Life with Picasso – Françoise Gilot & Carlton Lake

Françoise Gilot’s terrific memoir Life with Picasso is a book I read for #NYRBWomen24 in May, but only got around to writing about now…

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In 1953, Françoise Gilot, in her early thirties and with two children in tow, left Pablo Picasso, painter extraordinaire, with whom she was in a relationship for a decade. A move that greatly enraged the powerful and influential Picasso, he threatened to destroy Gilot’s painting career. That Picasso should behave in such an abominable manner is not surprising once you have read Gilot’s memoir and got a sense of his personality – a narcissistic and entitled bully, and deeply disrespectful of women.  The publication of Gilot’s memoir also faced a lot of rage and drama, Picasso tried to halt its release but to no avail. Picasso, who had no qualms about criticizing his peers and other important people in his life, could not handle any criticism leveled at him.

It explains his response to Gilot’s memoir and yet, Life with Picasso isn’t a book that only rails against Picasso but rather a comprehensive, richly layered text that highlights Picasso’s extraordinary talent as an artist and painter along with fascinating snippets on an array of renowned well-known artists and painters who were his contemporaries whom Gilot met first-hand. In terms of tone, it is a frank, honest, detached portrayal of a fascinating yet turbulent time in Gilot’s life, a very balanced account of a complex, difficult man – a celebration of his art and painting techniques but also a critique of his volatile temperament and persona.

More importantly, Life with Picasso is about Françoise Gilot herself, her independence, her intelligence and fearlessness, her singlemindedness in pursuing art, and her courage to stand up to a man who consistently failed to value her.

THE ICONIC FIRST MEETING

The book opens by depicting Gilot’s first meeting with Picasso.  It’s May 1943 and France is under Nazi Occupation. The setting is a restaurant – Le Catalan – where Françoise is dining with her best friend Genevieve and the actor Alain Cuny. At the next table, she sees Picasso with a group of friends among who is Dora Maar, one of his famous muses, the tortured-looking subject of scores of his paintings.

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.

Gilot notices Picasso observing them and soon he walks over striking up a conversation. He invites Gilot over to his place to see his paintings at a time and day convenient to her, and the rest they say is history.

Until then he had been, for me, the great painter that everyone knew about and admired, a very intelligent, witty man but impersonal. From then on he became a person. Until then he had aroused my interest and engaged my mind. Now my emotions and affections were involved. I had not thought before then that I could ever love him. Now I knew it could be other He was obviously capable of side- stepping all stereotyped formulas in his human relations just as completely as in his art. One recognizes the stereotypes even if one has not experienced them all. He took command of the situation by stopping the intellectual game, sidestepping the erotic one, and putting our relationship on the only basis possible in order to be significant for him and – as I even then realized for me as well.

FRANÇOISE GILOT – EARLY DAYS

As Gilot recounts the early days of her meetings and budding courtship with Picasso, we also get a glimpse of her family and upbringing. Born in Paris to an agronomist father and an artist mother, Gilot developed a taste for art influenced by her mother, a ceramic artist. Her parents were intellectuals and reasonably well-to-do, and Gilot was homeschooled. The father was a strict man and pushed Gilot into law, but while she fared reasonably well in her studies, it was art and painting she wished to devote her time to. Rebelling against her father, Gilot decides to branch out on her own, away from her father’s control, and focus on her burgeoning career as an artist. In her endeavors, she is supported by her grandmother, who sort of becomes an anchor during this difficult transitional period from dependence to independence, having cut off ties with everyone else in the family. This move highlights Gilot’s zeal for forging her own path, and figuring out the artist she is and wants to become.

PICASSO – THE ARTIST AND THE MAN

Through Gilot’s memoir, we get a detailed view of Picasso’s versatility as an artist and painter, his prolific output, and his willingness to experiment with forms, while also challenging boundaries in terms of technique. Besides oil painting, we see Picasso immersed in pottery, lithography, book illustration, and sculpture. On the back of Gilot’s astonishing memory, the book is peppered with illuminating conversations as well as Picasso’s viewpoints on a variety of topics encompassing art styles, painting techniques and movements, and painters themselves including his peers and his ancestors – Cubism, Fauvism, and Impressionism, sculpture and the language of colour, movement and disruption, Matisse and Miro, Braque and Bonnard and so on. Here, for instance, is Picasso discussing Cubism…

“We tried to get rid of trompe- l’oeil to find a trompe-l’esprit. We didn’t any longer want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind. The sheet of newspaper was never used in order to make a newspaper. It was used to become a bottle or something like that. It was never used literally but always as an element displaced from its habitual meaning into another meaning to produce a shock between the usual definition at the point of departure and its new definition at the point of arrival. If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.”

