Notes
1. Dora Ashton, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p.
23. Donald Kuspit finds Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso signaling “the end of art” with “the fragmented, disjointed, abused body—a seemingly arbitrary assemblage of various part objects that can hardly be called a whole and complete body, and in fact is a very distorted pathological idea of body—that appears in modern art, perhaps most famously in Picasso”. The End of Art (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 118.
2. Rank, Otto, The Don Juan Legend, trans. and ed. David G. Winter (Princeton University Press,1971), p. 22.
3. Mary Matthews Gedo, Picasso: Art as Autobiography (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 9.
4. Ibid., p. 9.
5. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. I, 1881-1906 (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 478. In “Psychoanalysis and the History of Art” (1953) E. H. Gombrich advocated studying Picasso’s art with reference to its “conventional elements” rather than its “personal one”. With restrictions on biographical facts long since lifted, it is possible to return to the task of relating Picasso’s psychology to his art which, though insufficiently equipped, Richardson is inclined to do.
6. Ibid., I, p. 433.
7. Ibid., I, p. 27. Richardson is perhaps going on Picasso’s comment to Genevieve Laporte that he had “no grudges” against his parents, “although I left them very soon, since I was on my own in Madrid at the age of fifteen”. Sunshine at Midnight: Memoirs of Picasso and Cocteau (New York: Macmillan, 1975) p. 20.
8. Ibid., I, p.25
9. Ibid., I, p. 486
10. Mary Main, “Recent Studies in Attachment”, Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives, ed. Susan Goldberg et al. (Hillsdale N. J.: The Analytic Press, 1995) p. 407f. See also Carol Magai, “Affect, Imagery and Attachment: Working Models of Interpersonal Affect and the Socialization of Emotion”, in Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research and Clinical Implications, Jude Cassidy and Philip R. Shaver eds. (New York: Guilford Press, 1999.)
11. Patrick O’Brian, Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1976), pp. 19-20. Jean-Paul Crespelle remarks of Don Jose, “he was a sort of playboy, who liked bullfights, women and the cigars he smoked in the company of good friends at his club”. When at forty he married a cousin, Dona Maria Picasso-Lopez, “he would have preferred to remain a bachelor”. Picasso and His Women (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1969), pp. 12-3.
12. Ibid, p. 20. In “Picasso and the Painter Model Theme: Multiple Identifications and Creative Transformations of Aggressive Conflicts” Leon Hoffman focuses on Picasso’s depressed father while seeing women as recipients of “aggressive fantasies”. Yet Hoffman scants the actual troubled relationship between the young artist and his mother that underlay destructive portrayals of women lovers. International Review of Psycho-Analysis 11 (1984): 291-300.
13. William Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1996), pp. 232-3. Note also the resolute face of the artist’s Aunt Pepa (1896), p. 235. Gedo thinks that the comparatively small number of representations of Picasso’s mother, in contrast with those of his father, show him keeping himself “relatively detached from his mother”, Picasso: Art as Autobiography, p. 21.
14. Gedo, p. 11. This remark is repeated by the biographers, for instance by Arianna Huff-ington in Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (New York: Avon Books, 1988), p. 19. Huff-ington also reports an exchange between Gertrude Stein, who on first meeting had admired Picasso’s looks, and his mother Dona Maria whose response was: “If you thought him beautiful then I assure you it was nothing compared to his looks when he was a boy”. Though they agreed that Picasso was no longer so “beautiful”, his mother said to him “you are very sweet and as a son very perfect”, p. 180.
15. Alice Miller, The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1990), pp. 14-5.
16. Huffington, p. 19. She does not disclose sources, nor did Richardson elicit this important information when he interviewed Picasso’s widow Jacqueline Roque on the painter’s relations with his parents. Jacqueline only said of his adoring mother that he was “undeniably fond of her but a touch ashamed of her dumpy, housewifely appearance”. He seems to have taken her “love and nurturing very much for granted”. Richardson was not fully convinced by Jacqueline that relations with mother had been “uncomplicated”; yet he states that relations with father were “far more ambivalent”. A Life of Picasso (London: Pimlico, 1997), vol. II, p. 277.
17. Ibid., p. 19; Gedo, p. 11.
18. Gedo, p. 45.
19. Huffington, p. 17.
20. Ibid., p. 17.
21. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1970). Chapters 7:“Freud” and 9: “Jung”. See index for “creative illness”.
22.See Picasso’s stark final self-representation in the portraits of 1972, especially Self Portrait, wax and crayon on paper (Zervos XXXIII, 435); Rubin, Picasso and Portraiture, p. 173. Such bleak male images had appeared before, for instance in the figure of a young doctor removed by Picasso from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, but nothing as frightening as this.
23. Ashton, p. 48. Picasso is quoted as saying, “The inner I is inevitably in my painting, since it is I who make it. I needn’t worry about that. Whatever I do, it will be there. It will be all too much there ... It’s the rest that is the problem!”, p. 47.
24. Ashton, p. 78.
25. Huffington, p. 214.
26. Phil Mollon, The Fragile Self: The Structure of Narcissistic Disturbance and its Therapy (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1993), pp. 109-10. There are other reports of grandiose inducements by the artist’s mother, for instance, “if you become a soldier, you will be a general; if you become a monk, the Pope”. (Quoted by C. Kate Kavanagh in “Picasso: The
Man and His Women” in Creativity and Madness: Psychological Studies of Art and Artists, Barry M. Panter et al., eds. (Burbank, CA: AIMED Press, 1995, p. 265) .The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, IV, 301.81 gives an overview of narcissistic personality disorders.
27. Ibid., p. 111.
28. Ibid., Mollon clarifies: “The more common situation in narcissistically disturbed patients may be that the father is not completely barred access to the person’s mind, the reality of parental sexuality is partially accepted, but it is de-emphasized ...”, p. 114.