Picasso Surviving

...You know nothing on earth will keep him out of the maisonette...

...Love filled him with energy, and he portrayed his loved ones inexhaustibly, in a multitude of media, in an amazing variety of incarnations, infused with an in-your-face sexual energy that hits us like a wave...

...Photograph ©1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New York...

...beneath her dress she is visibly, hence actively, undressed...

...These women are featured in Surviving Picasso, the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film that opened this past fall...

...88 • DISSENT Picasso look...

...I don't mean he learned to engage in sexual activity—he seems to have done that very nicely all his life, inhibited only by age and health...

...Dora has nothing like Marie-Therese's aura, her inner radiance...

...Over the next decade he made hundreds of portraits of her...

...he also said he didn't think many people got there...

...Opened fall 1996...

...But we should be glad they're there: it takes an impure art and impure ideas to show all of us who we really are, and to help us imagine who we can be...

...A little later, we meet Eva Goulet, one of Picasso's unsung heroines...

...If we could talk back, we might want to say that love and hate are primal feelings, and that both our art and our lives will be better if we have the guts to see and to say how they are intertwined...

...But I think if we look close, we will be impressed that he could see women with such personal tenderness along with overpowering body heat...

...reaches out and just barely touches him...

...But that is the life of the underclass as comically imagined by a member of the overclass...

...For most of the twentieth century, Picasso drove brilliantly through the world art market's fast lane—indeed, he did as much as anyone to create this lane...

...The women who came through with him most dramatically are Marie-Therese Walter and Dora Maar, stars of the MOMA show...

...Matisse's serene reply is, "No, I leave that to you, Monsieur...

...Maybe it was the one place she went hoping to get away from him ) In one such painting, the easy chair beneath her seems to catch fire...

...Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss...

...The contradictory aspects of her personality are shown in sharply clashing colors and post-Cubist skewered planes...

...Neither woman on this wall looked beautiful...

...Her wrecked face seems pointed at him like a J'accuse...

...Picasso seems to see her as a kindred spirit, a fellow modern artist...

...but in the end they stay outside alone.* It might help us "get" Picasso if we imagine him—not the beautiful boy with all the world before him, but the grown man who has been to too many funerals—in a scene like this...

...You could walk out very soon after this, and you wouldn't miss much...

...SURVIVING PICASSO...

...It may be extravagant to say Surviving Picasso has ideas, but at least one of its themes echoes thoughts that have long been around in parts of the art world: as much as Picasso is condemned as a beastly sinner, his lifelong rival Matisse is venerated as a transcendent saint...

...Suddenly, this lonely man finds himself in the presence of a vibrantly sexual woman: Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye Is underlined for emphasis...

...Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Summer 1996...

...Picasso here is not so much a character as a machine for generating evil...

...The point of the scene, it appears, is that Picasso (who is seen painting on a scaffold while the fight goes on) laughs at them both because Picasso was a Bastard...

...Picasso, like Freud, spent his life wrestling with the unconscious, and with the dialectics of love and hate...

...Picasso's portraits can show us how devastated he was by the early deaths of people he loved...

...This role imprisons Hopkins far more effectively than Hannibal Lecter's cage in The Silence of the Lambs...

...but she has something else, she looks infinitely more interesting...

...As long as we have art, and the mechanical reproduction of art, people will know these women and admire them because of him...

...It's certain that he acted horribly toward women he loved...

...They dream fervidly about open sexuality, about human mutuality, about the infinite mystery of life in the maisonette...

...She is foreign (does "Russian" mean Jewish here...

...If Picasso's Marie-Therese is defined by organic curves and naturalness, his vision of Dora is all jagged artificiality—her makeup, jewelry, pointy nails, her elegant dresses with abstract designs, her look of self-consciousness, her heraldic color of neon red...

...Thus the movie contains plenty of art business, but (unlike the old Hollywood art biopics) very little art...

...She was his model and girlfriend in the 1910s, she died of TB early in World War I, and he nursed her tenderly at the end...

...His pale blue melancholy face is so soulful, the entrance wound so brutal, a giant candle's pointillist flame (love...

...398 pages, illustrated...

...The makers of Surviving Picasso flaunt their list of VOPs as an excuse not to look at his work...

...he himself has put it there...

...In the most compelling of these, the shapes are curvy and organic, the feeling lyrical, the pace breathless— it's as if he felt he had to finish these paintings before some metaphysical closing time...

...He gave Marie-Therêse Walter and Dora Maar—and Fernande Olivier, and Eva Goulet, and Sara Murphy, and Francoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque, and more—a permanent presence in world culture...

...It was startling to find ourselves in a museum crowd whose emotional fervor felt like Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden, or like the Fillmore East and other nice places long gone...

...no matter what might happen, he's going in...

...Dora was in fact a photographer, and the one person to see, and portray, every phase of "Guernica...

...One of the MOMA's classic paintings is the 1932 "Girl Before a Mirror": she turns out to be that girl...

...Webster was much possessed by death," he begins...

