Books: Mistress to a Monument

LIFE WITH PICASSO by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake. 373 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

After nine years and two children, Franchise Gilot finally left Pablo Picasso, reportedly exclaiming: “I am not living with a man, but with a monument.” Many women have tried to live with the monument who, as the greatest living artist, was bound to make it a monumental task. Françe was his fourth long-term mistress, escaped becoming his second wife. Now, twelve years after the end of the affair, Françoise recollects in tranquillity—something she rarely had with Picasso—with the aid of the Paris art correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.

In his courtship of Franchise, Picasso didn’t show her his etchings—he showed her how to etch. Since she was a full 40 years younger than he, she had to pass acid-test encounters with Gertrude Stein, Braque, Matisse, Cocteau, and a dozen other greats before she could share his life. Yet, judging from her memoirs, crammed with incredible recall, she was a cool creature who passed the tests but, instead of sharing his life, only came to understand it.

Marriage Album. Everything had the power to stir Picasso’s imagination. He kept owls, pigeons, even a smelly he-goat around the house. He loved to blow loudly on an old French army bugle. He was superstitious to a degree unsuspected in such an undisciplined liberal thinker. A hat thrown on a bed (meaning that someone in the house was going to die before the year was over) could throw him into a tantrum. Dancing was total depravity to Picasso, who was otherwise unbothered by convention.

Picasso was a collector of people as well as things. He constantly visited Françoise predecessor, Dora Maar, who responded by conventionally snubbing Françe when they met. It did not bother him a bit that his first wife, Olga, trailed Françe around the streets. He even kept an entire apartment in Paris, where he had lived with Olga, intact. His suits were still there, moth-eaten to the seams; paintings were slathered with inches of dust. But Pi casso regarded it as a kind of album of his first marriage. Taken to see it, Françe began to think of Picasso as some sort of Bluebeard. Writes she: “I began to have the feeling that if I looked into a closet, I would find half a dozen ex-wives hanging by their necks.”

Monster Love. To Françe, Picasso seemed like one of his recurrent mythological figures—the minotaur. Painfully aware of his bandy legs and his small stature, Picasso believed that he could be loved only because he was a monster. “God is really only another artist,” Picasso told Françe. “He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor [himself]. First he works from nature; then he tries abstraction. Finally he winds up lying around caressing his models.”

For a woman who spent so long with Picasso, Françe writes as if love’s labor’s lost. But in the minotaur’s ca ress, Françe admits that she found herself. No woman could ask for more.