Despite all the time spent in France I was struggling; clearly my French and my impoverished circumstances were making no impression on the fearsome châtelaine on the other side of the counter. I was nervous, frustrated, and almost in tears.
It was summer holiday and those of us who were staying on after school closed found ourselves in great need of diversions. For the younger students, the staff who remained organised cultural coach parties to the usual places – Monaco, Cap Ferat, Grasse and so forth, but we final year students – almost adults – were left pretty much to our own devices. My regular choice in this final year was different to my classmates and mostly solitary. Every day after lunch for the last six weeks I left the school grounds outside Cagnes and walked the blazing dusty road alongside the railway the 2 or 3 kilometres into Antibes to visit the Château. Almost all of my fellow pupils thought I was crazy. The sophisticates amongst them said “Why go and spend an afternoon sitting in a hall in the château when you could be riding into Nice or Cannes for a nice afternoon in the cafes!” – whilst the testosterone-fuelled wanted company on their trips to the sand and stone that they laughingly called a beach, in order to ogle and be ogled by the swarms of teenage girls.
I had a secret though; I knew what I was doing and I knew why I had to be at the Château.
Only Siggi seemed to understand, and it didn’t surprise me that he did. It was a cultural thing, an artistic thing: something in the soul which, despite our differences, we both shared. Together over the last two years we had explored the artistic backcountry of the Cote d’Azur, seeking out the impromptu late evening jam sessions around the beach cafes of Juan that were rapidly burgeoning into the International Jazz Festival, the writers from Cocteau to Prevert, from Greene to Durrell, who invaded the cafes beside the ancient quai at the port of Antibes whilst consuming seafood wine and gossip with equal gusto, as we had also explored the hundreds of small potteries and painters and crafts studios in the hills behind this lavender coast with our rented motobicyclettes.
On my last visit back home for the Easter holidays I’d sat with dad in his studio. It had been a grey cold and blustery day with no hint of spring in the air. The ground outside the north light picture window was dank and muddy – I’d needed Wellington boots to walk down the garden paddock to his door. Inside, the studio was a warm fug of cigarette smoke and paraffin heater fumes and stale linseed oil, with the garish daylight tubes overhead shedding their humming effervescence across dozens of canvases sketches and books, all piled up higgledy pigledy wherever there was space on floor and shelves and camp-bed. We sat to one side of the room, close to the heater, in a pair of ancient brown broken-down stuffed leather armchairs with horsehair bursting from every seam, the samovar gently steaming on the heater, each of us cradling a glass of the vicious lemon-soused black tea my father habitually consumed by the gallon, dipping the traditional sugar cube a little at a time to infuse the brew and swapping large-format books as we once again browsed our way through a millennia’s worth of art history. Behind us on the shelf his Sobell radio quietly issued the phrases of a Donizetti operetta to which he hummed along.
On this day I was initiated. On this day I was drawn deeply into the mysteries. I’d had my grounding over the years. Long walks through the myriad galleries, the quiet inspections of ancient tomes and modern reproductions in national trust houses and libraries up and down the land; the gleeful hunts for the rare and unexpected through second-hand shops and market stalls the length and breadth of Britain – from Farringdon Road to Leeds Market. All of the old world was – I believed – already mine. I knew these masters well and in many if not most cases could cite their histories and precedents, their line, their forms and their colours; the way the delicate impastos of Turner succeed to those of Friederich in an unbroken line of passion and honesty. Yet somehow, over the years, I had managed to evade the modern. Or perhaps I had been gently steered away until I was deemed ready.
On this day past and present were to be connected.
We talked, slowly and for hours, of the First War, of where and how he had served on the Eastern Front. Properly, he talked and I listened. Of patriotism and nationalism, of imperial idiocies and foolish republicans and insane demagogues and where these had all, inevitably, led. He talked of the horrors of that decade of war only lightly, although on other and later days he would expand that theme much further; today was not the day for horror itself. Today was to be the day of my new beginnings, of learning what it was that was born from that hell. Of how painters and musicians and writers on all sides had all taken their lessons from that war to end all wars and made from it a new vision for the world. A vision with remarkable consensus across the breadth of Europe and the Americas and Australasia. Enough! No more! We humans are better than this!
