Life with Picasso Read online

  About a dozen years ago Alice Toklas described to me a visit she had recently made to Picasso and Françoise Gilot in the Midi. She gave Françoise very faint praise indeed but in the process she succeeded, against her own best efforts, in convincing me that Françoise Gilot was a person of very considerable interest. When I saw one of her paintings at the Salon de Mai some months later, my interest was sharpened. But it was several more years before I met her.

  While I was working on a cover story about Picasso for The Atlantic Monthly in 1956, I talked with Françoise Gilot for the first time. Long before the end of our conversation that afternoon, I realized that she had an infinitely deeper and truer appreciation of Picasso’s thought and work than anyone I had encountered. Over the years since then we have talked often about Picasso and painting. During the course of a luncheon in Neuilly one raw January day, we discovered we had been working toward this book.

  Throughout our work on it, I have been continuously impressed by her demonstration of the extent to which that much abused term “total recall” can be literally true. Françoise knows exactly what she said, what Pablo said, every step of the way for the ten years and more that they spent together. The direct quotations from Picasso are exactly that.

  I retraced with her, time and again, the threads of many of these episodes, always from a different vantage point. Each time they checked out—even to the smaller touches of phrasing, style, figures of speech—although weeks or months may have intervened between our original discussion of a subject and our return to it. Along the way, various points which Picasso had taken up in some detail with me in the course of our discussions in the Midi, and which I wrote down in his presence at the time, came out in Françoise’s conversations with me in exactly the same form, the only difference being that this time it was Françoise speaking for Pablo.

  Further checks and controls were made possible by my having access to Picasso’s letters to her, her own notes and journals of the period, and many other pertinent documents—three large boxes of them—which, because they happened to be in the attic, miraculously escaped the fate of the other personal effects stored in her house in the south of France in 1955.

  Carlton Lake

  PART I

  I MET PABLO PICASSO in May 1943, during the German Occupation of France. I was twenty-one and I felt already that painting was my whole life. At that time I had as house-guest an old school friend named Geneviève, who had come up from her home near Montpellier, in the south of France, to spend a month with me. With her and the actor Alain Cuny, I went to have dinner one Wednesday at a small restaurant then much frequented by painters and writers. It was called Le Catalan and was in the Rue des Grands-Augustins on the Left Bank, not far from Notre Dame.

  When we got there that evening and were seated, I saw Picasso for the first time. He was at the next table with a group of friends: a man, whom I didn’t recognize, and two women. One of the women I knew to be Marie-Laure, Vicomtesse de Noailles, the owner of an important collection of paintings, who is now something of a painter herself. At that time, though, she had not yet taken up painting—at least publicly—but she had written a poetic little book called The Tower of Babel. She had a long, narrow, somewhat decadent-looking face framed by an ornate coiffure that reminded me of Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV in the Louvre.

  The other woman, Alain Cuny whispered to me, was Dora Maar, a Yugoslav photographer and painter who, as everyone knew, had been Picasso’s companion since 1936. Even without his help I would have had no trouble identifying her, because I knew Picasso’s work well enough to see that this was the woman who was shown in the Portrait of Dora Maar in its many forms and variants. She had a beautiful oval face but a heavy jaw, which is a characteristic trait of almost all the portraits Picasso has made of her. Her hair was black and pulled back in a severe, starkly dramatic coiffure. I noticed her intense bronze-green eyes, and her slender hands with their long, tapering fingers. The most remarkable thing about her was her extraordinary immobility. She talked little, made no gestures at all, and there was something in her bearing that was more than dignity—a certain rigidity. There is a French expression that is very apt: she carried herself like the holy sacrament.

  I was a little surprised at Picasso’s appearance. My impression of what he ought to look like had been founded on the photograph by Man Ray in the special Picasso number that the art review Cahiers d’Art had published in 1936: dark hair, bright flashing eyes, very squarely built, rugged—a handsome animal. Now, his graying hair and absent look—either distracted or bored—gave him a withdrawn, Oriental appearance that reminded me of the statue of the Egyptian scribe in the Louvre. There was nothing sculptural or fixed in his manner of moving, however: he gesticulated, he twisted and turned, he got up, he moved rapidly back and forth.

