A good friend says that men (males, I clarify) don't change much; simply and reluctantly, we get used to aging. I was thinking about this while browsing the photographs Edward Quinn took of Picasso around 1953 in La Galloise, with the painter Françoise Gilot and their children Claude and Paloma, where the painter is seen playing with the children in front of a Christmas tree or feigning a gesture of surrender, with hands raised, before the little one, dressed as a musketeer. In recent years, feminist critical theory has tried, without much success, to recontextualize or cancel the mythification of the Picasso genius, appealing to his ancestral custom of treating women as a simple creative laboratory. Curated by Paloma Picasso herself and the director of the Montcada street museum, Emmanuel Guigon, Growing up between two artists has the undisguised goal of reminding us that Picasso also knew how to age and, without renouncing his creative power, act as a good family father.
Picasso lived for a decade with the painter Françoise Gilot, with whom he had a forty-year age difference, and this was undoubtedly an arrangement of creative explosion, but not as idyllic as the paintings suggest. Once separated, the painter from Malaga did everything possible to destroy and boycott the work of his beloved, as well as to prevent her from publishing her celebrated Life with Picasso. Despite everything, Gilot could proudly boast of being the only woman who had enough guts to tame the beast.
She explains it herself in a short text, included in the beautiful catalog of the exhibition, where she compares their coexistence to a mano a mano with certain doses of bullfighting: "After our separation, and despite new loves entering our lives, we were left with a feeling of loss. It was the end of a great passion. It had run its course without self-complacency or concessions, and had left us exhausted, like two worn-out warriors. But it was an honorable fight."
All this paraphernalia that I explain could revive the eternal debate about the separation between an author's life and work (an absurd discussion, because they are already two separate things in essence), but it speaks much more about how Picasso enthusiasts are already accustomed to manipulating their idol's existence to offer a vision that fits a certain imaginary. Of all this, of course, the genius laughs from beyond; we, the spectators, should be much more concerned with enjoying his work... and also Gilot's art, a more than notable painter. In fact, the interest of this beautiful exhibition is precisely to see the marital differences in the treatment of childhood. In works such as Four Profiles in Chinese Shadows, Paloma and her doll on a black background (1952) and The Mother and Children (1953), the painter cannot help but use his children as objects of inspiration, with an oppressive excess of black, as if childhood were an accident that fate had dealt him.
On the contrary, upon entering the spacious room of Gilot's paintings, one has the sensation of being able to breathe air charged with oxygen and joy. We admire works of exquisite naïveté, almost like early Miró, such as My Children Playing, Claude on a Toy Horse (1952) or The Acrobat Children (1956). It is not merely a colorful fact; here the little ones appear as a source of joy and play is no longer mediated, but tries to be joliu. This is how life must have been, on a much more real level, for Claude and Paloma, who, according to the interviews included in the catalog, always return to their childhood times with an idyllic spirit.
It is a shame that the selective Darwinism of historiography and the fact of being Picasso's occasional companion have cast a shadow on Gilot's pieces, because in this brief sample of her art we see first-rate works such as Claude with feet together (1949). But gossip often surpasses complexity, and Gilot will go down in history as the only woman who tamed the old bravo.
They say that some time later, when asked about her life with very powerful men, Gilot expressed a very attractive idea: "lions attract lions." Travel to the artistic cage on Montcada Street, even if it's just to make the ushers happy, who smile hopefully when they see a fellow citizen addressing them in our language. Picasso wins the battle, as always.