“When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs, we love with our desires.”
- Picasso
Ego Trumps Id
Devoting a prominent ten-room exhibition to one year of an artist’s career, hung more-or-less chronologically - that might seem to be overplaying the genius card. Even when your subject’s Pablo Picasso. Taken literally, it would suggest we could have seventy-three such exhibitions, one for each of his productive years.
But the show’s argument is that 1932 was key. That June, aged fifty, he received a prestigious major retrospective in Paris. And, rather than feel flattered he seems to have taken the occasion as an existential threat. He insisted on curating the show himself, proclaiming in advance he intended to do it “badly”, refused for it to be hung chronologically and then for any dates to be provided, capping it all by refusing to attend the opening.
Retrospectives were then rarely given for living artists, and it seems to have suggested to him he no longer was one. To him it was more millstone than milestone. As the show puts it: “By 1932… Picasso increasingly experienced the trappings of success as a gilded cage. He missed his artist friends of old. He wanted to be closer to the discussions around contemporary art, not least the storm that was Surrealism.”Bob Dylan once said “An artist has gotta be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming.” I suspect Picasso would have agreed.
All of which raises the question - if the artist himself felt that way, that his best years were behind him, shouldn’t we take him at his word?
Take Surrealism. It’s true the Surrealists at first embraced him, devoting to him most of the first issue of their magazine ‘Minotaur’. Both he and they were not just interested in primitivism, but tended to treat it as the key to art. And he painted on impulse, getting out of his own way as much as he possibly could, impatient of requests to explain himself. He was a compulsive artist, someone who paints because he can’t not paint.He’s quoted in this show as saying “it’s strange how little the artist’s will matters.”
Which this might look from the outside like the Surrealist surrender to unconscious forces. But it isn’t. The mediumistic aspect of Surrealism is entirely absent. To them art was a tool, a way of getting at something. Which, when it arrived, should be as much a surprise to the artist as anyone else. While Picasso wasn’t about id but ego, specifically his ego. As he said: “A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.”
His liaison with the Surrealists was more marriage of mutual convenience than meeting of minds. An emerging art movement got themselves a star player, while he got to look contemporary all over again. He never formally joined the group notorious for Stalinist levels of party discipline, insistent table-thumping manifestos and high-profile excommunications. On a wall quote he claims his concept of Surrealism was always different to everyone else’s, which is just a more self-important way of saying the same thing.
And yet despite all this his supposed ‘Surrealist’ era is probably my personal favourite of his many periods, and the Marie-Therese pictures are among my favourites of that era. Speaking of who...
The Object Desired
Norman Mailer’s theory of Picasso was that his art wasn’t advanced by broad social, cultural and scientific changes. Art critics like to throw that bigger stuff in because it makes them seem learned, that’s all. Really, it was his love life. He had endless styles simply because he had endless affairs, and he’d boldly launch a whole new look to his work to best flatter his latest crush. This theory goes unmentioned by this show, yet is proven on every wall.
And by 1932, though still married to Olga Khokhlova, he’d already embarked on an illicit affair with Marie-Therese Walter. Picasso never painted from life, but invented a set of motifs to represent figures. (Enhanced by the necessity, at this point, of hiding his affair from Olga.) To the point that its oddly jarring to see actual photos of her, the real person outside of Picasso’s depiction.
The most famous portrait of her, which inevitably makes it onto the poster, is ’The Dream’ (above), apparently on show in the UK for the first time. Typically she’s made up of sweeping contours captured in elegant curves, with a deliberately limited range of bright bold colours. The environment behind her is often similar, as if her personality’s projecting onto her world. There’s a great warmth and softness to these images. She’s made to look innocent, an Alice abroad, her eyes never scrutinising but either absorbingly open or (as here) dreamingly closed.
She looks so childlike partly because of the childlike nature of the painting. Picasso’s often thought of as bawdy and unashamedly eroticised, yet here she seems as much child crush as sex object. We should remember that, while the actual Marie-Therese famously met Picasso when seventeen, by this point she’s twenty-two. Less than half his age, but scarcely a child. While some of her descriptions (“I was smothered with love and kisses and jealousy and admiration”) make it sound more like his first affair than hers.
With ‘Reading’ (above) there’s more modelling in the figure, and the background looks more like pictorial space. (Unusually it’s made up of angles rather than curves, including a somewhat unexplained frame to the left.) Yet the figure is more distorted, not to mention bright purple. But perhaps most notable is that despite these differences her head is in two halves in both.
