It was perhaps an anxious holiday in some ways, for although fauns appeared as soon as Picasso stepped on classic ground (he etched some, piping to ecstatic maenads) and although he stayed well into the autumn, it does not seem from most of his work that the Mediterranean or the recovered sun had anything like their full effect. Apart from other causes, the great picture was waiting for him in Paris. But he did enjoy himself some of the time, and he did travel inland, to the remoter Provence behind the Luberon, to the village of Ménerbes in the Vaucluse, across the valley from Gordes and not far from the Sorgues of his days with Eva. Here, right in the village, stood a house that a man in Paris had offered him for one of his still-lives: Brassaï’ speaks of a color-merchant in a blue suit who haunted the studio during the war, urging Picasso to make just such an exchange, and although there are some differences of detail—Brassaï mentions a park—it was probably the same man. In any case Picasso accepted the house at Menerbes: it is said that he did so without having seen it; it is certain that having seen it he liked it and that he at once gave it to Dora Maar.
Returning north in late October he made the acquaintance of Fernand Mourlot, who had the finest lithographic workshop in Paris, and he plunged straight back into the medium he had used with such success in the twenties.
He had made a number of prints by the end of November, when Françoise Gilot, finding that she could not do without him and having persuaded herself that her continuing absence “probably would not restore his deteriorating relationship with Dora Maar,” came to the studio again, and there she noticed that some of these lithographs had direct reference to her.
As portraits they were not flattering, but in fact he had missed her; and although he delighted in lithography, the warm workshop full of busy, skilful artisans, a refuge from his cold studio (fuel and many other things were still rationed) with its crowds of visitors, most of them idle, he was nevertheless lonely, particularly as there was no more Geneviève Laporte to come and drink tea with him on his bull’s hide. She had done with school, and some months earlier Picasso had helped her to realize her ambition of going to the United States, where she went to Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania.
He was therefore all the more pleased to see Françoise, who at this time certainly had the most fetching air of youth and freshness. Their relationship assumed a new quality, and when in February, 1946, she broke an arm and decided to recuperate in the south he took rooms for her in a house at Golfe-Juan belonging to a friend of his, the aged master-engraver Louis Fort, who had printed many of Picasso’s illustrations for Vollard.
Françoise traveled down with her grandmother, with whom she was living; but when they reached the coast she left the old lady at Antibes and with a former school-friend she went to Golfe-Juan, where Louis Fort taught her something about engraving. Picasso soon arrived to stay for a while; he got rid of the school-friend by offering to rape her; and before he drove Françoise back to Paris he took her to see Matisse at Vence. Although he was very poorly, Matisse could now paint for a few hours a day, but when they came he was in bed, cutting out shapes in colored paper for his immense, joy-filled collages. The two men talked about painting, colors, and their interaction, and at one point Matisse said, “Well, in any case, if I made a portrait of Françoise, I should make her hair green.”
Before the return journey and during the course of the drive Picasso said that he wanted Françoise to come and live with him. She demurred on the grounds that it would mean leaving her grandmother, and in this she was supported by Marcel, the chauffeur (they all sat on the front seat) whose view was that she should be given time to think it over, and that at this stage Picasso should let her go home.
Another reason for not living with him that Gilot brought forward was his continuing connection with Dora Maar. Picasso assured her that it was over, that Dora Maar understood it to be over, and that she would say so herself. He pressed Françoise to go with him to her flat: she was unwilling, but eventually did so, and she was present at a scene as ugly and cruel as can be imagined, in the course of which Dora Maar, having been compelled to state that the liaison was finished, said to Picasso, “You’ve never loved anyone in your life. You don’t know how to love.” Françoise describes it in loving detail, asserts that she was very much upset, and gives the date of her going to live with Picasso as towards the end of May, 1946.
From this time until their final parting seven years later Picasso’s life is fully documented: the vagueness about his movements, the contradictory evidence about pictures that he did not date himself, the confusion that hangs over much of his earlier life and work, now appears to vanish; here is Picasso living day by day, working and talking about his work, and the biographer seems to be in possession of the most precious material he could hope for. But what is the value of the document?
The French translation of Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake was published in 1965: it had been known that she was busy with her memoirs and those who disliked Picasso eagerly bought the book; they were disappointed—it was not an obviously vicious attempt at destruction, there were few scandalous revelations, and the general impression, after a superficial reading, was that although the book handled the man with some severity it treated the artist with respect. His friends, however, and those who read deeply in the hope of some closer understanding of the painter, were startled to find that the book was not about the Picasso they had known either in life or through his work but about a small man, ill-tempered, unkind, self-indulgent, and essentially weak, nothing like the Picasso who had painted the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” or “Guernica,” nothing like the man of whom Clive Bell said, “Two people I have known from whom there emanated simply and unmistakably a sense of genius: one is Picasso.… It has been my fortune to be friends with a number of very clever people: Maynard Keynes, the cleverest man I ever met, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Raymond Mortimer, Jean Cocteau. None of them cast the peculiar spell I am trying to characterise. The difference between these very clever people and the less clever, between Roger Fry and me for instance, was it seemed one of degree rather than kind.… But Virginia [Woolf] and Picasso belonged to another order of beings; they were of a species distinct from the common; their mental processes were different from ours; they arrived at conclusions by ways to us unknown.”
