Dear Frank,
I want to write to you about something I feel about you that is very important.  I have noticed an element of sadness in your work of late.  That doesn’t seem to match the happy person I know you to be.  Why has this sadness crept into your work?  I know you are trying to make a living as an artist.  I have traveled that path and this is what I’d like to share with you about it.

This is the way it works in America for an artist.  In order to survive with your painting you have to work on many jobs; some of them menial, low-paying, just to keep you and people who depend on you, alive. That’s why I want to share my life experience with you.  Pablo Davis today, in his old age, 89 years old, is touted in the media as being a “great artist” renowned, professional, and successful.  Well, I am not really any of these.

When I was eight years old I worked briefly on a job in south Philadelphia which was a concentrated Italian community.  Walking around in the great marketplace, selling men’s socks and neckties, I shouted my wares, “Five cents a piece.”   I worked from 6 in the morning ‘til 11 at night.  Pay? $1.00.  When I was 14 years old I worked in a coal mine 1800 feet below the surface for 28 cents an hour. That was during the depth of the great depression when there was no work even for grown men, so we near starved.

A big part of my artistic life was the time I spent with Rivera and Kahlo, but that trip was made by hopping trains and spending a grand total of 60 cents - hardly an economic gain for me.

When I was in high school I worked after school for the A&P store produce department for $8 a week.  I helped unload big semis bringing food to the store and even at my small stature (150 lbs.) I would carry on my shoulders 2 sacks of sugar or potatoes, each weighing a hundred pounds.  I would carry them from the truck, up a flight of stairs to the second floor.  No wonder I ended up with several hernias.  When I was 18 years old, just out of high school, I worked briefly for Kohl Brothers’ Circus on a flying trapeze, 40 feet up, for $3.00 a day.  It’s true that when I was in art school, only by the grace of an anonymous scholarship donor, I did receive three or four commissions from the Saturday Evening Post and book publishers. All this while I was producing drawings and paintings and studying to perfect my art.  Through these periods, sometimes many weeks went by before I did any art. When I’d come back to my work I either imagined or maybe it was true that I thought that I had gained something from my work experience.  At least it made me feel better.

My first high-paying job out of art school was as an industrial designer for Philco corporation.  I had just come off a low-paying, rather disgusting job producing ads for the yellow pages of the phone book.  During all this period of my life I suffered with tuberculosis.  After  I’d been with Philco a year, I had a tubercular breakdown and was shipped to the National Jewish Hospital in Denver, where by the grace of God and man’s discovery of antibiotics, my tuberculosis was cured and I lived...and I lived.   Even though my first one-man show was in the prestigious Whitney Museum in New York, (due to the influence of my art teacher, Franklin Watkins), and was a successful show that sold out, the fame and fortune I experienced was fleeting.  Just as my career seemed destined to take off, Hitler’s fascism was taking over the world and Jews were being murdered by the millions. I myself one, I could not stand aside both as a human being and as an artist.  I therefore volunteered to try to stop fascism in Spain.

Unfinished.....
 

A Stay in France, 1946

Interview of Pablo Davis

My bedroom was plain, about ten by twelve feet in dimension, with a wooden floor, a wooden four-poster bed and a huge feather comforter.  There was only one decoration; a painting of a mother and child.  It was so tender and inspiring to go to sleep to and wake up to. It was an original painting by Picasso, who wasn’t afraid to show his tender side. In fact, this home was full of original works by Picasso because this was Picasso’s own home in Valauris, France.

I’d been invited by Picasso a few years earlier when he came to visit me as I suffered in a field hospital near Paris, injured by a German bayonet during my fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.  I recovered with some nasty scarring but here I was now, eager to wake up every morning for another tremendous day.  The view from my window was breathtaking.  The fields were defined by rows of gorgeous trees and were full of spring-like greens and light sandy colored earth.  I could also see some destruction by German aircraft which left some sections of trees down, some broken buildings, and a completely destroyed church.

In the distance, there was a business section with a marvelous bakery.  Wonderful, friendly, jolly bakers made sumptuous hard-crusted French breads from a brick oven and marvelous pastries.  The pastries were everything.  Beautiful to look at; crispy, fruity, nutty, delicate, sugary, and chocolaty.  Picasso was addicted to some of those pastries.  That bakery was a symbol of rebirth to the French citizens in that little area.  The food was so French.  It gave the people the feeling that France was still alive.  Walking into that bakery was like walking into a celebration every day.  I became part of a daily hugging and kissing celebration.  Another thing, the baker’s wife asked if I was married and when she found out I wasn’t she tried to fix me up with a few young French women.  There was a shortage of French men because so many had been killed in the war.  One day when I was coming back from the bakery, I ran into Picasso on his way to the pottery factory.  He jokingly said to me, “Did they try to fix you up with a girl?”  I laughed and said, “Yes.”  Then he said, “Don’t get tangled up with a French girl – I’ll introduce you to a great Spanish girl.”

