Pablo Picasso’s contributions to the development of art in the 20th century cannot be understated. However, in the last few decades, his treatment of women in his life has raised questions about his suitability as a revered historical figure. There is a large debate on whether we should separate art from the artist. However, it is important to know the story behind an artist to better understand the work. Picasso was one of the greatest artists in history; however, his story may contain similar darkness to much of his work.
Who Was Pablo Picasso?
Pablo Picasso was born in Spain in 1881. From early on in his life, he showed signs of artistic talent, painting all through childhood and adolescence. His style changed consistently as he experimented with different ideas and techniques. By the age of 7, Picasso had begun formal artistic training through his father’s lessons, studying figure drawing and learning to paint in oils. His father, Ruiz, was an academic artist and instructor who strongly believed in the traditional: that copying the masters and drawing the human form was integral to properly training artistic skills.
Ruiz vowed to give up painting when he found Picasso’s painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Noting the precision of his son’s work, the older artist believed the thirteen-year-old had already surpassed his own artistic talents. Soon after, Picasso’s father managed to get him admitted to Barcelona’s School of Fine Arts’s advanced class. While Picasso lacked discipline, he met fellow artists that became important later in his life. After moving to Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the sixteen-year-old Picasso stopped attending classes, citing a dislike for discipline. Instead, he studied the works of El Greco, Francisco Goya, Francisco Zurbarán, and Diego Velázquez.
At the beginning of his artistic career, he experienced poverty and desperation, as well as a strong urge to distinguish himself. He became associated with other modernist artists, poets, and writers at this time, who gathered at the cafe Eks Quatre Gats. Much of his work at the time was dark and desolate, with themes of loneliness and despair. After moving to Paris in 1904, he found dedicated patrons in Gertrude and Leo Stein, American siblings, who would host salons in their home on Saturday evenings. These events were known as incubators of modern thought, bringing the artistic and intellectual minds of Paris together.
At this time in his life, he gained an interest in African and Oceanic art as well as pre-Roman Iberian sculpture, which praised intuition above all else. This is the explicit inspiration in his most famous work, which laid the groundwork for the Cubist movement that he assisted in the facilitation and growth of.
Despite this, the outbreak of World War I reverted him back to more traditional styles until the end of the 1920s, when he began incorporating Surrealist imagery and techniques into his work, creating morphed and distorted figures that, by the 1930s, he had refined into what he is now known for. He also continued to paint in his old age, reveling in the financial success he had accrued throughout his career and building his own collection of art.
Why Was Pablo Picasso So Famous?
In 1998, Robert Hughes wrote, “to say Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the twentieth century is, by now, the merest commonplace…No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime…Though Marcel Duchamp, that cunning old fox of conceptual irony, has certainly had more influence on nominally vanguard art over the past thirty years than Picasso, the Spaniard was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees.”
No matter what is believed about his nature, there is no denying that Pablo Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He is most known as the creator of the Cubist movement alongside artist Georges Braque.
He dedicated himself to his artistic pursuits, contributing significantly to the development of Modern Art. Picasso and Braque’s work revolutionized artistic representation. Their complete rejection of naturalism and their use of illusionistic tricks to transform three-dimensional objects into flat objects were radical. Not only did the introduction of Cubism to the artistic discourse change the course of art history, but it also changed the way society saw the role of art. The movement allowed room for other abstract movements to be established and build traction through the second half of the century.
Today, Picasso is often talked about because of his misogynistic views and appropriation of African tribal masks. Critic Eliza Goodpasture notes that “the lurid radicality of his art rests on a wanton disregard for the humanity of the women he painted and slept with.”
Women: Goddesses or Doormats?
Despite the significant success and influence Pablo Picasso achieved in his artistic career, his legacy has been corrupted by the devastation he left in his wake. He has become known for the cruelty and misogyny he showed toward women; during his life, he was seen as a lusty, macho man, traits which have become, arguably, infamous alongside his art.
