29. Stephen J. Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, & the Politics of Anxious Masculinity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), pp. 31-2.
30. Ashton, p. 43. More than once Picasso insisted on the destructive function of painting, as in the famous comment on a picture being a “sum of destructions”, not additions as once it had been. He saw picture making as a sort of symbolic killing: “Unfinished, a picture remains alive, dangerous. A finished work is a dead work, killed.”, p. 38. Portraits were not excluded from this chilling remark.
31. Fernande Olivier, Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), p. 72.
32. Ibid., p. 22.
33. Ibid., p. 22, p. 40; See pp. 42, 46, 72 etc.
34. Ibid., p. 140. Aged about 23, Picasso was just leaving a romance with a woman called Madeleine who had been made pregnant by him, according to Richardson I, 304, 306. He adds that there were two other mistresses at the time.
35. Ibid., p. 162, 159.
36. Ibid., p. 258.
37. Ibid., pp. 191-2; Picasso told Gertrude Stein that Fernande’s “beauty always held him but
he could not stand any of her little ways”. Huffington, p. 122.
38. Macgregor-Hastie, Picasso’s Women (Luton, Beds, 1988) p. 6.
39. See also Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture, p. 256f. for a series of winningly benign likenesses of Fernande from 1905f.
40. See Donald Kuspit, Signs of Psyche in Modern Art (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 48, where he remarks, “Rembrandt’s portraits invite us to intimacy with the subject; those of Picasso and Braque forbid such closeness. They retain the impersonality of the primi-tivist figure—its distanced, uninviting character.”
41. Ashton, pp. 59-60. See also Buste de Femme au Bouquet, 1909, (Zervos XXVI, 419) and Ingrid Mossinger et al, eds., Picasso et les Femmes (Kunstsammlungen: Chemnitz, 2003), p. 87.
42. Huffington, p. 139; Richardson, II, p. 289.
43. Huffington, p. 137f; Richardson, II, p. 363f. (aka. Gaby Depeyre)
44. See Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture, p. 319; Mossinger, ed., Picasso et les Femmes, p. 153. Olivier W. Picasso’s chronology places this meeting in 1923, a minority opinion. (Picasso: The Real Family Story, p. 335) Picasso commented to Genevieve Laporte, “Do you know, I couldn’t sleep with a woman who had had a child by another man. I would have feelings of disgust”. (Sunshine at Midnight, p. 37)
45. Richardson, II, p. 405.
46. Huffington, p. 183. Two quotations from Genevieve Laporte’s account are useful. Picasso is reported to have said: “You see, getting a woman with child is for me taking possession, and helps to kill whatever feelings existed. You can’t imagine how constantly I feel the need to free myself". He added, “I am full of contradictions. I love what belongs to me, yet at the same time I have a strong urge to destroy [my itals.]. It’s the same with love. Any desire I have for procreation is an expression of my other desire, namely to free myself from the woman in question. I know that the birth of a child will be the end of my love for her. I shall have no more sentimental attachment. But the child will bind me with moral obligations." (Sunshine at Midnight, pp. 36, 74)
47. For example, see Rubin ed., Picasso and Portraiture, p. 330 for images of murderous fantasies. Extreme distortions and denigrations are seen in Woman in an Armchair and Seated Bather, both of 1929, in Alfred H. Barr Jr., ed., Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), pp. 161, 163.
48. Diana Widmaier-Picasso, “Marie-Therese Walter" in Mossinger ed., Picasso et les Femmes, p. 169.
49. Huffington, p. 193. C. Kate Kavanagh speaks of women becoming addicted to Picasso’s abusiveness: “Marie-Therese when asked what happiness was for Picasso, said, “First he raped his women, then he worked"—which helps to explain the controlling contempt of many images of the female face and form. (Barry M. Panter et al., eds., Creativity and Madness: Psychological Studies of Creativity & Madness, p. 269.)
50. Olivier Widmaier Picasso, Picasso: The Real Family Story. (Munich: Prestel, 2004), p. 53.
51. Diana Widmaier Picasso, “Marie-Therese Walter and Pablo Picasso: New Insights into a Secret Love" in Markus Muller ed., Pablo Picasso and Marie-Therese Walter: Between Classicism and Surrealism, pp. 27-8.
52. Illustrations are in Markus Muller, ed., Pablo Picasso and Marie-Therese Walter..., pp. 71, 73.
53. Ibid., p. 103.
54. Ibid., p. 43.
55. Ibid., p. 159; Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture, pp. 366-7. Marie-Therese’s only known comment on the more distorted portraits was that “they didn’t look like her". Huffington,
p. 212,
56. Huffington, p. 211; See also Olivier Widmaier Picasso, The Real Family Story, p. 63—an often repeated vignette also in Gilot, Life with Picasso, pp. 85-6.
57. Brigitte Leal, “‘For Charming Dora’: Portraits of Dora Maar" in Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture, p. 385. The most detailed critical account of Picasso’s art during his relationship with Dora Maar is Anne Baldassari, Picasso: Love and War, 1935-1945 (Paris: Editions Flammarion, 2006). Baldassari’s historical and iconographic commentary discourages psychological interpretation of Picasso’s distorting portraits of Dora. She objects to “the vulgate of art history, with its outright partiality and misogynist analysis" p. 28. Dora merely focused and reflected Picasso’s “inner torments" rather than contributing to them. “Often as not, the ‘deformations’ in the portraits of Dora are interpreted as deliberate, violent attacks on the integrity of her personality. In our view, this is to ignore completely the symbolic function of the figurative thread between work, artist and model ...." (pp. 163-4). Baldassari sees Picasso’s portrayals of Dora as reanimating classical motifs, especially in the Minotaur pictures which present her as both victim and victimizer. She does not attempt to answer the observation: “What Picasso leaves us with is his re-statement of the great fear that has flickered in men’s nightmares—the fear of destruction at the hands of voracious women”. (Edwin Mullins, The Painted Witch, Female Body: Male Art. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985) p. 52)
58. Illustrated in Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture, p. 386. James Lord reports Dora saying that sometimes Picasso would exclaim, “I’m God, I’m God”, although “you would wonder whether Picasso in reality wasn’t the other one”. Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corp., 1994), p. 122.
59. Illustrated in Rubin ed., Picasso and Portraiture, pp. 395-9; for distracted portraits see p. 388 (Zervos VIII, 304-7); and for a painting suggesting a split, dissociated psyche see illustration p. 384 (Zervos XI, 374).
60. Leal in Rubin ed., p. 386.
61. Olivier W. Picasso, Picasso: The Real Family Story, p. 66.