Living with the Minotaur

...But for all the critical insights of Mme...

...The account of the displaced Olga continually showing up to disturb the love-nest is a disheartening one...

...While working on a lithograph of a bullfight scene, Picasso confided to her, "You must always work with economy in mind...

...If you can handle three elements, handle only two...

...Gilot's observation that other artists, like Laurens, were sometimes wary of showing Picasso what they were working on for fear that he would appropriate it, using it to better effect and with more attendant publicity, is a case in point...

...But the book is valuable, primarily, for Picasso's observations about his own work and the work of others...

...Gilot's memoir, Picasso still comes through as a man and an artist of indomitable vitality—an aging minotaur devouring art...

...life and youth in large nourishing quantities...

...Gilot was, herself, succeeded by Jacqueline Roque, who, in the fullness of time, has become Mme...

...An art-student of 21 when she first met Picasso in 1943, she succeeded Dora Maar, who succeeded MarieThérèse Walter, who succeeded Olga Koklova, who succeeded Eva (Marcelle Humbert), who succeeded Fernand Olivier, with whom, from the point of view of art history, it all began...

...Gilot on the subject of composition...

...Aline Saarinen, reviewing the book in the New York Times, has suggested that Mme...

...In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve...

...There is something a little too stilted about these portions of the book, as if Picasso were delivering himself for posterity, ex cathedra: but they are nonetheless important...

...And the descriptions of his malicious and high-handed maneuvers with European and American dealers fill out the picture of a shrewd manipulator and opportunist—capacities not unrelated to his art at its best and at its worst: the artist and the businessman in equal measure...

...Reviewed by JAMES R. MELLOW Executive Editor, "Arts Magazine" If lovers do not always make just biographers, they are often able to give us an intimate side of the great man that escapes the later and more judicious scholar...

...Life with Picasso does make its points about the sometimes brutal selfishness and egotism required to perpetuate a career of such fame and longevity...

...Gilot got no less than she deserved, considering the importance conferred upon her...

...Gilot's narrative...

...The broody hens, one supposes, are also part of that picture...

...But in matters of marital propriety, even sophisticated women seem to take a surprisingly tough line toward the errant members of their sex...

...There is no denying that the dispossessed lover is apt to give us a picture decidedly different from what might have been expected during the first flush of romance, and there is an increasingly bitter tone towards the end of Mme...

...What one notices mostly is the common-sense approach to method, and the fact that his observations have come from long and persistent experience...

...For Mme...

...Picasso's remark—"When there's anything to steal, I steal"—was fair warning to the competition...

...In modern art he has been, for years, the cock-of-thewalk...

...What I've done, you see, is to use the same form twice—first as positive form and then as negative form...

...You must always work not just within but below your means," he observed to Mme...

...Besides, it makes a kind of plastic reference —one part to the other—which is very effective composition...

...The picture of the artist, sulking in bed, waiting to be prompted, cajoled and pushed into the day's activities by a team of servants and friends all of whom had to assure him of his importance in the world, is a healthy antidote to the usual products of the Picasso legend factory...

...Gilot's memoir makes me feel that it is, on the whole, a rather level-headed account, frank and full-bodied, open to the claims of Picasso's greatness even while it skirts perilously close to viciousness...

...Where Matisse, as a doyen of the modern movement, cast his roles as that of a comforter to the tired businessman, Picasso, in his maxims, comes across as the efficiency expert...

...For whatever he conferred upon lovers or friends, Picasso was ready to extract his pound of flesh...

...Françoise Gilot, on the basis of incomplete returns, is the sixth of the attractive young women commemorated in the life of Pablo Picasso...

...In the 10 years that she was with him, Françoise Gilot bore Picasso two children, Claude and Paloma...

...If you can handle ten, then handle only five...

...What flaws the book as a human document is Mme...

...It is liberally sprinkled with anecdotes and gossip, accounts of his raffish dealings with the important artists of his time—Braque, Matisse, Mirò, Chagall, Léger—which give us an inside view of the jealous crowding that exists even at the top of the heap...

...Picasso has been in the public eye for more than half a century and there is no sign that the interest in him is abating, despite the sadly decreasing relevance of his recent work...

...Never a man to throw anything away, he enjoyed the competition between his present affair and his previous amours, most of whom he managed to keep dangling on strings of varying lengths...

...soothed his professional jealousy, put up with his tantrums, built the fires in his cold ateliers, took care of business matters and drew him out from his morning depressions...

...Gilot it cannot have been an easy life, and she is probably right to feel that she has paid for everything she got...

...Gilot's attempt to place herself, at certain moments, in the role of the wounded dove...

...Picasso...

...That's the basis of my two picadors...

...My own reading of Mme...