Memoirs of Picasso: four characters in search of an artist

Pablo Picasso inspired four memoirs, published between 1933 and 1964, by Jaime Sabartes, his oldest Catalan companion; Fernande Olivier and Françoise Gilot, his long-time, live-in French lovers; and Brassaï, the noted Hungarian photographer. These writers, whose viewpoints range from reverence to hostility, attempt to capture Picasso’s elusive, quicksilver, unmistakable genius. Connected by rivalry and animosity, their conflicts with Picasso and each other could be fierce.

Torn between focusing on Picasso and telling their own story, each memoir has a strong element of self-interest and sometimes reveals as much about the author as the subject. These writers benefited from knowing a great artist, and relied on Picasso’s prestige and fame to publish their own works. But they also felt stifled by the overwhelming character who had a profound impact on their lives. These complementary memoirs of Picasso are valuable sources for his biographers, who correct the errors and establish the truth.

They describe Picasso’s studios and phases of his art, narrate important events in his life, portray his friends, illuminate the culture in which he lived and emphasise his personal idiosyncrasies as well as his creative achievement. The memoirs compete with each other while trying to present the most accurate and authoritative view of Picasso. Fernande and Sabartés are devoted and self-effacing, Brassaï helpful and congenial, Françoise bitter and angry. By placing the memoirs in the context of the authors’ lives, we can read them as they were written: not as isolated works but in relation to each other.

In Picasso and His Friends (1933), Fernande Olivier, who lived with Picasso from 1905 to 1911, says very little about her own background. Her parents made artificial flowers and she had a brief unhappy marriage when she was 17. In fact, she was illegitimate, and forced to marry the man who’d seduced her and then beat her. After a miscarriage, she ran away, and became a promiscuous artists’ model and amateur painter. Fernande (1881-1966), beguiling and affectionate, had reddish hair and green eyes. She describes herself, despite her tragic past, as “tall, full of life, optimistic, cheerful and confident.”

Like Jethro’s daughter meeting Moses at the well in Botticelli’s painting, she met Picasso at the outdoor fountain of the Bateau Lavoir, the long, narrow artists’ quarters named by Max Jacob after the Seine laundry boats. “One thundery evening,” she recalls, “he was holding a tiny kitten in his arms, and he held it out to me, laughing and blocking my path. I laughed too, and he took me to see his studio,” — and she replaced the kitten in his arms. The lively, short, randomly-ordered chapters in her memoir emphasise their extreme poverty, and the appearance and character of their friends, especially Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. She loved the vie bohème with the group of poor but talented young French and Spanish artists. She’s self-effacing, quietly observes their brilliant conversations, but doesn’t take part in them.

Like most of Picasso’s friends and lovers, Fernande was unable to resist “his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, which gave him a sort of magnetism.” His shoulders were broad and body sturdy, his legs were shapely but unfortunately short.

She liked him physically, but was horrified by his lack of personal cleanliness. He dressed like a workman and wore espadrilles and plumber’s overalls (decades before the hippies adopted that outfit), which clashed violently with his red-spotted shirt and bright tie. Morbidly jealous of her past lovers when she’d been a model, he didn’t trust her and asserted complete control of her body. He would not allow her to work or go out of the house alone and, holding a net bag, he did all the shopping.

Moody and silent, withdrawn and absorbed in his work, he revealed little of himself, though like many artists he had a weakness for flattery. Despite her love and her inspiration as a model, Fernande could never really make him happy. He had a morbid fear of illness, was terrified of consumption, and kept to a weird and rigid diet. She states, with some exaggeration, that he cooled his distracting lust by rejecting meat and wine: “for several years I never saw him drink anything but mineral water or milk, or eat anything but vegetables, fish, rice-pudding and grapes.”

Since his studio was barren, he replaced the real with the illusory, painted the furnishings on the wall and made the room look like a stage set. He loved animals and kept dogs, cats, birds, tortoise, tame mice — even a greedy and affectionate monkey. He keenly watched circus acrobats and boxing matches, liked the idea of striking blows but hated to be hit. He once got into a fight with a drunkard and punched him in the jaw. Braque fortunately separated them before the startled man could retaliate. In a sad, self-reflective passage, she observes that Picasso loved female attention, which “was often enough for him, for his natural laziness and his horror of complications frequently brought his affairs [like the one with Fernande] to an abrupt end.”

Fernande, who spent several summers with Picasso in the Spanish Pyrenees, is perceptive about his powerful attachment, despite his long years in Paris, to his native country. When they traveled to Barcelona, where he’d lived as a young artist, he came alive. He was less tormented there, and “it seemed that calm and serenity flowed into him as soon as he got back to Spain.” The Spanish atmosphere “was essential to him and gave him a quite special inspiration.” He liked Spanish guitarists, flamenco dancers and gypsies. To please him, Fernande was dressed and photographed in a stunning Spanish costume with a high lace mantilla and lavishly decorated shawl.

