Carlton Lake

Françoise Gilot

Françoise Gilot's candid memoir remains the most revealing portrait of Picasso written, and gives fascinating insight into the intense and creative life shared by two modern artists. Françoise Gilot was in her early twenties when she met the sixty-one-year-old Pablo Picasso in 1943. Brought up in a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, who had sent her to Cambridge and the Sorbonne and hoped that she would go into law, the young woman defied their wishes and set her sights on being an artist. Her introduction to Picasso led to a friendship, a love affair, and a relationship of ten years, during which Gilot gave birth to Picasso’s two children, Paloma and Claude. Gilot was one of Picasso’s muses; she was also very much her own woman, determined to make herself into the remarkable painter she did indeed become. Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in 1961, is about Picasso the artist and Picasso the man. We hear him talking about painting and sculpture, his life, his career, as well as other artists, both contemporaries and old masters. We glimpse Picasso in his many and volatile moods, dismissing his work, exultant over his work, entertaining his various superstitions, being an anxious father. But Life with Picasso is not only a portrait of a great artist at the height of his fame; it is also a picture of a talented young woman of exacting intelligence at the outset of her own notable career.

Life with Picasso

Sarah Christine Gill

She had a long, narrow, somewhat decadent-looking face framed by an ornate coiffure that reminded me of Rigaud's portrait of Louis XIV in the Louvre. 

Before my first afternoon visit to the Rue des Grands-Augustins, I telephoned Picasso in the morning to make an appointment. I arrived on time, wearing a black velvet dress with a high white lace collar, my dark-red hair done up in a coiffure I had taken from a painting of the Infanta by Velázquez. Picasso let me in. His mouth open. ‘Is that the kind of costume you put on to learn dropped engraving?' he finally asked. 

Certainly not, I told him. But since I was sure he hadn't the slightest intention of teaching me engraving, I had put on the costume that seemed most appropriate to the real circumstances. In other words, I was simply trying to look beautiful, I said. 

He threw up his hands. 'Good God! What nerve! You do everything you can to make things difficult for me. Couldn't you at least pretend to be taken in, the way women generally do? If you don't fall in with my subterfuges, how are we ever going to get together?' He stopped. He seemed to be reconsidering his criticism. Then he said, more slowly, You're right, really. It's better that way, with the eyes open. But you realize, don't you, that if you don't want anything but the truth-no subterfuges you're asking to be spared nothing. Broad daylight is pretty harsh. He paused, as though he felt unsure. Well,' he said, ´we've got plenty of time. We’ll see.

DURING THAT WINTER and spring of 1944 I worked harder than ever at my painting. Sometimes whenI went to the Rue des Grands- AugustinsI would take a drawing or a painting to show Pablo. He never gave me any direct criticism. His instruction was always in the form of general principles: for example, You know, we need one tool to do one thing, and we should limit ourselves to that one tool. In that way the hand trains itself. It becomes supple and skilful, and that single tool brings with it a sense of measure thatis reflected harmoniously in everything we do. The Chinese taught that for a water-colour or a wash drawing you use a single brush. In that way "erything 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 too, fashion than if you had used brushes of different sizes. Then, too, forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.' 

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