PICASSO AS I KNEW HIM...

HANGING OUT AT LA CALIFORNIE

With Marina Picasso at La Californie, Antibes, 2003.

       In the satire show Beyond the Fringe, Alan Bennett parodied fake celebrity memoirs. "Those who knew Lawrence of Arabia as I did," he began "- hardly at all..."

When it comes to Pablo Picasso, I can go one better.  I never even met him.  But that's not to say our paths didn't cross.

In April 1973, I happened to be in Barcelona just after he died, and was surprised to see posters  announcing "Picasso's Last Exhibition," illustrated with one of his characteristic portraits. Impressed that someone had put together such a show so quickly, I went looking - to find a tiny gallery tucked down a side street. The “paintings” barely took up one wall. Most were on the backs of menus or napkins. One was inside a matchbook. The poster portrait could have served as a postage stamp.  Notoriously tight, Picasso never paid for food or drinks. Instead, he dashed off a sketch - which the owner of these scraps, proprietor of a local bodega, had been shrewd enough to collect.
              The next near-encounter took place in the south of France. In 1955, Picasso bought La Californie, an old chateau above Antibes. It served mainly as a place to store his thousands of canvases, ceramics and general clutter.  Each summer, however, he held open house there for his retinue of bullfighters, gypsies, dealers, girlfriends, the man who made his trousers, another who cut his hair - and, invariably, critics and art historians, eager to document his life and work, and grab any scraps that fell from the great man’s table; often literally, since meals were taken in the dirt-floored kitchen, with a browsing goat underfoot.
              I never expected to set foot there but in 2003 my phone rang.
              “Read your piece in Vogue,” said a growling American voice. “Want to help me make a movie about the old fraud?”
              The caller was Bill McClure, who produced documentaries for CBS news. His subject would be Picasso's decision to leave no will. "They fought over my fortune which I lived,"  cackled Pablo. "Imagine the chaos after I'm dead." 

What appeared in Vogue was my review of a memoir, called, tersely, Grand'pere, by Marina, his grand-daughter. “He drove everyone who got near him to despair, and engulfed them,” she said of the artist, and, with chilly candor, spelled out his stinginess.  Marine and her brother Pablito were forced to stand outside La Californie, often in the rain, appealing for money for food, only to have Jacqueline Roque - housekeeper, mistress and, eventually, wife - emerge to announce that the man she addressed, even in private, as “Master” or “Soleil” – the Sun - was too busy to see them.

           He only took an interest in Marina when she entered an attractive adolescence - too late for Pablito, who drank drain cleaner when Jacqueline barred him from Picasso's funeral. He joined  Picasso's other victims. The artist's first wife was in a mental hospital. Pablo, father of Marina and Pablito, who lacked artistic talent, tried to open a garage - unthinkable for the son of Le Soleil, who instead made him his chauffeur. The humiliation drove him to the bottle.
           Sweet revenge, then, for Marina to let us film in the mansion she’d inherited. Gone were the dirt-floored kitchen, the resident goat. The huge salon, cluttered in his lifetime with canvases, was a private gallery, floored in marble. It displayed Picasso urns, serene Matisses, a sublime Balthus, but, dominating everything, the portrait, seldom seen in public, of Olga Khoklova, the Russian dancer who became Marina’s grandmother.

           We filmed all day. As the light changed, the cameraman asked Marina to move to a spot where the portrait would be behind her.
           “Oh, just bring it here,” she said. As a servant unhooked the canvas and propped it on a chair, the cameraman and I, accustomed to seeing works of art treated with museum reverence, exchanged a startled glance. Can he do that?
           The shot finished, Bill left to film the grounds, leaving me alone.

Well, if a flunkey could do it...

I picked up the canvas – so light! - leaned it against a couch, and sat opposite. From a metre away, one could see every detail. Ah, look how he didn’t bother to finish the edges of her long dress, the brushwork petering out, the better to concentrate attention on that lonely, despairing face. And the colour of the dress,  foreshadowing the depression into which Olga would descend.

Bill McClure died shortly after (the victim of an automatically closing door at his hotel…but that’s another story) so the film was never completed. But the best sequence is the one I can re-run in my mind. My moment alone with a masterpiece. 

           (In 2015, Marina sold La Californie and offered its art for sale at an estimated $290 million. The portrait of Olga alone had a price tag of $60 million.)