Jacqueline
Opinions vary as to Picasso’s second marriage in 1961 to Jacqueline Roque (1926-1986), when he was nearly eighty and she thirty-five. Jacqueline was a somewhat solitary figure who helped with sales at the Galerie Madoura at Vallauris, where Picasso showed his pottery. They had met in the early 1950s before Olga’s death, during strained relations with Fran?oise when Picasso was having other affairs. Jacqueline’s marriage to a civil servant working in Africa had broken down, and she was unattached when Picasso noticed her “sphinx-like profile”. Jacqueline’s bourgeois and Christian background was ill suited to Picasso’s liberated way of life, the accommodation being uneasy and somewhat artificial. Olivier Picasso quotes Helene Parmelin as saying, “She called him my lord, my master and did not address him tu in public. Lover, model, assistant, nurse, permanent interlocutor—she was all of those things! She knew how to protect him from the tide of visitors that was endlessly washing against his door. ... She was the uncompromising guardian of the space he needed to be free, to create.... But at the same time she was fiercely jealous of anything or anyone that she might suspect of undermining her sovereignty over this space and her monopoly of the man-god, for whom she posed as a vestal virgin”.79
The truth about this relationship is summed up by Mary Gedo who sees Jacqueline as so needy and possessive that she threatened suicide when Picasso first spurned her. He too was excessively needy after Fran?oise’s departure; he had stopped painting. Picasso “surrendered to his fate, and lived out the remainder of his life as the prize of a woman who tyrannized him through idolatry”.80 Gedo rightly sees this relationship as a sort offolie a deux, in which Picasso returned to the extreme dependence of a child upon its mother. “She exacted a fanatical control, like the artist’s mother, who had once possessed the most beautiful child in the neighborhood. Jacqueline could claim the world’s most famous artist—and he was now a geriatric prodigy rather than the Wunderkind he once had been.”81 Although Picasso sometimes called Jacqueline “Maman”, she was hardly motherly towards his offspring and grandchildren who were rigorously excluded from Picasso’s domain at Vallauris. Marina Picasso writes of going to the house Notre-Dame-de-Vie, with her father Paulo, Olga’s son, only to find the gate “hermetically sealed” by “the black widow”, Jacqueline, who presided over a realm of darkness.82 When Picasso died in l973, Jacqueline “kept a lonely vigil beside his body until the physical deterioration of his corpse finally forced her to bury his remains.. Subsequently she withdrew into what she herself later labeled a ‘nervous breakdown’. When she finally reemerged into society several years later, she posed for the cameras before an enormous photograph of her beloved ‘master’.”83 Lonely and bereft, Jacqueline died by suicide, shooting herself in the temple in October, 1986. She had spent thirteen years after Picasso’s death as a martyr to his memory. It is not known whether Marie-Therese’s suicide nearly nine years earlier influenced Jacqueline’s terminal act. Both had invested too heavily in a man who excited them sexually but could not, in any sustained way, reciprocate their affection or affirm them as persons in their own right.
There is lack of agreement as to the effects of this relationship on the art of Picasso’s old age. Writing in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue of 1996, William Rubin says of Jacqueline, “Her understanding, gentle, and loving personality combined with her unconditional commitment to him provided an emotionally stable life ... over a longer period of time than he had ever enjoyed”.84 Rubin praises the vividly disassembled Seated Nude (Jacqueline) of 1959 (Zervos, XVIII, 308) as “one of the most extraordinarily inventive portraits Picasso ever painted”.85 The portraits of Jacqueline after 1969 he finds characterized by “tenderness and delicacy”, Woman on a Pillow (Zervos XXXI, 315) having a “willed” awkwardness of the image but “full of feeling”—not at all “a question of loss of dexterity in old age”.86 In 2003 Roland Doschka wrote that Jacqueline “was neither submissive nor reverent towards Picasso; rather, she was a proud woman who was proud of her genius of a husband whom she loved”. Picasso’s portraits of her “are not just aesthetic,
but also highly dramatic, and even today they proclaim the eternally youthful inspiration of the painter by his model”.87
It is indeed difficult to establish enough critical distance from the late portraits to see them as decadent and unworthy of Picasso’s great gifts. Critics are too ready to assimilate them to earlier undoubted portrait masterpieces. The late erotic portrayals of women, however, are best seen as summarizing Picasso’s incapacity for sustained relationship and exhibiting defeated eroticism as a result of never having confronted gynophobic anxiety . They bring out his abusiveness and misogyny with concerted power, and their very bluntness makes them unpleasantly memorable. Two of Picasso’s biographers, who happen to be female, take a very different view of this late work than do Rubin and Doschka. While Arianna Huffington may seem a hostile witness, using excessive language, she has an unanswered point about the art centering on Jacqueline. Huffington sees the marriage as mutually destructive, “she by her smothering possessiveness and he by crushing first her spirit and then her humanity”. Jacqueline wanted power: “The Spoiled Child had met his match in the Terrible Mother all too eager to enclose him in her deathly womb, the better to foster all that was dark, cruel, gross and mean-spirited in him”.88 Her own daughter, along with Picasso’s offspring, were pushed aside as she fought for exclusive possession of the artist. For his part, under the pressure of death, Picasso painted more portraits of Jacqueline than of any other partner. Huff-ington writes, “Jacqueline’s body was massacred in painting after painting and drawing after drawing. ‘Sometimes I dream that he loved me,’ she said. But it must have been hard to maintain that dream when, “as the years went on, more and more of her was brutalized by his brush”.89
The dislocated, double-faced late portraits, and especially the grossly dehumanized Sketches for Bust of a Woman, 1962, (Zervos XX, 234-42), along with puffy dead-fleshed seated nudes, give evidence of an implacable wish to do damage. There is no depth of character, no effort at understanding or empathy in these paintings of a corpulent threatening woman who had got “too close”. The pictures have a terrible sameness with many previous efforts to exert control and bring submission when signals of anxiety mounted in him and the need to “triumph over trauma” again surfaced. There are indeed idealized portraits of Jacqueline, such as the winning Jacqueline in a Black Scarf, 1954, (Zervos XVI, 331), but by 1971 she had been transformed into a hideous monster in Seated Woman (Jacqueline) (Zervos, XXXIII, 181).