...She comes across as a woman who has plenty to say...

...These verbs are obviously about sex, but they're more importantly about imagining and knowing other people...

...A post-Cubist woman gets to have more than one body, so she can be at once gorgeously dressed and nude...

...Dora, who entered Picasso's life in the mid1930s, is her metaphysical complement, the dark side of the moon...

...We get the idea in the first minute...

...She looks like somebody who has constructed a montage of herself...

...His sheer overdrive endangered everybody who got close to him...

...His own class, tragically imagined, can't seize life at all...

...But the makers of this movie don't love them, and indeed don't have any interest in what they might have been like, apart from two more items on the list of VOPs, Victims of Picasso...

...Catalogue, edited by William Rubin, with essays by Anne Baldessari, Pierre Daix, Michael FitzGerald, Brigitte Leal, Marilyn McCully, Robert Rosenblum, William Rubin, Helene Seckel, and Kirk Varnedoe...

...Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1995...

...In another, a swirling palm tree sprouts from her lower body...

...He shows Picasso his late portraits of women, and says that he (Unlike Others We Could Name) is attuned to the biological life cycle, at home in the fullness of his years, and happy to live a sexual life in his imagination...

...Culture, Marx said, is public property...

...Donne, I suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense, WORKS DISCUSS ED IN THIS ESSAY PICASSO AND PORTRAITURE: REPRESENTATION AND TRANSFORMATION...

...Picasso says, "You don't seem to feel any hate for the women you love...

...1997 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York...

...What has any of this to do with the project of Dissent...

...Norman Mailer, in his Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, is right to stress learning: he argues that Picasso's sexuality was not the easy self-confidence of a stud, but an uphill struggle, precarious and vulnerable, an imaginary construct that he had to reconstruct again and again...

...Based on Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, the biography by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington...

...One of the great collective dreams of change is the modern dream of love: the primary social contract, lonely people bring= ing together their bodies and souls...

...496 pages, illustrated...

...This made sex a source of dread, but also of dramatic power, a way to say, "Look, we have come through...

...It's true, Picasso grabs spectators in private places...

...But its members can dream up a storm...

...Her eruption into Picasso's life late in the twenties gave his art a sudden surge of energy...

...By Norman Mailer...

...But both looked sublime: so serious, so intense, so wholly there...

...Picasso was in love with them in the 1920s and 1930s, at times simultaneously...

...They are like Newland Archer in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, pacing outside Countess Olenska's door: they know they are welcome inside but can't bring themselves to ring the bell...

...People who try to confront human ambivalence get spat on in the streets (as Freud did in old Vienna), or in print, or on film...

...His portraits capture not only women's beauty, but their dignity...

...Picasso loved painting Marie"Girl Before a Mirror...

...Market society thrives on this dream, but it throws us into a fast lane where we crash against the people we want to love most...

...It is as if Picasso is laying claim to all the clichés of endearment, and trying to make the words flesh...

...Like the dark ladies in Henry James's fiction and the brunettes in classic film noir, she has been around the block...

...No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone...

...SPRING • 1997 • 87 Picasso To seize and clutch and penetrate...

...But soon we grow weary even of a face, a body, a voice we like...

...Eliot, another child of the 1880s who lived long...

...But Picasso got there, and a lot of his art helps us see how a fusion of tender and sensual feeling can •Is this unfair to the creator of "Sweeney Agonistes...

...ESCAPING PICASSO," by Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker, December 16, 1996...

...Before long, we feel ourselves drifting off into nostalgia not only for Kirk Douglas gnashing his teeth in Lust for Life, but even for Captain Hook, whose creator had the grace to let the villain tell jokes about himself...

...The gold of her hair and the pink of her flesh vibrate intensely, often set off by rich blue and purple clothes...

...For his heroes, the dream girl is always just out of reach...

...Avon Books...

...Toward men he loved, he might have been even worse...

...For awhile, they hung together on his wall, then they were scattered to different parts of the world...

...That Picasso was a Bastard turns out to be the point of every scene in the movie...

...We meet her in a more emdodied form when she is near death, a barely perceptible lovely girl who is not just wrapped but trapped in layered Cubist planes...

...He had to find a way to choose life...

...And right opposite him, as if on a cathedral's façade, "Behold that degenerate, who is driven by hate along with love, and who wallows in ambivalence...

...Dreamers of democratic socialism, we can thrive on Picasso's imaginative visions of what the modern self and modern love can be...

...The older he got, the more he resembled a classic tycoon, choked by his own corporate conglomerations, dead to anyone's needs but his own...

...MOMA, 1996...

...The show introduced us to dozens of subjects, but its real subjects were love and death...

...It could well be that this search led him "to seize and clutch and penetrate," and to become "expert beyond experience...

...But he not only lets the sign stand...

...Modern capitalism forces us all constantly to revolutionize the way we live, just in order to survive...

...An alluring fantasy: a foreign, arty, odorous, physically friendly girl with an apartment of her own...

