I’ve been complaining about the title of “Life with Picasso” since I started reading it. At first I wanted it called “Life with Pablo,” to underscore the intimacy between the author—Françoise Gilot—and Pablo, her lover of ten years with whom she had two children. About halfway through the book, I started calling it “Pablo’s Tantrums,” given the number of times Pablo flew off the handle and spewed vitriol at whomever was close by—usually Françoise. But in the end I decided the title was perfect: it clarified the distance in the relationship, and it hinted that Pablo’s legacy was his only love.
When Françoise first meets Pablo at a Paris restaurant in 1944, she’s twenty-one years old, studying to be a painter. Pablo is sixty-two and has two ex-wives, both obsessed with him (he laughs as they wrestle over him on the floor of his atelier one day), and a son older than Françoise. He’s a scoundrel of the highest order and a ball of creative energy with a youthful spirit, an entourage, and a red Hermés suitcase stuffed with Francs.
Françoise enters Pablo’s life with a professional interest in his work, but—despite his awkward seductions—she soon develops a desire to get closer. She’s hesitant, not wanting to become another “failed” ex-wife. She knows Pablo is a hurricane; she knows he won’t let anyone get too close, but she can’t pass up the opportunity to be with him.
That’s the central struggle: she tries to get close, he backs away. So she recedes and he pursues her again. For Pablo, everything is a game to either be won or, in the worst case, stalemated. He’s the provocateur and conqueror, and no relationship is sacred. So it’s frustrating to watch Françoise dedicate her life to a monster for so many years. She has two children to him, she assists him in the studio late into every night, she keeps his books and she tends his fires. While she learns how to stand up to him at times, the relationship still tears her apart and destroys her health.
But there’s a lighter side to this book. While Françoise spends much of the time describing how Pablo took advantage of her innocence, his fame, his art dealers, other women, and everyone else, she also gives fascinating insight into his working style. In the studio, he’s full of valuable design principles:
“The Chinese taught that for a watercolor or a wash drawing you use a single brush. In that way everything you do takes on the same proportion. Harmony is created in the work as a result of that proportion, and in a much more obvious fashion than if you had used brushes of different sizes. Then, too, forcing yourself to use restricted means is a sort of restraint that liberates invention.”
He hands her a piece of blue paper, a cigarette wrapper, a match, and a piece of cardboard, and asks her to make a composition with them. “It’s incredible the number of possibilities one has with three or four elements,” she says—to which Pablo replies, “I’ve always believed that one should work below their means. If you can handle ten elements, handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery.”
Pablo and Françoise visit Matisse often, and Matisse delivers wise art historical commentaries. He is the levelheaded Buddhist, and one of the few people Pablo doesn’t vilify. On one visit, Matisse flips through a book of reproductions of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionist paintings:
“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 based on completely different foundations … as far as these new painters are concerned, I think it is a mistake to let oneself go completely and lose oneself in a gesture. Giving oneself up entirely to the action of painting-there’s something in that that displeases me enormously … The unconsciousness is so strong in us that it expresses itself in one fashion or another. Whatever we do, it expresses itself in spite of us. So why should we deliberately hand ourselves over to it?”
The book pairs philosophical art commentaries with scenes of vicious psychological abuse. It’s full of fiery bullfights and private beaches in southern France, discussions of Cubism and discussions of childbearing. It’s an intimate, candid biography of an aging Pablo Picasso, and I recommend it to admirers of art and struggle and the struggle of art.