  As the meal went on I noticed Picasso watching us, and from time to time acting a bit for our benefit. It was evident that he recognized Cuny, and he made remarks that we were obviously supposed to overhear. Whenever he said something particularly amusing, he smiled at us rather than just at his dinner companions. Finally, he got up and came over to our table. He brought with him a bowl of cherries and offered some to all of us, in his strong Spanish accent, calling them cerisses, with a soft, double-s sound.

  Geneviève was a very beautiful girl, of French Catalan ancestry but a Grecian type, with a nose that was a direct prolongation of her forehead. It was a head, Picasso later told me, that he felt he had already painted in his work of the Ingresque or Roman period. She often accentuated that Grecian quality, as she did that evening, by wearing a flowing, pleated dress.

  “Well, Cuny,” Picasso said. “Are you going to introduce me to your friends?” Cuny introduced us and then said, “Françoise is the intelligent one.” Pointing to Geneviève, he said, “She’s the beautiful one. Isn’t she just like an Attic marble?”

  Picasso shrugged. “You talk like an actor,” he said. “How would you characterize the intelligent one?”

  That evening I was wearing a green turban that covered much of my brow and cheeks. Geneviève answered his question.

  “Françoise is a Florentine virgin,” she said.

  “But not the usual kind,” Cuny added. “A secularized virgin.” Everybody laughed.

  “All the more interesting if she’s not the ordinary kind,” Picasso said. “But what do they do, your two refugees from the history of art?”

  “We’re painters,” Geneviève answered.

  Picasso burst out laughing. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day. Girls who look like that can’t be painters.” I told him that Geneviève was only on holiday in Paris and that she was a pupil of Maillol in Banyuls and that although I wasn’t anybody’s pupil, I was very much a painter. In fact, I said, we were having a joint exhibition of paintings and drawings right at the moment in a gallery in the Rue Boissy d’Anglas, behind the Place de la Concorde.

  Picasso looked down at us in mock-surprise. “Well . . . I’m a painter, too,” he said. “You must come to my studio and see some of my paintings.”

  “When?” I asked him.

  “Tomorrow. The next day. When you want to.”

  Geneviève and I compared notes. We told him we’d come not tomorrow, not the next day, but perhaps the first of the next week. Picasso bowed. “As you wish,” he said. He shook hands all around, picked up his bowl of cherries, and went back to his table.

  We were still at table when Picasso and his friends left. It was a cool evening and he put on a heavy mackinaw and a beret. Dora Maar was wearing a fur coat with square shoulders and shoes of a type many girls wore during the Occupation, when leather, along with so many other things, was scarce. They had thick wooden soles and high heels. With those high heels, the padded shoulders, and her hieratic carriage, she seemed a majestic Amazon, towering a full head over the man in the hip-length mackinaw and the béret basque.

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING, about eleven o’clock, Geneviève and I cli
mbed a dark, narrow, winding staircase hidden away in a corner of the cobblestone courtyard at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins and knocked on the door of Picasso’s apartment. After a short wait it was opened about three or four inches, to reveal the long, thin nose of his secretary, Jaime Sabartés. We had never seen him before but we knew who he was. We had seen reproductions of drawings Picasso had made of him, and Cuny had told us that Sabartés would be the one to receive us. He looked at us suspiciously and asked, “Do you have an appointment?” I said we did. He let us in. He looked anxious as he peered out from behind his thick-lensed glasses.

  We entered an anteroom where there were many birds—turtle-doves and a number of exotic species in wicker cages—and plants. The plants were not pretty; they were the spiky green ones you see frequently in copper pots in a concierge’s loge. Here they were arranged more appealingly, though, and in front of the high open window they made a rather pleasing effect. I had seen one of those plants a month before in a recent portrait of Dora Maar that was hung, in spite of the Nazi ban on Picasso’s work, in an out-of-the-way alcove of the Louise Leiris gallery in the Rue d’Astorg. It was a magnificent portrait, in pink and gray. In the background of the picture there was a framework of panels like the panes of the large antique window I now saw, a cage of birds, and one of those spiky plants.

