Picasso and Françoise Gilot at Gagosian Gallery

On the one hand I wonder what it was like to have been a 21 year old artist, meet 61 year old Picasso and fall in love with him. I wonder how a weathered artist and man looked at a young talented painter and blossoming young woman who was a self-described tomboy at the time. On the other hand, I am not confounded. Love creates unlikely and irrational connections between people and mercifully and cruelly catches them in the state of the natural partial blindness and knowledge.

The show is based on a difficult, if not impossible premise. The exhibition of almost 200 works is about the relationship, both contemporaneous and retrospective as he is no longer alive. How do you follow it? It is very hard to thoroughly understand one’s own relationship, let alone the relationships of other people. Can one observe the show with detachment and without trying to make sense? Or is it beyond human not to seek meaning, however limited and flawed?

The relationship is reflected in the 378 pages of the catalogue somewhat differently than in the exhibition halls. The catalogue includes many more photographs of Gilot and Picasso than the show (over 100). The photographs and the artists’ works are on a similar scale, limited by the sizes of the pages. You glimpse at the moments of their life and lives and you see them in and next to each other’s paintings. Life and art truly concur in this book. The catalogue also includes excerpts from Gilot’s book Life with Picasso which the artist tried to stop from being published. She wrote it when she was in her early forties, and now, in her 90s, she is looking back again.

We will never know the extent of Picasso’s and Gilot’s mutually encompassing visions. It may seem strange to insist on blindness and to focus on the unseen and unseeable, but if we follow Picasso’s vision of painting being a blind man’s profession (as recorded by Cocteau)[1], than we can look from an unusual perspective at the relationship of a man and a woman, both artists, separated by a sea of time, lived and unlived lives, and future.

What did Picasso mean when he said that painting was a blind man’s profession? We’ll never know. I wonder if he fully knew. Genuineness of insight is not always rooted in knowledge. Perhaps, he meant that a painter works not with what is seen, but what is unseen. Essentially, the artist walks his road blind; if you see where the painting will end, why even start? It is of course a great irony of the profession that the artist’s journey in the province of unseen and unknown is often looked at, understood and judged as visual artifact or optical illusion. For Picasso, the act of painting and the act of love weren’t rooted in different realms. I dare to say they mirrored each other. He famously said to Brassai that art was never chaste[2], and claimed there was no difference between art and eroticism[3].

The show is beautifully installed. The room on the 6^th floor gives space to the dialogue between his paintings and sculptures. The 1946 Femme dans un fauteuil talks to the 1953 sculpture Femme portent un enfant. I couldn’t miss the bond between the two grisaille paintings from 1946 La femme-fleur (Francoise Gilot) and Anatomie feminine and the 1950 bronze La femme enceinte I. Yet I felt the limits of my vision intensely. At home, as I was looking through the catalogue I read the conversation between Gilot and Richardson about the 1950 painting Paysage d’hiver, which was a diagram of Picasso’s and Gilot’s relationship. I understood that many, if not all of the paintings from this period must have a deeply private dimension. I returned to see the show, acutely aware that I was witnessing an intimate diary written in an unspoken language.

The first hall on the 5^th floor is divided in two, Picasso’s paintings and Gilot’s. Both bodies of work are about their life together (with the exception of her early work), their children and private rituals. The second hall on the 5^th floor is all about Gilot – the way he saw her, painted her and drew her. The walls in this room are colored a soft, yet vivid crisp green, almost the green from his 1947 Femme en vert et mauve. The color choice couldn’t be more precise. Perhaps, because Gilot is known as femme-fleur and this color invoked this image.

As I was talking with a friend about the show, he exclaimed: “Imagine painting in Picasso’s backyard?” The Picasso we know is very different from the one Gilot knew. Gilot mentions that she was much more enamored with Braque’s and Matisse’s art at the time. On the other hand, when you are very close to someone, their talent that is so remote to outsiders is very natural to you. You can’t imagine it otherwise, sometimes it even becomes ordinary. It is rarely separate from a person and his or her humanity.

I like Gilot’s work form the early 1940s. I found the paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s less exciting. I missed the gravity holding everything together, the density of the works from the early 1940s. I could not quite relate to the later works’ literalness and weightlessness (as compared to the solidity of the earlier paintings). And I forgot that their author was still only in her 20s or early 30s. But the more I looked at them, the more I appreciated the later paintings. I started to understand their seeming looseness. I sense that they are about loss. I think they are about letting your erstwhile self go, which is a difficult risk to take. I wonder if these works embody a fundamental personal reinvention.

Picasso’s work from these years is all about perpetual metamorphosis. He is inventing and re-inventing, imagining and re-imagining endlessly. And this mode is most obvious in his portraits of her. Gilot tells a story about her recurrent childhood dream of an old mansion and her first visit to Picasso’s studio, which she realized resembled the attic in her dream. She talks about another coincidence (as if there’s such a thing) when she and Picasso discovered that she looked like one of the female characters in his 1930s etchings Suite Vollard. She would have been eight years old at the time. Picasso’s reaction was possessive: “So, I invented you. Art always precedes nature, it’s not the other way round… I foresaw you as you are now. You should be thankful to me.”[4]

What does his continuous re-imagining of her mean? Why did he transform her into a flower in a few of his paintings? In mythology flowers (or plants) often symbolize the passage from life to death in the multitude of its meanings. For example, Daphne was transformed into laurel, Baucis and Philemon became trees, Narcissus and Hyacinth turned into flowers that took their names.

