115. Huffington, p. 473.
116. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 1, p. 277.
Appendix
Picasso’s production of female portraits is larger and more various than the foregoing selection conveys. A further sampling indicates the full range of his portraits of lovers, acquaintances and celebrities. Page references are to Ingrid Mossinger et al, eds. Picasso et les femmes (Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, 2003); Zervos cataloguing is often lacking, especially for minor works.
Picasso’s lesser relationships with women are documented in portraits displaying much the same tendency as discussed above, first to idealize, then to denigrate the subject. But the effect is less evident as portrait drawing and painting often was not sustained, with one or the other emphasis prevailing. Relationships beyond those cited in this chapter produced varying degrees of expressive distortion. some portraits are quite naturalistic while others betray the relational anxieties seen in the main groups studied. For example, Self-portrait with a Nude (1902) is a quick impression of a moment of sexual tension with an unknown woman , (p. 51). There is a sensitive portrait of Madeline (1904), the woman Picasso is said to have made pregnant during the relationship with Fernande Olivier (p. 60), and the tender Mother and Child (1905) could also be Madeline (p. 62). In contrast, there is a rather hard, yet realistic portrait of sexually adventuring Alice Derain (1905) (p. 66). Even the famed mask-like portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) preserves enough likeness to signify that Picasso’s fear and avoidance of women had yet to be fully activated. There are tentative drawings of the Lesbian and promiscuous Irene Lagut (p. 118f) contrasting with the dignified finished pencil Portrait of Mme. Eugenia Errazuriz (1918) (p. 127). Occasional portraits of Genevieve Laporte (p. 270f) and Sylvette David (p. 312f) are little more than banal fashion statements, and there is the flawed drawing—the hand over face—of Florence Loeb (p. 293), inept for Picasso. The charming portrait of Angela Rosengart of 1954 may be contrasted with the more menacing portrait of the same subject in 1966 (pp. 298-9). Occasionally Picasso could not connect with a subject and admitted failure, as with the fashion designer Helene Rubenstein. He could produce tender and seemingly spontaneous portraits such as that of Nush Eluard of 1941 (p. 200); yet in 1937 he had given her a maniacal, distracted look complete with menacing teeth—reversing the usual order of reactions (p. 197). In the case of Lee Miller, “turbulent and adventurous” partner of the English surrealist Roland Penrose, there is no mitigating portrait, only frightening distortions of 1937 done in parody of Van Gogh’s contemplative
L’Arlesienne (pp. 204-5). There is also an expressionistic recreation of Helene Parmelin (1952) as a predatory tiger-woman stalking its prey. Parmelin had been an enthusiastic biographer, supporting the marriage to Jacqueline, yet in her own way she seems to have got “too close” for Picasso’s liking (p. 269). However harsh the imagery, there is undoubtedly an element of truth in such portraits of women as Picasso was adept at picking out flaws and weaknesses of character which others could see as well as he. Yet, the artist’s fateful subjective ambivalence also operates throughout this series, as a systematic study of them would bear out. it is when the portraits of lovers are seen in series that the full force of Picasso’s narcissistically destructive dynamic appears, and the women, however insightfully characterized, tend to disappear as persons replaced by monstrosities of the imagination.
Hans Bellmer
Hans Bellmer’s Sacrificial Dolls
Perhaps someday perversion will not be necessary.
—Robert Stoller, Perversion, p. 219
Struggle to Control
Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), Polish-German artist and writer; studied engineering in Berlin from 1922-4 before becoming a commercial artist. Influenced by Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, he turned to expressive art, emphasizing the erotic. Looking to Surrealism, he constructed dolls, publishing their photographs in Karlsruhe in 1934 and in Paris in 1936 as La Poupee. A large retrospective of his work was held in 1971-2 at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris.
Hans Bellmer’s dolls are among the most arrestingly perverse Surrealist images, yet the Surrealists never quite accepted them, nor have critics successfully categorized or explained their disturbing presence.1 Freudian theory opened discussion of Bellmer’s obsessive distortions of adolescent female bodies but it takes us little distance towards an explanation of his motives. Freudian theory supplies no convincing reasons for Bellmer’s choice of “object” to mutilate and control, leaving it to subsequent psychodynamic theory to do so. This study is a psychobiographical reconstruction of Bellmer’s traumatic childhood as background to his extraordinary lifetime of artistic venturing in the imagery of sadistic sexual perversion, beginning with the dolls of 1934. Symbolic abuse of female dolls, and subsequent representations, is traced to the abuses Bellmer himself suffered in childhood and adolescence.
The dolls (actually eighteen photographic views entitled La Poupee) gave Bellmer hope of reducing relational and sexual anxiety, but their result seems more like despair. Not only do the dolls themselves present an iconography of wounded despair, they set their maker’s artistic direction towards nihilistic resignation, both in his hypersexualized art and his relations with actual
women. Bellmer had superb drawing ability, together with the craftsmanly discipline that gives his created objects instant authority; yet the objects are so tension-producing, fascinating while repelling viewers, that criticism is almost impossible.
The artist cannot be separated from his art, but we need a convincing theory to unify them. Feminist critics, such as Sue Taylor and Therese Lichtenstein, have attempted formulations of Bellmer’s psychological distress as it affected his art, but both are too deferential to questionable psychoanalytic concepts, and too “art as art”, fully to understand its origin in early life events. Art should not be held sacrosanct, and attachment theory will reveal the limitations of Bellmer’s achievement. In my view, Bellmer’s art was an unsuccessful attempt to amend a life shaped by trauma-caused suffering. It represents a “false solution” to his troubles, arising from gynocentric combined with gynophobic fantasies generated unawares in childhood and made manifest with acquired artistic skills. When looked at this way, the art documents pathology leaving little room for esthetic pleasure. Yet seen in its entirety, it conveys a profoundly affecting pathos. To make this case requires looking squarely at Bellmer’s struggle to free himself from developmental constraints.
Unknown Reflections
For many viewers, Bellmer’s hyper-sexualized and misogynistic doll imagery simply overwhelms an esthetic response. The rapt, intransitive gaze of the esthetic moment is precluded by associations so disturbing that the would-be esthetic object is cast into permanent ambiguity. It is impossible to fix on it with the surrender necessary to intensive seeing. When we see the female human body dismembered, the response is likely to be guilt-inducing for males and frightening to females, with suggestions of sadistic rape. No amount of sophisticated irony , or “seen it all before” distancing, can overcome basic human responses of the deepest unease in the presence of Bellmer’s dolls and the other later hypersexualized and eviscerated “created” objects. He forcefully transgressed the accepted esthetic standards of the nude in western art, and no art criticism, reinforced by the early theories of psychoanalysis, deals fully with the result.