Portraiture is a two-way process (Getty)
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“Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?” Pablo Picasso once asked. Through the intersecting planes of his Cubism, the artist achieved all three, portraying himself as a god-like, omnipresent creator. But at what cost — and at whose expense?
This May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will sell Picasso’s first major sculpture, “Tête de femme (Fernande)”, at auction. Christie’s have placed an eye-watering estimate of $30,000,000 on the piece. Lauded as the work which launched Analytical Cubism, it has cemented Picasso as a master of modernism. But few have acknowledged the story of the woman who inspired it: Picasso’s first great muse, Fernande Olivier.
Born Amélie Lang, Olivier first met Picasso in 1904, while working in Montmartre as an artist and model. After moving in with him, she posed for more than 60 portraits, both in Picasso’s Paris studio and during trips abroad. One summer in Spain, the artist created a series of paintings focused on Olivier’s head from multiple viewpoints, capturing her high cheekbones, straight nose and full lips. These experimental portraits culminated in “Tête de femme”.
Some 20 years after her seven-year relationship with Picasso ended, Olivier attempted to create her own self-portrait, writing a series of memoirs about their life together. Six extracts were published in Le Soir before Picasso, who was by this time both famous and wealthy, used lawyers to silence her. Powerful men, unfortunately, have a history of misusing NDAs and making settlements to protect their reputations — and cover up crimes against women.
Eventually published, Olivier’s account exposed an abusive relationship in which Picasso prevented her from both painting and modelling for other artists. He believed that women should not “trespass on men’s preserve” and would even keep her locked inside the house while he went out. While he immortalised her in art, he didn’t value his muse as an artist or woman in her own right. It’s difficult not to see a desire to control in “Tête de femme” — viewers are not only invited to imagine the artist moving around his model while working, but to circle the sculpture and touch its surface themselves.
Olivier had gifted Picasso his seminal subject: from this point onwards, the female form dominated the artist’s practice, across all media. As with any abuser, a pattern emerged in Picasso’s life and art: a woman would provide him with inspiration for his greatest portraits, before being discarded for a younger muse. He even took pride in this attitude: “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid… You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.” Of course, he was still happy to keep making money from the art each one had inspired.
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SubscribeSome objections:
Olga Khokhlova stopped dancing with the Ballets Russes because of an ankle injury that ended her career as a professional ballet dancer. Marie-Thérèse committed suicide four years after Picasso’s death. Is he still to blame for that? Both Maar and Gilot lived to a very advanced age. Did he endow them with longevity?
I do not doubt that Picasso was an insufferable egomaniac and sometimes sadistic to boot. But he was clearly also very charming and that, combined with his celebrity status and his wealth, evidently proved irresistible to many women, as other commentators here have pointed out. So the real question is this: Are we women adult human females? And if so, can we please start treating ourselves as such – in other words as adults with agency who make our own decisions and take responsibility for our own actions? Gilot knew from the outset what she was getting herself into, but did it anyway – and got a best-selling book out of it (which Picasso was unable to suppress). Dora got a house in the country and numerous paintings, which as an ex-lover she was able to sell at a premium. Marie-T also lived comfortably off the many paintings in her possession, while poor Olga got only a château… Anyone notice a pattern here?
Men like Picasso – an actual genius – are charismatic. Their energy and powerful personalities, draw people, often other powerful personalities, to them. Men admire and like them, women find them s e x y. That’s how it is, human nature.
So what does this young feminist want ? Shall we cancel Picasso ? Glorify the second rate art of the ladies in question a bit more ? Find a way to hamper and hobble present day geniuses like Picasso so that susceptible women don’t fall for them ?
Just think, without Picasso and his beastliness (he would laugh I think at my describing him thus), there’d be one less feminist article to write, one less cheque in the bank.
The only genius Picasso displayed was convincing the credulous that his ugly daubs were works of art.
I can’t stand The Weeping Woman and the others in that style, but I do appreciate his early works, Blue Period, Guernica, sculptures, pottery and his War and Peace project.
I love this topic! Thanks, Clair!
My art teacher parents* gave me the Time-Life Library of Art Collection when I was eight years old. Looking for the first time at pictures of “The Rape of the Sabine Women” and the sculpture (my favorite) of “The Dying Gaul” formed my tastes. While I and my pre-bra friends giggled at the Rubens’ fat ladies and all the other chubby, eyebrow-less “beauties” throughout the centuries, I came to appreciate and recognize technical skill, and developed an eye and taste for mastery.
Woe, then, when the series moved to the 20th Century. Good God, what happened?! Picasso’s “Guernica” looked to me like a Mad Magazine cartoon. Most of what was coming out of the “art world” was proudly hideous. The only beauty was being produced by commercial illustrators, because most people prefer refinement, wit, skill, and style to ugly inability.
