Lee Miller believed fiercely that:
from the point of view of art in Paris, the most valuable contribution has been the fact that Picasso stayed here under the Occupation as an inspiration to others. The fact that he didn’t abandon the ship but went on about his business, quietly, unobtrusively, showing himself little in public other than in the immediate vicinity of his studio. He has painted prodigiously during these four years, never accepting anything from the Germans and often pleased to use his ingenuity with new materials as a necessity.
Picasso loved women and needed them to give energy to his life. But he was cruel to individual women, particularly Dora Maar, who died in 1997 aged eighty-nine and whom he never ceased to humiliate. His art always came first. According to Fran?oise Gilot, this piece of self-knowledge was learned young after he made a crucial promise to God that if his adored little sister, Conchita, recovered from diphtheria he would never paint again. In fact she died but Pablo continued to paint in any case, the promise discarded soon after it was made. Gilot said Picasso only told this story to the women in his life. ‘It was a warning that they, like Conchita, would be sacrificed on the altar of art, a fate all of them, except for Gilot, would share.’
This story about the primacy of art above people is in the forefront of my mind as I visit Paris’s Picasso museum. The museum, housed in a magnificent seventeenth-century mansion in the Marais district, reopened in October 2014 after five years of delays and infighting following a closure for renovation. I am stunned by the serenity of a 1918 painting of Mme Rosenberg, wife of Picasso’s dealer, impresario and friend Paul, and their baby daughter Micheline, who all fled Paris in 1940. This was one of the first pictures the Rosenberg family managed to regain after the war, discovering it in a small museum in Paris after it had been renamed by G?ring Mother and Child. A gift from Picasso to his dealer, it must have been painted shortly after Rosenberg discovered that his wife had been having an affair with his business partner, Georges Wildenstein, a poignant story recounted in 2012 by Rosenberg’s granddaughter, Anne Sinclair, when she too was emerging from a painful personal history. The discovery nearly broke Rosenberg. Sinclair wrote a sensitive account of how her grandparents found a way of living together after that, adding that it helped her understand why her grandfather always appeared burdened. So much turbulence followed that sitting. So much history in one canvas.*
The beautiful, talented and sharp-witted Fran?oise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress for ten years from 1943, moved in with him only in 1946. Picasso frequently insisted that one cannot be a real woman without becoming a mother and, in 1947, their son Claude was born; a daughter, Paloma, was born in 1949, the year of the Dove. Yet Gilot’s independence was as much irritant as stimulant and when, in 1964, she wrote Life with Picasso, an amusing and revelatory book about their life in wartime Paris, an enraged Picasso tried to prevent publication. He failed in his attempt to silence her but, following this debacle, refused to see Claude or Paloma again.