a weird scene from Gilot’s book

The closer Picasso feels to Gilot, the more he wants to show her scenes from his past life.

The weirdest scene of them all is when they return to Picasso’s former marital residence where he had lived with Olga, his Russian ballerina wife and mother of his first child.

It’s 1947, and it turns out that no one has entered the house since 1942. Due to various legal complexities, Picasso and Olga were unable to get an actual divorce (under French law at the time, marriages between two foreigners could end only according to the laws of the husband’s home country, and Franco had more or less ended divorce in Spain by then). So, they’re technically still married and the home is joint property, but for whatever reason, neither Olga nor Picasso has been in to look after the place.

Five years’ worth of dust covers everything. There are priceless Matisse paintings on the wall. Someone had left in a hurry… there is a five-year-old breakfast on the table, and in the bedroom of Picasso’s son, toy cars are still scattered all over the floor.

But then they enter a tiny storeroom, the weirdest scene of all. Picasso was apparently a bit of a pack rat, so there is all kinds of sheer junk in the storeroom. But mixed in with the junk is a watercolor by Seurat, notes from Picasso’s maid mixed in with important early correspondence between Picasso and Apollinaire and Max Jacob, as well as a 17th century Italian puppet, and– a box filled with gold pieces!

They then open a closet. It contains a half-dozen of Picasso’s old suits, eaten down to transparent fibrous outlines by hungry moths.

As Gilot describes the house:

“The chance accumulation of so many unrelated objects, end to end, had achieved a result that was more Picasso than anything he could have put together consciously. In fact all these objects seemed so obviously and intimately related to his work that I had the impression of having entered the cave of a very familiar Ali Baba, but an Ali Baba who would have preferred looting an alchemist’s shop…”