Portrait of Pablo Picasso (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n When he died at the age of 91 in 1973, Pablo Picasso was hailed as far and away the greatest artist of the 20th Century. News reports at the time declared: \u201cPicasso did things no man had ever done before with brush and canvas.\u201d<\/p>\n An astounding shape-shifter whose style moved effortlessly through his Blue and Rose periods to Cubism, Neo-Classicism and the avant-garde, the ground-breaking painter created artworks that transcend time and will be treasured forever.<\/p>\n The Spanish artist was responsible for such masterpieces as Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon, Weeping Woman and Guernica.<\/p>\n A true revolutionary, Picasso upended the conventions of 20th Century painting time again and again, repeatedly rewriting the history of art. He utterly transformed the way we see the world. According to fellow artist Julian Schnabel: \u201cHis work will be around till the planet blows up.\u201d<\/p>\n His granddaughter Diana Widmaier Picasso sums up the artist \u2013 who had an ego the size of Spain: \u201cHe is inventive, fearless, very human, very passionate, sometimes dark and probably thrilled by knowing that today we talk about him so much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n READ MORE <\/strong> Nearly half of Brits admit they are ‘clueless’ when it comes to famous artworks <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n ‘Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon,’ painted by PIcasso (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n In a career lasting more than 80 years, the creative powerhouse was astonishingly prolific, producing more than 150,000 works of art \u2013 enough to fill an aircraft hangar.<\/p>\n An artist who lived through two world wars and was a peerless chronicler of love and death, Picasso is also the subject of more books than any other artist \u2013 in excess of 4,000 volumes, at the last count. This underscores his reputation as the world\u2019s most popular and influential artist.<\/p>\n And yet, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Picasso\u2019s art is being radically re-assessed. Half a century after his death, the painter is being \u2018called out\u2019 for the heinous way in which he abused the myriad women in his life.<\/p>\n The man who declared, \u201cThere are only two kinds of women \u2013 goddesses and doormats\u201d, is now being held to account for his appalling sexism.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, his family has rushed to his defence. They argue that many of the women Picasso was close to went into their relationships with him with their eyes open. Much more than caricatured, submissive \u201cmuses\u201d, they had agency. They were brilliant, independent-minded, three-dimensional women.<\/p>\n According to the artist\u2019s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso: \u201cMy grandfather had love stories with each woman, and no one was forced to do anything. Pablo Picasso is Pablo Picasso. It would be too easy to say all those women were victims. But everyone knew it was not an ordinary world they were entering.\u201d Nevertheless, there is still a great deal stacked against the artist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For instance, in 1927 when Picasso was 45 and married to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, he spotted the 17-year-old Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Walter by Galeries Lafayette in Paris. Instantly smitten, he invited her out. She went on to become his muse and have his daughter, Maya. But almost immediately after his child was born, the painter embarked on an affair with the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar.<\/p>\n In other examples of extreme cruelty, Picasso stubbed out a cigarette on the cheek of his then partner, Fran\u00e7oise Gilot, and, despite the fire risk, he locked his first love Fernande Olivier in his studio whenever he went out for the day.<\/p>\n As the author and psychologist Phillippa Perry, married to British artist Grayson, notes: \u201cLike he could control paint on a canvas, he wanted to control his world and control other people in it.\u201d In a dark coda, finding life without Picasso exceedingly hard, Walter committed suicide in 1977 and, equally bereft, his final wife Jacqueline Roque shot herself in 1986.<\/p>\n Picasso stands accused of gross exploitation and the most reprehensible misogyny. As critic Eliza Goodpasture puts it: \u201cThe lurid radicality of his art rests on a wanton disregard for the humanity of the women he painted and slept with.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s Pablo-matic,\u201d an exhibition currently running at the Brooklyn Museum, adds to this re-evaluation, re-examining his work through the lens of his undoubted sexism. Should Picasso be cancelled or celebrated, then? Is he a monster or a genius? Or both? A compelling new BBC2 documentary, Picasso: The Beauty and The Beast, investigates that very question.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Weeping Woman by Picasso (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n Director John O\u2019Rouke weighs up whether we should now simply dismiss Picasso as a horribly outdated misogynist. Stories about the artist\u2019s private life have, he admits: \u201cLed to some people questioning whether he should be, quote, unquote, cancelled.\u201d<\/p>\n He continues: \u201cThere are so many opinion pieces and podcasts that ask those questions, but when that is the starting-off point for a discussion on Picasso, I find it\u2019s not a discussion that goes particularly deep. It\u2019s a fallacy to think that by looking at something we are necessarily validating it.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the accusations surround the fact that when he was 45 years old, he had a relationship with a 17-year-old. That\u2019s clearly problematic in this day and age, but he\u2019s not Caravaggio. He didn\u2019t murder anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t help to simply write controversial figures out of history, O\u2019Rouke contends, because you need to explore them in order to interrogate them. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult because it\u2019s such a nuanced thing to pursue, but I don\u2019t think he should be cancelled because you need to look at these stories.