And this split face is another recurring motif. Here, despite what was said above, is one point we do have something genuinely Surrealist. In Surrealism muses were held to occupy a liminal space, which the double face might be seen to represent. Note that ‘The Dream’ also has a split background, which includes a curtain being half-pulled back. And gives her arms, and even different parts of her necklace, different colours.
If Surrealism was the desire to break the divide between conscious and unconscious, to see them less as opposites than halves of the same whole, muses were the guides who helped you cross that barrier. And women made muses precisely because they were half-outside society, because they were considered to be more akin to children than men.
‘Girl Before A Mirror’ (above) again plays upon a double image. The mirror’s not obvious, the reflection symbolic rather than actual, the figure not even looking into it. Here the mirror seems to represent not self-awareness so much as another self, rearing up at us.
‘The Sculptor’ (one of the few 1931 works sneaked in) shows Picasso as a sculptor and Marie-Therese as a bust, blurring the line between muse and product. The other two works in the background, the sculpture and hung painting, look to also be of her. If Marie- Therese is an Alice, Picasso’s a combination of luring White Rabbit and Mad Hatter, but mostly Red Queen. Around here, even the way she looks belongs to him. (Though note how he now has her split face and Roman nose.)
Yet simultaneously to all this evoked innocence, if we look back to ’The Dream’ she’s depicted with one breast bared. Which is quite common, though they’re often (as in ’Reading’) represented only by concentric circles. While the upper part of her turned head resembles a penis. (A dirty in-joke I think I’m actually glad I had to have pointed out to me.) In other works she’s not just naked, but has this foregrounded in the title, such as ‘Nude Woman in a Red Armchair’.
‘Yellow Belt’ is one of the simplest and boldest works, yet also one of the most crudely sexualised. This time even I didn’t miss the phallic nose, nor the red slit for the mouth. (Which is then echoed in the back rest of the chair.) If anything, it’s too crude to pass as a piece of toilet wall graffiti.
Body as Landscape
Focusing in on one year like this, you get to see just how fixated Picasso was. Things recur again and again and then again, in sometimes quite slight variations. Yet he wasn’t known for being short of imagination. Why should this be?
Years ago, as the most amateur cartoonist in world history, I’d find myself frequently draw the same things repeatedly. It was out of sheer necessity. I was hoping to hit on what I wanted, a paw-handed monkey hoping to score a visual Shakespeare. But Picasso… I am going to argue that he wasn’t the same sort of artist as me.
We shouldn’t see these myriad variations of a theme as a way of working out, of trials intended to arrive at a finalised version, sketchbook doodles he inexplicably painted up full scale. We should see them more as a way of getting out, of exorcising something. His head was packed with obsessions, which he could only deal with by painting them.
Nevertheless, if there isn’t a progression there are phases. Over the months elements morph, or shift in and out.
Traditionally, tall paintings are described as Portrait, and long as Landscape – after the genre they were most used for. Picasso starts with Marie-Therese in portrait, as shown above. But he soon comes to paint her recumbent figure as a landscape. And not merely in landscape format, he effectively paints her as if she was a landscape. She becomes, in the words of Mark Hudson at the Telegraph, “a slumped mass of prone flesh”. The attention shifts quite decidedly from her face to her body, which has the effect of further sexualising her. There’s paintings where her head’s a bust, as in ’The Sculptor’, as if detached altogether.
The still-nearly-square ’Nude in a Black Armchair’ (above) can be seen as transitional. The cheeseplant, placed here as if sprouting from her, becomes another recurrent motif. Timothy Hilton’s description, “the paintings overflow with a sense of fecundity, felt in the girl herself and all that surrounds her”, (‘Picasso’, Thames & Hudson) kicks in about now.
...then look how far he takes it with ’Reclining Nude’ (above). It’s still recognisably Marie-Therese. The curved arms and disc-like breasts are in a continuity with the works above. But what of the strange flipper shapes in her lower half? The disappearance of hands? The cold slab and complete loss of the cosy domestic interior?
The show comes up with a few possible influences for this, but if you were already thinking ‘tentacle porn’ - top marks! Picasso’s known to have taken to Shunga, Japanese erotic art. And while there are definite similarities, such as the sexually charged use of nature in garden or indoor settings, it might be more illuminating to look at the differences.