He loved everything to do with bullfights and matadors: the gleaming costumes, shouting crowds and mortal danger. He retained a strong Spanish accent, called shops that sold gateaux (cakes) gâtonerries, instead of pâtisseries, always pronounced the letter V as a Spanish B, and said bien, bien for viens, viens (come, come). Most important, she saw first-hand that Picasso’s concrete and exact cubism was not derived from Cézanne’s distant Aix-en-Provence, but inspired by the earthy colors and geometric forms of the square, sharply-angled houses in the typical Catalan mountain village of Horta del Ebro.

For a long time Picasso, who had a demonic desire to create, worked undisturbed through the calm silence of the night and slept till mid-afternoon. An intuitive and spontaneous painter, he could not explain his artistic intentions in words. Fernande knew him during his Blue Period, when he created the mournful, deeply moving and compassionate etching, The Frugal Repast (1904). He portrayed with stark realism a gaunt, starving, elongated El Greco-like couple seated at a wine shop table, overwhelmed by poverty and alcohol. A dark bottle of rough wine, an empty glass and plate, and a crust of bread are placed on the wavy tablecloth.

The man, with derby hat, darkened left eye, narrow nose, sunken cheeks, half-open mouth and stretched neck tendons, is seen in profile. One of his spidery, bony-fingered hands rests on the woman’s shoulder, the other along her right arm, but he provides no comfort. The wretched woman, seen in three-quarter view, wide-eyed and with pursed lips, rests her elbow on the table and her chin on her bent hand. She has surprisingly large, sagging, asymmetrical breasts, and gazes with a hopeless expression at the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Fernande saw Picasso evolve from the Blue and Rose Periods to the Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906), Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the cubism of 1909-12. Picasso never exhibited in the Salons; and though the dealers came to him, he hated to haggle about prices. Having found a market for Picasso’s works, the dealers were always nervous as he constantly changed styles.

In 1904 Picasso made one of his rare visits outside Spain and France when he was invited to a remote village in northern Holland. (He later traveled to Italy, Poland and England.) The sun-lover disliked the fog-bound country and was most impressed by the tall Dutch girls who towered over him. He bought some minor works, but they did not see the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

As her title suggests, Fernande describes Picasso’s friends as well as the artist himself. She was especially fond of his most lively and devoted companion, the Jewish poet Max Jacob, who sustained and encouraged Picasso during his years of struggle. She notes that Jacob “was already bald, with a nervous, evasive expression, high colour and a pretty, elegantly curved mouth, which gave a suggestion of delicacy and wit and malice as well.” To earn a bit of extra cash, the permanently impoverished Jacob posed as a palm-reader, fortune-teller, astrologer and clairvoyant.

She vividly describes how Jacob entertained his friends: “His trousers were rolled up to his knees to reveal two hairy legs. In shirt-sleeves, his collar wide-open to expose a chest forested with curly black hairs, with his bare-bald head and his pince-nez, he would dance with tiny steps and pointed toe, doing his best to be graceful and making us rock with laughter at his superb over-acting.” This tragic clown also had a dark side. He was addicted to ether and drugs, and Fernande discreetly hints at his unhappy homosexuality. His first experience with a woman disgusted him forever and his concierge, upset by his scandals, “would have preferred that he wasn’t… [dots in the original] she’d have liked him more normal.” Jacob felt right at home at fancy-dress parties which featured “every deviation from normal human behaviour.”

Matisse, older than the others, “was the wisest and sanest, despite the audacity of his work.” The handsome, talented, self-destructive Modigliani was charismatic and attractive: “young, strong, his beautiful Roman’s head compelled attention by the astonishing purity of his features.” The December 1908 banquet for the vain, charming and naïve painter Henri Rousseau began as a practical joke and ended as a sincere tribute with speeches and songs.

Fernande remarks that Rousseau “remembered that dinner with emotion for a long time afterwards, and the good man took it in good faith as homage paid to his genius.” He later told Picasso, who was influenced by African statues and masks: “We are the two great painters of the age. You paint in the ‘Egyptian’ style, I in the modern.” Except for the poor Jacob, most artists were not generous and helpful. Fernande states that the intensely competitive painters were jeering, mocking and malicious, cutting deep with a cruel and wounding wit: “Despite the solid affection which appeared to unite them, no sooner had one friend left — almost before he’d gone through the door — than the others would begin to tear him apart.”

