How Picasso’s Muse Became a Master (original) (raw)

Her appeal to Picasso seems obvious. She was young, unattached, beautiful. But so were many girls. More unusual, she was confident, opinionated, unafraid. “I knew that here was something larger than life, something to match myself against,” she writes, like a scrawny prizefighter training to take on the champ.

Picasso called her “the woman who says no.” He was funny, charming, expansive—she reports that they spoke to each other with total understanding—but pretty soon she had an idea of what she might be getting into. She describes arriving one evening at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, only for Picasso to shout that he would rather be at a brothel. Gilot’s strategy in ugly situations, and there were many, is to insulate herself with irony. Coolly, she calls his bluff: he doesn’t even like whores; he is only trying to test her. But she is wary. For months, she stays away, and goes back only “as a birthday present to myself.” This is sweet, and startling—one of the few times that Gilot sounds as young as she was.

Their courtship was a playful battle for dominance; each is constantly trying to throw the other off rhythm. When she doesn’t resist his kisses, he declares himself disgusted by her forwardness. He tries to provoke her by alluding to his sadomasochistic habits in bed, but she is unimpressed: “I told him, the principle of the victim and the executioner didn’t interest me. I didn’t think either of those roles suited me very well.” The matter of sex is finally settled during a nude modelling session; afterward, he treats her with “extraordinary gentleness,” and that contrast, softness after so much sparring, produces the book’s most beautiful line: “From then on, he became a person.”

Few others saw him that way. When Gilot first went to his studio, she found it to be “the temple of a kind of Picasso religion, and all the people who were there appeared to be completely immersed in the religion—all except the one to whom it was addressed.” He had been famous for forty years, and when the war ended he became a cultural totem, the mascot of liberated France. (He then joined the Communist Party, compounding his notoriety.) Gilot understood how Picasso, who fed on this celebrity, was also isolated by it. Early in their courtship, he took her on a pilgrimage to the Bateau-Lavoir, the dilapidated Montmartre building where he got his start alongside Max Jacob and Apollinaire—the last time he truly had a private life. He complained that he nourished the public (“like a chicken”) but had no one to nourish him. “I never told him so,” she writes, “but I thought that I could.”

“Oriental City II,” from 1977.Courtesy Várfok Gallery

There is a carnival atmosphere to Picasso’s charmed world, and it can be wonderful. We see Matisse making his cutouts (and flirting with his secretary), and meet Braque, who stands up to his old collaborator by hosting him for a visit in which he shows off his paintings but refuses to offer any lunch. Picasso himself is a kind of magician, inventing things out of thin air: a new lithography technique, special glazes for his pioneering pottery, sculptures made from toy cars and scrap metal.

Then there is Gilot’s private Picasso. He is superstitious, terrified of flying and of getting his hair cut, and must be coaxed, like a child, through trivial decisions: how many tickets to get for the bullfight? Should he take a little trip? (The tyrannical moods are childish, too—tantrums.) When Gilot is pregnant with Claude, Picasso doesn’t want her to see a doctor, which he is sure will bring “bad luck.” Instead, he sends her to be analyzed by Lacan.

Gilot is Picasso’s amanuensis, his interlocutor and interpreter, his money manager, his model. When they move house, it is she who loads and unpacks the car. He stays up late, so she does, too, and she is out of bed first thing in the morning to start the fires at home and in his studio, since “he had very suavely made the point that it was only when I built the fires that the place ever got warm enough.” More difficult is the situation with his other women, whom he arrays before her like an obstacle course: fragile, resentful Dora Maar; Marie-Thérèse, who writes him loving letters daily, and, when she and Gilot meet, warns her not to “take my place.” (Gilot tells her not to worry: “I only wanted to occupy the one that was empty.”) It would be a stretch to say that Gilot expresses solidarity with her predecessors, but she does feel sympathy, even for Olga, half mad with bitterness, who ambushes her and Picasso on vacation and trails them in the street, shouting curses. At the same time, Gilot analyzes them like a general reviewing lost battles, looking for their vulnerabilities so that she can seal up her own.

There’s no way to know, of course, if all this happened as Gilot says it did. (Lake said that she had “total recall,” a claim that tends to raise rather than allay suspicions.) She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute. The bigger mystery is Gilot; the self in her self-portrait can be hard to see behind the lacquered irony and reserve. She goes along with Picasso’s more outlandish demands and schemes, but, she tells us, “not at all for his reasons.” Her dissent is withering and sarcastic rather than furious; like other women of her generation who pointedly overlooked the bad behavior of their husbands, she is concerned with preserving her own dignity. When she is seven months pregnant with Paloma, her doctor (an obstetrician this time) tells her that she is in danger; the labor has to be induced immediately. Alas, this is inconvenient for Picasso, who is due to be at a World Peace Conference elsewhere in Paris the same day. After much grumbling, he decides that his driver will take him there and then come back for Gilot. Even in a book full of ghoulish caprice, this incident stands out, but Gilot treats it with an eye roll. What really bothered her, she says, is what Picasso wore when he finally showed up at the hospital: ripped, tatty pants. Then she launches into a long complaint about his inability to buy new clothes. This may be a standard case of displacement, Gilot directing onto his attire an anger fuelled by the man’s egomania. But she had devoted her life to him. The least he could do for her was put on a decent suit.