...Thousands of people jammed the place, and circled and spiraled through it again and again, making florid gestures, and shouting exclamations—"Get this," and "Incredible," and "My God," and "Oh, wow...

...Feature film directed by James Ivory, produced by Ismail Merchant, written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala...

...Both looked worn out, and you can see why...

...it is drummed into our heads relentlessly lest we forget...

...One day in January 1939, maybe hoping to sort his feelings out, he painted large oil portraits of both women, in identical positions— "Reclining Woman with Book"—in the identical place in his studio...

...Captions tell us, "The German Occupation Of Paris In 1943," and an image of Picasso stamping down his studio stairs is juxtaposed with an image of Nazi Storm Troopers stamping down Parisian streets...

...Given women of such depth, how could you not love them both...

...In the next stanza, she smells like "the couched Brazillian jaguar" (animal, exotic, dangerous), and—unusual in the 1910s—"Grishkin has a maisonette...

...Yet she is nothing like the sun in the "Girl Before a Mirror," a great hymn to inwardness, where both the subject and her self-image are absorbed in each other...

...her face is not just made-up but "underlined," written on, suggesting art, and a kinship between them...

...SPRING • 1997 • 91...

...Maybe, then, Picasso redeemed himself from death by imagining human sexuality in explosive and original ways...

...So was John Donne, he says: indeed, Donne's feeling for death brought his erotic vision to life...

...In "Whispers of Immortality," a lyric from the 1910s, Eliot's narrator is a learned shlemiel, meditating on culture, history, and the inadequacy of sex to make men happy in the face of death...

...But, in Eliot's imaginative world, fantasy is as far as it goes...

...In Apeneck Sweeney's block of flats, people routinely fuck (and kill) each other...

...I mean something deeper: what Eliot meant by "to seize and clutch and penetrate...

...The first really striking and shocking painting was an in-thecoffin portrait of the poet Carlos Casegemas, dear friend of Picasso's youth, who had killed himself in 1901 when the woman he loved refused him...

...The portraits of her are fascinating as collaborations, as acts of dialogue...

...Once more the movie's message is "Behold this master, perfect in both art and life: see how he feels and loves and creates in total purity, without ambivalence...

...They are hopelessly impure, prime candidates for labels like "Degenerate Art...

...Once we grasp what we need, we can take it and make it our own...

...In another she sleeps naked, and the sun outside echoes her roundnesses and seems to draw on her as a source of heat and light...

...In one scene Marie-Therese and Dora actually have a physical fight, but we never learn what they thought they were fighting for...

...Even as Eliot's narrator reflects, the poet picks him up and throws him into a jump-cut...

...In a portrait called "Weeping Woman," her face appears in such a state of active disintegration, it's unbearable to look...

...In these early works, we can see Picasso vibrating on the same wavelength as T.S...

...In the portraits that stopped traffic last summer, she seems almost a subject without subjectivity, no more self-conscious than the sun...

...About halfway through the movie, Picasso and Francoise Gilot visit Matisse, whom we are told is close to death but who glides along on his crutches like an Olympic skater, overflows with smiles, and speaks in Zen parables like Yoda in Star Wars...

...Last summer, at the MOMA, after half a century, they came together again—in all likelihood (insurance costs, and so on) for the last time...

...In collaboration with some extraordinary women, he learned to create some of the sexiest art of the century...

...Again and again we are shown potentially complex characters in potentially interesting situations, but all their life and energy are sacrificed to the prosecutorial aim of proving beyond a doubt that Picasso was a Bastard...

...SPRING • 1997 . 89 Picasso Therese asleep...

...Anthony Hopkins plays the villain with great verve, and at first we are happy to see him strut and fret and thrust out his chest and laugh dia90 • DISSENT Picasso bolically...

...Visitors to the Modem have known MarieTherese for some time, though we didn't know we knew her till now...

...For some years Picasso seems to have loved both women at once, and they seem to have loved him, in ways that must have been unbearable for them all...

...Now, there are people out there (many in the art world: see Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker) who hate Picasso obsessively, and many of those people seem to see these protraits as sexual assaults on themselves...

...Last summer's portraiture show and its splendid catalogue can help us see how Picasso's art connected to people...

...But it's ridiculous to call him, as he is often called, a misogynist...

...Expert beyond experience, He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton...

...But there is always a mystery about this Marie-Therese, a way she has of curving into herself, so that she radiates a perfect inner harmony that no lover can touch...

...Sometimes he draws her like a giant cartoon beach ball, with delicious curves that invite our touch...

...Who is this dark lady...

...Freud said the capacity to feel both tenderness and sensuality toward the same person was a sign of being grown up...

...But in his prime he invented new forms of empathy, new ways to get close to other people, and to open up the self: his art was a way to grow and a medium of love...

...sign...

...PORTRAIT OF PICASSO AS A YOUNG MAN...

...What could it have been like for Picasso himself...

...In his Cubist heyday her presence is symbolic and abstract, a guitar, the title "Ma Jolie...