Fernande had a keen rivalry with the painter Marie Laurencin, the lover and muse of Picasso’s great friend Apollinaire, and satirises her character and art. She found Laurencin attractive, intriguing and interesting as well as pretentious, parasitic and vicious: “Her very individual charm, made up of a childish awkwardness and a certain oddness and unreality, helped her… She quickly came to understand what she could get out of a group as original and advanced as this one.” As an artist, ”she wasn’t capable of great depth. Affectation combined, I think, with bogus naiveté, is the mainspring of some of the strange effects of her compositions.” Unlike Fernande, Marie ended up securely married to a German baron.

The feckless Apollinaire got Picasso into trouble a couple of times. A tall, heavy-set man with a huge head and prominent chin, rather like Oscar Wilde, he challenged someone who’d insulted him and deserved the severest chastisement. He named the willing Jacob as his second in the duel and Picasso stood by to help. But Apollinaire’s self importance disguised his terror. Since the combatants were not eager to fight, they apologised and the duel never took place.

More seriously, in August 1911 some wooden Iberian statues and stone masks, stolen from the Louvre, were indirectly acquired by Apollinaire and given to the innocent Picasso. They decided to get rid of the hot loot, carried it in a suitcase to the Seine, but couldn’t find the right time and place to dump it. Apollinaire foolishly gave it to a newspaper, which promised not to reveal the source but immediately published the great scoop. Apollinaire, interrogated by the police, confessed to everything. He implicated Picasso, who was summoned to appear in court and “almost out of his mind with fear.” Apollinaire spent a few days in Santé prison; and in the end the criminal charge, like the duel, was dropped.

Model and muse of Picasso during their years of hardship, Fernande did not share his prosperous years. Referring to his bourgeois and ultimately unhappy marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, she concludes that he allowed himself “through weakness and vanity, to be monopolised by a world which will always be alien to him.” He acquired cars and bought fur coats for his wife. Fernande, by contrast, was “growing old alone, with only her bitter memories as constant companions.” Though she was harshly rejected by Picasso and had an impoverished life, her memoir is surprisingly sympathetic and kind.

Despite her devotion and inspiration, John Richardson notes that Picasso would never have married Fernande (who was in any case still married): “she was too prone to miscarriages to be a mother, too indolent to be a good housewife, and too independent to submit to his tyranny.” She doesn’t mention that Picasso, jealous of her affairs, left her in 1912 and became the lover of her friend Eva Gouel, who died of cancer, aged 30. The suicide of his close friend Carles Casagemas in 1901, the death of Eva in 1915 and of the poet Apollinaire from influenza in 1918, all intimately connected to Picasso, had a profound emotional impact. They gave him a superstitious fear of death and a tragic view of life.

Richardson adds, “When her book came out, in 1933, Picasso was outraged by the invasion of his privacy and, prompted by his even more outraged wife, tried to stop publication.” They didn’t want the world to know that he’d once lived in squalor with a Jewish homosexual and an ill-bred, immoral woman. But Picasso later admitted that “Fernande had provided the most authentic picture of the period.” In 1956, deaf and crippled by arthritis, she promised not to publish anything more about Picasso while they were both alive and persuaded him to pay her a small pension.

The Catalan Jaime Sabartés (1881-1968) met the young Picasso in 1899 at Els Quatre Gats artists’ café in Barcelona. He worked as a journalist in Guatemala and Uruguay for thirty years, and then returned to Spain. Meanwhile, Picasso had grown wealthy and married Olga in 1918. In 1935, after the bitter breakup of his marriage, Picasso wrote a desperate letter: “I am alone in the house. You can imagine what has happened and what is still in store for me,” and asked Sabartés and his wife to live with him in his now desolate home in the rue La Boëtie.

Sabartés then became his lifelong sacrificial companion, consigliere, confidant, secretary, guardian and jailer. Despite the bitterness and resentment he caused by excluding many importunate visitors, he made sure that Picasso kept his most precious commodity, his time to work. When Brassaï criticized Sabartés’ memoir, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait (1948), for saying nothing about Picasso’s love affairs, he defended himself by stating, “For me, that subject is taboo. I don’t know what Picasso, in his heart of hearts, thinks of women and love.”

Picasso was small and delicate, with unassuming courtesy and a radiant smile. He had to surround himself with an entourage who believed in him and his art. He received or refused visitors, playing them off against each other in kingly fashion, and his astonishing personal magnetism lasted right into his nineties. He would feed on the love of women and the energy of his followers, which fuelled the night’s work in his studio. He saw the skull beneath the skin and always remained superstitious about the merest mention of death.

Sabartés writes that Picasso’s friends were enchanted by his mirada fuerte, his fierce stare. They followed his changing moods and he was “able, quite unconsciously, to raise or to depress the spirits of those around him.” Though Picasso was never seen with a book in his hand, he read widely before going to sleep, was familiar with literary classics and current works, and was influenced by the poetry of his friends, Apollinaire and Paul Eluard.

