As to Picasso the apostle of peace, this too needs re-examining. Though famed for the moral outrage that inspired Guernica (1937), and for originating the dove as symbol of the peace movement, Picasso was never an anti-war crusader of the order, say, of Bertrand Russell. He was far too narcissistically entangled in his own affairs to look critically at world politics and especially at what membership in the Communist party during Stalin’s era actually meant in terms of oppressive cruelty to the people of the soviet Union. Picasso was hardly the pacifist he claimed: anti-war sentiment perhaps, but by addiction to bull fighting, and by his treatment of women and children, another story is told.
Picasso’s underlying disorder was an attachment trauma due to near neonatal death, failure of mother to nurse at the very start, and strong though belated onset of maternal attachment only to be disrupted by the birth of a sister during an earthquake when Picasso was three. This appears to have reinforced his dominant avoidant attachment style, which was a compromise strategy for remaining with mother while being emotionally detached from her. Picasso’s deepest fear was that he might become a woman. As he jocularly confided to one of his lovers, Genevieve Laporte, “I’m a woman. Every artist is a woman and should have a taste for other women”.111 Picasso liked conundrums of which this certainly is an example; but it contains a fear. Picasso seldom voiced this fear and when he did it was said outrageously, with a quick change of subject. His words to Genevieve Laporte convey what he feared may have happened to him in childhood—gender assimilation to the predominantly female household in which he grew up. By accepting that in some sense he was a woman, Picasso signified how deeply he feared becoming one. His predicament was such that he even thought of death as a woman. Late in life Picasso is reported to have remarked “I think about Death all the time; she is the only woman who never leaves me”.112 Making and breaking affectional bonds in the changing emotional confusions of attaching to mother, grandmother and aunts, not to mention sisters, set a pattern of attachment and withdrawal (for emotional safety) which lasted Picasso a lifetime. It permeated his love relations making them more or less temporary, according to the rate at which his women got too close and he ran out of resources for keeping them while also pushing them away.
While Picasso’s mother was sometimes unavailable to him at the start, she had a grandiose “idea” about her wonderful son, the only male child growing up amidst emotionally starved female relations, about whose ministrations too little is known. Instilling this “idea” of a miraculous child, able to perform heroic feats, even emulating God, brought about the narcissistic grandiosity which marked Picasso for life. His young mother battened on her son at the cost of his much older father, a discouraged and depressed failed artist. Of course, Pablo’s sometimes intense relations with men, whose portraits he frequently painted especially early in his career, needs study too—but it would be unlikely to much alter this assessment. Picasso had to make a rebellious escape to Paris from his parents and repressive Spain, yet he remained permanently indentured, committed to restaging old traumas with women who little understood what was happening to them.
How could Picasso, or his lovers, have seen the origin of his compulsive attraction to, fear of and rage at women as erotic objects? The very success of his art inhibited self-doubt and enquiry into motivation. Further, while psychoanalysis was seized upon by Surrealists, there was at the time little relevant psychology that could have helped him, even had he wanted it. struggling artists in Paris of the 1920s and 1930s were not likely to frequent therapists. Picasso failed to take seriously Carl Jung’s recommendation of1932 that, as an artist, he himself should undertake a mythic journey into the unconscious where the basic archetypes of female images could be encountered and imaginatively transformed.113 Freudian Oedipal theory would have been some assistance but Freud, as seen through the lens of Picasso’s friend the charismatic analyst Jacques Lacan, would have obfuscated the enquiry. Lacan had been a Surrealist whose later reinterpretation of Freud produced a cult-like following in France but not one that attracted Picasso. The advent of “Object Relations”, and then of “Attachment Theory” emphasizing real-life developmental scenarios with strong implications for psychobiography, is too recent to have much altered considerations of whether the creative arts really are autonomous. For all Picasso’s admission of an art-life connection, when it came to actual distortions in his pictures, he insisted upon the autonomy of art: “The secret of many of my deformations—which many people do not under-stand—is that there is an interaction, an intereffect between the lines in a painting; one line attracts the other and at the point of maximum attraction the lines curve in towards the attracting point and form is altered”.114 He had got far too close to his own work to see its larger and deeper dynamics.
While Picasso’s lover-victims typically had been weakened by their own developmental irregularities, they were not entirely helpless, especially those who found strength to write their experiences. With access to developmental psychology they certainly could have done more to save themselves from self-blame and depression. It took indignant feminism to change decisively the direction of biographical study of Picasso, but indictments then became excessive. Huffington’s moral condemnation of Picasso, building on Gilot’s revelations, begs a more balanced, psychologically informed re-assessment that reserves judgment of guilt or innocence, at least until a more truthful larger picture has formed. However, Huffington justifiably summed up: “He took to its ultimate conclusion the negative vision of the modernist world—so much that followed has been footnotes to Picasso”.115 This prompts the question whether Picasso destroyed more than he created. Was his art attacking inherited western visual culture, along with conventional sexual morality, mainly self-serving and incapable of replacing what was destroyed with something better? Picasso certainly sanctioned sexual anarchy through the apotheosis of personal desire over every traditional family and social obligation. He undermined the confidence of women in men and reinforced men’s dread of “too close” control by women. He was indeed a cultural scourge and destroyer, his art a degradation of, or at least a threat to, everything accomplished in chris-tian-Humanist artistic endeavor.
But condemnation is not the intent of this essay when there are gains in understanding made possible by attachment theory, changing the critical framework to connect art and life. Picasso brilliantly opened a vista on the psychological peril of men and women who try to find unity with one another while knowing too little of themselves as products of childhood trauma. The missing ingredient in Picasso’s life and art is critical self-awareness. compassion for suffering seen at the outset of his career ebbed away as his sexual odyssey became more complicated; the feelingful works of the “Blue Period” he later dismissed as “nothing but sentiment”.116 He dealt in the most powerful affects which, nonetheless, he could not allow himself actually to feel or enquire into. Today these affects can be specified and traced to probable origins. The challenge of Picasso’s misogynistic portraits necessitates psychobiography which should be more fully expanded than is possible here. No other artist can be said to have so fully manifested male narcissistic pathology, a menace to everyone it touches, yet when named and understood the result is enriching, and possibly corrective, in our sexually over-stimulated times. In this changed perspective, Picasso has a far larger contribution to make than has yet been recognized.