Life with Picasso

Now nearly halfway through Françoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso, and it’s a beautifully strange book, one you can get lost in.

It could have been a disaster. Tell-all books by ex-spouses about celebrities are often nothing but unsanitary vindictiveness. Furthermore, Gilot met Picasso at a time when he had already been world-famous for three decades. That’s often a boring period of life to read about: picking up prizes, appearing on magazine covers, meeting with other celebrities. Much more interesting are the initial obscurity and then the breakthrough moment.

What saves the book from disaster, above all, is that Gilot is a very interesting person in her own right. She has an unusual way of looking at most things. From early in the book, one enjoys listening to her own thoughts as well as to her Picasso anecdotes.

The most striking thing about the book is how many articulate thoughts Picasso had, not only about his own work but about life more generally. We get a taste of his abundant energy, which was always combined somewhat paradoxically with a very sedentary lifestyle. (He didn’t leave Paris after the 1940 invasion out of sheer inertia, he tells Gilot.)

We do meet other celebrities in the book, of course: de Beauvoir/Sartre, Malraux, Eluard, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas. Gilot and Toklas loathed one another; Gilot also found Sartre too “didactic,” and disliked Malraux’s nervous tic. Hemingway is presented as a joker who left a case of hand grenades at Picasso’s studio immediately after the liberation.

We get a look at the objects scattered inside Picasso’s studio, and a sense of his everyday life of his period. We also hear about Picasso as a seducer; in Gilot’s case it was a surprisingly classy job, though Picasso’s typical cruelty would come later.

Unfortunately, we also get an unappealing (and unsurprising) picture of Picasso as a horrible manipulator too easily amused by playing people off against each other, including old friends who had helped him in tough times. His treatment of the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler is especially petty.

I’d been meaning to read this for several years, but it kept slipping my mind. Finally I found a copy at the Philadelphia Art Museum on that early April day when Tim Morton and I went over to look at H. Rousseau’s “Carnival Evening.”