About twenty five years ago I began a more concentrated study of modern art than I had done prior to that time, especially the life and works of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. It soon became apparent to me that there were two schools of thought in which it was claimed that either Matisse or Picasso was the greatest artist of the twentieth century. In 1986 I visited the Pompidou Center where I saw the late, magnificent Matisse papiers colles, and on the next day I saw the nearby Picasso Museum. The strongest impression made in the latter venue was the ubiquitous presence of women in his art works and what I strongly felt was the artist’s blatant hatred for them. Comparing the work of the two artists seen back to back and considering the strong distaste I felt for the Spaniard’s misogyny decided me to throw my support to the Matisse camp.
However: on a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, merely reading the title for their permanent collection, From Matisse to the Present, and seeing a collection with an almost glaring omission of the work of Picasso, made me aware that with Matisse we might have some very pretty paintings but that without Picasso there is no modern art. In the insight of that moment Picasso rose to the summit of the pantheon. I have not however been able to divest myself of what I have perceived of as his strong misogyny; not, that is, until I began reading the Richardson biographies and especially not until I saw the exhibition at this gallery.
Richardson brings to our attention Picasso’s habit of using the women in his life as his present subject matter. Sometimes this is overt and obvious and at other times the identity of the subject is hidden or coded. And what is very clearly stated in all of those works, as it is in Picasso’s works as a whole, is that the artist has been very forthright and honest about expressing his feelings about his subject matter, in this case the woman who is the subject …whether those feelings are anger, tenderness, or more complex and conflicted.
When reading about Picasso’s early years I think there is a tendency for us to look on those years from the perspective of what we know of the later years. We might indeed be aware of his poverty, his hunger, and his struggles, but knowing that it all turned out well in the end lessens our understanding and our full appreciation of the reality of those years for him.
Those of us who have been to Paris are well aware that the Parisians can be among the rudest and most unfriendly persons on earth. If we do not speak Parisian French, god help us. The young Picasso did not speak French and so he would not have been made to feel welcome in his travels about the city. In addition he was extremely short …about five foot four. This would not have made him attractive to the women there, and for Picasso, who had a very strong attraction to women as well as a dependency from having been an only son, this would have been alienating as well. Living on a very meager income, if not in abject poverty, he would have felt a further alienation as he looked about him upon the glories of fin de siècle Paris. To find himself in Paris, in a foreign culture, without sympathy, without recognition, and without succor, must have been extremely unsettling for him.
He did have friends. He had traveled to Paris with friends from Barcelona; he lived in the Catalan section of Paris. But all of these friends appear to have been male. His first friends in Paris and his first patrons were males and they were almost exclusively homosexual males. At that time homosexuality was a criminal offense. While there might have been some encouragement from these early supporters, knowing that they were social outcasts might have mitigated the sense of support he received from them.
There was also, according to Richardson, a period of drug use, specifically opium, among his new found French friends. While that might be explained as a socially acceptable thing to do among members of that set, there are so many in similar circumstances who do not take drugs that we might consider agreeing with the view that drug abuse is a form of self medication: one takes drugs because he doesn’t feel well.
All of these feelings of alienation and isolation are evident in Picasso’s work of that period. Among the influences we can see evidence of Puvis de Chavannes, El Greco, Toulouse Lautrec, and Gauguin. But while we see the influences we are aware that he has only used them to make works like works of theirs that he has seen, in few of them does he make the work his own. When he does, notably in the Blue Period, the works are extremely morose, if not morbid.
Clearly it was a period of despair and many sources attribute this to the death of his friend Casagemas. I think it is more likely that all of these factors contributed to his mood. And I think the only thing that likely kept him going was his desire to be an artist, and not merely an artist, but among the greatest of the artists …clearly a result of his family engendered sense of entitlement. …yes, young Caesar was ambitious.
In 1904 this all began to change. Not because he was just naturally moving on as an artist but because of the events in his personal life. In that year he met Fernande Olivier and began his first extended intimate relationship. Socially he began to be not merely a member of an exclusively male crowd but a man among men and women. With Fernande on his arm his Spanish male pride could be asserted.
From that time there is a lighter palette, a lightening of subject matter …his subjects are now the living rather than the dead and the dying. Something has opened him up and given him light and air. The work began to pour out of him …the saltimbanques, the Rose period…so much so that we might say he had been inspired.
In 1906 Picasso and Fernande spent the summer in Spain, in the village of Gosol. I think most sources consider this the moment when Picasso began to master modern art. From that time he first exhibited his responses to ethnic and prehistoric art and a new understanding of classical art. There followed very shortly his work with Braque which resulted in cubism. Fernande figures in many of the paintings of the Gosol period. In the catalogue for the Marlboro exhibition, Plate1, Tète de Femme, 1905, is, I believe, Fernande, in a very sweet, sensual, and loving portrait. Because of her presence in his life at that time I think it would be correct to think of Fernande as the first muse in his life … She salvaged him, she resurrected him, she inspired him, but most importantly she gave him permission to be creative.
