Book review: Life with Picasso - by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake.
Reviewed by Lili Owen Rowlands
Life with Picasso is Gilot’s account of their decade-long relationship. First
published in 1964 and written with the American critic and curator Carlton
Lake, the book is based on conversations he and Gilot had over the course of
several years, beginning in 1955. The end result, which Lake cross-referenced
with Gilot’s journals and the letters from Picasso she had kept, follows a
roughly chronological order, though it loops and repeats as conversations tend
to do.
Françoise Gilot, former lover and muse of Pablo Picasso, in 1949.
Photograph: Gjon Mili/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
It’s a thorough picture of Picasso’s life in the postwar period, at the
moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude
Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean
Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his
involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one
‘goes to the fountain’; there’s his wit and acid tongue; there’s his
sidestepping of ‘all stereotyped formulas in his human relations just as
completely as in his art’ – which made him a thrilling lover and painter, but a
monstrous partner and father.
More telling, though, is what we learn about
Gilot, who came from a rich Parisian family and entered Picasso’s life with the
intensity of a ‘little Rimbaud’. She was restless, spirited and determined not to
become another of Picasso’s ‘grains of dust’, those women she watched ‘floating
in the sunlight’ all around him, waiting to be pushed out of his life with the
swish of a broom. She was, by any normal measure, successful in this, leaving
Picasso of her own accord in 1953 – the only one of his lovers ever to do so.
She turned out to be a grain of dust gifted with ‘autonomous movement’, but she
was a grain of dust all the same....
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n06/lili-owen-rowlands/the-scene-on-the-bridge