We’re publishing these exchanges just about every two weeks—a compressed timeline that somehow seems like an eternity amid this summer’s news cycles. Thankfully, art offers its own distinct time signature. When we look at a painting or read a poem, we don’t escape from time, but we do experience it differently. Time contracts and dilates; it folds in and out; mere sequence becomes pattern, shape, meaning. “You are the music / While the music lasts,” as T. S. Eliot puts it. This temporal re-shuffling is one of the gifts of art, and it’s one that I’m especially appreciating during this frenetic summer.
Françoise Gilot’s 1964 memoir Life with Picasso begins by locating us in time: “I met Pablo Picasso in May 1943, during the German Occupation of France. I was twenty-one and I felt already that painting was my whole life.” I enjoyed many things about this book, which recounts the tempestuous ten years that the young painter Gilot and the forty-years-older Picasso spent living and working and raising two children together in France. I loved the gossipy details: Picasso resents shopping for suits because it reminds him of his weirdly proportioned body (“You have a long, sturdy upper torso,” a tailor tactfully declares, “but you’re really a very small man”); Alice B. Toklas speaks “with an accent that sound[s] like a music-hall caricature of an American tourist reading from a French phrase book” and forces “rich and gooey” cakes upon Gilot so as to prevent her from talking too much with Toklas’s partner, Gertrude Stein. The book, co-authored by Carlton Lake, is filled with interesting observations about art, from Gilot’s claim that underneath Cubism’s deconstructive surface is a deeper desire for a “kind of order” to Picasso’s assertion that “painting isn’t a question of sensibility; it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.” (This isn’t the only time Picasso equates masculine aggression with artistic genius.)
But most of all, I admired Gilot’s sense that, even in a time of great historical and personal tumult, life could be lived in and through art. Take the first meeting between Gilot, who ended up becoming an excellent painter herself, and Picasso. Everything is filtered through an aesthetic lens:
I was a little surprised at Picasso’s appearance. My impression of what he ought to look like had been founded on the photograph by Man Ray in the special Picasso number that the art review Cahiers d’Art had published in 1936: dark hair, bright flashing eyes, very squarely built, rugged—a handsome animal. Now, his graying hair and absent look—either distracted or bored—gave him a withdrawn, Oriental appearance that reminded me of the statue of the Egyptian scribe in the Louvre.
This could be a moment out of Proust. Ray’s photograph leads Gilot to expect a certain kind of man. When these expectations aren’t met, she simply moves on to another aesthetic tradition to understand him. Style isn’t incidental to how we think and feel about others; it shapes how we think and feel about others.
In Life with Picasso, art mediates experience again and again. When Gilot meets Picasso’s secretary, she realizes that she’s already encountered him in “reproductions of drawings Picasso had made of him.” When she ventures into Picasso’s studio for the first time, she notices some flowers and a birdcage that she’s seen in a recent portrait he made of the Surrealist painter Dora Maar. When Gilot and Picasso visit Matisse, the older French painter declares his interest in making a portrait of Gilot: “she has a head that interests me,” he says. This leads the competitive Picasso to ask Gilot to move in with him. For Gilot, there’s an absolute porousness between living and painting.
When Life with Picasso was reissued in 2019, it was described as “a revealing precursor to the literature of #MeToo.” Indeed, Picasso was petulant, temperamental, and controlling. He demands that Gilot have a child—“You won’t know what it means to be a woman until you have a child”—and then pouts when his children make too much noise or demand attention. When he meets Gilot and is told she is an artist, he laughs: “Girls who look like that can’t be painters.” When she leaves him and takes up with another man at the book’s end, he spits out, “Anybody else will have all of my faults but none of my virtues. I hope it’s a fiasco, you ungrateful creature.” There’s a reason that Picasso tried to prevent the book’s publication with three separate lawsuits.
And yet to describe this book as solely a record of Picasso’s monstrousness is to ignore the more complicated history. Gilot became an accomplished painter in part because of the exhilarating conversations and real support she (occasionally) had from Picasso in their early years together. For stretches, he took her seriously as an artist—a gift that survived the relationship’s many curses. Picasso modeled for Gilot how, in good and bad ways, a life might burn with the intensity of art.
Gilot ends her memoir describing how, after she left him, Picasso cut off all contact: “But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.” Gratitude is a strange note on which to end this complex and fascinating book. What were you grateful for in your reading of Life with Picasso, Griffin? And how did it prime you for Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse?
*
Tony,
I’ll answer bluntly: I’m grateful Gilot got out. A decade of living with a malignant narcissist as manipulative and noxious as Picasso is ten years too long, no matter how formative Gilot found their relationship. I knew he was toxic, of course, but I didn’t understand to what extent until I read Gilot. I’m not saying Picasso should be canceled—you’re right, it’s more complicated than that, and besides, you really can’t understand the history of European art in the twentieth century without him—but for me it’ll be hard to look at any of his paintings in quite the same way.
