Life with Picasso Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Contents

  Introduction

  Life with Picasso Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Part 1 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part 2 Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part 3 Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part 4 Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Part 5 Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Part 6 Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Part 7 Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Index

  Illustrations

  Illustration Credits

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Start Here

  Table of Contents

  FRANÇOISE GILOT (b. 1921) was born in Paris to an agronomist father and an artist mother. Having decided to be a painter at the age of five, she began her training in art while still in her early youth. She later studied law at her father’s insistence but returned to painting during the Second World War. Because of the censorship of art in Nazi-occupied France, Gilot’s early work relied heavily on symbols. In 1943 she met Pablo Picasso and they lived together for ten years. They had two children: Claude, born in 1947, and Paloma, born in 1949. In 1950, the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler took Gilot under contract at his gallery. After leaving Picasso in 1953, Gilot rekindled a friendship with the surrealist painter Luc Simon. They were married in 1955 and their daughter, Aurélia, was born the following year, though the couple would separate in 1961. Gilot began exhibiting in the United States in the early 1960s and in 1962 the Tate Gallery provided her a studio in London where she painted an abstract series about the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In 1969, after an exhibition in Los Angeles, she met Jonas Salk; they were married in 1970 and lived and worked in California, Paris, and New York until Salk’s death in 1995. Gilot’s American period is marked by a bold use of color and movement. In addition to painting, Gilot has written several books, including Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1975), the biography Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990), and, with Lisa Alther, About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter (2016). Her art is in the collections of, among other museums, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Pompidou Center; she has shown around the world, including a 2012 dual exhibition with Picasso’s work at the Gagosian Gallery in New York and a series of retrospectives from 2010 to 2012 in Japan, Hungary, Germany, and the United States. She was made an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur in 2009.

  CARLTON LAKE (1915–2006) was an art critic, curator, and collector. He was the Paris art critic for The Christian Science Monitor and contributed art criticism to a number of publications, including The New Yorker and The Atlantic. After returning to the United States in 1975, he became the curator of the French Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where he had donated his extensive collection of French art, manuscripts, and music. His other books include A Dictionary of Modern Painting (1956), In Quest of Dalí (1969), and Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist (1990).

  LISA ALTHER is the author of seven novels, a memoir, a short-story collection, and a narrative history. In addition to writing About Women with Françoise Gilot, Alther’s novella Birdman and the Dancer is illustrated with monotypes by the artist.

  LIFE WITH PICASSO

  FRANÇOISE GILOT

  and CARLTON LAKE

  Introduction by

  LISA ALTHER

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1964 by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Lisa Alther

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Françoise Gilot, Self-Portrait, 1953; courtesy of the artist

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Frontis: Robert Capa, Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot at Their Home, 1951; copyright © by the International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos

  The publishers would like to thank Aurélia Engel for her assistance in the publication of this volume.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gilot, Françoise, 1921– author. | Lake, Carlton, author.

  Title: Life with Picasso / by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake. Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2019] | Series: New York Review Books Classics | Originally published: New York : McGraw-Hill, c1964.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018025719| ISBN 9781681373195 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681373201 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Gilot, Françoise, 1921– | Picasso, Pablo, 1881–1973. | Painters—France—Biography.

  Classification: LCC ND553.P5 G55 2019 | DDC 759.4 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025719

  ISBN 978-1-68137-320-1

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  LIFE WITH PICASSO

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  Part VI

  Part VII

  Index

  Illustrations

  Illustration Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  I FIRST encountered Françoise Gilot as a painter, not a writer, at an exhibition of her work in Paris in 1986. Small and slender with excellent posture and intense green eyes, she was friendly and funny. She also struck me as a powerful person, an impression her paintings reinforced with their bold shapes and vibrant colors.

