Eva, Gaby and Sara
What might be called the typical A/C shift in Picasso’s affections is a guideline to keep in mind. There is no absolute rule about the cycle of idealization to disenchantment through which Picasso’s portraits of women went, and it is worth looking at some exceptions. Portraits of Eva Gouel (Marcel Humbert), with whom Picasso took up in 1911, fall entirely into the cubist idiom. In part this was because the new and exciting style prompted exploring, but also because the idealizing phase with Eva may have been attenuated in view of her neediness and the covert nature of their relationship. The most celebrated portrait, Woman in an Armchair (1913) is an uneasy combination of female sexual attributes with layered planes and geometric shapes (Zervos II/2 522). Were it not for a realistic sketch of Eva on her deathbed in 1915, we would think that Picasso had no empathic response to this woman cryptically referred to, for instance, in a cubist painting J’Aime Eva (Zervos II, 364). He is said to have deeply mourned her death, reporting to Gertrude Stein that “My poor Eva is dead. It is a great sorrow ... she was always good to me”, but Richardson notes that Picasso’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler accused him of treating Eva badly.42 He had certainly betrayed her during her last illness by secretly keeping company with another young Parisian woman, Gaby Lespinasse.43 Perhaps there was not time to go through a full cycle of attraction and repulsion.
Another exception is found in the idealized portraits of the wealthy American art patron Sara Murphy, who did not suffer the usual metamorphosis. Picasso met Sara, a married woman, in Paris in 1922 when he had been married to Olga Khokhlova for four years. Their son Paulo had been born the year before. Picasso’s adoring relationship with Sara seems to have remained platonic, and it generated some of Picasso’s most memorable Neo-classical portraits. A young cultivated and enchanting beauty, Sara was a recent mother. It is just possible that the tender Mother and Child of 1922 (Zervos IV, 171) is not of Olga and Paulo but of Sara Murphy and one of her children.44 It is, however, firmly believed by William Rubin that Picasso’s masterpiece Woman in White, in the New York Museum of Modern Art, is a portrait of Sara
Murphy. If so, this glorious image of archetypal womanhood came about because Sara, though engaging and coy, was sexually unavailable to Picasso. While he composed several beguiling conceits, he could not colonize her psyche with his amorousness. contempt and dismissal came only with conquest. Sara maintained a safe distance, preventing the damage that might have been done by eroticism. With predatory demons thus restrained, Picasso painted some of his most lastingly important portraits. This set of images seems to hark back to Catholic ideals of chastity from Picasso’s Spanish youth.
Olga and others
Equally classical, beautiful and timeless, the early portraits of Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955) mark the beginning of a series of predictable transformations. During his probably chaste relationship with Sara Murphy, Picasso was equally able to paint his wife Olga with classical serenity, as in Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (Olga) of 1923 (Zervos V, 53). Olga was a Russian ballerina, ten years younger than Picasso and far more conventional in her mode of life. She tried to make over the artist she had not begun to understand into a presentable “society” husband. This was an error which Picasso answered with savage resentment. Yet, for a time, his compliance resulted in some arresting portraits, the most charmingly stylish, if somewhat china-doll like, being Olga in an Armchair of 1917 (Zervos III, 83). In others he even tried to make her into a fashionable Spanish lady. They had met shortly before Eva Gouel died of cancer, married in l918, separated in l935 when Picasso requested a divorce (his paramour, Marie-Therese Walter, having become pregnant in l934) and were legally separated in l940. By then hostility on both sides had eroded a marriage which Olga had vainly tried to keep up, if only in appearance. Until 1943 when her appeal against final severance was denied, she had continued to harass Picasso as he entered more romances, juggling an increasingly complicated and fraught set of dependencies. While married to Olga he was more or less deeply involved with Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar, Irene Lagut and Nush Eluard, each of them a subject of portraits. Olga lived long enough to assail the youthful Fran?oise Gilot, with whom Picasso had two children and, when Olga died, it was in bitterness at never having understood why Picasso had so harshly repudiated her.
As Picasso’s biographers have seen, but without tying it to a full psychological critique of the art, he practiced what Richardson called “pictorial lovemaking”, leading to “fiendish manipulation—deification [of the woman of the moment] followed by a degrading process of psychosexual dissection—which endow the portraits of his wife Olga ...”45 Huffington similarly sees the once ardent lover Picasso inexplicably withdrawing “into his own world”, “with no explanation and for no reason that she could understand”.46 She sees the often illustrated frenetic Three Dancers of 1925 as a comment on his dancer wife Olga’s ill tempered and ineffectual attempts to exert control over the marriage. More damaging is Picasso’s assault on her person in a series of portraits, all the more surprising after his pictorial tributes to her as mother of Paulo. By 1927/8, however, ideograms of fear and revulsion, showing bared teeth, appeared: for example in Figure and Profile (Zervos VII, 144) and Bust of a Woman with Self-Portrait of 1929 (Zervos VII, 248). In the latter, a red male head in profile, no doubt that of the artist, appears just where the teeth threaten to bite. The message could not be clearer and, thereafter, other degrading and murderous images appeared as relations with Olga deteriorated.47 Woman with a Hat painted in 1935, the year of separation, makes Olga seem more silly and vacuous than threatening. The numbing devaluation was final in a paroxysm of avoidance and coercive damage to her once beautiful image of womanhood.
Marie-Therese
Further erotic complications were forming, with much the same cycle in store. Picasso found Marie-Therese Walter (1909-1977) as a young girl in the streets of Paris, enticing her into his life as a sexual partner. From 1927 an intense secret alliance formed as Picasso distanced himself from Olga. “The day I met Marie-Therese I realized that I had before me what I had always been dreaming about”, he is reported as saying.48 The illusion of female perfection was revived in the artist of fifty by an athletic blond girl of seventeen. More than Fernande or Olga, the child-woman Marie-Therese stimulated a sado-masochistic sexuality that took Picasso’s portrait painting in a new stylistic direction. Influenced by Surrealism, and especially by the writings of Georges Bataille advocating transgressive sexuality, Picasso entered forbidden territory. According to the art historian Lynda Gassman who interviewed
Marie-Therese towards the end of her life, “Some of the most vivid, lasting memories of Marie-Therese were precisely Picasso’s sado-masochistic sexual preferences”. Gassman continues, “She recalled that at the beginning of their liaison, he “asked” her to comply with his fantasies, and that she was so naive at the time that his demands made her laugh”. Yet, “Pablo did not want me to laugh. He was always telling me to be serious”. Details are lacking, but we may be sure that, from the start, submission and even degradation was required of Marie-Therese. She reported bowing “my head in front of him” and crying a lot because of her “wonderfully terrible” lover.49