Céline at the Museum, Antibes, 2014

AUNT MATILDA WAS LIKE A racehorse champing at the bit when our cooking class assembled in the white van and went off to have our private tour of the Picasso exhibit.

“I can’t believe they’ve got all these paintings in one place!” she chortled. “Do you realize how lucky we are to see this? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime show.”

The rest of us behaved like a bunch of school kids on a field trip as we arrived at the museum and descended from our minivan into the sparkling sunshine. Gil hadn’t come with us; he was off on another one of his mysterious meetings. I couldn’t imagine his restless persona in a museum.

Our guide, a slim, proper middle-aged French lady with wire-rimmed glasses and a decorous navy suit, was standing on the front steps of the museum to greet us. “This way, please,” she said briskly, turning smartly on her chic, polished low-heeled shoes as if she would brook no lollygagging.

Aunt Matilda eyed her so warily that I stifled a giggle. We were going to have dueling art experts on this tour, I could sense it right away, as Aunt Matilda gazed at the exhibit’s banner: Picasso: Between the Wars and Between the Women. “First of all,” she muttered covertly from the side of her mouth, “there were no neat periods of this woman or that. There was a lot of overlap with Picasso’s women—he kept them on the hook and played them against one another to make them jealous.”

“Okay, Tilda, take it easy. Just go with the flow, all right?” Peter advised soothingly. The mild-mannered wine steward from London was turning out to be quite a companion to my aunt; she claimed that this genteel fellow was “a real beast at poker and bridge”. She meant it as a compliment.

Our class shuffled with awe through the exhibit’s rooms which were, indeed, arranged according to the women in Picasso’s life. But I had my own timeline—Grandma Ondine’s notebook. I was hoping that this excursion would provide me with answers about what was going on with Picasso while she was cooking for him. This morning I’d quickly flipped through her recipes and their dates; now, I was waiting impatiently for our tour to reach the period that really mattered to me: April and May, in 1936.

The first gallery we entered was earlier than that—it was called The Olga Period, with loving, dignified portraits of Picasso’s Russian ballerina wife and their son. Then the images of his wife became uglier—she began to look like a miserable harridan, especially in Large Nude in a Red Armchair, a painting which caused the guide to comment, “Olga became highly nervous as her marriage fell apart. Here Picasso has reduced her to a naked, anguished, complaining heap of flesh. Picasso himself admitted that it must be painful for a woman to discover in a painting that she is ‘on the way out’.”

“Good God,” Magda-from-Scotland grumbled as we looked at the mercilessly caricatured, amoeba-like creature splayed over a chair. “I always feel sorry for the wives of artists, don’t you?”

“Next we have our Marie-Thérèse Period,” the guide said, briskly leading us to a gallery of artwork that varied dramatically: from soft sweet schoolgirlish portraits in bluish-grey hues, to Amazonian giantesses thundering down the beach, to the erotic etchings of a Minotaur devouring his nude blonde mistress. There was another series that featured a cartoony girl with a penis-shaped head and body, to which my elderly classmates responded as if these were naughty schoolboy drawings.

“That’s supposed to be a woman?” Lola drawled skeptically.

“Looks like a prick with eyes to me,” Joey murmured to the other men, “but hey, I’m from Chicago, what do I know?”

“It’s called the femme-phallus,” Aunt Matilda volunteered. “The girl and the penis become one.”

“Whatever became of Marie-Thérèse?” Peter inquired in his polite English way.

“Not long after Picasso died, she hanged herself,” the guide answered. There was a collective gasp of dismay among my classmates. “But that was many years after this period,” she added hastily.

Lola asked rather knowingly, “What kind of lover was Picasso?”

Aunt Matilda announced breezily, “They say he took a perverse pleasure in denying women their orgasm.” There was a collective clucking among the women.