The main employer of the town, the pottery works factory, had been badly damaged in the war but was rebuilt when Picasso, in an effort to get those men back to work, agreed to pay all the pottery workers’ salaries.  That put the town back on its feet.  Picasso learned to do ceramics from those grateful workers and produced some of the most exquisite pottery-work ever made.

Back to my life with Picasso and his wife, Jacqueline.  Often, I’d wake up in the very early morning and I’d greet Picasso who usually worked through the night.  He was very focused on his painting and seldom carried on a conversation at those times.  He had a sketching studio, two painting studios and a sculpting studio on the first floor.  He’d move from medium to medium and even painting to painting very quickly and with a great intensity.  It was amazing to see how much art could come from just one man.

The chateau had about twenty rooms, three bedrooms and six studios with very large diagonally-paned windows, that filled each room with large amounts of sunlight. Picasso gave me my own sunny studio space on the third floor and would come up often to see how I was doing.  His criticisms, both good and bad, were utterly honest; just what a young artist like me needed

  At breakfast-time I’d go to the kitchen where Jacqueline would insist on making my breakfast (But one had to be there before 9 a.m. because she didn’t make breakfast after that time!).  She took such good care of Picasso – she was totally in charge of everything except his art.  For breakfast she’d make a variety of foods – fruit tarts, oatmeal, eggs and breads to name a few.  During the meal we’d talk and eat Jacqueline’s delicious food.  Picasso would come from his studio and the first thing he always did was tell everyone a good joke.  Then he’d wash his big hands and hug and kiss Jacqueline, who would throw her arms around him as if she hadn’t seen him in weeks.  She was the most warm-hearted person there could be.  You could tell they warmed each others’ hearts.

Usually, one or more of Picasso’s children would be visiting and we all took joy in each others’ company.  Picasso would get down on the floor with his younger children and work on paintings and drawings with them.  Paul especially, would do a few brush strokes and then hand the brush to his father and say, “Now you do it.”  There was no sense of ego or celebrity at all.  He had this emotional Spanish kind of fathering with lots of hugging between him and his children.  It was only when a former wife would visit that there could be turmoil.  Some shouting  ~in Spanish.

Picasso’s chateau was made of squared-off sandy-colored stones covered with old vines and it welcomed many interesting visitors.  One afternoon Charlie Chaplin walked through the doorway.  He stayed about ten days and was joined there later by his wife Oona, Eugene O’Neill’s daughter.  I learned that Chaplin and Picasso had been great friends for years and that Chaplin owned quite a few of Picasso’s paintings.  The first night Chaplin was there he really got funny at dinner.  He made it look like the dinner rolls were his fingers and then got up and did a pantomime.  Picasso got up and pantomimed too to try to outdo Chaplin.  Well, Picasso pulled Jacqueline up and she outdid them both!  They were so creative and hilarious. [Kanweiler, Picasso’s agent, and Paul Allard, the brilliant writer, were there and were laughing their heads off too. Paul Allard was later assassinated by Franco’s forces, and just like the assassination of Martin Luther King in this country caused riots, the death of this beloved man spurred half of Europe to near revolution!]

After dinner, we’d have long conversations with our visitors, and sometimes, a drop or two of brandy. Everyone was fascinating but Chaplin was particularly so.  He was a very kind and soft-spoken and talked so well on everything but especially art, politics and current events.  He was a painter and a pianist too.  He played several of his compositions for us and there were simply beautiful.  Chaplin liked my work and that felt so good to me.

Every Friday, Kanweiler would visit to pick up new artwork to sell, and deliver money from the artwork he’d sold the previous week.  On one such Friday Picasso gave him his weekly stack of paintings and then brought him over to see a painting I’d done of a poor washerwoman.  Kanweiler said he was amazed at the variety of Picasso’s styles and choice of subject, and that he loved the painting.  Picasso winked and told him that it was my painting and that it should be in the Louvre.  Kanweiler agreed, and sold it to the Louvre that very week.  At the time, France was bankrupt (due to the war) so I was amazed when Kanweiler handed me $360 (U.S.) the next Friday.  I said I would have given the painting away with half my soul.  I later learned that, at that time, only 29 American artists were represented in the Louvre’s vast collection.  I am truly humbled to have been one of those artists.

At the end of those amazing days with Picasso and all the good people around him, I’d go to bed exhausted but so full of life.  As much as I loved Picasso and France, I was more in love with America and eventually returned to her  to make my own way and my own life.