by Jon Lackman | 5 November 2010 | Books, Modern
Will John Richardson finish his multi-volume biography of Picasso? According to a 2008 Artinfo piece, he “freely admits that he may have trouble” but “shows no signs of slowing down.” For a fresh sign of his undiminished fighting spirit and a clue to his thoughts on late Picasso, one might look to his just-published article in The New York Review of Books on two recent Picasso books and the exhibition that one of them occassioned:
Picasso’s work abounds in paradox, as did his religious and political beliefs, not to mention his love life. All the more reason to look skeptically at the exhibition “Picasso: Peace and Freedom,” which started out at the Tate Gallery’s Liverpool branch, is currently at the Albertina in Vienna, and will end up at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. Lynda Morris, who has masterminded the show, makes much of the period following World War II when Picasso, who had joined the Communist Party in 1944, painted works that reflected Party propaganda. But as the art historian Gertje Utley has shown, many of the works in the exhibition, such as The Rape of the Sabines, are not “programmatic statements,” as the exhibition catalog claims, but testify to Picasso’s “life-long fear and horror of armed conflict” …
Compared to the new discoveries coming out of Spain and other European countries, Lynda Morris’s “rich variety of original and unknown material” is neither original nor unknown: pro-forma acknowledgments of charitable contributions to Party and other causes, long known to scholars such as Utley. Rather more worrying are the conclusions that Morris derives from these receipts. In a newspaper interview headlined “Picasso Revealed as a Feminist in New Exhibition,” she describes, for example, how a donation to the Women’s International Zionist Organization in Tel Aviv entitles us to see Picasso (famous for obliging his mistresses to read de Sade) as having “sympathy for women.” Contributions such as this confirm Picasso’s generosity to liberal causes. However, his art tells a somewhat different story. Take the painting Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which sold for a record $106.5 million seventeen days before the opening of “Picasso: Peace and Freedom.” It depicts Picasso’s mistress in bondage and, according to the art historian Charles Stuckey, is based on one of Man Ray’s fetishistic photos. The image is redolent of predatory possessiveness. Picasso was indeed a paradox; he was also a misogynist.
[...] John Richardson may approach Picasso as a fan as much as a scholar, but his recent New York Review of Books piece is a fine read. [...]
If Picasso is a paradox, then why can’t this include being a feminist? What if his misogynistic depiction is meant simply to make us reflect on the woman’s condition, reflect on our own fascination with the voyeurism, and our own outrage at her abuse? We are all invited to examine the paradox in ourselves no?