Our guide primly pretended not to hear us. “And now, something different,” she said hastily as she whisked us into another, adjunct room. “Here we have Picasso’s mysterious interlude on our very own Côte d’Azur—in the spring of 1936.” Aunt Matilda nudged me with those sharp elbows of hers.

“Picasso had stopped painting, perhaps because of distress over his personal life,” the guide explained. She added proudly, “But then he retreated to the Riviera in great secrecy. And something in our little town of Juan-les-Pins provided the Master with the peace and inspiration he so desperately needed.”

“What an odd series,” Peter noted, peering at a wall covered with four pictures. “Hmm. These were all done the first week in April. See?” he said, craning his neck at the dates with scholarly interest.

“Wow, he was averaging about one a day!” Ben observed over my shoulder, impressed.

Eagerly I edged my way to the front of the group. I saw that Picasso had put the dates on each one in fierce black strokes, starting with: 2 Avril XXXVi. The numbers instantly jogged my memory—this was the day that Grandmother Ondine cooked bouillabaisse for him! With a thrill of excitement I studied the picture. It was a pastel done in shades of charcoal-grey on a beige background, and at first it seemed hardly more than a doodle—of a face half in darkness and half in light, like tarot-card images of the moon—but the longer I gazed at it the more its magic worked on me, conveying a sublimely celestial yet warmly human quality, for the character even had a hat upon its surreal head.

I peered at the next ones which were dated April 3, 4 and 5. I recalled that in Grandmother Ondine’s first week of cooking for Picasso she’d recorded in her notebook that she’d made him a beef miroton, a lamb rissole and a veal terrine.

“Love his sense of humor,” Aunt Matilda murmured. “See how, in each successive canvas in this series, he re-imagines the face that was in that first pastel? Here it fragments into objects on a beach—a seashell, a cornucopia, a womb. An eye here becomes a clitoris in that one. A breast here, a hillside there. Picasso loved nature. Springtime blooming, animals mating, the stars, the sun—he embraces it all!”

Indeed, each successive canvas was bursting with color—dazzling Mediterranean blue and joyous Easter pastels of pink, yellow and green making a landscape of fecund breasts, hills, trees, and sea…as if Picasso were celebrating the entire earth’s feminine powers of fertility and rebirth.

I wondered if Grandma ever saw these pictures. Could any of them even be the very painting he gave her? Or was there another one somewhere that was missing from this series?

“Character with a Seashell,” Magda murmured, reading the title on a brass plate for the last painting in this series. “Looks like a face painted on a kite, right? I guess those gloves dangling at the bottom are the tail of the kite. At least, I hope they’re gloves!” she added, staring at the lifeless pair of hands.

Joey grinned. “I like Picasso, but I have to admit, this dude is Jack the Ripper!”

“We must see these fragmented images in the context of twentieth-century history,” Peter said quietly. “The speed of technological advances in science, medicine, psychology, travel—and warfare. Two terrible world wars that shattered cities, people and animals. We all saw things we wished we hadn’t.”

I glanced at Peter, so debonair-looking in his pale flannel suit and neatly trimmed white hair; but now I pictured him as a kid in London running for shelter during the “Blitz” bombings. There had always been an undercurrent of sadness in Peter’s gentle nature, and now I could see why.

Across the room on another wall was a painting dated April 6. It was called Minotaure tirant une charette. Staring at this playful Minotaur pulling a wheelbarrow full of clutter, I quickly calculated that this was the day Grandma Ondine cooked a cassoulet for a party of three. Rather cryptically she’d noted, P. and M. and C. were well pleased. We drifted on to view more paintings from Picasso’s Juan-les-Pins interlude; portraits of Marie-Thérèse, done in bright circus-like colors.

But then, at the last painting on this wall, our guide noted, “Here we have something different—a still life from this period.”

A loaf of bread, a bowl of sensual fruit, a vase of wildly expressive yellow-orange flowers—

I stifled a gasp. There it was—an object so unmistakably familiar to me that it stopped me dead in my tracks. “Mom’s pink-and-blue striped pitcher!” I said under my breath.

