Olivier Widmaier Picasso’s Picasso: The Real Family Story unsuccessfully attempts to counter and correct the relational revelations of Marina’s book, while providing a history of the legal and financial entanglements of Picasso’s legacy. Olivier (b. 1961) is a lawyer, Maya’s son and Marie-Therese’s grandson. Lacking Marina’s personal reason for trying to reconstruct Picasso’s dismissive behavior, he is guided by Baudelaire’s statement that “Exceptional geniuses are not there to please the fainthearted”. It is more family honor and the posthumous Picasso establishment (“The Picasso Administration”, with it vast financial resources) he wishes to defend. There is more than a whiff of idolatry, and Olivier’s attempted vindication of Picasso’s human relations is shallow. When writing that “Picasso seems to have taken great care not to hurt anyone—which some people put down to deft maneuvering”, Olivier ignores the biographical record. Or when he writes that Picasso was “genuinely fond of the women who crossed the path of his destiny” and that “They stimulated and inspired his work”, it is clear that he had not examined the evidence and is taken in by Picasso’s own evasions.98 He allows that Picasso was “jealous”, “possessive” and “fatalistic”, but never mentions his narcissistic cruelty and indifference to the suffering of others. Olivier’s inability to see Picasso’s pathologically impaired relationships is explained in a revealing sentence of his own: “I understand this Latin temperament [of Picasso’s] because I have inherited it and behave similarly in relationships myself’.99
It is unlikely that such revisionism as Olivier’s will seriously affect a growing consensus about Picasso’s inability to form normal human relationships, though the attitude of “what would you expect of such a great artist except scandal?” may well help to maintain the inflated commercial value of his work. Picasso’s name is recognized the world over, with the astonishing prices for his art reflecting the epithet “genius”, as the sycophantic biographer of Dora Maar, James Lord, established in the public mind after interviewing the artist following World War II.. To change from “genius” to destructively pathological narcissist will not happen quickly, as long as media hype of Picasso’s life and art continues. The public seems to like being played with by such an outrageous rule breaker as Picasso, the bad boy, or permanent rebel, who goes into old age never growing up. Picasso himself fostered the image of “trickster” or “lord of misrule”—understandable in someone of massive ability who had grown up in church-dominated, socially repressive spain. The cultural argument for macho and misogynist rebellion is compelling, but incom-plete.100 In this respect, he was a “fantasy leader”, giving stunning pictorial validity to a promiscuous mentality that flouted the then current rules of chastity and holy matrimony.
When society cannot adjust its rules governing sexuality to human reality, it gets a breakaway fantasy leader such as Picasso who forces, not measured reform, but an extreme correction. The next stage would be such promoters of the 1960s so-called “sexual revolution” as Hugh Hefner, who tried to turn attractive young women into sexually available bunnies. A prominent feature of decor in Hefner’s posh Chicago mansion was Picasso’s painting Nude Reclining}01 Picasso assumed the role of the amoral fantasy god Eros, maker of libidinal images, presiding over a generation which put sexual gratification over lasting relationships. No amount of exception-taking by feminists seemed capable of controlling the apotheosis of Picasso, Hefner and many other male writers, artists and media promoters. Even the feminist-inspired biographer Arianna Huffington relied too much on indignation and failed to go deep enough to change fundamentally our view of Picasso as a life-long psychological casualty of childhood attachment disorder.
Reinvention and Genius
Picasso’s mystery, charm, deviousness and ability to reinvent himself no matter the predicament, together with his enormous sustained production of painting, sculpture, graphics and pottery in a startling succession of styles, made him an untouchable twentieth-century icon. Ruthlessly promoted by the art market, auction houses, museums and publishing houses, Picasso became an institution. Highly publicized exhibitions made him chief spokesman for “modern art”, now given cultural permanence by the Picasso Museum in Paris. His disputed personal fortune is legendary, with many upper level art transactions trading on his name as the “value” of even trivial scribbles goes unchallenged.
Yet in lucid moments, in the last phase of painting when he tried to recreate in his own idiom the great art of the past, Picasso admitted that he might not belong with the immortals. Speaking of reworking Velazquez, he said “I don’t know at all whether what I did is sublime or whether it’s shit”.102 He knew himself to be not far from fraudulence or, at least, the temptation to give what his public would take: “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies”.103 Such equivocation served Picasso well in beguiling his public. However much “necessity” may have compelled his art, Picasso was unwilling to see it as revealing truth, least of all any explaining of his repetitious ambivalence towards women. He could accept that he was an explorer, but of precisely what order of ambivalent fantasy he was unable to say. In an interview of1952 with Giovanni Papini, reported in Libero nero, Picasso is quoted: “In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences seek what is new, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters: I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere”.104
If these are indeed Picasso’s words, they are less those of a calculating charlatan than of someone with a modicum of self-knowledge who, had he been prodded, might have gone somewhat further in explaining his deeper motivation. Yet the God-like pose he assumed prevented such approaches. One wonders whether his explanations are really only pseudo-explanations, tasteless jokes such as the painter having “indigestion” and going through “states of fullness and evacuation”. He seems to have wanted to deflect enquiry, warning: “People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree,” and asking “How can anyone penetrate my dreams, instincts, wishes, thoughts that took a long time to ripen and come to light, and above all how can one deduce from them what I was after—perhaps against my will?”.105 But he never explained what his “will” might have been since verbal explanation was not his forte, and pictures needed to be seen for themselves.