I say that not because I think bad men can’t produce great art—they certainly can; just watch any film by Pier Paolo Pasolini—but because Gilot’s hard-earned insights into Picasso’s prickly personality actually pinpoint what I find lacking in his artistic vision. The man was undoubtedly a genius, and, from a technical standpoint, gifted beyond belief. But, like his physical stature, he was stunted, not just developmentally but aesthetically as well. Sure, he could draw—I’ll confess that every time I view his black-and-white bullfight series, which Picasso completed while living with Gilot, I’m amazed by how with just a few flicks and dabs of his brush he can convincingly conjure an entire stadium along with thousands of roaring, bloodthirsty fans.
But, apart from his insights into “plastic tension” and color theory, did Picasso ever really have anything to say? I’m not asking flippantly—he certainly achieved more than most humans ever will. But Picasso’s paintings fail to move me as deeply as, say, the art of his rival Matisse, precisely because I find them wanting in the one thing that Gilot sought in him, too: a “capacity for human warmth,” a sense of vulnerability and a willingness to reveal who he was as a person.
If Picasso stood for anything, it was perhaps for himself and his own fame. Beyond that it’s all emptiness, a selfish pride that his facile, self-serving interest in Kierkegaard and Spanish saints John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila can’t hide. Todo es nada, he quotes: he mimics the form of Carmelite mysticism, but he misses the paradoxical content. For John and Theresa, nada was in reality something, both an end (of self) and a new beginning (the first step on the journey to God, to a life of infinite love). Picasso knew as much about love as he did about himself—which, if we take Gilot’s word for it, was pretty much nothing.
Something similar could be said about Daniel and Adrien, the two handsome young men who form a love triangle with the beautiful and even younger Haydée in Éric Rohmer’s 1967 masterpiece La Collectionneuse (The Collector). Rohmer is known for clever titles (and even wittier dialogue), and this one is no different: it refers, pejoratively, to Haydée’s habit of “collecting”—that is, sleeping with—almost any man that comes her way (she’s already bedded Daniel and Adrien’s absent friend Rodolphe, the owner of the villa in the south of France where most of the action takes place). Rohmer’s opening shots—a series of quick closeups of Haydée’s waifish, slender body as she walks along the beach in a bikini—offer a literal preview of Daniel and Adrien’s “male gaze,” hypocritically both judgmental and jealous at once.
When it comes to Daniel and Adrien, there’s little for Haydée to collect—there’s no there there, Gertrude Stein would say. Daniel is some kind of “artist” who glues razor blades to empty cans of paint (“You remind me of elegant people in the eighteenth century who were very concerned about their appearance, and the effect they had on others…. You yourself are the can of paint surrounded by razor blades,” a pompous friend claims). Adrien, who narrates the action and orchestrates a plot for Haydée to seduce Daniel (though it’s really Adrien who wants her), is an aspiring gallerist attempting to “do absolutely nothing” for a month (we see him floating face down in the sea, attempting to clear his mind) while his girlfriend is away in London. Spoiler alert: he fails.
I liked this film a lot, even though I didn’t like the characters. Rohmer doesn’t seem to, either: Daniel is insufferable, Adrien is selfish, Haydée is naïve. But that’s what makes watching them interesting—each of the three, in their own way, attempts to transcend the existential ennui that, as in many of Rohmer’s other films, hangs like a heavy moral haze above the plot, expressed in lethargic poses, vacant stares, and endless philosophical monologues.
Unlike Picasso, a rigorous formalist if there ever was one, Rohmer is a humanist, interested not only in the interiority of his subjects but also in the possibility of connection and well-being that could exist among them, if only they would realize it. If Rohmer is merciless in his depiction of the angst at the heart of La Collectionneuse, he’s also aware that such angst really has a deeper, more poignant cause: his characters are lonely, longing for authentic love and communion that the characteristics of modernity—fluidity, rapidity, impermanence—constantly thwart. That’s what makes Adrien’s jokey, half-brotherly relationship with Haydée more tragedy than comedy: we sense that he really could find happiness with her, if only he’d allow himself to be “weak” enough to admit that he needs her.
But taking such a leap would mean decisively leaving behind convention, along with the safety and reassurance it promises. Which brings me back to Gilot, who lived about as unconventional a life as one can live (and a long one, too—she only died in 2023!) When she realized Picasso could never give her the connection she craved, she left, on her own terms. Her evident warmth, solid, self-effacing sense of humor, and her life well-lived is the perfect response to the petty tyranny of small men like Picasso, and to the moral question posed by Rohmer: yes, a rich, full life of love and happiness is possible, but you’ll have to invent it, and achieving it will probably involve a good deal of suffering.
How about you, Tony? Did you find Adrien and Daniel’s missed connection with Haydée as tragic as I did? And am I right about Picasso being such a scumbag? Or am I missing something?
