Sitting on the beach, looking over the water to St. Malo, Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, 40, is thankful that there has been a break in the rain.
Pablo and his family—his wife, Russian-Ukrainian ballerina Olga, 31, and their almost 18-month old son, Paolo, who is teething—came to Brittany from Paris a couple of weeks ago. Pablo would have preferred spending the summer in sunny Midi, but Olga wanted Brittany. After about a week, they moved out of the hotel to this villa on the beach.
Villa Beauregard, Dinard
When the weather is nice, Pablo paints outdoors; he has finished a few paintings and quite a lot of drawings of people on the beach.
But it has been mostly raining, so the tourists crowd the two casinos and the town’s hotel ballrooms. Inside their rented home, Pablo does sketches of Olga and Paolo as well as the exterior and interiors of the villa. Despite his wife’s whining about her “woman problems,” an endless stream of visiting friends, and his screaming son, Pablo has managed to produce a surprising amount of work.
The baby screaming he can understand; but the wife is just plain annoying.
Family at Sea by Pablo Picasso
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
Later in the year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
SuchFriends Blog 