From my own experience I know that a companion, a mate, can be a muse, an inspiration, or a completely destructive force, often both simultaneously. And while it was once common to refer to “the little woman” behind the successful man, there are probably many, many abject failures over the centuries who followed the siren’s lure of a jealous, possessive, selfishly misguided mate.
In Picasso’s life, where there were so many women with whom he was intimate, perhaps we should not think that he was by nature simply promiscuous, as most men are, but that like the well known artist’s works he studied and drew inspiration from, he might have exhausted the source of inspiration from each of those women as well. Thus not one woman but many women inspired him over the years and played the part of his muse.
As common as the presence of women in his work is the presence of the personal in his work; Picasso’s work is a life record of his emotional experience. Because women tend to be more concerned with the emotional temperature of their relationships than their men do …or so women have told me …it is tempting to think that it was the women in his life who encouraged him to be honest with them, with himself, and in his work. Clearly those women meant something to him and I think it behooves us to consider their individuality rather than to look on him as a man who used them for his own ends. Every relationship is an entity created by the other entities which compose the relationship, in this case by the man and by the woman. While Picasso might have found inspiration from each of the women who passed through his life, so did each of them find something of personal value in their relationship with him. But rather than viewing his life and work from the perspective of a sting of women subject to his whims, let’s give each of those women their individuality and agree that there is another perspective …that of individual women who over the course of their lives had at one time an intimate contact with an artist named Picasso.
Let’s think of all this as the experience of a very complex and talented genius who has enriched our lives and simply consider all of it as the story behind some remarkably magnificent art works, works that stand on their own whatever their inspiration might have been. That of course is always the test: does the work stand on its own? Is this drawing interesting as a drawing?
The Marlboro Gallery has mounted an exhibition of 205 Picasso prints featuring the women in his life, each described here as the muse of the moment. I don’t remember seeing one drawing here that was not interesting. And what struck me immediately was that there is no sense of misogyny in any of them. In fact the opposite is true: he loved these women, each in her turn. And working with them as the subject of drawings, of art works, he has made some incredibly wonderful art works.
In 2005 I saw the Vollard Suite at the Fort Worth Museum of Contemporary Art. It was my first encounter with an extended exhibition of his prints and I was bowled over by his sheer delight in seeing the results that issued from his marking device moving across the surface of a ground spilling out the contents of his imagination. Seen as components in an extended narrative each print was an arabesque of delight. I had not realized before seeing them again here at the Marlboro Gallery that Marie-Therese had been the inspiration for them, or if not the inspiration, that she had played so large a part in their ebullience. And seeing them again I suddenly realized that almost every one of them featured a little bowl of flowers. I had never suspected that Picasso could have been so … “sweet”.
Gary Tinterow, in his talk at the Metropolitan, mentioned on two occasions that Picasso had read Freud’s work avidly and was quite an adherent of his insights. If so, one can see humor in the 347 Suite: Freud has gone on record with the statement that the only unnatural sexual act is an act one cannot get into a position to perform. In this suite, which is blatantly sexual, executed when he was 87, Picasso shows us that there is in fact no position one cannot get into in order to fuck. I think Freud would have been amused. I know I was.
But all of these prints are wonderful. It is a full career retrospective and we are able to share in the artist’s delight in his subject matter and in his process, and to empathize with his emotional experience. In his book, Modern Prints and Drawings, Paul Sachs lists his criterion for determining the success of drawings and prints: is there clarity of form, is there flexibility and sensitiveness of touch, is there expressiveness, is there feeling for the medium, etc. In all of these prints the answers are yes. But there is an especial yes in the feeling for the medium: each medium has elicited from the artist a unique response that could only have been expressed in that particular medium. While the subject remains somewhat the same, the woman, the muse, the whole variety of the print making media is needed for this artist to honestly express his multifaceted emotional experience. And, in the end, I think it is that, his profound expressiveness, which earns for Picasso the title of the greatest artist of the twentieth century.
There are two things that enhance the pleasure of the seeing here. One of them is the gallery itself. This is a large space, basically a square divided into nine sections. On the north, east, and south walls there are large floor to ceiling windows. Thus the galleries are flooded with both natural and artificial light. There is a wonderful sense of variation in moving into and out of open and closed spaces. There is a wonderful sense of light and air in every part of the galley. There were no glaring lights on the glass nor were there reflections of the observer over the art works. Bravo!
But what was most wonderful the day I was there was that I was the only person there. (Later two others, each with a profound respect for quiet, ventured in.) Fifty years ago when I was new to New York, before museums became big time players in the tourist industry, this is what museums were like. Alas, alas, and rue the day! But perhaps that is the answer for those of us who appreciate seeing the fine arts: from now on let’s confine our fine art viewing to commercial galleries and let museums continue to rush headlong to their own self destruction. As ye sow…
Excellent. Excellent! Unfortunately this has now closed in New York. But it will be opening soon in London. If you have nothing better to do this summer…
http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/exhibitions/celebrating-the-muse-women-in-picassos-prints-from-1905-1968
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