\u201d<\/p>\n The Picasso family have welcomed the \u201cIt\u2019s Pablo-matic\u201d exhibition as an attempt to view the artist from another position. They have not tried to block the curators\u2019 access to any of the painter\u2019s work. O\u2019Rourke also thinks you need to approach Picasso\u2019s work with an open mind.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you try to reduce somebody to just one element, you\u2019re not going to make much progress in trying to understand who they are and what their art means,\u201d he says. \u201cObviously, we have to look at these artworks and his life story from the perspective of where we are today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe can\u2019t just pretend that we\u2019re back in Paris in 1907 blithely condoning men locking up women in their studios, even when there\u2019s a fire risk. We need to see the whole picture, in the round.\u201d<\/p>\n But, the director continues: \u201cIf we only look at a story from one narrow standpoint, I don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to make a huge amount of progress in understanding it and why it\u2019s had the impact on our culture that it has had today.\u201d<\/p>\n It is also important to recall the historical context, the rampantly sexist environment in which the artist was raised. Alice Perman, series director of Picasso: The Beauty and The Beast, asks: \u201cHow can you learn or challenge or question if you\u2019re just intent on cancelling an individual? Seen through a contemporary lens, Picasso is pretty abhorrent.<\/p>\n “By our own mores today, his treatment of his lovers, his children and his friends was terrible. At times, he delighted in psychological cruelty. His bad behaviour is without question.\u201d However, she concludes: \u201cWhat gets lost is our historical perspective sometimes.<\/p>\n “Picasso was a man of his age and his environment.He was the product of 19th century Andalusia, which was incredibly misogynistic. Womanising and visiting prostitutes were part of the rituals of male culture there. Also, his mother completely doted on him and did everything for him. That was the world in which he was exposed to relationships with women.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s only in the last decade, post-#MeToo, that we\u2019ve been having this conversation. Our view of relationships and equality has shifted dramatically, which is, of course, progress. But the difficulty is that we have a propensity to say that purely by the standards of 2023, he\u2019s a shockingly bad individual and not take into account the historical context. We are trying to understand his art solely through the prism of our contemporary experience.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Pablo Picasso and his family (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n Ultimately, the filmmakers would like us to come to our own judgment about Picasso\u2019s work. This reflects the artist\u2019s own view that his art was not there to spoon-feed people with answers.<\/p>\n O\u2019Rourke muses: \u201cRather than saying as filmmakers, \u2018This is the way you should interpret this\u2019, all we\u2019re trying to do is relay the facts, provide a showcase for Picasso\u2019s art and let the audience at home make up their own mind about how they should see it.\u201d<\/p>\n In a world too often dominated by the loudest voices on social media, Picasso has certainly been painted as a very divisive figure. But for all that, it is possible to retain two ideas in your head simultaneously.<\/p>\n Perman observes: \u201cPicasso has increasingly become a polarising figure. But I think that there\u2019s a lot in between the two extremes and that you can hold both of those positions at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Rourke adds: \u201cSometimes there\u2019s an appetite for outrage that people like to fuel by invoking Picasso. But I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s representative of how everyone understands and sees him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n “The \u2018Picasso 1932\u2019 exhibition at Tate Modern in 2018 was one of the best-attended exhibitions in the 23-year history of that museum. I don\u2019t think people went to that purely for the sake of being horrified or offended. The vast majority of people went to see that exhibition because they wanted to connect with great art.\u201d<\/p>\n To some degree, then, it is feasible to separate an artist\u2019s creative output from their life. At some point, the work has to stand on its own two feet. Perman adds: \u201cIn reappraising the works of great artists, post-#MeToo in particular, we try to understand the body of work as well as the frailties of its creator. But too often, there\u2019s a tendency to conflate the two.\u201d<\/p>\n If there is a conclusion, then, perhaps it is that Picasso is the archetypal man of contradictions; he can be a world-class artist and a world-class misogynist at the same time. The Beauty and The Beast can co-exist. As his daughter Paloma puts it: \u201cYou can\u2019t just say he\u2019s a monster or a genius. He\u2019s just a man.\u201d<\/p>\n That duality is mirrored in Picasso\u2019s own work. So many of his paintings feature a motif of two profiles resolving into a single face. Clearly, he was very aware of the duality in us all. Whatever our take on Picasso, then, it is clear we shouldn\u2019t rush to chuck him in the dustbin of history. \u201cIf we cancel Picasso,\u201d Perman asks, \u201cOh my goodness, who else do we have to cancel as well?\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe we should pause a moment and consider that there may be rather more to Picasso than a hideously sexist dinosaur.<\/p>\n [ad_1] Portrait of Pablo Picasso (Image: Getty) When he died at the age of 91 in 1973, Pablo Picasso was hailed as far and away the greatest artist of the 20th Century. News reports at the time declared: \u201cPicasso did things no man had ever done before with brush and canvas.\u201d An astounding shape-shifter whose …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[765],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Portrait](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/36\/590x\/secondary\/4991957.jpg?r=1696345108670\" "\\"Portrait")
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