Sabartés was characteristically discreet about his bitter quarrel with and two-year estrangement from Picasso in 1936. He cryptically said that while living with Picasso for a year, “I had tried to help him when he would let me; and now I felt that I was in his way.” They met again in 1938 and Sabartés returned to Picasso’s service (though not to his house) for the rest of his life.

To celebrate their reconciliation, in October 1939 Picasso painted his Portrait of Jaime Sabartés as a Spanish hidalgo in the seventeenth-century costume of Velázquez. It is wildly different from his two tranquil, brooding Blue period portraits of Sabartés in 1901 and 1904. He is now dressed in a wide black bonnet with a flowing white plume, and a fan-like white ruff that extends around his neck from ear to ear. He has a high bald forehead and grotesquely distorted features. Both eyes are on the right side of his wide-nostril nose, which is twisted off the left side of his face, and accompanied by thick wavy asymmetrical lips and a goitrous double chin. His upside-down spectacles, with blurred black stars in the middle to emphasise his extreme myopia, rest on his bulging right cleft-cheek. The ugly yet unmistakable and affectionate portrait greatly pleased the sitter.

Picasso was passionate about bullfighting, retained his afición during his long exile in France, and was able to watch matadors perform in the ancient Roman arenas of Arles and Nîmes. Emphasising his poverty and ignoring the paintings he created after the corrida, he recalled his youthful days in Barcelona: “People think the bullfights in my pictures were copied from life, but they are mistaken. I used to paint them before the bullfight to make some money to buy the ticket.”

He also warned Sabartés, with more exaggeration, that the much smaller French bulls could not be killed in Provence, and that the danger was greatly reduced without the “moment of truth”: “Don’t think you’re going to see an honest-to-goodness bullfight. What they give us these days is fake stuff, clownish imitations, parlour tricks, and no more. This morning we saw the bulls — just little lambs, don’t you think? You can be sure that no blood will be spilled. The bullfighters of today know how to do everything with precision. Everything is measured, calculated. Emotion is out of style.”

After observing Picasso from the very start of his career, Sabartés was extremely perceptive about his creative genius. Picasso worked at night, with lights, in order to be alone and free from distractions. Sabartés found it incredible that the artist could have achieved so much in one lifetime, and Christian Zervos eventually catalogued 16,000 works (about 220 per year) in 33 volumes. Though extremely social and always in great demand, Picasso put his art before everything else. When war broke out in September 1939 he half-seriously exclaimed, “If it’s to annoy me that they make war they are carrying it too far. They might at least have told me.”

Like all Picasso’s friends and admirers, Sabartés praised the ardent, undulant and voluptuous form of his female bodies. Like Ezra Pound who wanted to “make it new,” Picasso was bent on defying artistic traditions and challenging prevailing fashions. He insisted: “Those which today we consider ‘masterpieces’ are those which departed most from the rules laid down by the masters of the period. The best works are those which show most clearly the ‘stigma’ of the artist who painted them.”

Sabartés explains: “He only wanted change; he feared that unless he was ready to sacrifice his most cherished inclinations, those which justified his very reason for being, he might fall into a rut.” Endlessly inventive, Picasso told his friend “a thousand times that he never found time to carry out an idea due to the fact that he immediately had others.” This is remarkably like Leonardo da Vinci’s observation: “Receiving the ceaseless flow of images from nature that, although intense and beautiful, vanish immediately, painters ceaselessly generate new images that by contrast endure.”

Always surprised and impressed by his magical Master, Sabartés concludes: “One might think some occult power guided his hand and caused it to follow, with the tip of his brush, some path of light which only he perceived, for the brush was never lifted from the wall, and the line which it left behind did not seem to proceed from an intention, but to emanate from the wall itself.”

Though Sabartés says that Picasso hated to interrupt his work and avoided moving at any cost, he was always restlessly shifting from place to place, and kept possession of his old estates after he’d abandoned them. He owned Boisgeloup in Normandy; and in the South, La Galloise near Juan-les-Pins, Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, La Californie in Cannes and Notre-Dame-de-Vie above Mougins. Sabartés was instrumental in establishing the Museo dedicated to Picasso’s work in Barcelona. Though always poor, Sabartés never sold any of the art that Picasso generously gave him and affectionately inscribed. Sabartés donated 574 extremely valuable works of art from portraits to engravings. The Museo, enhanced by Picasso’s own bountiful donations, opened in 1963 and attracts more than a million visitors a year.

Brassaï, pseudonym of Gyula Halasz (1899-1984), was born in Romania, the son of a Hungarian father and Armenian-Catholic mother. He studied sculpture in Budapest, served in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in World War I, moved to Berlin in 1920 and to Paris in 1924. Brassaï and Picasso, both foreigners, went from the edges of Europe to the center of art in Paris. They spoke French as their third language: Brassaï knew Hungarian and Romanian, Picasso knew Spanish and Catalan. Brassaï came to take photographs for a book on Picasso’s sculptures, which were scattered throughout several studios and distant houses, and became a close friend. Picasso recognized his artistic talent and arranged an exhibition of his drawings.