Aunt Matilda wore a shocked expression of recognition, too, and she raised her eyebrows at me. “Do you see what I see?” she whispered. I nodded, dumbstruck. Yes, although exaggerated, it was unmistakably that lovely Provençal pottery that Mom brought to America when she eloped. The same pitcher I’d seen all my life, which always had sentimental pride of place on a shelf in our kitchen—until Deirdre threw it away. Now here it was, triumphantly surviving for all eternity in Picasso land.

We stood there gaping until the guide spoke again. “And if you’ll step this way, we have a very unusual pair of paintings, also from this mysterious period in Picasso’s life,” she announced, “which I feel form a bridge between the Marie-Thérèse Period and the Dora Maar Period.” She moved us into a special alcove where two canvases were placed side by side because of their similar subject—a dark-haired girl in a blue dress, sitting on the floor and gazing into a mirror. Everyone clustered around the first painting, which was dated 30 avril XXXVi and was so odd that you had to keep staring at it.

“Very strong, but strange, even for Picasso. Her neck looks like a can-opener,” Lola said, gazing searchingly at the picture. “Which one of his sex slaves was this poor girl?”

“We do not know who the model was for this painting,” the tour guide answered. “Some say the model must be Dora Maar, because of the dark hair,” she continued. “Others say it is surely Marie-Thérèse, because of the curves and sensuality. Or perhaps this model was the dark-haired sister of Marie-Thérèse. We will never know for sure.” I pressed forward to see it better.

And, as distorted as the model’s face and body were, I felt goosebumps at the sight of her. For there was something I recognized in the woman’s graceful looks and attitude—and most strikingly in that long, dark curly hair flowing down her neck, which so distinctly resembled Grandmother Ondine’s luxurious, poetic curls. In a strange way these paintings were telling me more about Grandma than her photograph did; and while I felt a poignant surge of admiration for the youthful sweetness of her draped limbs, I was also moved with pity for the tender vulnerability in her bowed head.

“Femme à la montre,” Peter read the painting’s title aloud from a brass plaque on the wall.

“Woman with a watch,” Aunt Matilda translated, pointing to the wristwatch on the model’s arm.

Could it truly be Grandma Ondine? I stared until I could almost hear the painted wristwatch ticking from its canvas. I noticed that Picasso, in his iconic, disjointed way, had painted a heart-shaped bottom visible through the skirt of the girl’s blue checked dress, as if backlighting made the cloth translucent. I wondered why Mom didn’t tell me that Grandma posed for Picasso—but maybe she hadn’t known a thing about it.

“The second painting, Femme dans un intérieur, is the same model,” the guide pointed out. I saw that it was dated 2 mai XXXVi. She continued, “See how her mirror no longer has a reflection in it. But a ghostly ‘double’ sits on the floor opposite her—a doppelgänger with identical long dark curls.”

Yes, that distinctive hair again. And if Grandma Ondine was the girl in these canvases, then it wasn’t so farfetched that Picasso might really have rewarded her with the gift of a painting, after all.

“Was there a third study of this model?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

The guide shrugged. “Not that I know of,” she replied, steering us into the next room. “But from time to time, unknown Picassos have turned up.” We entered another gallery. “This brings us to the Dora Maar Period. She was an intelligent, artistic photographer. In early, more naturalistic portraits we observe her looking happy and spirited. Yet Picasso called her ‘the weeping woman’, and you can see that these later pictures indeed capture a look of utter despair and misery.”

“Please God, don’t tell me she killed herself,” Magda said gloomily.

“No,” Aunt Matilda piped up, “but they say Picasso sometimes beat Dora until she was practically unconscious. And she had a nervous breakdown after he dumped her.”

My classmates groaned. We moved on to the exhibit’s Postwar Coda. “The last two important women in Picasso’s life were his mistress, the painter Françoise Gilot, who gave him two children, Paloma and Claude,” the guide explained. “And Jacqueline, his second wife, who was twenty-five years old when she met the seventy-one-year-old Master. Jacqueline outlived Picasso—but not for long. She shot herself.”

