Column | Fish from Picasso in the sea, fish from Picasso on your plate

Because I was born for happiness (sometimes I think so), I am in the Picasso Museum in Antibes. It sits in the 14th-century Chateau Grimaldi and is filled with works of art by Picasso that are all at least good and often very good. They were also largely made in the same year: in 1946 when Picasso lived and worked here for six months. He had left Dora Maar in 1945. She inspired his ‘La femme qui pleure’, four masterly canvases, four unspeakable fits of crying.

For Picasso, a woman is like a favorite coat. You wear it all the time, until you see another one you like and then you take it.

Dora Maar is a thing of the past. Now 21-year-old artist Françoise Gilot is his courtship and he no longer paints women in tears, he creates swarms of elated masterpieces in all shades of sun and sea and cricket chirping.

I see sea urchins and octopuses. I see a smiling fish in the sea, I see fish on your plate with onions and garlic. There are tapestries, there are ceramics. There is a lot and it is beautiful and I think Picasso is a jellyfish. But he paints so sweetly. I sway through Chateau Grimaldi on the waves of a chanson in my head. “La mer” by Charles Trenet or something, something my mother turned up the radio for.

One drawing holds me, thin pencil lines on soft white paper. The center is a small triangle, image shorthand for a pubic area, surrounded by rectangles, circles, ellipses: a woman as a geometric problem. The lines whisper of beauty, passion and shame, I think. Françoise is the subject, here everything is about her, so this drawing too. Picasso studies her body, and her effect on him, he draws what she does to him.

At the bottom of the sheet is the outline of a left hand. We’ve all done that at one time or another: you put your hand on a piece of paper and trace it around with a pencil or marker. Hand away. Hey, he turned into a drawing. Magical moment.

Whose is this hand? I let my own hand hover over it – it fits. That hand is not Picasso’s hand, can’t, this is a woman’s hand. From Françoise. Did Picasso ask her to add her hand to his geometric drawing?

Or, and that is also possible, did Françoise Gilot challenge Picasso with the circumference of her hand? Did he suddenly see her hand on a sheet of paper and start working on it? That’s where I stop. I’m a romantic, I want Picasso to recognize her hand as a sign and immediately think of a caress.

But I can only guess and make up, that hand is a mystery. That’s right, art is full of mysteries. Otherwise there’s nothing to it.