In Conversations with Picasso (1964) Brassaï describes twenty years in the life of the artist from 1943 to 1962, and contains 53 of his own excellent photos. Pierre Daix calls this memoir “at once a document, a living biography, and a masterful inquiry into the processes and transformations of Picasso’s art.” Avoiding the temptation to distort the truth through adulation or envy, Brassaï’s sharp eyes portray Picasso’s ambience and friends, personal traits and habits, conversation and ideas on art; his amazing mind, memories, curiosity and perception.

The book begins by contrasting Picasso’s luxurious, high-society life with his first wife to the self-imposed squalor of his “apartment turned pigsty” in Paris. With Olga he had “an Hispano-Suiza driven by a chauffeur in livery, suits made by the finest tailors, pedigreed dogs, an upper-middle-class double apartment, a little château in Normandy, and a safe beautiful girlfriend.” Though this artificial life flattered his vanity and amused him for a while, he soon got tired of it and of Olga.

Brassaï first met Picasso during World War II when Paris was occupied by the Nazis and terrorised by the Gestapo. It was “a Paris without taxis, cigarettes, chocolate… of curfews and scrambled airwaves, propaganda newspapers and films; a Paris of German patrols, yellow stars, air raids, arrests and executions.” Picasso, creator of “degenerate and Bolshevik” art, could have been taken hostage, interned or handed over to his enemies in fascist Spain. But he chose to risk his life and remain in Paris.

After the Liberation of the city in August 1944, the whole world wanted to salute the courageous symbol of recovered freedom. Though Paris was liberated, Picasso was besieged and invaded. A mob climbed his steep staircase and crushed into his studio. Brassaï emphasises the oppression of fame: the insoluble conflict between Picasso’s urgent need to work and — since he needed an admiring cuadrilla — the desire to see his friends.

Picasso bonded with Brassaï through the most sinuous and graceful letter of the alphabet, the double s of their names. The name Picasso, unusual in Spain, originated in Italy and was more resonant than his father’s more commonplace “Ruiz.” A lifelong exile, Picasso emphasised his Spanish qualities. El Greco influenced the elongated figures in his Blue period; Velázquez was his favourite painter and he created a long series of variations of Las Meninas. He explained why he felt at home in his severe and gloomy house at Vauvenargues: “I’m a Spaniard and I like sadness.” In a rhythmical statement about Guernica, he declared, “the Spanish like violence, cruelty, they like blood, like to see blood flow, stream — the blood of horses, the blood of bulls, the blood of men.” His recurrent image of the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, combined the two combatants of the corrida.

It’s ironic, therefore, that Brassaï shows the same discretion as Sabartés about Picasso’s love affairs. In Brassaï’s book the women make only fleeting and shadowy appearances. He relates that Marie-Thérèse Walter was hidden from Olga in the Normandy château. She attracted Picasso with her youth, gaiety and playful nature, and his portrayals of his most attractive lover are filled with joyful sensuality and carnal pleasure. By contrast, Marie-Thérèse’s simultaneous rival Dora Maar was somber and severe, prone to emotional outbursts and temper tantrums. She once arrived at a café wringing her hands and clenching her teeth. After a short silence she suddenly declared, “I’ve had enough. I can’t stay. I’m leaving.” She knew exactly how to excite and lure Picasso, who became panic-stricken, ran after her and disappeared.

Their successor Françoise Gilot radiated a freshness and youthful excitement. Brassaï shrewdly observes, “Picasso is in love with Françoise and allows himself to be worshiped by her.” When she becomes pregnant, he feels young again: cheerful, happy, bursting with energy, and she soon appeared in his art. “For him, romantic adventures are not a goal in themselves, but rather the indispensable stimulus to his creative power. The features of his new favorite immediately superimpose themselves on to the one he has forsaken.” Yet when Brassaï turns up with his new girlfriend, the great seducer exhibits false modesty. He appears bare-chested and in shorts, and shyly says, “Excuse me. I’m not presentable. Showing up naked in front of a young lady.”

In Brassaï’s book friends appear like actors on a stage, force their way through the crowd, speak to Picasso, then disappear. Salvador Dalí, who stole Gala, the wife of Picasso’s close poet-friend Paul Eluard, gets a bad press. To flatter Picasso, Dalí says he prefers his work to the pictures in the Louvre, and “expressed his intense veneration and admiration, surpassed only by his boundless jealousy and hatred.” The art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who died in a car crash in 1939, “was very secretive. He knew how to surround his paintings with mystery and thereby increase their value.”