Shunga’s adoption of tentacles dates back at least to Hokusai’s 1814 ‘Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’. Yet, even as that artwork’s (literally) monstrous there’s still something sensuous about it. There’s an accompanying text conveying how much the Fisherman’s wife is getting off on things, so perhaps we can only shrug, say “consenting adults” and not concern ourselves with how she’s going to introduce that squid to her parents. Part of the fantasy is of course more appendages equals more fun. But another part is that sex enables us to become beasts again, to slip out of that pesky human consciousness for a bit.
But there’s a difference. As I once said over Shunga: “With those elegant, endlessly overlapping contours it’s often hard to tell one set of limbs from another – a neat visual analogy for the loss of self that comes with sexual release. The couples look like they’ve become single creatures, multitudinous and self-pleasuring.”
Whereas Picasso’s depictions of flesh lean much more to the monstrous.If there’s someone who finds ’Reclining Nude’ sexy, I can only hope I never run in to them. Unlike the copulating couples found in Oriental art Picasso is rarely himself represented, and if he is (as seen) it’s as the artist. Which only adds to the sense that what we’re seeing is his desire, his fetishistic gaze. The association of sex with horror is never too far away. To misquote Heisenberg, the act of desiring changes the object which is desired. In fact, its the desiring look which makes theobject of desire becomes monstrous, as if it’s been saturated by some kind of transforming ray.
...and, as if that wasn’t enough, there’s one more mutation to come.
Repeat a phrase too many times and you wear out its meaning, it degrades into anunintelligible set of sounds. Similarly, draw something over and again and it becomes codified, at a greater remove from what it ostensibly represents. Picasso may have been painting Marie-Therese out of sexual obsession, but this still happens. So he uses it to his advantage. The elements he’s used to signify her become discombobulated, a set of parts gathered together like loose stones.’Woman in a Red Armchair’ sounds like an alternative title for ’The Dream’, whereas it actually looks like this…
It assaults and breaks down its subject as much as his Cubist era, though in quite a different way. It’s not our view but the object itself which is broken up. Yet the pieces are modelled and textured, so in themselves look more ‘real’ than most of the portraits. Perhaps without him intending it suggests an absence at the core of things, that beneath the motifs he’s been using to fetishise Marie-Therese the real person is absent. Object of desire degrades intojust plain object. Or, as sounds more likely, she was in front of him the whole time but Picasso never really saw her.
Dagger Glares
And where, you may be asking, was Picasso’s wife in all of this?
This was how he painted Olga in ‘Portrait of Olga Picasso’ in 1923, less than a decade earlier - elegant, poised and confident. Now compare that to his mildly different view of her in ‘Woman With Daggar’, below.(There’s also ten portraits of her in a timeline here.)
Full of shapeless protuberances stretching in every direction, this Olga seems more malevolent spirit than flesh-and-blood person. She’s like a dark cloud intensifying the claustrophobia of the room, her extended devouring mouth poised over the much smaller head of the white figure. The dagger seems to pin down, hold in place, as much as it causes blood to pour. This savage work was painted, of all times, on Christmas Day 1931, perhaps after it was suggested Picasso might want to spend such a day with his wife and child. We should also note how the title has switched from ‘girl’ to ‘woman’.
While the extremely unrestive ’Rest’ (above) takes the setting Marie-Therese occupied in ’The Dream’, only to place in it a contorted figure in it who looks a whole lot more like the Olga of ’Woman With Daggar’. The figure’s angled the other way, facing stage left, enhancing the sense of them as opposites. The warm, solid colours are repeated but made paler, more diffuse, possibly even smeary. And the room’s become claustrophobic and windowless, even the wallpaper pattern distorted.
And what do we make of ’Sleeping Woman By a Mirror’?Compositionally it’s almost a complete echo of ’The Dream’, even down the section missing from the head. But it’s not just bolder and starker, the face is actively violent – an act which seems almost all the artist’s? It seems built around the distinction between an artistic blurring of the features and an actual bruising of the face. 'Sleeping' seems a bit of a euphemism for it’s reminiscent of the way “rub you out” is slang for murder. Yet the features are preserved perfectly in the mirror. (Which also proves this is Marie-Therese, not Olga.) It seems even within an image of her, we’re being told the image of her is the ‘true’ thing.
The Year Draws In
The show goes on to say: “If love had been the guiding star of Picasso’s life and art in the early part of 1932, and fame its crowning summer glory, by the end of 1932 the signs of tragedy were writ large.”
