Books, Arts & Manners: Lives of the Artists

IT is not easy to convey on film an artist at work, especially in the nonvisual arts. But even a painter at the easel invites all kinds of cinematic clichés and possibly inevitable but trivializing shortcuts. Most nearly successful, to my knowledge, was Peter Watkins with his Edvard Munch (1975), Ken Russell coming a not very close second with Savage Messiah (1972), about the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. We now have two new attempts at artists’ lives, neither of them serious competition to a latter-day Giorgio Vasari.

First, the Merchant-Ivory production Surviving Picasso. This purports to be the story of the ten years Françoise Gilot, a young art student, spent as the mistress of Pablo Picasso, in his mid sixties when they met. Making this story was a doomed enterprise from the start. Mme Gilot, the mother of two illegitimate children by the painter—Claude and Paloma—has written her own memoir, which Merchant-Ivory were unable to acquire. Instead, they bought Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s trashy and suspect Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, drubbed by all serious Picasso scholars at the time of publication. Mme Gilot has expressed her disapproval of the movie, even though she is presented in it in a goldenly flattering light.

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John Simon

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IT is not easy to convey on film an artist at work, especially in the nonvisual arts. But even a painter at the easel invites all kinds of cinematic clichés and possibly inevitable but trivializing shortcuts. Most nearly successful, to my knowledge, was Peter Watkins with his Edvard Munch (1975), Ken Russell coming a not very close second with Savage Messiah (1972), about the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. We now have two new attempts at artists’ lives, neither of them serious competition to a latter-day Giorgio Vasari.

First, the Merchant-Ivory production Surviving Picasso. This purports to be the story of the ten years Françoise Gilot, a young art student, spent as the mistress of Pablo Picasso, in his mid sixties when they met. Making this story was a doomed enterprise from the start. Mme Gilot, the mother of two illegitimate children by the painter—Claude and Paloma—has written her own memoir, which Merchant-Ivory were unable to acquire. Instead, they bought Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s trashy and suspect Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, drubbed by all serious Picasso scholars at the time of publication. Mme Gilot has expressed her disapproval of the movie, even though she is presented in it in a goldenly flattering light.