Picasso, the man, is another story altogether – egoistic, cold, childish, attention-seeking, verbally abusive, often lacking empathy and demanding to be the center of attention among the women important to him. During some pivotal moments in Gilot’s life, his indifference and cruelty are particularly stark – when Gilot wants one of his assistants to accompany her to the hospital to deliver her second child (Paloma), Picasso is indignant at being interrupted in his preparations for an upcoming show; even during her first pregnancy, Picasso does not consider it important to consult a doctor until the very end when the baby is due.

PICASSO’S WOMEN

We learn how the women before Gilot – the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khoklova, French model Marie- Thérèse Walter, and French painter and photographer Dora Maar – are unceremoniously discarded although Picasso does not care for completely severing ties with them with the result that they continue to intrude on their lives from the fringes, a burden Gilot is compelled to bear. The more disturbing aspect is the way Picasso revels in the bitterness these women display towards one another and the way they compete for his attention.

The constant drama that this conflict between Marie-Thérèse and Dora brought up didn’t bother Pablo at all. On the contrary, it was the source of a good deal of creative stimulation to him. The two women were completely opposite by nature and temperament. Marie-Thérèse was a sweet, gentle woman, very feminine, and very fully formed – all joy, light, and peace. Dora, by nature, was nervous, anxious, and tormented. Marie-Thérèse had no problems. With her, Pablo could throw off his intellectual life and follow his instinct. With Dora, he lived a life of the mind. This contrast crops up in a number of paintings and in many drawings of the period: one woman watching over another woman sleeping; two women of very contrasting types watching each other, and so on.

Dora Maar’s brooding nature and fragile mental state made Gilot increasingly cautious at first in starting a relationship with Picasso – she respected Dora Maar’s talents as an artist but was troubled by her severe personality. With Marie-Thérèse Walter a kind of awkwardness was palpable although Gilot subsequently developed a soft spot for her daughter, Maya. Picasso’s first wife, Olga, resorted to stalking Gilot and generally making a nuisance forcing Gilot to change houses and approach the authorities. In a nutshell, none of their relationships with Picasso lasted for long, a precursor of how the relationship between Picasso and Gilot would eventually pan out.

After all, their fate didn’t depend exclusively on themselves; it depended in large measure on Pablo. And mine did, too. They had all had different kinds of failures, for very different reasons. Olga, for example, went down to defeat because she demanded too much. One might assume on that basis that if she hadn’t demanded too much and things that were basically stupid, she wouldn’t have failed. And yet Marie-Thérèse Walter demanded nothing, she was very sweet, and she failed too. Then came Dora Maar, who was anything but stupid, an artist who understood him to a far greater degree than the others. But she, too, failed, although, like the others, she certainly believed in him. So it was hard for me to believe in him completely.

PICASSO’S PEERS – VIGNETTES OF PAINTERS, ARTISTS, WRITERS, POETS ET AL

One of the striking features of this book is Gilot’s colourful, interesting, and often funny impressions of a range of artists, writers, art dealers, and other personalities and people who called on Picasso to discuss art complete with their exhausting mind games and trivial jealousies.

There was Joan Miró with his angelic smile, reserved personality, and mysterious demeanor who said “nothing about himself or his plans and gave out no clear-cut opinions about anything or anybody” while Picasso talked freely. Georges Braque and Picasso were best friends but indulged in bizarre mind games to test the tenacity of that friendship; there’s a wonderful set piece where Picasso and Gilot call on Braque unannounced in the afternoon and Braque deliberately ignores the hint and refuses to extend an invitation to lunch.  We meet Giacometti, sculptor extraordinaire, whom Picasso deeply respected (“Giacometti, he felt, often did succeed in changing something at the heart of the problem, something basic to sculpture as a whole, and that gave his work the unity Pablo admired in it”).

Picasso pitted his loyal art dealers – Kahnweiler and Kootz – against one another when it came to procuring his paintings, often inviting one to the house and consequently sparking jealousy in the other. We meet the poet Paul Eluard (a seemingly harmonious being prone to sudden tempers) and his first wife Nusch, with whom Picasso had an affair and Eluard knowingly turned a blind eye, and her sudden death which left Eluard heartbroken. Another poet we meet is Andre Breton who ends his friendship with Picasso disapproving of his Communist leanings.

