How does memory of an artist function in pop culture? Would Picasso’s name be recognizable if it had not been used in the name of a new Citroën model? Would it be known if a scandalous book had not been written about one of his relationships?
Tourists visiting Picasso museums in France most often mentioned three things they associated with the artist: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the dove of peace, and the opinion that he was bad for the women who loved him. That is the definition of the artist today.
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”—prostitutes from Avignon Street in Barcelona—is a painting that shook the art world and ushered in a new era. The dove of peace was a brilliant trademark. The opinion that he abused women was created by one of Pablo’s partners, Françoise Gilot, in a book describing their years together. Some of the marital scenes described there provided tabloid material for a long time.
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” was created in 1907. Picasso lived in Paris’s Montmartre district in a wooden annex, so poorly put together that in stronger gusts of wind it creaked and swayed like an old boat. It was named accordingly: bateau (boat) Lavoir (laundry). The apartment and meeting place for artists reminded the poet Max Jacob of the laundries on boats, many of which were on the Seine at that time. While creating “Les Demoiselles…,” Picasso shut himself away in his studio and showed the painting to his friends only after completing it. They recalled it as being like open-brain surgery. After seeing Picasso’s work, nothing could remain as it had been—not only in art, but also in life. The opinions of the shocked artists did not express boundless admiration. The painter Braque, who later worked with Picasso in the same style, said after seeing “Les Demoiselles…”: “It’s as if you had made us eat oakum and wash it down with paraffin.”
The new movement, called Cubism by critics, was attacked and mocked. In “The Older Gentlemen’s Cabaret,” in one of the sketches, Michnikowski plays a Cubist painter. Proud of his work—a portrait of a woman à la Picasso—he is unpleasantly disappointed when his muse steps out of the painting and turns out not to be the beautiful model who posed for him, but the grotesque creature he painted. Mocking artists who had ceased to be natural and betrayed beauty was commonplace. Nobody liked Cubism because it was not meant to be liked. It changed the rules for depicting things, overthrew sacred stereotypes, and thereby gave artists the freedom to create outside established patterns.
Picasso painted the dove of peace on a napkin in a restaurant next to the Monopol Hotel on Świdnicka Street in Wrocław. As a member of the French Communist Party, he came to Poland in 1948 for the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace. It is said that he received the Lenin Prize for his dove. During his stay in Poland, he also visited Warsaw, which was being rebuilt, admiring the new city rising from the ashes. In an unfinished apartment on Deotymy Street, he drew Warsaw’s mermaid in crayon, holding a hammer instead of a sword. Crowds of tour groups came to see the famous artist’s work. The owners of the premises asked for the drawing to be moved; eventually, their requests led to it being successfully scrubbed off the wall.
After 1955, Picasso was an unquestioned idol in Poland, and queues formed for his exhibitions. A Polish phenomenon was industrial design known as “pikasy”—irregularly intersecting lines and geometric patches in vivid colors, symbols of modernity. They decorated dresses, handbags, curtains, and even wall paintings.
During his stay in Kraków, Picasso bought traditional Zakopane sheepskin coats for his beloved partner Françoise Gilot and their little son. He portrayed her wearing the coat. The painting is titled “Woman in an Armchair.” Things were already not going well between them. Françoise could not forgive Picasso for entrusting the editing of the dispatch from Poland to his chauffeur, or for leaving her for so long when their son was only fourteen months old.
Five years later, she left Picasso. She said that she could no longer endure living with a “historical relic.” Twelve years later, she published a book full of spicy details about their ten-year relationship.
“I wouldn’t wish my fame on anyone, not even my enemies,” Pablo complained to a friend. He fought persistently against Françoise’s book and her vision of their relationship, involving lawyers and demanding that the entire print run be withdrawn. When he lost, he called his former lover and congratulated her, saying that he had always admired winners. Perhaps she published the book so that he would admire her again, when her body was no longer attractive to him and he had chosen a partner 45 years younger than himself.
Picasso loved women and wanted to be loved by them. He worshipped them, and they allowed him to create. The first was Bella Chelito—a dancer and star of Barcelona’s paralelo theaters, regarded as a forerunner of striptease. When he saw her, fascinated, he did not sleep after returning home until he had painted around a hundred portraits of the alluring artist. He had a compulsion to create. Friends say that he would look around and repeat, “This has to be painted.”
We know all of Picasso’s women from the portraits he painted of them. His women included Fernanda Olivier from the Bateau Lavoir period; Eva Gouel, Picasso’s great love who died tragically; his wife Olga Khokhlova, with whom he began his involvement with theater and started creating stage designs; Maria Teresa Walter and Dora Maar, with whom he practically lived at the same time; Françoise Gilot; and Jacqueline Roque—his wife and final partner, who apparently never recovered from his death and committed suicide six years later.
Would Picasso have been troubled that we recognize him mainly through pop-culture symbols, while his fascination with women is obscured by the grim image of a destroyer from Gilot’s book? Perhaps not. One of his opinions on the death of an artist, expressed in reference to the painter Henri Matisse, was: “A dead Matisse does not interest me.”
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Grażyna Hanaf