*
Griffin,
I agree, Picasso could be a jerk and, like you, I prefer Matisse. For that matter, I’m often more moved by the work of Pierre Bonnard, who Picasso contemptuously describes in Gilot’s telling as “just another neo-impressionist, a decadent; the end of an old idea, not the beginning of a new idea.” One of my favorite poets, Lawrence Joseph, takes a different stance towards the radiant Bonnard, one that I share:
Our God, wrote Bonnard,
is light—lucent
greens, bronze-gold
in the river’s
silver blaze, pink-black-tinged clouds
dissolving,
darkened purple air.
On this much we concur.
You ask if Picasso ever really had anything to say. Is that the artist’s charge, though—to directly tell us things? You suggest that Picasso has nothing to say “apart from his insights into ‘plastic tension’ and color theory.” As if formal insight isn’t the artistic route to truth; as if color and tension aren’t the means by and through which the painterly vision is thought and achieved; as if a painting’s composition is ancillary to its content.
Of course, it’s silly to pretend that we ever could perfectly distinguish the artist’s life and work. (As Brandon Taylor put it in a brilliant reflection on how to read Alice Munro in response to recent revelations, “There isn’t ‘the art and the artist’ and one does not ‘separate art from artist.’ To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world.”) But I fear that you’re allowing your (understandable!) repugnance towards Picasso the person to overly determine your claims about Picasso the artist. Surely Picasso isn’t only in it for “himself and his own fame”—though, as with many great creators, these things play a large part.
To take a famous example, doesn’t Guernica have much “to say,” not only or even primarily about the Spanish Civil War, but about the experience and meaning of suffering? And doesn’t the painting say what it has to say—that bodies and hearts break; that sometimes anger is the proper response to the world’s evil—through technique and form? And doesn’t this fact show that, with all his personal blindnesses, Picasso knew something of love’s clarity and righteousness—or, at the very least, that his work knew something of love? Indeed, love and human warmth can be seen in many of Picasso’s paintings, especially in early works like The Mother and The Blue Room. We see this again and again in the lives of great writers and painters: their work knows more than they do. One doesn’t have to pick between formalism and humanism. At his best, Picasso chose both.
Now, another thing on which we can agree: La Collectionneuse is a masterpiece of longing and loneliness. To be more precise, it’s about the longing that comes from loneliness. You put it nicely, Griffin: all of Rohmer’s characters are looking to “transcend the existential ennui” of modern life. Though it’s worth asking, has any director made ennui so seductive and enveloping? This was Rohmer’s first film in color, and the palette in La Collectionneuse—warm brown and warmer pink, cool gray and cooler blue—is gorgeous. Rohmer isn’t afraid to hold the camera for five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen seconds, as Adrien walks back to the house after a matutinal swim or Daniel stomps his foot in pique. The film’s sound is entirely diegetic, so we really can hear, and luxuriate in, the lapping of the water and the chirping of the early morning birds.
“I’m searching,” Haydée says at one point, and that could serve as a gloss for every character living in Rohmer’s beautiful and corrupted world on the Riviera. Daniel and Adrien, two overly aestheticized dandies—oh, the ridiculous robes they wear!—are searching for nothingness. They want to strip away all activity and mean interest, to become perfectly passive and completely receptive, embracing what Jean-Jacques Rousseau described in Reveries of the Solitary Walker as the pleasure of far niente, doing nothing. (It’s no accident that Adrien reads Rousseau while lounging by the water.) Sam, a rich American who Adrien hits up to fund his half-assedly dreamed-of art gallery, is searching for art (he buys a rare Chinese vase from Adrien) and pleasures of various kinds (encouraged by Adrien, he paws at Haydée and smugly pontificates his way through a few scenes).
Haydée’s search lacks a clear object. Adrien and Daniel tell us, and tell us again, all that they want (purity; passivity; pleasure) and all that they avoid (ugliness; thought; labor of any kind). Haydée’s desires, though, remain mysterious. She has affairs but hasn’t, she clarifies, “had a lover.” She yearns “to have normal relationships with people,” but that doesn’t clarify things much. She doesn’t want to be part of whatever game Adrien and Daniel are playing, though her mischievous smile indicates that she isn’t opposed to all games. Or maybe I, like the film’s male characters, am misreading her. “I’ve often wondered what your smile means,” Adrien says at one point, to which Haydée simply responds, “Nothing.”
I don’t quite agree with your criticism of Picasso as a cold aesthete, concerned only with form and uninterested in humanity. But I can’t think of a stronger indictment of a certain kind of aestheticism than La Collectionneuse. Daniel criticizes Haydée for “collecting” men. But it’s Daniel and Adrien who are the real collectors: cruel aesthetes who seek to replace human connection with cool distance, who find ugliness an insult and pleasure the only currency worth having. That’s the real sin and the real source of tragedy in Rohmer’s universe: to choose isolation over communion, purity over happiness. At the movie’s end, Adrien triumphantly declares that, with Haydée gone, he can get down to the important task of doing nothing. Yet he almost immediately picks up the phone and asks when the next flight to London is. Adrien ends how he began: restless, unfulfilled, searching.