André Malraux, author of Man’s Fate and war hero in Spain and France, makes the most dramatic entrance. Pleased to see the dashing survivor, the civilian Picasso remarks, “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back. You like to tempt fate. You pursue danger. You’re a daredevil.” Malraux describes his escape from the Gestapo and latest feats in the triumphant battle for Strasbourg. He also recounts the massive destruction of German cities, reduced to sinister skeletons and houses of horrors.

Dogs are an essential part of Picasso’s entourage. The long-haired, pointy-nosed Afghan hound Kazbek, named after a mountain in Russian Georgia, is (unlike his master) silent, sad and strange. He’s later replaced by a dachshund who resembles a basset hound, a spotted Dalmatian who’s found his way into several paintings, and a blind Boxer who threads through the mass of rubble in the studio and comes when he’s called. At 80, Picasso is in better shape than his animals: his muscles are supple, his reflexes quick as ever.

Brassaï records Picasso’s illuminating views on art. He believes that beauty must be “convulsive”; that painting must always break new ground, that reality must always be re-invented. Picasso thinks there’s no point in rendering what the lens can capture so well, that photography has freed painting from the subject and given it a new freedom to do something different. In a vivid simile, he calls Brassaï’s photos a “blood sample” that allows Picasso “to analyze and diagnose what I was at those moments.” Brassaï calls Picasso’s lines fluid, intense, sensual and heaving with desire.

Brassaï is amazed and impressed, at a time when the Nazis are melting all the statues in Paris to make cannons, that Picasso has managed to cast his delicate plaster statues in permanent bronze. Picasso explains that “a few devoted friends transported the plasters at night in handcarts to the foundry. And it was even riskier bringing them back here in bronze, under the noses of the German patrols.”

Brassaï’s most poignant and tender story concerns Picasso’s imaginative way of consoling Dora Maar, who was grieving after the death of her white lapdog. At every meal for several days he “resuscitated the little dog with his big black eyes and floppy ears. The nose and mouth are burned with the embers of a match. The fluffy paper of the napkin has vanished, replaced by the silky, wavy white coat of this dog summoned back to life, staring at us through the fringe of its long fur.” Brassaï’s photo (#47) shows how Picasso combined his love for Dora and love of dogs with the miraculous transformation of napkin into art.

Françoise Gilot, born in 1921 and still alive at 101, was the daughter of a stern chemical manufacturer. Educated by Dominican nuns and studying literature at the Sorbonne, she’d had one unhappy love affair and wanted to be a painter. She met Picasso at his favorite Catalan restaurant in May 1943, during the Nazi Occupation of France, when he was allowed to paint but could not exhibit his “degenerate” art. He was dining with Dora Maar, whom Françoise had seen in his prewar Weeping Woman portraits, and overheard her conversation at the next table. He offered her a rare bowl of cherries (pronounced cerisses with a double-s Spanish accent) as he had once offered a kitten to Fernande Olivier. He gave Françoise, a talented beginner, a rare opportunity to learn from the greatest living artist and to study his works, unseen during the war, before the big Paris exhibition in May 1944.

Françoise gives a dramatic and amusing description of Picasso’s surprisingly restrained and gradual seduction. The experienced minotaur, 40 years older and trying to gauge her response, didn’t quite know what to do when she failed to offer a proper show of resistance and make his conquest more intriguing. When he kissed her and she didn’t object, he seemed shocked: “That’s disgusting. At least you could have pushed me away. Otherwise I might get the idea I could do anything I wanted to.” She smiled, told him to go ahead and rather formally said, “I’m at your disposition” (i.e., at your disposal).

A week later, showing her the view of Paris from his roof, he moved his hands over her breasts while she remained passive and still. More time passed and then, in his bedroom, he said he wanted — aesthetically, of course, not sensually — “To see if your body corresponds to the mental image I have of it. Also, I want to see how it relates to your head.” He could have said, with John Donne, “Licence my roving hands, and let them go, / Before, behind, between, above, below.” As he undressed her, she “would certainly have done whatever he asked me to.” They lay down on the bed, he gently moved his hand over her body like a sculptor — and the curtain falls discreetly on the scene.

She later compliments him by saying, “Pablo not only didn’t seem old to me; in some ways he seemed more youthful — mature but vigorous — than friends my own age.” She adds, in a tantalising passage, “In our love-making, whenever he let himself go too far and became especially tender and childlike, the next time we were together he would invariably be hard and brutal. Obviously Pablo felt he could permit himself everything with everyone and I have always been someone who accepts ‘everything’ with great difficulty.” He suddenly changed moods in sex as in all other aspects of his life, and it’s not clear if “everything” refers to his brutal behaviour or sexual perversions.

