The anodyne view of Picasso’s mother promoted by O’Brian and Richardson is contradicted by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington in Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. She writes, “Dona Maria, alternately sickly and wilful, sluggish and dominating, had one constant in her life: her total absorption in her son”.16 Rather than expanding on this startling observation, Huffington remarks on the traumatic effect of the earthquake which virtually coincided with Lola’s birth—a point first made by Gedo, and seen later as central by Miller.17 The probability of insecure early attachment to mother has still more far-reaching implications for angry rebelliousness. Early frustrating physical separation and dislocation are needed to explain the school phobia Picasso developed at age five and his general wilfulness as a child. He was indeed acting out “avoidance” of a frustrating mother, yet could not bear separation from her. (It is recorded that Picasso was dragged to school by the rough maid, Carmen, reinforcing avoidance of coercive women.) Resistence to schools and formal learning persisted after the family’s move from Malaga to Corunna when Pablo was ten. But primary attachment should be kept in focus. Gedo rightly suggests that Picasso’s probable rage at being displaced by Lola’s birth, together with idealization of his doting mother, made rebellious independence in his youth both compelling and painful. She sees the sad and destitute women of his “Blue Period” pictures as comments on his fear that assertions of independence might depress his mother: “His partiality for painting so many Madonna-mothers suggests that he had never resolved his own early over idealization of his mother”.18
Anxious attachment is not surprising as there is evidence that Dona Maria brought unresolved anxiety into marriage and motherhood, displaying an alternating “sickly and wilful, sluggish and dominating” nature. As Huffington writes, “Life had wounded her at an early age. Her father, Don Francisco Picasso Guardenso, had taken off on a journey to the Antilles and had never returned. Her mother, Dona Ines Lopez de Picasso, left alone with four girls, had brought them up as best she could while growing fatter as each year passed. Maria’s oldest sister had died, and the other two, who were unmarried, lived with her and her mother in a modest apartment ...”.19 As the wife of an austere, reserved husband seventeen years her senior, Dona Maria must have seemed young, even vivacious; but Huffington finds her a too determined manager, who “looked at everyone with a deep skepticism and mistrust”.20 In other words, she was a tough survivor, who knew only feminine company and had no model for married life, let alone for raising an exceptionally alert and gifted infant son to whom she clung with an intensity she had no means of understanding. If her moods were as contradictory as suggested, this would have confused the young Picasso’s expectations of his mother, complicating Pablo’s already avoidant tendency in their earliest relationship. Her skeptical mistrust of the outside world would have contributed towards Picasso’s own determined stand-off (counteracted by his teasing showmanship) from the world at large. Yet Picasso was not to be a captive “mother’s boy”. Despite being unable to balance idealization and repudiation of his aging academic artist father, Picasso is lucky to have had his tutoring and what affection went with it. But as his powerful mother (d. 1939) long outlived his father (d. 1912), Picasso’s difficulties with women lovers had more to do with accommodating to her than with regrets about his father.
Picasso’s hyper-masculinity, his macho assertion—from bullfighting enthusiast to sponsor of Communist revolution—was a mask of a male insecurity he could never see for what it was. He said that if a line were drawn through his entire life, it would delineate a Minotaur, the shaggy predatory monster central to his most powerful art, seen for example as a bull in the massive Guernica (1937) and earlier in the masterful etching Minotauromachy (1935). The Minotaur’s brute power is a more fitting image for Picasso’s “false self’ persona than is the less muscular Don Juan. The drawings of his last years featuring an aged, leering, gnome-like artist confronting a desirable young model are the decadent form of this hyper-masculinity. The pathetic artist would like to retain Minotaur power over women, a power that age has removed; but he still does not see the fallacy (or origin) of wishing for dominance. In few instances in Picasso’s art, not since the “Blue” and “Pink” periods, are male and female principles found in balance, least of all at the end of his life when the most repellant images of gross women and lascivious, if increasingly impotent, men appeared. Mainly the sexes are out of balance with male dominance and control either displayed or implied. This is especially true of later phases of the portrait series of his lovers which we will consider in detail. Picasso defined the problem without considering corrective action, beyond the excitements and palliative effects of art.
Release and Entrapment
Picasso never looked for therapy because he could not see anything wrong with male dominance, the cultural assumption of a Spaniard who happened to have it to a toxic degree. Many Parisian bohemian artists brought such cultural baggage, some seizing upon psychoanalysis for radical ideas about the unconscious without understanding where they led. Therapeutic release from the entrapment of contradictory feelings about females never appealed to Picasso, though it can be argued that painting was a partial self-therapy insofar as it assisted in regulating mood. Restlessly inventing revolutionary styles must have given a sense of euphoric omnipotence to which few, if any, other artists could lay claim. Picasso’s phenomenal ability to invent new styles may at first look like what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called the capacity for play needed to break out of captivity to a false self. Picasso was indeed playful and exploratory to a high degree, and we would like to know exactly how he came by these capabilities. But he was not really “psychologically minded”. Freudian psychoanalysis, which stimulated Andre Breton’s Surrealism, from which Picasso took permission to tap into the irrational in painting and poetry, filled him with revulsion when he thought about actual therapy. Picasso had no wish to risk the life-transforming “creative illnesses” which had opened such broad vistas of the unconscious to Freud and Jung.21 In a sense his playful imagination was severely constrained, even at times stereotyped , with a far smaller range of self-revealing psychological discoveries than his pyrotechnic changes of style might suggest. He was certainly aware that his actual subject matter gravitated around a limited obsessive theme: the game of Eros. Consequently, Picasso was terrified of repeating himself, of becoming a bore, always insisting that his art was on the move in an addicted, “workaholic” drive never to stop advancing into new territory. But the more he tried to innovate in painting women, the more the results remained the same: each goddess became a doormat when the newly discovered ideal lover got “too close” for comfort, that is, threatened to turn into a real person. Being a real person would mean that she had escaped his absolute control.