It can be argued that, despite his lackluster treatment of women, Picasso’s life and art were only made possible by women. On one hand, the artist utilized his wives and mistresses as his caretakers. On the other hand, he worked with countless women as models and muses, without whom his art would not be the same.
Brooklyn Museum curators Lisa Small and Catherine Morris said that Picasso was damn good at objectifying women. This statement is clear in his art: Picasso saw women as objects to depict. He took his wives, mistresses, and sex workers, transforming them into flat objects, baring their bodies and his view of them for the world to see.
In his life, the artist was married twice, had four children with three women, and had numerous affairs. He utilized his emotional and erotic relationships to influence and inspire his creative expression. The inclusion of women in his life in his art cemented his place in history. Biographer John Richardson notes his three obsessions were work, sex, and tobacco.
During his first marriage to Olga, Picasso’s work was naturalistic, reminiscent of the Neoclassical period. Olga, a Russian ballet dancer, was one of his first muses and the mother to his son, Paul. Their relationship began lovingly, but after the birth of their son, Picasso and his friends were suspicious of Olga’s refined tastes, and his passion, shown in his portraits, cooled significantly.
The artist began frequenting brothels and having an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a 17-year-old. He was roughly 45 at the time they started their relationship. During this secret affair, Picasso’s work became very Surrealist. His depictions of his wife showed clear unhappiness as he began displaying works of his mistress in exhibitions.
In his sixties, Picasso began a relationship with another girl who was 40 years his junior. This was an art student, Françoise Gilot. He had grown tired of his previous mistress, Dora Maar, and he began living with Gilot. After having two children together, Gilot left Picasso, describing his abusive behavior and continuous affairs.
Gilot wrote at length about their relationship, noting his lack of love and empathy. She wrote about him saying: “For me, there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.” He had a lust for seduction and exercising his power over young women, something shown in every relationship we know of. Gilot described a pattern the artist had: idealize, devalue, and discard, explaining it was almost as if he actively sought to damage the lives of the women in his life.
His portrayal of women as tortured and distorted figures was revolutionary, but it feels deeply informative of his perceptions of the women in his life.
Pablo Picasso’s “The Weeping Woman”
The Weeping Woman (1937) is one of Pablo Picasso’s most famous artworks. It depicts a woman in a red hat, holding a tissue up to her face, with tears streaming down her cheeks. Many may not know that this work depicts a longtime mistress and muse, Dora Maar. Their relationship lasted from 1935 to 1945 when she frequently photographed him in his studio painting.
Despite their 26-year age difference, the pair shared a passion for art and politics. Maar has been described as politically aware, articulate, and persuasive, and it has been suggested she may have altered some of Picasso’s views, even if only slightly. Picasso painted his first portrait of Maar in September 1936, and throughout the autumn and spring of 1937, she became his main model and muse. She was depicted as a tranquil figure until the Weeping Woman, when his depictions became noticeably different.
Their relationship was physically violent and heavily contributed to Dora Maar’s eventual breakdown. The artist often depicted her in tears, with Maar later stating that “all {Picasso’s] portraits of me are lies. They’re Picasso’s. Not one is Dora Maar.” Later, Françoise Gilot notes that Picasso said the following about Dora Maar: “For me, she’s the Weeping Woman. For years I’ve painted her tortured, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me.”
Biographer John Richardson notes, “The source of Dora’s tears was not Franco, but the artist’s manipulation of her.” This beloved artwork depicts the artist’s effect on his lover; his fascination with her tears and desire to share them with the world can be seen as perverse.
Picasso will always be revered as the pioneer of the Cubist movement. His contributions to 20th-century art cannot be dulled, but it is important to look at the artworks without rose-tinted glasses. Picasso was abusive and a raging misogynist who consistently cheated on and emotionally damaged the women in his life, and he used these actions as fuel for his creative expression.