  A couple of years later I came across her memoir Life with Picasso. Although o
f course aware of Pablo Picasso’s status as a demigod in the art world, I read the book from an interest in its author rather than its subject. What most impressed me, as a writer myself, was how well written it was. Although French was Gilot’s first language, she had composed the book in a much better English than most of us native English speakers can usually muster. Once I got to know her, I asked her about this, and she replied that she has written all her books, of which there are now a dozen, in English because she prefers the shorter sentences. French sentences can run on for an entire page, she explained, including many unnecessary details and qualifications, whereas English sentences are usually more crisp and succinct. She also mentioned that the nuns in her convent school were so severe in their criticisms that she feels less inhibited when writing in English, which she learned in school and during childhood summers in England.

  Gilot also expressed gratitude to Carlton Lake, an American journalist listed as her co-author on Life with Picasso, for persuading her to undertake the book and for handling the technical aspects of the project—the taping and typing. They met three afternoons a week for a couple of years, on the first afternoon taping Gilot’s recollections of her relationship with Picasso. The next day she would rework the typescript, and on the third day she would review the edited episodes and place them within the text.

  When Life with Picasso was published in 1964, it generated a lot of controversy. Picasso launched—and lost—three lawsuits trying to prevent its publication. Some forty French artists and intellectuals, many presumed champions of free speech, many former “friends” of Gilot when they believed she could smooth their pathway to Picasso, signed a manifesto demanding that the book be banned. They evidently found it acceptable for Picasso to have used Gilot’s likeness in hundreds of his artworks—but scandalous if she portrayed him in hers. In that pre–Me Too era, women were not supposed to bite the tires of the Humvees that were rolling over them.

  More than fifty years later, I have difficulty comprehending the objections to this book, since Picasso emerges from its pages as the supremely gifted artist that he undoubtedly was. His methods and rationales regarding his painting and drawing are lucidly described, as are his groundbreaking excursions into etching, lithography, sculpture, and pottery. Gilot makes it clear that he was a genius of invention and a force of nature, someone whose compulsive creativity was constantly percolating. He deconstructed and reconfigured everything he encountered, including the works of old masters as well as those of his own contemporaries. His goal seemed always to dismantle stale visual clichés and to employ familiar forms in unusual ways, in order to stimulate fresh perceptions and emotions in his viewers. Picasso also comes across in the book as an amusing character at times, with an antic sense of humor.

  But all accurate portraits must include some shadows. That Gilot exposed his shadows—his moodiness, selfishness, perversity, and casual cruelty—was what Picasso could not endure. When Gilot met Picasso, he was on the verge of becoming a media star. Because he had stayed in Paris during the German occupation, he was widely admired. Later, he became a darling of the International Communist Party. His accomplishments from a lifetime of hard work were being widely shown and appreciated, selling for large sums. Unfortunately, he began to believe the hype, and to expect and demand only praise. Also, Picasso turned seventy during his relationship with Gilot, and his apparent fear of death, no doubt magnified by various unresolved childhood traumas, led him to require a parade of increasingly younger women to help him avoid facing the sobering realities of aging.

  Although nonfiction, Life with Picasso first read to me like a bildungsroman—a novel that concerns the education of a young person in the ways of the world. But this memoir was even more compelling than a good novel because it had really happened. I became intrigued watching this young woman, raised by extremely cultivated parents who belonged to the intellectual bourgeoisie of Paris, as she fell in love with—and then fell out of love with—the bohemian who became the most famous artist of the twentieth century.

  Gilot acknowledges all that she learned from Picasso about the hard work and household asceticism necessary for artistic creation. But she had been drawing and painting for several years before meeting Picasso when she was twenty-one. She had already been showing and selling her work. She had developed her own style and artistic beliefs, and she understood the need to guard them from distortion by the powerful influence of Picasso. In fact, John Richardson, Picasso’s Boswell, has said of Gilot, “Picasso took from her rather more than she took from him.”

  Through Picasso, Gilot got to know the painter she most admired—Matisse. A northerner and former law student like herself, Matisse possessed a style and temperament more akin to her own, with his use of complimentary and contrasting color schemes to define space and with his search for harmony—in contrast to Picasso’s penchant for disruption and deformation. Picasso helped Gilot define who she was not as a painter, at the same time that Matisse was helping her better understand who she was.

