Not being psychologically minded, or inclined to write her experiences in order to re-examine them, Dora did not pursue explanations, electing aesthetic indulgence and refuge in catholic devotion for the rest of her long life.
Fran^oise
Picasso’s belief that “women are suffering machines” underwent another trial with Fran?oise Gilot (1921—). Although the clearest seeing of any of his women, Gilot was put at emotional risk as severe as Dora’s. The difference was that Fran?oise’s vigorous youth and overt rebelliousness gave her a better chance to withstand Picasso’s punitive dominance.66 They met in May, 1943, she 22 and he 62, remaining together for ten years and having two children, Claude and Paloma. (It was actually not until 1946 that the relationship fully emerged, with Olga, Marie-Therese and Dora variously positioned in the background.) Fran?oise was a striving artist in Paris, who had defied the wishes of her dominating father that she become a lawyer, to which end she had been brought up as a boy. Until age fifteen Fran?oise dressed like a boy having no desire to be feminine, but her androgynous beauty made her attractive to certain men. Picasso’s comment, when challenged, was “I’d like her just as much if she were a boy”, a remark suggestive of the feminine males sometimes seen among Picasso’s circus folk and a possible bisexual interest.67
Picasso was in fact older than Fran?oise’s engineer-industrialist father and, like him, given to commands, which Fran?oise skillfully parried. Hers had been a violent relationship with her father, with battles of wills and beatings meant to break her. To end the violence she left home to live with her grandmother. Fran?oise was thus liable to re-enactment of abusive relations repeating what had happened with her father. Yet in her youthful idealism she believed that the same punitive tendency in Picasso could be overcome.68 It was not to be overcome and this relationship also fell into acrimony and bitterness, but not before Picasso had done his utmost to idealize Fran?oise’s sexual charms. Early portraits, such as Woman-Flower of 1946 (Zervos, XIV, 167), develop the metaphor of her blooming youthfulness—an upright plant with minimal head and prominent breasts. But what of the orb enclosing jagged forms painted over a blue ground to the left? And what is the elongated object with the downward lines to the right if not another sign of negativity? The previous year there had been a compromising dark blue portrait,—skewed face, menacing teeth in a dark mask, hair with frayed ends enclosed within a hard triangle—the dislocated body below. (Zervos XIV, 77). The mood of this portrait hardly differs from some of the visual attacks on Olga and Dora, and we understand that signs of danger had appeared early in the amour, with the strained attempts at idealization in the sentimental Woman-Flower being at the other extreme.
Life with Franqoise was indeed a battle of entangled love and suffering. There is no fuller revelation of this than Franqoise Gilot’s own Life with Picasso, first published in 1964 over his protest. It is a graphic account of their struggle, never contradicted by Picasso or anybody else as to its truthfulness. Lacking psychological theories to explain what was going on, Gilot nonetheless achieved insight and perspective surpassing anyone else involved in Picasso’s story, including his biographers, with the exception of Huffington whose reconstructions depend largely on Gilot’s account. The book is a highly important phenomenology of a conflicted woman’s erotic and romantic engagement with a narcissistic male of acknowledged genius. It may be that Picasso’s art coming out of this relationship is not of a high order and that the real gift to civilization is Gilot’s courageous book. Far more than a proto-feminist tract, her account of the rise and fall of attractions establishes the maiden/ Minotaur, goddess/ doormat or madonna/ whore paradigm in its proper context of narcissistic male erotomania. Gilot came far enough along in the sequence of Picasso’s burnt-out meteoric loves to see a pattern, and to make something of it, thereby prompting attempts at interpretation such as this one.
As father of two children, who could delight him as many paintings show, Picasso tried to resist old terrors of female engulfment, but again he re-enacted distant childhood traumas. For her part, Franqoise’s motherhood of Claude (1947) and Paloma (1949) helped to stabilize an uncertain relationship with their father, although complicated by troubled feelings about her own father. Further, parenthood out of wedlock led to unhappy complications once Olga died (1955) and Picasso was free to marry Franqoise, which he chose not to do. The legal status of their children became contentious. The story is well known of how he betrayed Franqoise’s trust after she had left him in frustration over his affairs with other women and other cruelties. Franqoise, who had divorced a new husband expecting to marry Picasso, was stunned to find that instead he had married Jacqueline Roque. This deliberate betrayal, a final attempt to break her, conclusively showed her Picasso’s destructiveness, reaffirming that “my life with Pablo was like a sickness”.69 Gilot reports Dora Maar as saying to Picasso: “You’ve never loved anyone in your life. You don’t know how to
love”.70
There is ample evidence for this accusation from Picasso himself, as reported by Gilot: for instance he commented, “There’s nothing so similar to one poodle dog as another poodle dog and that goes for women too”. Picasso often repeated, “For me, there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats”. He added with near sociopathic emphasis, “Nobody has any real importance for me. As far as I’m concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go”.71 Franqoise thought this “imperialism ... incompatible with true greatness”, without calling it by its right name, malignant narcissism. Naively, she had thought that “he had no reason to defend himself against me”, nor did she connect his gentleness with outbursts of rage when frustrated, as when he burned her face with a cigarette or threatened to throw her into the Seine.72 She summarizes, “There was no means, ever, of coming really close to him for long. If for a brief moment he was gentle and tender with me, the next day he would be hard and cruel. He sometimes referred to that as ‘the high cost of living’”.73 She saw that “Minotaur” was a hardened identity and that by trying to reform it, the empathic woman would inevitably come “too close”, risking retaliatory violence. She could not get past the lies and evasions covering other erotic adventures by which Picasso had tested his defenses against intimacy, the affair with Genevieve Laporte, for instance, which he kept from Franqoise as long as possible.74 Picasso’s avoidant attachment style, desiring intimate connection while spurning it, came to her as a mystery—the mystery of the Minotaur, who “goes in for orgies” because he “can’t be loved for himself’, as Picasso himself said in a rare moment of insight.75 The only tactic left her was to separate, which she did in 1953, taking the children to Paris. Gilot turned the tide in Picasso biography, but it is doubtful that her insights have been fully taken in. Life With Picasso is no psychobiography because Franqoise does not consider the developmental determiners of Picasso’s ambivalence towards women. She does, however, strive for language to evoke the phenomenon: “he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he had collected in his little private museum”. But he did not quite cut them off, allowing his rejected women’s lives to hang by a thread which he controlled. They would let out “little peeps and cries ofjoy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls ...”, a comment putting him perilously close to Hans Bellmer’s perverse interests.76 Gilot learned wisdom, writing more in sadness than anger: “I realized ... that Pablo had never been able to stand the company of a woman for any sustained period”, and once he had made this tomboy a mother “he wanted no part of it”.77 Final confirmation of the diagnosis came from his own mouth: “Every time i change wives i should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around now to complicate my existence. Maybe that would bring back my youth. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents”.78 One wonders how his mother would have taken this cruel comment, and whether she could have shed any light on its origin in childhood.