“Jeez,” Joey commented. “Two suicides, two nervous breakdowns—not a good track record.”

I’d felt proud that Grandma Ondine had achieved a place among the goddesses in this gallery. But now I found myself feeling uneasy for her. How had she survived her encounter with Picasso?

Our tour was ending as we reached the front door. “Any questions?” the guide asked.

“Did Picasso ever give away his paintings as gifts to people who, um, worked for him?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” she replied. “Picasso could be extraordinarily generous when the mood struck him. It’s said that he gave artwork to his chauffeur, doctor, housemaid—even his barber. But there were also court cases where other people who claimed to have received such gifts were accused of stealing them.”

“How much is a Picasso worth these days?” asked Lola’s brother Ben, ever the pragmatist.

“There was a recent sale at auction,” our guide said carefully, “in which a single painting went for the price of a hundred seventy-nine point four million dollars.” Joey whistled appreciatively.

“I don’t care how rich and famous he was,” Lola announced on our way out, “someone should have put up signs around him saying, Ladies, beware of the dog!”

As we stepped outside back into the brilliant midday sunlight, I felt reinvigorated by all I’d seen. When I recalled how the lawyer Clément had chortled over the notion that a little old lady like Ondine might have possessed a Picasso, I decided that I shouldn’t have let him make me feel that I was on a fool’s errand. Clearly there was a lot about Grandma that he—and my mother—knew nothing about.

Then suddenly I had an idea about a person I’d overlooked, who just might have some answers for me. So while my class was waiting for our bus to pull up to the curb, I sat down on a bench with my phone and tapped out a message asking Grandma’s lawyer for the contact info I needed. Good old Clément was on vacation and might ignore this, but I flagged it as urgent, just the same:

Dear Monsieur Clément: My mother told me that on the day my Grandmother Ondine died, a neighbor had looked in on her and called for the doctor. Do you know who this neighbor was, and if so, please provide me with the name, address and telephone number. Any other information you have would be most helpful, as I feel it is extremely imperative that I make contact right away.

As we boarded the van that took us back to the mas, I glanced at Aunt Matilda, but she and Peter were deep in conversation about possible day trips they might take when our class was given its “free time” at the end of the course. I hadn’t yet found the right moment to tell Aunt Matilda that the mas we were staying in had belonged to Grandma. When I’d returned from seeing Monsieur Clément, and Aunt Matilda asked me how it went with him, I told her only that he didn’t seem to know about a lost Picasso painting. Since I’d already searched the mas and found nothing, there didn’t seem to be any reason to burden the talkative Aunt Matilda with another one of Mom’s little secrets.

When we arrived at the mas we were offered complimentary massages in the spa’s open-air white tents that overlooked the lush fields and cerulean sky. As I lay there on my massage table I wondered what other family secrets Mom didn’t know about. I’d just seen two paintings of a model with a mirror who I felt sure was Grandma Ondine. And even Aunt Matilda recognized that striped pitcher in a still life. I felt I was truly on the right path, but now I knew that my mother’s ideas could only take me so far.

While sea breezes fluttered the spa curtains, an expert French masseuse gently kneaded my muscles with massage oils made of local lemon and almond. Beneath the sheet which I was lying on were crushed flower petals of violet, jasmine, rose and lavender, and I wondered fleetingly if this was a new addition inspired by my impromptu flower-shower. I smiled, recalling the look on Gil’s face when he plucked the flowers out of my hair. A bit unsettled now, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, surrendering to new impressions that came drifting in and out of my thoughts on the soft, scented air.

If I’m ever going to find that painting, I’ve got to stop thinking like Mom, I mused. I ought to think more like Grandmother Ondine in order to figure this all out.

Come to that, I might even have to learn—in whatever way possible—to think like Picasso.