Life with Picasso by Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake is a 373-page hardcover published in 1964 by McGraw-Hill Book Company. This is a Book-of-the-Month-Club Selection. The dust jacket has light shelf wear and small closed tears along the edges. Inside, the cloth-bound hardcover has the previous owner's name written on the inside endpaper but the rest of the book is pristine, with clean unmarked pages and tight binding. The condition is very good.
Life with Picasso is the most intimate and revealing portrait of Pablo Picasso ever published. For nearly a decade, Francoise Gilot shared her life with this greatest artist of modern times, giving birth to two of his children. In her recollections, she describes the exuberant, if exhausting world they knew together--a world lit by Picasso's genius, threatened by his moods, and made glowingly alive on these pages.
A gifted painter herself, she not only painted with him, but served as his model, and enjoyed his complete professional confidence. Watching him work, listening to him, and learning the relation between his thought and his art, she gained immense insight into his genius. She throws light on his aesthetic philosophy, his views of other great artists both past and present, and hi magnificent inventiveness, not only in painting but in sculpture, etching, lithography, and pottery.
Best of all, here is Picasso the man, the husband, the father: sometimes savage, sometimes astonishingly gently, given to sudden rages and childish superstitions, struggling through fits of depression or exulting in creative fervor, suffering pangs of anxiety for the life of his infant son, reproaching his eldest like the most bourgeois of fathers, miserly and generous by turns, suspicious and resentful yet often humorous, very human in a thousand petulant demands, and always larger than life.
And here too are perceptive portraits of the people, great and humble, who moved through Picasso's atelier and his life: Matisse, Gertrude Stein, Eluard Gide, Cocteau, Miro, and Chaplin are remembered, side by side with the less-well-known figures who surrounded him--Sabartes the dedicated amanuensis, Marcel the chauffeur, and Ines the devoted housekeeper. Here are the art dealers, fencing with Picasso over pictures and prices and, usually, getting the worst of it. Here are the bewildered Nazi occupation officials, assigned to suppress his work after Hitler's denunciation and always getting the worst of it. And here is Braque, cordially engaging in a fierce but friendly status duel with Picasso and, rare event, getting the best of it.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-23276
