Picasso, self-portraiture, and the roar of the crowd

It's not often that artists are hounded like rock stars, but that's just what happened when more than 1,600 people overran the McMullen Museum on Sunday, September 17, for the first public appearance in Boston of Fran�oise Gilot, a painter whose 10 years as Pablo Picasso's companion and status as the mother of two of his children has touched her with an apparently irresistible glamour. From June 14 to September 24 the McMullen held the first show of Gilot in Boston, exhibiting works from 1940 to 1950, but was not prepared for the intense, curiously personal interest in Gilot herself. At the last moment tickets to her talk were printed and given to visitors on a first-come basis, but still more than a thousand people were turned away. Six hundred others surged through the museum, some of them pressing up against the thick glass doors of the adjacent Admission office that served as the greenroom for the event to try to glimpse this woman who knew so many of the giants of modern art.

At 79 Gilot is a tiny woman of striking beauty, thick black hair in an angular bob, held back this day with a chocolate brown headband, setting off the kind of strong bone structure that endures. Garbed in black slacks and an elegant, geometric-patterned jacket (which she removes before her talk), she wears jewelry designed by her daughter Paloma Picasso, including a heavy gold cuff on her wrist and a chunky square ring on her left pinky finger that remind one that abstraction can still startle. At the luncheon that precedes her talk, she moves among the acid yellow tablecloths in her kelly green sweater, Picasso's Femme Fleur, a delicate stalk with a luminous face. She is her own subject, having done many self-portraits as a young artist, but she has also been the object of other painters' eyes. As she tells the story of the genesis of that famous portrait of her as flower, it is a story of male rivalry, both artistic and sexual. When Picasso took Gilot to meet Matisse, his great friend and colleague, Matisse announced, "I would paint her hair green and the body in light blue." Picasso was miffed, pointing out later to Gilot that Matisse had overstepped his bounds; why, he, Picasso, had never proposed painting Lydia, Matisse's mistress and assistant! Not long afterward, Picasso trumped Matisse, painting Gilot in Matisse's colors, her stem-like body a light blue.

Gilot's appearance today at the McMullen betrays once again the struggle to be known as subject, not object, a struggle for many a beautiful woman with a sharp mind (or eye). Nancy Netzer, the museum's director, introduces Gilot's lecture by saying it will be "not about life with Picasso, but life with Fran�oise," alluding to Gilot's 1964 book Life with Picasso. Gilot wants to be seen as the serious artist she is and has always been. As a guest on Christopher Lydon's WBUR radio show "The Connection" two nights before her appearance at BC, Gilot bridled when asked what museums and galleries she visits in New York, where she makes her home: "I am not a spectator of life! I'm working in my studio--that is more interesting!" This is a woman who began making art at age seven when her mother gave her ink but no pencils, forbidding her to erase; later she would use pencil and choose not to erase, pronouncing each stroke "an affirmative action without remorse."

Gilot's talk at BC is a painter's talk, not the lecture of an art historian. Titled "An Artist's Journey," it chronicles 60 years of painting, presenting 60 slides two by two, decade by decade, style by changing style. Gilot includes only two pairs of paintings from the period of the BC show: self-portraits (which she recommends for young artists--"Know thyself!"--but doesn't do any more herself, declaring with humor, "I know all I need to know about that!") and more representational, melancholy paintings from the war years. The slightly later abstract paintings in the show reveal a young artist who was growing in confidence and mastery, all the more astonishing in that she was painting in the very lair of the Minotaur. Their titles hint at struggle, artistic and personal: Dynamic Tensions (1945); Complementary Forces (1945), a meeting of male and female forms; Precarious Balance (1948).

After these colorful abstractions, Gilot had what she calls her "White Period" of using almost no color, exemplified in a slide of a 1952 portrait of her son Claude at age five, in which the shadows of leaves are rendered white and the leaves dark, "an inversion of reality, so to speak." In her book of the same name as this lecture, Gilot writes of the paintings she made of her children that they were "neither sentimental nor illustrative but rather heroic and architectonic in style." The grown Claude sits in a front row of the auditorium, a black-haired man with his father's blunt stockiness; he wears expensive European clothes of a casual but aggressively fashionable mode--square-toed leather shoes and spandex fingerless gloves. His son, a student in an art school, sits beside him in baggy jeans.

In 1955 Gilot returned to a representational style in angry response to a critic's comment that she could do modern art but not something classical. Walking through the BC show, two women are overheard saying "She's nobody's patsy!" Perhaps that helps to explain Gilot's personal appeal to the many who descended on the museum--her willingness to take up a challenge, the intellectual curiosity that drives her artistic experimentation, and the lucid self-analysis that informs her books. And it can't go unsaid . . . it blazed from the yellow banners on Commonwealth Avenue this summer: her unflinching confrontation of Picasso, represented in her drawing of his face--all angular planes and basilisk eyes. If he didn't blink, neither did she.

In the most recent paintings Gilot shows her audience, she admits that now, at the other end of life, she is trying to get in touch with the cosmos. In her strong French accent, she says, "I am enamored of comets"; the disorder of comets in an orderly universe makes the cosmos more lively. Showing the last slide, Fugitive Comet, Gilot says, "Definitely that comet wants to escape . . . where I don't know." She notes that it is certainly a "she."

After the lecture Gilot mingles briefly with a few invited guests in the safety of the Admission office while the shut-out crowd is told they can see a videotape of her talk at 4:00 (which Claude Picasso has graciously agreed to introduce). She is shepherded toward the exit, swept out toward a waiting taxi, but she stops to shake hands, formal and poised, not to be rushed. In 1946, when Picasso put on a full-press campaign to get her to live with him, she painted her feelings of turmoil on a canvas that hangs in BC's exhibit, House in the Autumn Wind. Shutters blown open, a house withstands a swirl of leaf-like shapes that morph into spades or carrots or hearts. It is not clear whether they are being scooped into the house like a harvest or blown out to freedom. The artist no doubt likes it that way.

Clare M. Dunsford

Clare M. Dunsford is an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences


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