  But Gilot also chronicles the abuse and insults she underwent as she struggled to overcome the demons that seemed to render Picasso incapable of sustaining lasting human relationships. Picasso, forty years older than Gilot, presented a challenge similar to the one she had confronted with her volatile father. She was in an almost untenable situation, surrounded by many people two generations older than herself. Some wanted to use her to gain access to Picasso. Others wanted to dethrone her from her privileged position with him. Yet others were watching for excuses to criticize and demean her as the new kid on the block. She had no real allies. But as an only child, she was accustomed to keeping her own counsel. Eventually, though, she was forced to recognize that there were limitations to love—and that Picasso was an egoist with no real interest in her, except insofar as she could reflect him back to himself in a glowing light. When she asked him for a break of several months so that she could go to the mountains and refresh herself and reflect upon their troubled relationship, he refused, precipitating her decision to split from him.

  Much is made in the media of the fact that Gilot is the only one of Picasso’s several wives and companions who managed to leave him. The others remained obsessed by him and continued to revolve around him even after he had moved on to other women. Two had breakdowns, and two more committed suicide after his death. But Gilot was also his only companion who didn’t need his financial support. Although her parents and many of her friends faded away during her Picasso years, her maternal grandmother stood by her and continued to visit her. When she died, she willed Gilot her house. In addition, Gilot had income from the sale of her own artwork. She knew that she could support herself and her children if they returned to Paris without Picasso.

  Ten years after her departure, in trying to document and lay to rest this epic episode in her life, Gilot managed to compose the best account yet written of Picasso’s moods and methods, in what has become one of the most important biographies of the twentieth century. Although only in her early forties when writing the book, Gilot displays the psychological acuity of someone much older. Its pages exude detachment and a calm objectivity. There is no evidence of the malice and vindictiveness that the forty-four signers of the manifesto demanding that the book be banned purported to have found in it (despite the fact that some signers confessed to not having read it).

  Life with Picasso is also fascinating as a social history of the French art scene during and immediately after World War II. Gilot provides vivid sketches of many of the artists and writers of that era, along with accounts of their interactions with Picasso and with each other. Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Paul Éluard, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and others emerge from the pages with all their idiosyncratic talents and petty rivalries.

  Before Gilot left Picasso, he warned her, “You imagine people will be interested in you? They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity
they will have about a person whose life has touched mine so intimately.” Happily, this grim forecast has turned out to be incorrect. Gilot has lived a full life, both professionally and personally. Her body of work includes more than six thousand pieces that are eagerly sought after when they appear in galleries and at auctions. Some are owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as by other museums around the world. It feels deeply ironic now to browse the catalogs of the international auction houses and discover Gilot’s pieces featured alongside those of Picasso and Matisse.

  Gilot went on to marry twice. Her first husband was the French painter Luc Simon, with whom she had a daughter, Aurélia, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in museum studies and who now manages Gilot’s archives. Claude, her son with Picasso, administers Picasso’s estate. Paloma, her daughter with Picasso, designs jewelry for Tiffany & Co. Gilot’s second husband was Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine. She lived with him for twenty-five years until his death in 1995. In contrast to Picasso’s dire prediction about Gilot’s dismal future without him, she has enjoyed a long life and a successful career, surrounded by children, grandchildren, collectors, dealers, admirers, and friends.

  —LISA ALTHER

  LIFE WITH PICASSO

  To Pablo

  FOREWORD

  Like a good many others whose primary interest is the art of our time, I have followed Picasso’s work and life as closely as possible for many years. And I have tried to see him through as many pairs of eyes as have presented themselves. One of the first pairs, both in Picasso’s experience and in my own, belonged to Fernande Olivier, who had been the companion of Picasso’s early days at the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre, and many years later brought bittersweet reminiscences of those days to my house in Paris when she came to give my wife French lessons.