  We followed Sabartés into a second room which was very long. I saw several old Louis XIII sofas and chairs, and spread out on them, guitars, mandolins, and other musical instruments which, I supposed, Picasso must have used in his painting during the Cubist period. He later told me that he had bought them after he painted the pictures, not before, and kept them there now as a remembrance of his Cubist days. The room had noble proportions but everything was at sixes and sevens. The long table that stretched out before us and two long carpenter’s tables, one after the other, against the right-hand wall, were covered with an accumulation of books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, hats, and miscellaneous clutter. Resting on one of these tables was a rough piece of amethyst crystal, about the size of a human head, in the center of which was a small, totally enclosed cavity filled with what appeared to be water. On a shelf underneath the table I saw several men’s suits folded up and three or four pairs of old shoes.

  As we walked past the long table in the center of the room, I noticed that Sabartés moved out around a dull brownish object lying on the floor near the door that led into the next room. When I came closer to it I saw that it was a sculpture of a skull cast in bronze.

  The next room was a studio almost entirely filled with sculptures. I saw The Man with the Sheep, now cast in bronze and standing in the square at Vallauris, but at that time simply in plaster. There were a number of large heads of women that Picasso had done at Boisgeloup in 1932. There was a wild disorder of bicycle handlebars, rolls of canvas, a fifteenth-century Spanish polychromed wooden Christ, and a weird and spindly sculpture of a woman holding an apple in one hand and what looked like a hot-water bottle in the other arm.

  The most striking thing, though, was a glowing canvas by Matisse, a still life of 1912, with a bowl of oranges on a pink tablecloth against a light ultramarine and bright pink background. I remember also a Vuillard, a Douanier Rousseau, and a Modigliani; but in that shadowy studio, the glow of color of the Matisse shone among the sculptures. I couldn’t resist saying, “Oh, what a beautiful Matisse!” Sabartés turned and said austerely, “Here there is only Picasso.”

  By another little winding staircase, on the far side of the room, we climbed to the second floor of Picasso’s apartments. Upstairs the ceiling was much lower. We passed into a large studio. On the other side of the room I saw Picasso, surrounded by six or eight people. He was dressed in an old pair of trousers that hung loosely from his hips, and a blue-striped sailor’s jersey. When he saw us, his face lighted up in a pleasant smile. He left the group and came over to us. Sabartés muttered something about our having an appointment and then went downstairs.

  “Would you like me to show you around?” Picasso asked. We said we would indeed. We hoped he would show us some of his paintings but we didn’t dare ask. He took us back downstairs into the sculpture studio.

  “Before I came here,” he said, “this lower floor was used as a workshop by a weaver, and the upper floor was an actor’s studio—Jean-Louis Barrault’s. It was here, in this room, that I painted Guernica.” He settled back on one of the Louis XIII tables in front of a pair of windows that looked out onto an interior courtyard. “Other than that, though, I hardly ever work in this room. I did L’Homme au Mouton here,” he said, pointing to the large plaster sculpture of the man holding the sheep in his arms, “but I do my painting upstairs and I generally work on my sculpture in another studio I have a little way up the street.

  “That covered spiral stairway you walked up to get here,” he said, “is the one the young painter in Balzac’s Le Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu climbed when he came to see old Pourbus, the friend of Poussin who painted pictures nobody understood. Oh, the whole place is full of historical and literary ghosts. Well, let’s get back upstairs,” he said. He slid off the table and we followed him up the winding staircase. He took us through the big studio, around the group of people, none of whom looked up at us as we passed through, and into a small room in the far corner.

  “This is where I do my engraving,” he said. “And look here.” He walked over to a sink and turned on a faucet. After a while the water became steamy. “Isn’t it marvelous,” he said. “In spite of the war, I have hot water. In fact,” he added, “you could come here and have a hot bath any time you liked.” Hot water wasn’t really the thing that interested us most, in spite of its scarcity at that time. Looking over at Geneviève I thought, Oh, if he’ll only stop going on about the hot water and show us some pictures! Instead, he gave us a short course in how to make resin. I was just at the point of deciding we’d probably have to leave without seeing any paintings and never get back there again when finally he took us out into the large studio and began to show us some. I remember one was a cock, very colorful and powerful in its features, crowing lustily. Then there was another one, of the same period but very severe, all in black and white.