When “Life with Picasso” first came out, this kind of anecdote did not go over well with Picasso’s supporters, who denounced Gilot as a spiteful ingrate and rushed in to avenge the great man. (He had tried to block the publication, and afterward he never saw Claude or Paloma again.) “Françoise Gilot had the good fortune to be loved by the most inventive and creative artist of this century—perhaps of all time,” John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, wrote, in a caustic review of her “wretched book.” (Later, they became friends.) Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, met Picasso just after his breakup with Gilot, and published a biography of the artist that portrayed Gilot as a self-absorbed villain who didn’t have “the least idea of the tension under which a creative man must work.”

Critics like these readily acknowledged that Picasso did harm to those around him, but their feeling was that genius ultimately justified transgression. Art demanded sacrifice—particularly with someone like Picasso, whose life fed his work. (Discussing Picasso’s hatred of Olga, Richardson wrote of the “rage, misogyny, and guilt that fueled his shamanic powers”; you can practically smell the spilled blood.) Now the popular view is at the opposite pole. Last year, the Australian feminist comedian Hannah Gadsby, in her Netflix special “Nanette,” performed an incendiary bit about Picasso’s treatment of women, quoting some damning lines from Gilot’s memoir and lamenting in particular the case of Marie-Thérèse. (“Picasso fucked an underage girl. That’s it for me, not interested.”) Next to these trampled lives, Gadsby couldn’t care less about the art.

And lives were trampled. Picasso died, at the age of ninety-one, in 1973. In 1977, Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself; eight years later, Jacqueline Roque, Gilot’s successor and Picasso’s second wife, shot herself in the head. Paulo, his son with Olga, drank himself to death, in 1975, and Paulo’s son, Pablito, killed himself by swallowing bleach when he was barred from attending his grandfather’s funeral. This is a body count out of Greek tragedy.

“Aspects of Femininity,” from 1994Courtesy Várfok Gallery

Yes, others may think, women’s lives were destroyed, but at least they got to be immortalized in the process. Gilot writes that Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar themselves both felt this way, and so did Fernande Olivier, his first love. This spring, Gagosian mounted a show called “Picasso’s Women,” with the apparent goal of rescuing Picasso’s wives and lovers from their status as victims and returning them to their perch as muses to a genius. The exhibition copy, buffed with pinup prose (“blonde Venus Marie-Thérèse . . . Jacqueline Roque, the devoted, romantic beauty”), argues that Picasso’s depictions of each woman captured “not how she presents herself to the world, but how she feels inside.” The show featured “Le Rêve” (1932), the lovely, serene portrait of Marie-Thérèse that Steve Wynn put his elbow through a dozen years ago; if you look closely, you can see that half of her sleeping face looks like a phallus. This was how she felt inside?

But it’s hard to make the case that caring about the lives of these women means throwing a cloth over their painted faces and walking away. It may be that the more you know the harder you will look, and look, and look. You can look forever and still wonder what it is that you see.

Gilot’s memoir shines, now, as a proto-feminist classic, the tale of a young woman who found herself in the thrall of a dazzling master and ended up breaking free. But it is also a love story, and a traditional one. The contradiction is right there in the book. “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,” she writes toward the end. “I consented to make my life with him on those terms.” Where is the fierce, proud girl we met at Le Catalan? Gilot explains it simply: love changed her terms. She wanted “more human warmth” from Picasso—to be a family. (He responded by having another affair.) Unseemly pain begins to well up. She admits to crying all the time, “something terribly feminine and—for me—most unusual.”

How did Gilot break free? It helped that she had a fling with a suitor her own age, who didn’t understand why she was going crazy over such a mean old man. And she had her art. Late in her book comes this perverse, delectable scene:

Once as I was working at a painting that had been giving me a great deal of trouble, I heard a small timid knock at the door.

“Yes,” I called out and kept on working. I heard Claude’s voice, softly, from the other side of the door.

“Mama, I love you.”

I wanted to go out, but I couldn’t put down my brushes, not just then. “I love you too, my darling,” I said, and kept at my work.

A few minutes passed. Then I heard him again, “Mama, I like your painting.”

“Thank you, darling,” I said. “You’re an angel.”

In another minute, he spoke out again. “Mama, what you do is very nice. It’s got fantasy in it but it’s not fantastic.”

That stayed my hand, but I said nothing. He must have felt me hesitate. He spoke up, louder now. “It’s better than Papa’s,” he said.

I went to the door and let him in.

The art monster versus the mother: this struggle is familiar to many women. What comes through here is the strength of Gilot’s ego. “It’s got fantasy in it but it’s not fantastic”: What child says that? One who has been trained to flatter his mother.

For all that, she was worried about what Picasso would do without her. Who would light his morning fire? A friend told her to snap out of it; he would find another woman. And he did: Jacqueline Roque, who presented herself as the submissive mirror image of Gilot. When the new couple moved away from Vallauris, Gilot went back to her old house and found nearly everything—her paintings, letters, books—gone. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, who had begun to represent her, dropped her, too. But, she writes, she was grateful to Picasso for totally severing their past: “In doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive.” A decade later, she got the chance to prove it. She dedicated her book to him. ♦