only means at his disposal.

  The first time I saw L’Homme au Mouton, it was a plaster cast of the clay original. On one of my first visits to the Rue des Grands-Augustins, Pablo had told me that the idea for it had been working in the back of his mind for a long time. He showed me preliminary drawings and also an etching of a frieze depicting a family group with a man carrying a sheep in the center.

  “When I begin a series of drawings like that,” Pablo explained, “I don’t know whether they’re going to remain just drawings, or become an etching or a lithograph, or even a sculpture. But when I had finally isolated that figure of the man carrying the sheep at the center of the frieze, I saw it in relief and then in space, in the round. Then I knew it couldn’t be a painting; it had to be a sculpture. At that moment I had such a clear picture of it, it came forth just like Athena, fully armed from the brow of Zeus. The conception was a year or two in taking shape, but when I went to work, the sculpture was done almost immediately. I had a man come to make the iron armature, I showed him what proportions to give it, then I let it sit around for about two months without doing anything to it. I kept thinking about it, though. Then I had two large washtubs of clay brought up, and when I finally started to work, I did it all in two afternoons. There was such a heavy mass of clay on the armature, I knew it wouldn’t hold together long in that form, so I had it cast in plaster as soon as I could, even before it was completely dry.”

  Between 1943 and 1949, when Pablo installe
d his sculpture atelier in the old perfumery in the Rue du Fournas, he did very little sculpture. But he had a great many pieces which he had done in plaster between 1936 and 1943 and which were still in that state when I first went to the Rue des Grands-Augustins. All during the Occupation it was impossible to have sculptures cast in bronze. All the available bronze, including many statues already set up in Paris parks and squares, went into feeding the German war machine. But as soon as restrictions were loosened after the war, Pablo began to talk about getting in touch again with his bronze-caster, Valsuani. He kept putting it off and two or three years went by. Finally one morning he took me with him to visit Valsuani’s atelier, near the Parc Montsouris.

  Valsuani was Italian, and like many bronze-casters he had inherited his métier from his father, his grandfather, and countless generations behind them. He had clear blue eyes and an aquiline nose, which was made to appear even longer and sharper by his extremely emaciated frame. He looked more like a Trappist monk than a man whose life was spent among the scalding steam and black billowing smoke of forges and molten metals. At the time I met him he couldn’t have been even forty, but he looked considerably older. He looked tubercular, too, but it was his métier, along with his passionate devotion to it, that gave him that look. It is a métier that wears men out early. As a result, bronze-casting is a dying craft.

  Pablo brought nothing with him that morning; it was simply a reconnaissance mission. After we had chatted a while in Valsuani’s office, Pablo asked him how he’d like to cast L’Homme au Mouton.

  “Not a chance,” Valsuani said. “I can’t do a thing for you. It’s just not possible these days. Besides, you’re too hard to please. You pick up every little detail that’s not just the way you want it. And your things present too many technical problems. They’re almost Chinese puzzles. I’m already a sick man. I’m not going to make things worse by starting to work for you again. Later, maybe. We can think about it. Perhaps we can do those heads of women; they’re more or less classical. Of course, they’re pretty big.”