Pablo Picasso knew how to make a woman happy: In the autumn of 1951, months after he had begun an on-and-off affair with author Geneviève Laporte, 25 to his 70, he gave her a lithograph he had made.
It wasn’t the first time Picasso gave her his art — he had sketched her many times in the summer of 1951 — but this print, which he had made two years earlier, was special.
It was not only a work of extraordinary beauty, his own take on Lucas Cranach’s David and Bathsheba, but it was also printed on rare Chinese silk paper. Thinking he’d want it back, Laporte handed it to him reluctantly, but Picasso wrote her name on the sheet, then said: ‘It’s for you. Take care of it, because this print is unique.’
Ultimately, however, no amount of thoughtful gifts could make up for a monumental blundering.
Picasso had been in a relationship with fellow artist Françoise Gilot when seeing Laporte. When Gilot left him in 1953, he implied that Laporte should move in with him, but he did so clumsily. As he was about to board a car to go to the villa in Cannes he had previously shared with Gilot, he turned towards her and said: ‘Are you coming?’ At which Laporte, taken aback, could only blurt out: ‘First, change the sheets.’
Geneviève Laporte (1926 - 2012) shows off new book 'Les Cavaliers d'ombre' ('Shadow Riders') at a cocktail party in the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower, in 1954. The book was illustrated by Picasso
It was the beginning of the end, although it was a dog that put the final nail in their relationship’s coffin; when Laporte visited Picasso, Yan, his boxer, came in from the garden and dropped a stick at her feet.
As she threw it across the room for Yan to fetch back, he complained his house was no place to play with a dog. ‘At that moment,’ Laporte recalled in her Sunshine at Midnight: Memories of Picasso and Cocteau, ‘he died to me.’ (Picasso’s biographer begged to differ, suggesting in a 2005 interview to the Associated Press that the artist may have left his mistress for other women).
Either way, Laporte would go on to marry a hero of the French Resistance and sell Picasso’s artworks to raise money to found her own animal-welfare charity — many of them, portraits of her. David et Bethsabée (d’après Cranach) is now available through Shapero Modern.
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