So it was that we came – that I came – finally – to that primal scream of rage and dishonour that was Guernica!
By the time I returned to France I knew what modern art meant to him. What Picasso and the others who painted their way out of hell in the years following The Great War had achieved. I knew that dad’s love of life and his passion for it could only be expressed through painting, just as his pain at the loss of friends and family could also only partly be expressed that way.
So it was that every day I set off to the Château Musée Grimaldi to watch a remarkable experiment in modern art. The curators of the Château had invented perhaps the very first modern Artist In Residence scheme, converting a cloistered walkway at one end of the great hall into a glassed-in private viewing space so that visitors could watch Picasso at work. Over that summer of 1961 Picasso worked in public in a number of media, from canvas to huge hand-made Fabriano papers but, most spectacularly of all, during the course of one week he erected several large sheets of glass parallel to and close up against the walled gallery where we visitors sat or stood, and painted directly onto his glass. It was an astonishing experience to watch his face and hands, both back and front lit by the huge oriel windows of the hall, through the medium of his own translucent images, as he applied the paint. Some were completed in mere hours, some took a day or more to grow to completion; all were a riotous symphony of form and colour. Mythical beasts, women at play in various states of dress, children on the beach. Celebrations of life through a modern reinvention of stained glass.
Each day, whilst buying my entrance ticket and also, again, before leaving the Château, I habitually explored a small corner of the museum shop in the lobby, mostly awash with the normal tourist fodder of a chateau museum, where the special items representing Picasso’s work were kept. Large format whole-plate limited edition art books, limited edition lithographs, ordinary prints, cards, and much more were on display.
Inevitably the school holidays and my years in France were drawing to a close and I was due to return home to London to resume my English education. I began to think of taking a present home with me for dad – perhaps a good book on Picasso or maybe, if I was lucky with the price, one of the unsigned prints. So I began my hunt and finally found one which I thought I could probably afford; a stone-cut lith from an original brush and ink drawing of Pan playing the pipes – a subject that drew music and art together in a single simple but strong image. On my last full day in France I returned to the Château to buy my present, only to discover that the last of the unsigned prints had been sold. Unsure what to do I picked up a signed copy of the same print from the shelves and took it to the counter to ask how much it was; to be shocked by the price – several hundred thousand Francs beyond my funds. In my halting French I attempted to haggle with the lady behind the counter, explaining that I was leaving the next morning and had no more money; that I really really wanted this print as a gift for my father. “NON! C’est pas possible!”
I was ready to give up and had resigned myself to going home empty-handed when a hand landed on my shoulder and a voice asked in a rusty English “What is the matter?”
Looking over my shoulder I saw Picasso and, like a naughty schoolboy caught in some act of idiocy, I began to shrivel, wanting to escape and hide my embarrassment.
The sales lady expostulated that I was trying to steal a valuable print for only a few sous. Picasso looked at me and asked me “Why do you want it?” – so I explained that it was “un cadeau pour mon pere” – a present for my father – who was also a painter and admired Picasso’s work greatly.
With a huge twinkle in his eye as he looked at me he said to the sales assistant “Give him the print! He deserves a reward for being bored every day for the last six weeks.”
The chatelaine looked both mortified and furious as she carefully packed the print.
I hadn’t even known he’d been aware of me sitting in the gallery watching him every day.
When I got home to London the next day and gave my father the print with the story that went with it he laughed long and hard and then just pinned the print straight on the wall of his studio, where it stayed long after his death, long after the studio itself was cleared and the dusty remnants of his life moved on to newer and better homes. The pinholes in the paper are still there more than 40 years later, though these days the print is in a frame behind protective glass.
French châtelaines can be defeated.