The most disappointing parts are those many long passages which purport to give Picasso’s views on art in his own words; for the wearisome, didactic voice that drones on and on is that of a stranger. The Picasso the world knew had many faults, but he was never, never dull: Gilot and Lake’s Picasso is a bore.
The form of the book may be partly responsible for this. Life with Picasso was written down by a journalist in the cosy, folksy style usual in lives “as told to,” and the presentation of Picasso as a tedious, theorizing man is less the result of malice than of incomprehension, self-complacency, and want of respect for a mind far beyond the reach of a commonplace understanding.
Ill-will there was, however, particularly towards the end of the book, but it serves rather to give a picture of the woman Françoise Gilot had become by middle age than to discredit Picasso: as The Times said, this “inflated, waspish, tritely-written narrative.… turns out to be much more of a ‘revelation’ of the character and mentality of its author than of the great man whose name is involved. It would not have seemed surprising had it been entitled Life with Françoise.”
Distasteful though the book may be, it contains factual material that can be safely used, while some of the opinions, remarks on painting, and aesthetic judgments do no doubt contain a certain amount of Picasso; but I shall not quote Gilot and Lake for any of these, nor for Picasso’s character, unless there is corroborative evidence from other sources.
But in 1946 Françoise Gilot was not yet sour: few people would have called her a particularly affectionate, warm-hearted, or sensitive young woman, but she had a splendid blaze of youth, and in those days she could be cheerful, even gay. No
one who has seen that well-known photograph of her walking up the beach in a long dress and a fringed straw hat with Picasso behind, holding a huge umbrella over her, is likely to forget the triumphant grace of her movement or her radiant young happiness.
Her unusual looks, much helped by her asymmetric eyes and what Matisse had called her circumflex eyebrows pleased Picasso now more than they had before; and his new delight in her company showed itself in a fresh outburst of work. Until this time he had painted only two unimportant pictures of her, but soon after she came to live with him he made a number of drawings and lithographs, far kinder than those of the previous November, and then he began the portrait known as “La Femme fleur”: a delicate blue stem for her slim-waisted body, long pods for her arms, two round ripe fruit for her breasts, a sideways oval for her face, and dark green leaf-like processes for her hair; and on the oval heart of the flower there are her features, little more than the formal marks a child might make, but perfectly unmistakable. It is an exquisite thing, in fresh, delicate colors, and it says a great deal about his notion of her then. And in the fruitful month of June he painted, among many other pictures, a big “Enlèvement d’Europe,” with a massive, highly-simplified, and sculptural woman, upright and slim-waisted, riding the red-eyed bull, guiding it with a firm hold on one of its horns: it was not his most successful picture, but it was his first important classical reference for a great many years.
In July, still enchanted with her and with his flowing work, he drove down with Françoise to Provence. It scarcely seems credible that the place he chose to take her to should be the house he had given Dora Maar at Ménerbes, but the fact is attested not only by Gilot but by some cheerful landscapes of the village. Quite apart from this the holiday began badly, since the town-bred Françoise had an exaggerated fear of the scorpions that swarmed in the house, and she resented the letters he received from Marie-Thérèse, giving news of the little household on the lle Saint-Louis. Presently she ran away: that is to say she walked along the highroad until Picasso’s car came up behind her. According to her account they prosed away to one another by the side of the road for a considerable space of time, with Picasso uttering such remarks as, “It’s up to us to build something together.” However that may be he induced her, perhaps without much difficulty, to come back to Ménerbes, and (says she) to have a baby.
At this point there is a conflict of testimonies: Gilot says that Picasso wanted her to have both this child and its successor in order “to bring you back to nature and put you in touch with the rest of the world.” Picasso told Geneviève Laporte that it was Gilot who wanted the children for reasons of her own; he did not. Whichever is right, the baby was soon on its way: but by this time they were on the coast again, at Golfe-Juan and then at Antibes; and at last Picasso’s holiday, his first true holiday since 1939, began in a splendid burst of joy.
The last painting he had made on the eve of war in 1939, the “Peche de nuit a Antibes,” showed the looming towers of the Grimaldi palace, or rather castle. Having suffered from long neglect and even more from the presence of troops, the great building had for many years been the local museum, housing a few Greek potsherds (Antibes was once Antipolis), the usual sad Roman remains in dusty cases, and some objects to do with Bonaparte—meager collections that did not nearly fill the rooms. But some time before this holiday a new curator had been appointed, Romuald Dor de La Souchere, a highly-cultivated man, a hellenist, who had fresh ideas about the function of a museum. Under his direction the castle had already housed the British Council’s exhibition of children’s drawings, and Picasso had come to see them when he was in Antibes in 1945 . Between that time and September 8, 1946, when La Souchère was on the beach at Golfe-Juan with Picasso and a group of friends, he had been urged to ask the great man to give the museum a picture. He felt all the awkwardness of making such a request, but nevertheless he brought it out. “Of course,” said Picasso, to whom these solicitations were unpleasantly familiar, “I’ll find a little drawing.” A chill fell on the conversation but presently Picasso, who for some time past had been complaining of his want of space in Louis Fort’s house, observed, “I’ve always wanted to paint really large surfaces, and I’ve never been given any.”
