Picasso had once believed that the painter, like a tribal exorcist, could raise demons and expel them, a variant of the evacuation metaphor. “If we give a form to the [threatening] spirits we become free”, Picasso had said to Andre Malraux.106 William Rubin is surely right to compare Picasso’s with Leonardo’s motivations, saying: “Art served both Leonardo and Picasso as a means of exorcizing anxiety ... by confronting the images of danger and disorder associated with it and then by endowing those images with an aesthetic order”.107 Rubin also observes that “Picasso’s private demons ... were projected almost exclusively onto images of women”. But the noble intention of exorcizing one’s demons by picturing them is beyond realization if those demons are so deeply installed in the personality that they are virtually coextensive with it. The corrective to developing “private demons” would have had to occur much earlier in interactive repair between mother and child, later therapy being laborious and protracted. Exorcism of misattunement would have had to be corrective unconditional mutual gaze, replacing the distancing, fear-inducing effect of avoidant attachment. But such developmental realities could not have been further from Picasso’s understanding, or that of most art critics. Public adulation deflected Picasso from self-questioning, and art criticism was often indignant at the mention of psychology. Thus Picasso’s art became thematically repetitive, never undergoing real mutations when trying to comprehend its subject matter. Inventing new styles turned out to be new packaging for the same destructive repetition of the artist-god viewing successive goddesses as he transformed them into door mats, or worse. Picasso had said, “copying others is necessity, but what a pity to copy oneself”, without seeing the relevance to his deepest anxiety which, because never experienced in its basic form, could not be expelled.108
Even contact with living archetypes would not have released Picasso from the stifling interior universe of his own making. From time to time Christian imagery entered his painting, especially the crucifixion, but he took no comfort from it. Neither grace nor nature counteracted the dominantly obsessive and avoidant picturing of women. By breaking decisively with landscape painting, from the Barbizon school to Impressionism, he relinquished the consolations of nature. When Genevieve Laport commented that he did not paint landscape, Picasso replied: “Well, I haven’t seen many. I’ve always lived within myself. My own interior landscapes are so amazing that nature could never show me anything as beautiful”.109 The desperate narcissism of this comment did not occur to him. How different it would be for the painter Balthus whose obsession with painting pubescent girls was frequently relieved by impersonal landscapes of great sensitivity. At least momentary release was possible for Balthus, while in certain of his box constructions Cornell’s imaginative realm enlarged to cosmic dimensions.
Neither were Picasso’s obsessions with interior objects modified by collecting rarities and the art of others. As a compulsive collector, Picasso accumulated large quantities of natural and man-made objects, usually of no more than whimsical value. Occasionally one contributed an idea for a design, but mainly they were clutter. More meaningfully, he accumulated his own art and that of others, but this too had an obsessive-compulsiveness about it. A parallel with collecting women as erotic trophies is suggested but neither could fill the void left by anxious early attachment. (It was remarked by many that, despite vigorous assertiveness, Picasso had a sadness or melancholia about him, as if something were perpetually lacking. Collecting is a well-known antidote to guilt and depression.) Prolific creation of art objects of all sorts temporarily diminished deficits which were intensified by fears of aging and coming death. Cannibalizing great painting of the past, and re-animating erotic distortions of women, seem not to have served Picasso’s deeper need for emotional re-fueling and visual delight.
Being psychologically incurious, he seems not to have noticed the recurring anxiety themes in his portrayals of women—visual strategies to counteract their coming too close. Had he been able to treat paintings as analogues to dreams, or dream-like imaginative occurrences, he might (like Jung and his followers) have found a pathway to greater emotional health and thus to fairness to those around him. Picasso’s free-association prose poems, written between 1935 and 1959, similarly offer a rich resource of affect-laden fantasy that, if systematically analyzed, would yield patterns of longing for and fear of women (see for instance that of December 1, 1935).
Despite the foregoing, it has to be admitted that Picasso’s portrayals of women have powerfully resonated with his public and will continue to do so. The appeal is about more than over-awed critics failing to point out the tragic relational cost of Picasso’s art. Nor is Picasso’s appeal mainly that of celebrity magazine scandalous revelations. Affixing such labels as misogynistic, gy-nophobic and femiphobic should not deter recognizing and affirming Picasso’s insights. Even the more violent portraits resonate with widely held unconscious male fears of women, and with women’s masochistic tendencies, as will be discussed in the conclusion of these studies. Picasso touched on something deep, pervasive and very inimical to the family in society; but it is taboo to say so. Picasso’s visual fantasies of dangerous women, who deserved to suffer, seem to have released latent gynophobia to which no other artist had given such successful expression. He showed how the Don Juan “lady’s man” could become a “man’s man” by taking control of threatening women who had moved too close for comfort. This helps to account for his meteoric success and for the complicit shallowness of so much art criticism of Picasso’s exhibitions. Many patrons appear to have been delighted that at last such egregious fear and rage against women was out in the open, albeit in the stylish guise of art. But the psycho-social sources of such destructive feelings are not to be named, with anodyne statements the rule. For example, the prominent Picasso scholar and critic, Douglas Cooper, proclaimed that “this was the Picasso century; he was the greatest figure of the century, greater even than Einstein or Freud”. When jilted and embittered Dora Maar heard this, her comment was: “poor century”.110
To summarize, Picasso’s portraits of women lovers conform to a pattern of idealization, disillusionment and expulsion (which was elastic and never complete), conforming with his relationships in real life. The most denigrating and dehumanizing portraits are manic, shrill and controlling in their avoidance of the once “loved” woman. she is pushed into a limbo of discarded lovers, another victim of the avoidant/ controlling defense built up during infant and childhood mal-attachment of Picasso, his mother and, secondarily, his distant father. The childhood death of Picasso’s sister Conchita might have made the early adolescent more compassionate, but it seems only to have increased his own fear of death. Coming from a macho Spanish culture increased the Don Juan effect of capture by and flight from mother, leading to hyper-sexuality, amounting at times to satyriasis. The products of creativity cumulatively diagnosed the source of Picasso’s pained feelings about women, assuaging rather than reducing or repairing conflict over attraction and avoidance. Each new portrait was a temporary triumphant “fix” bringing no lasting relief from the effects of underlying trauma. Hence his obsessively driven urge to work which became more insistent with age; perhaps, at their best, the pictures were psychological exercises in “undoing” that only compounded and reinforced the underlying emotional disorder. Nonetheless, Picasso’s ability to image anxieties about women coming too close made him a brilliant fantasy leader in an era when men could not, or dared not, express femiphobia.