Picasso

The summer of 1951 my husband Tom who was a painter, our baby daughter Catinka and I spent in Paris staying in the apartment of friends in St. Germain.Tom’s hero among modern artists was Pablo Picasso about whom he knew everything at that time knowable. Every painting ever published, every sculpture, every book,every apartment or studio he had ever lived in in Paris, Tom knew them all. He also knew that Picasso had an apartment and studio not far from where we stayed, at the rue St.Augustin. While Tom painted in the dining room I played the piano in the living room and Catinka, age eight months,crawled on the floor,exploring. Every so often she arrived at the piano,tickling my toes. When Tom needed a breather he would go for a walk which inevitably led him to Picasso's building. One day he came home excitedly. Picasso was in Paris. His car was in his courtyard. Now there was no holding Tom.He knew that the woman who took care of the building was the former flower girl whom Picasso had dis-covered by the roadside somewhere in the south and whose name was Inez. So he went up to her apartment, introduced himself in broken Spanish and asked if he could meet the maestro. Of course he could not.The maestro wasn’t in. So he went back the next day, and the next and so on.Once I even went with him. Then, one day, when Inez had delivered her friendly but firm denial, a voice behind her said:yes, he was here and asked Tom to come with him up to his apartment.Tom spent about thirty minutes with Picasso who kept asking him questions about his student years in Nazi Germany when “entartete Kunst” was forbidden.Later Tom complained that he really had not wanted to talk about himself, he wanted to talk to Picasso about painting. Nevertheless he was in seventh heaven, specially since Picasso asked him to come back again and bring his wife and child.So one day we went to visit the great man. Upstairs Picasso greeted us with a big smile and an even bigger one for Catinka whom I carried, riding on my hip. Then he opened a door behind which was a spiral staircase which led to the top floor. Slowly walking up the stairs we passed assorted sculptures such as the cows head fashioned from a bicycle saddle and the handlebars photos of which had been published. None of these items were displayed. They were just standing there in storage. After negotiating the narrow stairs we arrived at the top and entered a very large room without any furniture, just an easel. All around the wall were paintings, three and four deep with the face toward the wall. Picasso invited Tom to turn over any painting he wanted and as many as he wanted. Since I am not a painter, do not speak Spanish and had a child sitting on my hip I have no idea what they were talking about.But clearly both of them got along very well, Picasso as the maestro and teacher and Tom as the pupil At one point Picasso turned to me and told me that his wife,Paloma,carried their child the same way I did.When we were leaving he patted Catinka's cheeks lightly and gave her a small kiss. This is, what I have taken away from our visit with the giant of the modern art world.I have no profound in-sights but neither do I regret having had the experience. To me Picasso was a warm and friendly man,full of energy.Though Catinka has become an artist she has stayed away from any abstract art.Neither has her father ever followed the abstract style.