Marie-Therese grew seriously ill, from a virus she picked up while swimming. Something in Picasso’s brain associated this with (in the show’s words) “the threat of drowning and the possibility of rescue”, perhaps simply because they were simpler to depict in art.
’The Rescue’ (above) finds three figures in the rescue scene, then makes all of them Marie-Therese. There’s quite a stress on the two-dimensionality of the image, the background (bar a few flowers) a wall of green and the waterline conveyed by… well, a line. Also, while one figure is safely on land and looks to be pulling up another, in the lower right her foot is going back in the water, and seems to be mixing with the hair of the third figure. The scene looks urgent, but rather than depict the moment of rescue it’s showing something cyclic – as if we all go under the water repeatedly, and have to haul ourselves out.
A sequel, also called The Rescue’, (above, not painted till January ‘33), takes the same setting. The figures are reduced to two, but also fused into one, further enhancing the notion this is some kind of internal struggle.
And the dangling head in both versions is clearly echoed in the not-cheerily-titled drypoint ’The Rape’, where rescuing hands become the grabbing grip of the rapist. Perhaps we should try to look for some symbolic value for that figure. But we’d just come back to seeing it as Picasso. And perhaps worse, it not only resembles ’The Rescue’ but comes on the back of the notion our lives are beset by perennial problems, against which we can only constantly struggle.
The show tries to tie all this in with “the political and economic situation in Europe”, but inevitably fails. Mussolini was dictator of Italy, but had been for a decade. Hitler became Chancellor, but the start of the following year. In Spain, an early military coup against the Republic was defeated. Picasso was in many ways the Dylan of Modernism. Everyone really, really wants to imagine he was strongly influenced by politics. But he really, really wasn’t. Instead he lived in a hermetic, aestheticised world, where anything that permeated that world soon got absorbed into it. ‘Guernica’, not painted for another five years, was his ‘Masters of War’. An exception to the rule.
The Misogynist Mind
The alert reader may have noticed my first praising these paintings, even saying they’re some of my favourites of Picasso’s, then pointing out their rampant misogyny. Sometimes you need to hold in abeyance the sordid details of an artist’s biography in order to appreciate their art. Bob Dylan’s love songs might still move us, even though we know he often behaved like a jerk to women in real life. No such separation of duties is possible here. Picasso’s whole self goes into his art, for both good and bad. The misogyny’s in the very marrow of his work, the highly masculine virility turned into the creative urge, then disgorged onto the canvas. Picasso the misogynist is Picasso the artist. There’s no getting around this, and we shouldn’t even try.
I once said of Gauguin that “Gauguin, to Gauguin, is a multiplicity, while all women are One…. each individual woman is only there to represent Woman.” Though he was continually changing the style with which he‘d represent Woman, Picasso only really varies from this to decide that all women are Two. Who, not unsurprisingly, are those currently giving him what he wants and those who aren’t.
Women are contrapuntally split between providers/enablers and thwarters. Though Olga’s normally considered to be stabbing Marie-Therese rather than Picasso himself, she’s still in effect the castrating bitch to Marie-Therese’s love object. Yet if they’re constructed as opposites what’s more significant is what they have in common. Neither is a person in her own right, everything about both of them is to do with the role they play in a man’s world. They’re not portraits of two women but of Picasso’s own obsessions, in the path of which two women happened to wonder.
Picasso was a Bluebeard, effectively capturing women like prize treasures. Grand-daughter Marina said of him: “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.”
It would be tempting to argue that the problems are so pronounced they become benefits, that they’re so good artworks in the sense of expressing what they mean that they provide an x-ray into the misogynist mind. Like the Police do with suspects, shouldn’t we take wrong ‘uns and try to flip them into useful informers? As I said once of de Kooning, his works are “interestingly misogynistic, they offer insight into the misogynistic mind.”
But I want to believe that so much I can’t help but become sceptical of it. The obviousness of the images come back here. They fit so neatly into feminist theory that they even start to feel slightly unreal. You could drop these images at random into a feminist primer, and they’d fit so neatly. Yet if they illustrate the basics, do they take us any further? Was Picasso, however great an artist, merely commonplace as a misogynist? Is it like looking at a thousand coughs and sneezes, then trying to convince yourself you now have a cure for the common cold? I would, I promise, tell you the answer to that if I knew it.
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