Picasso famously said “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” And frauds like him go for the long con.
*My parents were big Picasso fans: One of Dad’s favorite assignments was to have students make glass and plaster mobiles (a la Calder) of his easily-copied style. Lemme tell you: I’d rather queue up for an exhibition of Patrick Nagel before I’d spend the 30 seconds it takes to walk through the Monet Room at The Clark.
This post belongs in an art gallery! It is so surreal…Did Salvador help you write it?.
Anyone…. a BIG thumbs up from me..Alas, not big enough to wipe those down thumbs away.
https://www.pablopicasso.net/war-and-peace/
Exactly. Why this article was published on Unheard is beyond me.
A few years ago I visited the Barcelona Picasso museum with my teenage daughter. The first room was dedicated to a selection of 60s line drawings/etchings (whatever they were) of grotesquely fat naked women with exaggerated pudenda (prostitutes in a brothel, presumably) with caricatures of Edward Degas inserted into many of the images, as if to incriminate him, as a punter.
My daughter and I agreed at the sleazy ugliness of the display but what struck me was our opinion did not appear to be shared by the many people who were viewing the exhibition with us. They assiduously studied and admired these works of the great master with no apparent moral response, presumably innured to the corruption on display through its status as art.
If Picasso hadn’t been famous would any of these young women even noticed him let alone have relationships with him? He sold them a lifestyle and they sold themselves to him – an aging, cruel man. It is a tale as old as time.
So what? Picasso was a very nasty man. We are interested in him because he was a great artist. As for the women, Maar seems to have had her own artistic career and taught Picasso something. The others seem to have had the same kind of input into Picasso’s art as Monet’s garden had in his.
Somehow Western civilization seems to have lost the ability to see things in three dimensions.
A man can be a magnificent painter as well as a very nasty man.
A woman born a century ago might have been forced to abandon her career, but that has no connection to today and reflects an era where those same women would stay home while the men died like flies at factories, mines and trenches. And that doesn’t necessarily imply she was a genius at the same level as Picasso.
What about the dictator’s wives? How much of the killings done by Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, Somoza, Noriega, Castro, Ceaucescu or Pol Pot should be also attributed to their muses?
…yeah, and ? So, for sure Pablo’s art and life reveals nature in the raw. What’s the deeper revelation the Feminarchy’s got for us then?
It is the same kind of sham argument that trans-activists put up and which the sisterhood demand we all see through and reject.
relationships are transactional. whining about it does not do anything to change it. sometimes people get involved with someone who is or will be more successful than they are – oh, wait, that happens in every relationship. it should be more of a compliment to those less-accomplished that they had an impact on the more accomplished.
He was so physically unappealing. He was very lucky that women value men for who they are and not how they look, the complete inverse of how he valued women. Better just to relate to his work and forget about him as a person.
Yes, women value men for their wallets, men admire women for their breasts
Mmmmh, which is more insidious
“male artists throughout history, is also a product of his muses”. No, not true. Picasso clearly is the creator and he for some time intelligently cooperated with his muses. But then, as we are no angels, in the end he abused them as well and did not acknowledge their contribution. Clearly not a nice man. It is hard to combine the two: be truly male, truly creative and fullly respect the female.
Is the author suggesting that artists’ muses are co-creators of the work they inspire, and as such deserve a share of the profits?
And what if Picasso was gay and his lover/muses were men, or if Picasso was a lesbian and her lover/muses were women – would she have bothered to write the article?
Of course she wouldn’t, because she has no interest in actually exploring the creative process. She just wants a story she can reduce down to “Powerful white male takes advantage of an innocent woman, a woman who has been so broken down by the patriarchy that she is helpless to resist”.
A long article, just to describe a grubby old man. I made an impressive grubby young man, but then I grew up: I am sure that the world is thankful.
“Some people try to pick up girls
And get called asshole
This never happened to Pablo Picasso.
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist to stare
And so Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
Well, the girls would turn the color of an avocado
When he would drive down their street
In his El Dorado.
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist to stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Not like you.”
Jonathan Richman 1976
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1agI3u1YUjQ
Thanks for posting. I was going to reply along the lines of “that was one thing Jonathan Richman got wrong; Pablo Picasso really WAS an asshole”.
On reflection, however, the song isn’t paying tribute to PP, is it? It’s only pointing out how the asshole got away with it.
It took me a while.
Artists believe they have a licence to behave badly. I am (eventually) married to one and I am busy influencing him to change tack.
More tweeny feminist cookie cutter stuff. Yawn