The typical cycle of idealization to denigration and emotional dismissal had been enacted again, although Jacqueline was retained for her usefulness as a pseudo-maternal caregiver in Picasso’s declining years. The paintings record the same metamorphosis of romantic and erotic idealization into manipulative and punitive rejection. This is the final installment of Picasso’s “diary of a seducer”, revealing a life of severe emotional limitation made to seem exciting by stylistic innovations, often of genius. He may be credited with accessing the essence of womanhood in certain of these phases, but overall it cannot be said that Picasso’s power as an artist derives from the deep archetypal reserves of culture. To have understood the healing power of archetypes, Picasso would have had to access Carl Jung on balancing the anima and animus, or Erich Neumann on The Great Mother, showing how, in tribal societies, myth and ritual balance love and fear of women. While Picasso readily appropriated “primitive” expressive imagery, he did not invoke its deeper archetypal potential. The balance of seeing, accepting and reconciling hostility and anger in himself is lacking. Radical swings of affirmation and avoidance continued, with nuancing of emotion (often present in the “Blue” and “Pink” periods) increasingly eluding him as innovations continued and celebrity burgeoned. Thus the self-reinforcing destructive cycles went on uninterrupted, not allowing entry for purgative ritual, let alone insight into the true source of venomous attacks on the feminine.
In 1980 Mary Gedo had clearly seen the pathology of Picasso’s art culminating in his final years with Jacqueline. She remarks that, despite Jacqueline’s “fierce protectiveness”, Picasso painted “lackluster pictures”, being further thrown off balance by “agony and rage” when Gilot’s revealing book was published. His erotic prints are “empty virtuoso performances”, and while sometimes having “a certain charm”, the “wit has a bitter quality which often seems directed at women”. The very last work is “an unending, self-indulgent rumination—a long, disjointed narrative which soon ceases to compel the viewer who studies these last pages of the artist’s life journal in detail”. These are the words not of an established art critic or historian but of a psychoanalyst seeing beyond specialists and the market. “In Picasso’s final decade, then, chaos became the main quality of the self.”90 The hypersexuality, combined with anxious negativity about women may reflect doubts hinted at by Gedo as “secret reservations and ambivalences about his new partner Jacqueline”91 Roy MacGregor-Hastie is blunt about their difficulty, writing of Jacqueline: “She was not very interested in sex—that had been the principal reason for the failure of her marriage—so she did not expect more from a seventy-four (sic) year old man than she had any right to”. Picasso’s old friend “[Tristan] Tzara always felt that she had strong lesbian tendencies ...”.92 If true, this would explain aging Picasso’s increasing anxiety that his masculine prowess was being diminished and that the only hope was to increase the sexuality of his art to the point of pornography.
Thus any authenticity of relationships went into terminal decline, while raw sexuality and resentment emerged to the detriment of art. So much for the contemplative serenity one likes to think about as the result of long application to art: Morandi’s timeless still-life objects or Monet’s lily ponds—were lost in an expanding emotional turmoil of failed relationships with women he exploited but did not know.
Retrospect: Marina and Olivier
While three of Picasso’s sexual partners and wives left substantial memoirs, none could be expected to see the entire sequence of his exploits, nor the dynamic originating in childhood of aggressive attraction followed by avoidant rejection of lovers. Fernande Olivier, Genevieve Laporte and Franqoise Gilot each reveal aspects of this cruel dynamic with various degrees of pained immediacy. Searching the documents of Picasso’s life for self-reflection does not contribute much beyond such facile rationalizations as: life “is set up to automatically eliminate those who can’t adapt” and “everyone’s nature is determined in advance”.93 Biographers from Roland Penrose to John Richardson have bravely tried to bring into focus the human cost of Picasso’s artistic achievement; but out of deference to his genius they refrain from invoking developmental psychology. Only Picasso’s grandchildren are distant enough to re-open family experience so as to make psychobiography imperative.
After fourteen years of psychoanalytic treatment, Picasso’s granddaughter Marina, daughter of Paulo, Olga’s son, wrote of the “Picasso virus” which she hoped to understand. Her brother Pablito (1949-1973), who had committed suicide when experiencing rejection, especially by his grandfather, needed a memorial and this deeply-felt family reconstruction thereby took shape. Paulo’s life (1921-1975) had been trivialized by his father and was seen by many as a waste, but that of Pablito was a tragedy needing vindication. Marina sees her grandfather as an “evil genius” with cruel eyes, and there is more than a hint that as a female child she felt sexually threatened when, aged eight and again aged seventeen, Picasso presented himself to her in shorts which exposed his genitals.94 In this passage, and many others of equally intense recollection, Marina articulates feelings of relational truthfulness Picasso could not manage for himself, nor attained by his biographers.
The narrative is angry but, much more than an attack, it is a stark revelation, never sensational because deeply processed and reflected upon thanks to the analysis. It is not so much an exercise in auto-psychobiography as a plain statement of realization about childhood suffering. Picasso had been purloined by Jacqueline, shut away, unavailable to his grandchildren who needed his help. Marina realizes that, “Even as a child he had already been shut inside himself’ and could not have normal relationships. Instead, he “swept up [women] into his tornado”, submitting them “to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them”.95 This restates with power Gilot’s naming a “Bluebeard complex”, and it hints at childhood origins without exploring the possibility. As to the creative process, Marina sees the limitations of his art: “He didn’t re-create the world; he imposed his own”. The imposition was typically laden with hostility: “A good painting” he used to say, “must be spiked with razor blades”.96 But in “dissecting his soul” Marina too falls short of realizing what it was Picasso worked on in himself, or why the “isolation” of his emotional life—the narcissistic, avoidant legacy of defective mothering remains unidentified. Marina’s task of exposing her family’s anguish is fulfilled without probing her Grandfather’s own disabling suffering. As the psychoanalyst John Gedo writes, Picasso “was always in danger of a recurrence of the early childhood difficulties with his mother”.97 In other words, he was entrapped by successive re-stagings of anxiety-laden unions and separations with women modeled on his mother, women who told him how wonderful he was only to find that they could not fulfil his grandiose entitlement to monopolize their lives. It follows that this dynamic also governed his art, restricting its imaginative range far more than has been recognized. Picasso may have been exceptionally inventive but only within a narrow range of obsessive idealization and denigration of women which culminated in the decade before his death in 1973. There is much more of interactive destruction in his images of women than of interactive repair as he did not expect to see in their eyes the loving kindness that a securely attached infant sees in its mother’s eyes. A natural urge to repair anxious attachment by mutually loving gaze is overtaken by the deadening repetition of un-fulfilling relationships compounding failures.