In her essay “Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot: mano a mano” (in the catalogue), Gilot describes them drawing together in his album. She compares their relationship to a mano a mano bullfight, in which two matadors take turns fighting and killing six or eight bulls. She says their fight was not with art, but for art, as in French the verb achever means ‘to complete’ and also ‘to kill’. The finished work is a death in a way. Gilot talks about “the strange fraternity that must exist between artistic partners in which emulation must never degenerate into rivalry” and that she felt existed between her and Picasso.

In this essay she talks about the end of their relationship:

After Pablo and I separated, even though new loves entered our lives, a sense of loss remained. It was the end of a great passion. It had run its course without complacency or concession, and it had left us depleted like two exhausted warriors. But it had been an honorable fight, a quest for the absolute.[5]

Gilot’s recent conversation with John Richardson (in the catalogue) gives a different, more earthly view of their complex and passionate relationship. When she talks about the end of the relationship, she says:

…I was in two minds. Would it be better if I left or stayed in at Vallauris with the children? Had I stayed, it would have ended in my death.[6]

I wonder if the intensity and passion of the relationship was rooted in a heightened awareness of the continual struggle between life and death. I wonder if the profession in which the works had to be completed (“executed”) heightened this. It was during this period that Picasso started to work in the mode of variations more intensely than ever before. I wrote at length about Picasso’s variations in my review of the 2010 show at MOMA Picasso: Themes and Variations. I see variations as denying the end to which a work of art must come when it is completed. Variations, as opposed to series, are not just united by a common theme or a common formal idea, but are this idea lived once again. It is as if you could re-live your life indefinitely, each time taking another turn at a different point in the road. Variations are not separate pieces with a common preoccupation, whether thematic or formal, but one piece with many beginnings and without end. Each variation is a step in a metamorphosis. The last one one is not the end, but another "if" that still lingers in the air. Printmaking makes the mode of variations visible, as the artist returns to the printing plate time and again. Only Picasso’s obsessive dating of each work in a set of variations placed them in succession and metamorphosis in time.

The exhibition includes the famous lithographs of Gilot done in 1948 – 1949 Femme au Fauteuil). The comprehensive graph of the 30 variations is published in the catalogue. In the fall of 1948, Picasso made a color lithograph for which he developed five stones, one stone for each color as this was the only way to print a color lithograph. Only three proofs of this lithograph were printed. He then let go the color, but used the five stones as five separate “tracks”. Each “track” had a number of “states”. All five were interrelated through what was left out – color. Each was a sliver of the original composition. Working on each piece, the artist was bound to respond to what was present, not present, present elsewhere and could be present. Each stone and each print allowed only a partial view. This work gave form to the state of partial vision and fragmentary grasp that could not be completed, but on the contrary, was about infinte points of view and instants of perception. There was no end to it.

I hesitated to write about this show. I was afraid of the enterprise rooted in the unknowable. I feared crossing the boundaries beyond which interpretation becomes intrusive. I did not know (and still don’t) how to walk the grey area between painting and love. Both deny words. I tried to find words for painting; I fell completely short of finding words for passion and love. It is hard to look in two mirrors at once. But then I did find them. The words aren’t mine. They are unusual:

…Does life mean well? Nature is not benign. Do you think it means to make you happy with this feeling? Nature has no need of human pipe dreams. All nature wants is to beget and destroy: that is its business. It is ruthless because its plan is indifferent to human predicament, beyond the human. Nature has gifted us with passion, but it insists that the passion be unconditional…

…You know, that flood of spring-is-here feeling most people experience at the start of a relationship…. I am deeply suspicious of it. Passion does not celebrate holidays! It’s a dark force that builds and destroys worlds and waits on no answer from those it has touched, not does it ask them whether they feel good as a result. Frankly, it doesn’t care either way. It gives everything and demands everything: it is that unconditional passion of which the deepest stratum is nothing less than life-and-death…

…It is no accident that history has regarded great lovers with the same awe and veneration as heroes, as brave pioneers who have risked all by voluntarily embarking on a hopeless but extraordinary human enterprise…

Behind each lover’s embrace stands the figure of Death, whose shadows are no less powerful than those wild flashes of joy. Behind every kiss looms the secret desire for annihilation, for an ultimate happiness that is no longer in the mood for argument but knows that to be happy is to cease entirely and surrender to feeling.

Love is feeling without an end in view….[7]

Picasso and Françoise Gilot

Gagosian Gallery

980 Madison Avenue (at 77^th street)
New York, NY 10075
Hours: Tue-Sat 10-6

Map

Official Picasso site: www.picasso.fr

On-line Picasso project: http://picasso.tamu.edu/picasso/

[1] Picasso on Art, Dore Ashton, ed., Da Capo Press, Inc., 1972, p.79

[2] Brassai, Conversations with Picasso, The University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 223

[3] Picasso: Mosqueteros, Gagosian Gallery, 2009, p. 29

[4] Picasso and Fraçoise Gilot, Gagosian Gallery, 2012, p. 305

[5] Ibid., p. 307