  About one o’clock the group around us broke up and everyone started to leave. The thing that struck me as most curious that first day was the fact that the studio seemed the temple of a kind of Picasso religion, and all the people who were there appeared to be completely immersed in that religion—all except the one to whom it was addressed. He seemed to be taking it all for granted but not attaching any importance to it, as if he were trying to show us that he didn’t have any desire to be the central figure of a cult.

  As we turned to go, Picasso said, “If you want to come back again, by all means come. But if you do come, don’t come like pilgrims to Mecca. Come because you like me, because you find my company interesting and because you want to have a simple, direct relationship with me. If you only want to see my paintings, you’d do just as well to go to a museum.”

  I didn’t take that remark too seriously. In the first place, there were almost no paintings of his to be seen in any of the Paris museums at that time. Then, too, since he was on the Nazi list of proscribed painters, no private gallery was able to show his work openly or in quantity. And looking at another painter’s work in a book of reproductions is no satisfaction for a painter. So if anyone wanted to see more of his work—as I did—there was almost nowhere to go but 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins.

  A few days after that first visit I dropped in at the gallery where Geneviève and I were having our exhibition. The woman who ran it told me excitedly that a little earlier a short man with piercing dark eyes, wearing a blue-and-white-striped sailor’s jersey, had come in. She had realized, after the first shock, that he was Picasso. He had studied the paintings intently and then walked out without saying anything, she told me. When I got home I told Geneviève about his visit. I said he had probably gone to see how bad our paintings were and prove to himself
the truth of what he had said when he met us at Le Catalan: “Girls who look like that can’t be painters.”

  Geneviève took a more idealistic view of it. “I think it’s a nice human touch,” she said. “It shows he takes a real interest in young artists’ work.”

  I wasn’t convinced. At best it was curiosity, I felt. “He just wanted to see what we had inside—if anything.”

  “Oh, you’re so cynical,” she said. “He seemed to me very kind, open-minded, and simple.”

  I told her I thought he perhaps wanted to appear simple but I had looked into those eyes of his and seen something quite different. It hadn’t frightened me, though. In fact it made me want to go back. I temporized for about another week and then, one morning, with Geneviève in tow, returned to the Rue des Grands-Augustins. It was Sabartés, of course, who opened the door for us again, his head sticking outside like a little sand fox. This time he admitted us without comment.

  Remembering, from our first visit, the very pleasant entrance with its many plants and exotic birds in wicker cages lighted by the high window, we had decided to add a little color to the greenery and so we arrived carrying a pot of cineraria. When Picasso saw us he laughed.

  “Nobody brings flowers to an old gent,” he said. Then he noticed that my dress was the same color as the blossoms, or vice versa. “You think of everything; I can see that,” he said. I pushed Geneviève in front of me. “Here’s beauty, followed by intelligence,” I reminded him.

  He looked us over carefully, then said, “That remains to be seen. What I see now are simply two different styles: archaic Greece and Jean Goujon.”

  On our first visit he had shown us only a few pictures. This time he made up for it. He piled them up almost like a scaffolding. There was a painting on the easel; he stuck another on top of that; one on each side; piled others on top of those, until it seemed like a highly skilled balancing act of the human-pyramid kind. As I found out later, he used to arrange them that way almost every day. They always held together by some kind of miracle, but as soon as anyone else touched them they came tumbling down. That morning there were cocks; a buffet of Le Catalan with cherries against a background of brown, black, and white; small still lifes, some with lemon and many with glasses, a cup, and a coffeepot, or with fruit against a checked tablecloth. He seemed to be playing with colors as he sorted them out and tossed them up onto the scaffolding. There was a large nude, a three-quarter rear view that one saw at the same time front view, in earth tones, very close to the palette of the Cubist period. There were also scenes of the Vert Galant, that little tip of the Ile de la Cité near the Pont-Neuf, with trees on which each branch was made out of separate spots of paint, much in the manner of van Gogh. There were several mothers with enormous children whose heads reached the very top of the canvas, somewhat in the spirit of the Catalan primitives.