Griffin Oleynick and Anthony Domestico at Commonweal: We’re publishing these exchanges just about every two weeks—a compressed timeline that somehow seems like an eternity amid this summer’s news cycles. Thankfully, art offers its own distinct time signature. When we look at a painting or read a poem, we don’t escape from time, but we do experience it differently. Time contracts and dilates; it folds in and out; mere sequence becomes pattern, shape, meaning. “You are the music / While the music lasts,” as T. S. Eliot puts it. This temporal re-shuffling is one of the gifts of art, and it’s one that I’m especially appreciating during this frenetic summer.
Françoise Gilot’s 1964 memoir Life with Picasso begins by locating us in time: “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.” I enjoyed many things about this book, which recounts the tempestuous ten years that the young painter Gilot and the forty-years-older Picasso spent living and working and raising two children together in France. I loved the gossipy details: Picasso resents shopping for suits because it reminds him of his weirdly proportioned body (“You have a long, sturdy upper torso,” a tailor tactfully declares, “but you’re really a very small man”); Alice B. Toklas speaks “with an accent that sound[s] like a music-hall caricature of an American tourist reading from a French phrase book” and forces “rich and gooey” cakes upon Gilot so as to prevent her from talking too much with Toklas’s partner, Gertrude Stein.
The book, co-authored by Carlton Lake, is filled with interesting observations about art, from Gilot’s claim that underneath Cubism’s deconstructive surface is a deeper desire for a “kind of order” to Picasso’s assertion that “painting isn’t a question of sensibility; it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.” (This isn’t the only time Picasso equates masculine aggression with artistic genius.)
But most of all, I admired Gilot’s sense that, even in a time of great historical and personal tumult, life could be lived in and through art. Take the first meeting between Gilot, who ended up becoming an excellent painter herself, and Picasso. Everything is filtered through an aesthetic lens:
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.
This could be a moment out of Proust. Ray’s photograph leads Gilot to expect a certain kind of man. When these expectations aren’t met, she simply moves on to another aesthetic tradition to understand him. Style isn’t incidental to how we think and feel about others; it shapes how we think and feel about others.
In Life with Picasso, art mediates experience again and again. When Gilot meets Picasso’s secretary, she realizes that she’s already encountered him in “reproductions of drawings Picasso had made of him.” When she ventures into Picasso’s studio for the first time, she notices some flowers and a birdcage that she’s seen in a recent portrait he made of the Surrealist painter Dora Maar. When Gilot and Picasso visit Matisse, the older French painter declares his interest in making a portrait of Gilot: “she has a head that interests me,” he says. This leads the competitive Picasso to ask Gilot to move in with him. For Gilot, there’s an absolute porousness between living and painting.
When Life with Picasso was reissued in 2019, it was described as “a revealing precursor to the literature of #MeToo.” Indeed, Picasso was petulant, temperamental, and controlling. He demands that Gilot have a child—“You won’t know what it means to be a woman until you have a child”—and then pouts when his children make too much noise or demand attention. When he meets Gilot and is told she is an artist, he laughs: “Girls who look like that can’t be painters.” When she leaves him and takes up with another man at the book’s end, he spits out, “Anybody else will have all of my faults but none of my virtues. I hope it’s a fiasco, you ungrateful creature.” There’s a reason that Picasso tried to prevent the book’s publication with three separate lawsuits.
And yet to describe this book as solely a record of Picasso’s monstrousness is to ignore the more complicated history. Gilot became an accomplished painter in part because of the exhilarating conversations and real support she (occasionally) had from Picasso in their early years together. For stretches, he took her seriously as an artist—a gift that survived the relationship’s many curses. Picasso modeled for Gilot how, in good and bad ways, a life might burn with the intensity of art.
Gilot ends her memoir describing how, after she left him, Picasso cut off all contact: “But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.” Gratitude is a strange note on which to end this complex and fascinating book. What were you grateful for in your reading of Life with Picasso, Griffin? And how did it prime you for Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse?
More here.