She held out much longer — for three more years — before agreeing to his pleas to live with him, and remained with him until 1953. Though he was a non-believer, he took her to a church and made her swear (as in a marriage vow) to love him forever. Destined to succeed Dora Maar as la maîtresse en titre, she was naturally concerned about his continuing affection for his clinging past lover. He swore there was no longer anything between them, but Dora had the last word by condemning his destructive egoism: “You’ve never loved anyone in your life. You don’t know how to love… As an artist you may be extraordinary, but morally speaking you’re worthless.”

Since Picasso was always rough with women, Françoise’s prospects were grim. Warned by the Weeping Woman, she wondered if she’d take on his knowledge and his power before the unstable man would let her drop. She began as his goddess and eventually became his victim and martyr. She gradually realised he had a “Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he had collected in his little private museum” and that her head would be the next to roll. Thinking of Olga, who’d made his life miserable, he frankly agreed: “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around now to complicate my existence.” He justified his brutal fantasies by exclaiming. “I’ve had the courage to live my life in broad daylight — with more destruction than most others, perhaps, but certainly with more integrity and truth.”

Since Picasso immortalised women in his art, he thought they had to repay him by suffering. Angry with Françoise and playing the devil, he once pressed a burning cigarette against her cheek and held it there: “He must have expected me to pull away, but I was determined not to give him the satisfaction.” Then, deciding not to deface his valuable property, he pulled it away. Picasso, not Françoise, wanted children and he insisted that having them (rather than testing her by torture) would make her a real woman. The only time he was cheerful and happy, when they lived together, was during her pregnancy with their son Claude, born in 1947. (Their daughter Paloma was born two years later.) He loved his small children and painted them tenderly. Though concentrating on his work and distracted by a complicated social and professional life, he was a kind if distant father.

Picasso’s sudden mood swings, like those of a king at court, affected everyone. But Françoise, for once, was furious when his three-day trip to the Communist conference in Poland lasted three weeks and he never wrote the promised letters during his absence. When he returned with tempting presents, she slapped his face and locked herself in Claude’s room. It soon became his turn to get angry. He had adopted a stinking he-goat, whom he said he loved more than he loved her. It had the run of their house and excreted everywhere. She gave it away to a band of roving gypsies, and he felt crushed by her “unnatural behaviour”.

Picasso was even superstitious and irrational about his beloved bullfights. He was reluctant to order the essential barrera tickets, and absurdly claimed that Paulo (his son with Olga, born in 1921) was making him a martyr by forcing him to attend and invite friends. Then, like a bull, “stoically, head lowered, shoulders squared, ready for anything,” he set out to witness the spectacle that gave him the greatest pleasure.

Françoise also portrays the surprisingly intellectual side of his character. He always had close friendships with poets: Jacob, Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard and the Surrealists. In calmer moments he discussed literature with his cultured German dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and even subjected the well-educated Françoise to long philosophical monologues on Heraclitus, San Juan de la Cruz, Hegel and Kierkegaard. He always concluded with his gloomy Spanish aphorism: Todo es nada, yet he was also idealistic. When a friend urged him to take French citizenship, he furiously declared, “I represent Republican Spain in exile.” In the same way, during the Nazi regime, the exiled Thomas Mann felt that he represented democratic Germany.

Françoise gives lively portraits of Picasso’s family, servants and friends. Though he and Olga had separated in 1935, he found it very difficult to get rid of her. She continued to hound him and to torment Françoise, who noted her freckled face, crinkly hair and stiff pony-circus walk. When Françoise was holding baby Claude and unlocking the front door, the half-crazed Olga would pinch, scratch and slap her. When Françoise sat on the beach, supported by her arms, Olga spiked her hands with sharp high heels.

She finally got rid of Olga by knocking her down, pushing her face into the sand and threatening to call the police. The gentle, joyous Marie-Thérèse, glowing with good health and interested only in sports, also remained on the scene. Picasso usually visited her and their daughter Maya (born 1935) on Thursday and Saturday. Paulo was a lazy, unambitious playboy who couldn’t hold a decent job, and was interested only in motorcycle riding and racing.

Françoise describes Sabartés — half-blind, fussy and cautious — as Picasso’s “secretary, front man, errand boy, scapegoat and whipping boy.” He disapproved of Françoise and accurately predicted: “This will end badly. It’s madness. It will bring you both to the edge of catastrophe.” Inès, Picasso’s pretty maid, model and mistress, was also hostile and saw Françoise as a rival. “Inès felt that Pablo belonged to her… that she filled a role in his life that no one else could duplicate exactly, and she considered herself a kind of priestess” who worshiped at his shrine.

