Waterstones Life With Picasso
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Price: £12.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Francoise Gilot was a young painter in Pasis when she first met Picasso - he was sixty-two and she was twenty-one. During the following ten years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. Life with Picasso, her account of those extraordinary years, is filled with intimate and astonishing revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts and his friends - Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti among others. Francois Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her turbulent life with the temperamental genius that was Picasso. She is a superb witness to Picasso as an artist and to his views on art. Waterstones Life With Picasso - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781853812330
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781853812330
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Author: Ralph Blumenau
Rating: 5
Review: Françoise first met Picasso in a restaurant in May 1943, when she was 21 and he was 61. He was immediately fascinated by her and she by him. She started visiting him, and he prepared to seduce her, but he expected resistance and was put off by the fact that she neither resisted nor egged him on. She was then studying literature and law at the Sorbonne, but she really wanted to devote all her time to painting. When she decided to give up the university, her violent father beat her up and she left home and stayed with her grandmother. (October 1943). After that she began to feel more than an interest in Picasso - she felt they had much in common and felt totally at ease with him. Being in her own right an artist (good enough for Kahnweiler to put her under contract), she was very knowledgeable about paintings, and eventually about etchings, lithographs and about pottery also. She describes at length the objets trouvés which Picasso used as components of his sculptures. She records how Picasso explained to her what he was trying to do in his paintings and sculptures - and that may indeed help many readers to understand the mental processes and philosophies that lay behind the pictures. He also philosophized to justify his own selfishness and cruelty - he felt entitled to what he called his needs taking priority over everything, including the needs of others. Incapable of real love himself, he constantly complained about not being loved - though his studio was always thronged with admirers (whom he usually deliberately kept waiting for ages before he would receive them.) Of course he was a monster, and Françoise was perfectly aware of this; but she was still fascinated by him and thought she could cope with him and would not become a victim such as poor Dora Maar, his previous companion, had become by that time. But (against protests!) she allowed him to use her to humiliate Dora. At times he told her that she did not mean all that much to him and that there was nothing permanent in their relationship. She knew that quite well and refused to feel victimized. She would simply not see him for weeks at a time. But then again he said he needed her and urged her to come and live with him. In 1946 she succumbed, merely leaving a note to her beloved grandmother. On two occasions when she was unhappy with Picasso, he suggested she should have a child - that would take her mind off her such thoughts. And on each occasion she followed his advice, giving birth first to their son Claude (1947) and then to their daughter Paloma (1949). The book is brimful of anecdotes and of incidents in their every-day life - of Picasso’s uncontrollable rages, his self-pity, his selfishness, his sense of entitlement, his bullying, his contrariness and perversity, his jealous possessiveness, his superstitions; of the cruel tricks he played on art dealers. She quotes in inverted commas long passages of what Picasso said to her: not only his theories about art but also his torrents of abuse. They are probably correct in substance, but one does wonder: did she have such total recall? Did she keep a diary? To what extent did she reproduced his sayings reliably. There are portraits of a plethora of dealers and artists who were in contact with Picasso: I thought those of Braque, of Giacometti and of Matisse are particularly vivid. (At this stage of their lives, in the late 1940s, the famous earlier rivalry between them had given way to as much friendship as Picasso was capable of.) Also excellent portraits of Marcel, Picasso’s characterful and devoted chauffeur, and of Sabartés, Picasso’s gloomy but equally devoted secretary. Françoise tells us the back-stories of Picasso’s earlier women, and of course she would largely share their fate. Although he had urged her to have children, he became more distant after Paloma was born (just as he had been with Marie-Thérèse after she had given birth to his daughter Maia). He felt tied down to a stable family life, and told her she was no longer sexually attractive to him because she had become so thin. The difference this time was that Picasso said he still needed her (to help him in his work and to discuss his paintings with her), but in 1953 she decided to leave him rather than wait for him to leave her. What are we to make of Françoise? It is astonishing to me that she had put up for so long with so much ill-treatment and verbal aggression from Picasso because she loved him. She even dedicates the book “to Pablo”, though this may be ironic. In relation to him she was both weak (in going along with him, often against her will) and strong (in apparently refusing to let him treat her like a doormat). The book is absorbing and extremely well-written (Carlton Lake, an American journalist, helped her to write it) - and although she says a good deal about her emotions throughout those years, she remains at the end something of an enigma to me.
Author: GORDON LOWE
Rating: 3
Review: More or less what I have to say...sorry.
