Picasso’s Paris Pigeons
Nonfiction by Margaret H. Wagner
My mother met Picasso in 1951 during her seven-month “grand tour” of Europe.
I imagined my mother, then a twenty-five-year-old traveling with a female friend from college, sitting at a long table in a café in the South of France. She had gathered her wavy brunette hair in a side ponytail and wore a white button-down shirt with a circle collar, a brown midi-length shirt, and saddle shoes. Those two young Americans, fresh from a visit to the Fragonard fragrance factory in nearby Grasse, which my mother had recorded in her trip journal, must have left a perfume trail.
Perhaps Picasso, at the head of the same table in a deep political discussion with his mates, piqued by the scent and the saddle shoes, offered to light my mother’s cigarette from his half-burned one. My mother never admitted to me that she ever smoked, but after she died, I discovered her cigarette habit from another of her college friends. At the time, Picasso was over twice my mother’s age.
“What was Picasso like? What did you talk about?” I had asked my mother these questions many times ever since I was a child.
“Fascism,” was all she muttered.
“You must remember more about an icon of twentieth-century art!” I continued to pry and never received an answer. I sensed her tight-lipped undertone was disapproval more than boredom.
I loved listening to my mother’s stories of her European trip before she married my father. She shared them with me about as often as we read fairy tales together. I was enthralled by her glee with life in 1951. Except for the bits about Picasso, her words poured out in an unfiltered jumble, and her mocha eyes glowed with spirited independence.
In 2014, a year after my mother unexpectedly died, I found a box of her trip slides and notes. It was clear she shared only certain aspects of her journey, so I decided to retrace her adventure to get closer to her. A bonus would be to reconcile how the streak of independence and aliveness that I experienced in her stories of Europe seemed to be dialed back after years of marriage and family life.
The only mention of Picasso in her trip notes was, “Picasso — horse with boy standing beside.” She was camping throughout the South of France, and I assumed she hadn’t written much during that stretch because she didn’t have a proper hostel or hotel desk on which to do so. My mother grew up riding horses; in fact, she kept a photo of one of her horses on her dressing table. Picasso and horse must have been a painting she saw in a museum.
While in Paris in 2022, I searched the Musée National Picasso-Paris for art Picasso had created in 1951. Maybe his work would suggest something more about their meeting. I walked through all the museum rooms and didn’t find any horses, but I did discover, under a glass case, that one of Picasso’s lovers had saved his nail clippings. That display would have made my mother arch her eyebrows. Rather than horses or nails, I felt compelled to take a seat in front of a black and white sketch of pigeons.
Pigeons was ink on paper dated “Paris, 4 decembre 1942.” Several of my photography teachers told me they never wanted to see pictures of pigeons, but here were sketches of those birds in a renowned museum. The art historian in the museum’s audio guide suggested Picasso’s competitive nature drove him to paint pigeons as Matisse did. Picasso considered Matisse both a mentor and a rival and would not be outdone by Matisse’s prized long-plumed pigeons as subject matter. Paris in the middle of World War II — pigeons, known for speed, made them perfect war time flying messengers.
But Picasso’s association with pigeons was deeper than artistic one-upmanship — he had drawn pigeons as a child, because his father bred them. In Spanish, the words for pigeon and dove, la paloma, are interchangeable. In fact, Picasso named his daughter Paloma, because she was born around the time his La Colombe (a French title which translated to “the dove” in English) paintings gained prestige. The cooing of the doves that woke me up as a child were the same birds my mother directed my brother and me to stay away from in town squares. A bird as common as the pigeon came to symbolize something as elusive as peace.
Picasso’s Paris, December 4, 1942, work depicted two pigeons. In the painting, the background above the pigeons was washed black from left to right, and the pigeons were sitting and standing on a black reflection. One bird was formed by a diagonal line that flowed down to the lower left corner. This pigeon’s head was distorted and flattened against its backside (just as Picasso often twisted the heads of the women he painted), emphasizing the bird’s military-uniform, epaulet-like shoulders. Did this express the harassment Picasso received from the Gestapo while he was in Paris?
The other pigeon had curved angles and seemed to be a mother warming her eggs on a nest. There was one dot of black for an eye that looked more like a dark tear. As I gazed at the pigeons, I drifted back to my mother. I bet she felt Picasso’s eyes boring into her, staring at the buttons on her blouse and the skin below her skirt. I could see my mother crossing her feet, clad in white bobby socks and saddle shoes, a little more tightly. Did my mother know Picasso’s reputation, then age sixty-five, a man who had two toddlers with his twenty-five-year-old mistress, Francoise, and an affair with a twenty-one-year-old the summer of 1951?
What struck me was the thick, black “V” of the momma pigeon’s beak — almost as if the female pigeon’s mouth was clipped shut. Was that how Picasso liked his women, a silent muse with no cawing opinions? Just then, I heard the sighing of a sip of air escape my mouth, an unmistakable sound made when I exhaled through the right side of my open lips. And there it was again. I heard my mother say to me, “Close your mouth. Your upper lip will curl.” How many times had she said this to me? My lifelong struggle to keep my mouth shut, stretching the upper lip over my horse front teeth like a T-shirt that rode up. It was an amplification of “children are to be seen and not heard,” a message I took to mean my opinion doesn’t count.
That “V” of the beak stood for an iron restraint that prevented my mother and me from truly communicating as women. In her twenties, if Picasso had tried to hold my mother’s hand when he lit her cigarette, she would have told him plenty. Why did it seem as if she had lost her voice later when I was growing up? Did she bow to society and all the pressures it must have imposed? Don’t offend anyone or my father’s business might be affected. If I complained about a boss, she took the boss’s side and asked what I could do to be better. I heard those remarks as an instruction to yield to the company line.
I wished my mother and I had shared our pain with the same force as the open mouths of Picasso’s painting Guernica, completed in 1937, the year the Germans and Italians bombed the town of the same name in northern Spain, helping the Fascist General Franco consolidate his power. Guernica’s regarded as the most antiwar painting of all time. Each mouth, be it horse, human, or bull, was open, screaming in pain or horror. If my mother had told me the pain of her miscarriages in the nearly ten years before adopting my brother and me, and if I had asked for her counsel on choosing a husband, would that have made a difference? And how invaluable it would have been for me to know how she navigated the death of her parents with such seeming equanimity.
Maybe if we fought out loud, we would have had a deeper relationship instead of a surface peace. Would she have felt comfortable telling me what happened with Picasso? I’ll never know.
In the next room of the museum, I saw Picasso’s pigeon/dove that was chosen to be part of the poster for the 1949 Peace Conference in Paris. The bird’s wings were outstretched to reveal a vulnerable belly, the feathers fluffing in semicircles. As the 1950s progressed to the early 1960s, Picasso continued to distill his image until his peace dove with an olive branch became the simple line drawing that’s well-known today.
I stood there pondering how long it would take me to be at peace with my mother and with her passing. My jaw dropped half an inch, and my mouth opened. Was my mother offering me this olive branch? I resolved to weave together my mother’s stories, feathered with musings of my own. That would be our peace pigeon.
Margaret H. Wagner is a writer, dancer, and artist based in California’s Bay Area who has written articles for World Screen, won four Travelers’ Tales Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing, and published poems in various literary journals. A certified Open Floor and 5Rhythms® dance teacher, Margaret founded WRITE IN THE BEAT, workshops that pair mindful movement with written poetry and visual art. She graduated with a B.A. in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College and has served as visiting faculty there, as well as at the Omega Institute and Kripalu. For more about Margaret’s writing, visit https://margaretwagner.com/