“Surfaces!” cried La Souchere. “You want surfaces? I can give you some.” He could indeed. The museum had a whole upper floor of vast rooms completely empty.
Picasso took him at his word, moved into this warm, sunlit, self-contained world, closed the door behind him, and began to paint. He was short of colors and materials—he had to use sheets of plywood and even fibro-cement instead of canvas, boat-paint and coarse brushes instead of the finest Paris could afford—but he had never had such a store of energy, and in these months until the winter cold, shut up from noon till nightfall, he poured out a great number of happy pictures. He had the sea at hand whenever he chose to emerge, good food at last—the Mediterranean was crammed with fish after these years of restrictions—and many friends. The Eluards came to see him; there was the sculptor Sima; the Cuttolis were close by; and once he was taken to Vallauris, a little pottery town a mile or so inland, to visit the kilns belonging to the Ramiés, a couple who were trying to revive the ancient industry, where he made a few small objects from the clay, leaving them to be fired.
He had plenty of company, plenty of amusement, and he could have had much more, but his mind was turned to his pictures entirely. “La Joie de vivre”—and that for once was Picasso’s own title—is perhaps the gayest of them all: among blue hills, with black to enhance them, goats with smiling human faces dance on a golden ground to the piping of a centaur and an ambiguous blue creature that has climbed on to a purple eminence, while a sort of femme-fleur capers in the middle with the sun caught in her hair and a boat sails by on the high blue sea. And there were many more, most of them great big pictures with horned demi-gods, satyrs, nymphs, and goats in profusion. This latest flowering of the ancient Mediterranean tradition has often been called Theocritan: but Theocritus never had Picasso’s sense of fun, and since he wrote in the crabbed Doric his verse is necessarily Greek to most people of today, whereas Picasso’s language is direct and timeless, legible to one and all; and as he said later, speaking of Antibes, “I did what I could there, and I did it with pleasure, for then at least I felt that I was working for the people as a whole.”
By no means all the pictures were idyllic pastorals, although it is they that give the general tone to the museum; there are also grave still-lives, some of them very much larger than any he had painted hitherto, but all filled with a sanguine harmony—here there is none of the brooding introspection or latent threat of the war years, no edge of madness. Several have to do with sea-urchins, and in one picture the urchins are combined with a figure, that of an owl perched on the back of a chair.
It is a scops owl, the kind to be seen on Athena’s shoulder: it comes to the south of France every spring, a familiar little bird, often living in the village trees; this one had got into the castle, had hurt itself, and had been brought to Picasso, who, having dressed its wounds, tamed it. That is to say, it lost all fear of him and would bite his finger. He was much attached to the bird, however, and in time it grew more amiable, perching on his shoulder with every appearance of affection. He drew the fierce, proud little creature, painted and modeled it; and now, though it was buried long ago, it is at least as immortal as bronze.
There were still other pictures—fishermen, the woman who sold sea-urchins, some highly geometrical yet curiously light nudes, one of which, like the owl and urchins, shows what looks like the wood-graining technique that he had learned so long ago from Braque but which is in fact the true grain of the ply either covered by a transparent coat, like a stain, or left bare. And there were many, many drawings, as pure in their line as anything he had ever done. All these he left at the museum when at last the winter drove him back to Paris. He did not exactly give them—he hated parting with his work, and he grew very testy indeed whenever i
t was suggested that he should make a formal donation—but there they remained in a kind of vacuum of ownership, and there they still remain in their perfect setting, an unexampled expression of what may well have been the happiest months of his life.
For Picasso Paris now meant lithography and Mourlot’s workshop; but after so long an absence he had first to attend to many things and to see his friends—Braque, for one. He took Françoise with him to Braque’s house, where his attempt at forcing an invitation to lunch was defeated by his friend’s determination not to yield to pressure: a humiliating incident that she relates in detail. Then there were the Eluards, Joan Rebull and many other Catalans, Dora Maar. With few exceptions he never lost touch with his former mistresses, in spite of the frightful scenes that often marked their parting. Even Olga remained in a kind of contact, at least by letter, and he never dismissed her from his mind. Françoise Gilot, a great imputer of motives, interprets this as an insatiable desire for possession, an unwillingness to allow any victim to escape: another explanation is that Picasso had a great capacity for friendship, that he was a friend as well as a lover, and that when the lover evaporated the friend remained. He and Dora Maar were most companionable after their break, abidingly fond of one another; and he was with her that November when they learned of the sudden death of Nusch—a shattering brain-hemorrhage that struck her when she was alone, Eluard being in Switzerland, and that killed her in a few hours.