And then, of course, there is Henri Matisse, older than Picasso whom the latter greatly admired (“Of all the artists Pablo knew and visited during the years I spent with him, no one meant quite as much to him as Matisse”), a painter for whom Gilot had a soft spot too. Picasso and Matisse often bought each other’s paintings (“Pablo had at least eight paintings by Matisse, of which he had bought perhaps three. The others he got from Matisse in exchange for paintings of his”). The section on Matisse is illuminating in terms of the topics discussed – Matisse’s mastery of colour which Picasso considered superior to Bonnard, as well as Matisse’s eye-opening insights on the generational gap between painters of various periods.

“You see, it’s very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows. Little by little, as one goes through life, one creates not only a language for himself, but an aesthetic doctrine along with it. That is, at the same time one establishes for himself the values that he creates, he establishes them, at least to a degree, in an absolute sense. And so it becomes all the more difficult for one to understand a kind of painting whose point of departure lies beyond one’s own point of arrival. It’s something that’s based on completely different foundations. When we arrive on the scene, the movement of painting for a moment contains us, swallows us up, and we add, perhaps, a little link to the chain. Then the movement continues on past us and we are outside it and we don’t understand it any longer.”

Plus, we are also given a taste of the cultural haunts that flourished at the time – Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp, Chez Marcel – where artists and writers often congregated for stimulating coffee, camaraderie, and conversations.

FRANÇOISE GILOT – NARRATOR, WRITER, ARTIST

We know that Françoise Gilot went on to become a successful artist in her own right post her leaving Picasso. Although she became a pariah in Paris after Picasso used his power and influence to halt her artistic ambitions (siding with Picasso, the art dealer Kahnweiler, for instance, terminated her contract), Gilot relocated to the US and met much success there.

In the last section of the book, Gilot writes, “At the time I went to live with Pablo, I had felt that he was a person to whom I could, and should devote myself entirely, but from whom I should expect to receive nothing beyond what he had given the world by means of his art.” Like Olga, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Dora Maar, Gilot loved Picasso to have spent a decade with him and bear him two children, although she wasn’t particularly inclined at the beginning towards motherhood. Unlike those three women in his life though, Gilot came across as his equal, a fact Picasso acknowledged towards the end – even after their relationship ended, he missed their intellectual conversations. Gilot was very much her own woman and did not require the kind of validation that those three women pined for, which means that she did not care about competing for Pablo’s attention. She wasn’t a doormat and fearlessly voiced her views and opinions, yet she did put up with Picasso’s abominable behaviour for the longest time, the kind of attitude and sexism that would definitely have been deemed unacceptable in the post #MeToo era – rages, tantrums, and insults, demeaning women and trying to control their lives for the sake of his massive ego.

Ultimately, the foundation of Gilot and Picasso’s relationship began to crumble as the years progressed; as her circumstances and priorities changed she longed for warmth and stability that Picasso with his advancing age, rampant sexism, and childish tantrums was unable to provide. Given that she went to live with Picasso at a very young age when she was just starting her career, she also philosophically considers her breakup with Picasso as essential however acrimonious…

Pablo had told me, that first afternoon I visited him alone, in February 1944, that he felt our relationship would bring light into both our lives. My coming to him, he said, seemed like a window that was opening up and he wanted it to remain open. I did, too, as long as it let in the light. When it no longer did, I closed it, much against my own desire. From that moment on, he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.

THEMES AND WRITING STYLE

Life with Picasso is about art and creativity, a vivid art history and cultural memoir, but also one that dwells on the themes of individuality, and independence and charting your own journey. It’s about women artists trying to come out of the shadows of their more famous male partners and finding their voice, a theme also explored in Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, and Lisa Tuttle’s My Death. But, it also throws a light on the concept of art monsters – can you separate the artist from the man, in Picasso’s case the genius from the bully?

In Life with Picasso, then, Gilot narrates an important, formative decade of her life with a piercing eye and a crystal clear, unsentimental writing style. Divided into seven sections, the book begins with her first meeting with Picasso and ends with their final break-up, their relationship is broadly depicted linearly, and yet within that framework the narrative flits between the past and present depending on the theme, period or people Gilot chooses to focus upon. Overall, it is to her credit that she paints a comprehensive portrait of Picasso’s complex persona, giving equal weight to his genius as an artist and his failings as a human with no one facet overwhelming the other. Brimming with a heady mix of captivating anecdotes on a range of famous art personalities and the essence of the creative process, Life with Picasso is a wonderful, immersive memoir, always surprising and never for a moment remotely dull. Highly recommended!