Françoise credited the chauffeur Marcel with shrewd psychological insight and the uncanny ability to detect fake Picassos. Like many servants who dominated their masters, Marcel decided whether or not Picasso’s trip was necessary, when they would leave and — if the journey were inconvenient for him — whether it should be delayed or cancelled entirely. Françoise satirises Alice B. Toklas, who had “a thin, swarthy face with large, heavy-lidded eyes, a long hooked nose, and a dark, furry moustache.” Gertrude Stein, in not very good French, egoistically but mistakenly boasted that “without her, there would be no modern American literature as we know it.”

Françoise carefully recorded Picasso’s witty condemnations of rival artists: Pierre Bonnard “never goes beyond his own sensibility”; Georges Braque, his former collaborator in Cubism, “is only Madame Picasso”; the faux naïve Joan Miró has “been running after a hoop, dressed up like a little boy, for too long now”; “Balthus began with Courbet and never got very much beyond him.”

He also had his favorites. Eugène Delacroix: “That bastard. He’s really good.” Vincent Van Gogh built up to a strange yellow in his wheat field and “burst out of nature’s straitjacket. That’s the way he asserts his freedom from nature. And that’s what makes him interesting.” His hero Paul Cézanne “painted terribly well the weight of space on the circular form of apples.” Among his contemporaries, Picasso most admired the older Matisse. Françoise says his “manner reflected an inner balance, a calm that brought peace even to a man like Pablo.” Most surprising was his praise of a retrograde fantasist: “there’s never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.”

Picasso was also illuminating about his own art. He rejected the light and color of the Impressionists and took the opposite course. Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, he leapt from one mountain peak to another and waged war on the visible world. Disturbing and subversive, he destroyed reality, replaced harmony with tension and created a new dynamic vision. He exclaimed, “I want to draw the mind in a direction it’s not used to and wake it up… My painting is a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.”

Françoise’s Life with Picasso (1964) begins with the gradual development of their liaison, which reaches its peak with the birth of their children, and ends with their slow decline and her final departure. Like an operatic heroine, she’s torn between love and duty. She realises that the self-absorbed Picasso will never give her the human warmth she desperately needs. He feels she’s using their children as weapons to control him and begins to withdraw from her. Their relations become increasingly impersonal and unhappy. At the same time, her health declines and she suffers uterine haemorrhages that weaken her and annoy Picasso.

Françoise is now forced to follow the tragic pattern and play the same role as her five (not three) ill-fated predecessors: Fernande Olivier, Eva Gouel, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar. Françoise then discovers that Picasso is having affairs with an unnamed young woman (Geneviève Laporte), with a married woman whose husband is delighted to be cuckolded by Picasso, and in Perpignan with the Countess Paule Lazerme, whose portraits he paints.

Françoise has a brief, retaliatory affair with Kostas, a young Greek philosophy student. Her successor, Jacqueline Roque, then appears. A salesgirl in the pottery at Vallauris, she’s short and cute, with high cheekbones and blue eyes. She has a six-year-old daughter, becomes Picasso’s dutiful caretaker and, in 1961, his second wife. The memoir ends as Françoise agrees with Picasso’s suggestion (opposed by Jacqueline), that she open the inaugural corrida at Vallauris, which is held in his honor. She performs admirably, “enters the ring on horseback, executes a series of intricate movements and circles the arena several times, making the horse dance.”

Life with Picasso, based on exhaustive interviews with Françoise — who has an artist’s eye, a clear memory and a first-rate mind — is well-written by the American art critic Carlton Lake. A joyous photo taken by Robert Capa in August 1948 portrays the pretty, smiling Françoise wearing a straw hat, beaded necklace and long sleeveless summer dress, swinging her arms and striding along the beach. Between the sea and Françoise the bald, tanned and muscular Picasso, dressed in a colored shirt and belted shorts, carries a large open umbrella like a devoted Asian servant following a king, to shield her from the Mediterranean sun. This photo provides a bitter contrast to Françoise’s furious, self-sacrificial memoir, which Picasso failed to suppress and which went on to sell more than a million copies throughout the world.

Three of these memoir-writers had lived with Picasso, all knew him well, and came under the spell of his charismatic genius, personal magnetism and dazzling wit. The devoted Fernande was cast off and ended badly. The masochistic Sabartés tolerated, even enjoyed, the punishment that lasted until l968. Brassaï made only occasional appearances, took useful photos and safely escaped. Françoise dutifully endured Picasso’s superstitions, hypochondria and tantrums for ten years before ceding the stage to the eager Jacqueline Roque.

Picasso radiated sexual attraction and retained his physical power as he grew older. Everyone was astonished by the brilliant transformations in his painting and the dynamic creation of high quality work. Sabartés kept him anchored to his vital Spanish origins, and protected him from parasites and exploiters so he could concentrate on his work. Moody, jealous and domineering, Picasso constantly tested his friends and the women who inspired him.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real

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