The Picasso Problem

2023 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso, one of the giants of twentieth century Modernism. Hailed as a genius, he transcended the art world, achieving the kind of universal status and recognisability normally reserved for film stars. Only Warhol, Pollock and possibly Dali have reached that level of ubiquity. Perhaps inevitably, since his death, there has been a reckoning, accelerated by the #metoo movement. Picasso is now more likely to be cast as a misogynistic abuser and exploiter of women, the personification of all that is negative about the 'male genius' myth. The backlash is so significant that there are no major exhibitions to commemorate this year's anniversary - although plenty of lesser ones. The Picasso Museum in Paris has controversially rehung the artist's work, with the aim of appealing to a younger generation, employing British designer Paul Smith to add 'colour and kitsch' and including interventions by contemporary artists. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Museum commissioned Australian comedian, Hannah Gadsby to curate 'It's Pablo-matic', examining 'the artist’s complicated legacy through a critical, contemporary, and feminist lens'. 

Picasso needed to be reassessed and his personal life, particularly his relationships with a series of women, is deeply problematic. But in all this, the one thing that that is in danger of being ignored is the art. For much of his life, Picasso may indeed have lived off his reputation and his celebrity, but for a few crucial years at the start of the twentieth century he really did, undeniably, revolutionise art. In a post-Modernist, post-representational, post-painterly world, the significance of Cubism can be underplayed, but look at one of Picasso's paintings of, say, 1910, in the context of what else was being produced and the impact is immediate. The National Gallery's 2023 After Impressionism exhibition meandered through tinkering experimentations with colour and composition until it brought you face to face with Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde, a silent explosion, like a Cornelia Parker on canvas. The fragmented facets, multiple viewpoints in time and space, create a characterful representation which is nevertheless divorced from the reality of both traditional Western art and photographic imitation. The ghost of Cezanne lingers in the subtly applied brushwork and soft tonal shifts but Picasso has effectively relegated the past to the past. 

Analytical Cubism, as it is drily known, was not just an esoteric, intellectual exercise. Its impact spread rapidly and widely. Futurist work in Italy, Russia and the UK could not have existed without Picasso and Braque, and through the Futurists came dynamic abstraction. Mondrian, having dabbled with colour based simplification, turned to Cubism for his Pier and Ocean series, again a step on the road to geometric abstraction. The Delaunays saw the potential of fragmenting through light and colour. Others, like Leger, created a more solidly sculptural version of Cubist facets. And if that wasn't enough to guarantee Picasso's significance, his found-object reliefs play a similarly seminal role in twentieth century sculpture, paving the way for constructivism, ready-mades and the use of new materials. 

You could end your story of Picasso in 1914 and he would still have done enough to earn a place in the history of twentieth century art, but the story does not stop there. Like virtually all of his contemporaries, Picasso's radical vision shifted after the First World War, turning back to representation and embracing a chunky classicism. However, by the end of the 1920s he was synthesising the clear colours and draughtsmanship of the start of the decade with the angularity and spatial distortions of his earlier work. The Spanish Civil War added a political, personal dimension, culminating in Guernica, a cri de coeur on a monumental scale which tears savagely at the rules of art.

The elephant in the room here is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso's huge 1907 depiction of five nude sex workers, two of whom are wearing African-style masks. It is a deeply disturbing painting. It's meant to be. Similar shock-tactics by Manet in Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe have been softened by time and familiarity, so that the panting now looks slightly quaint, but Demoiselles still cuts deep. Ugliness is hard to take. The casual appropriation of Iberian, Egyptian and African artistic heritage is problematic in a post-colonial world. The cold manipulation of the five female figures can be read as misogynistic. Yet, Demoiselles is in many ways the logical end-point of Post-Impressionism, which had seen artists question traditional ideas of beauty, perspective and finish; and consciously look beyond the Western academic tradition. Picasso was doing what other artists have done. He was just pushing a bit further. 

Whilst all these profoundly significant works were being produced, Picasso was living a life as a serial exploiter, sometimes abuser, of a number of women. He was, by all accounts, not a nice man. His artistic success probably exacerbated the problem: from around 1910 he was feted, increasingly wealthy, and able to have and do whatever he wanted. For the second half of his life, certainly after the Second World War, he pretty much lived off his past reputation, nurtured by an art market which paid ever extortionate amounts for anything and everything which he produced. But none of that changes the fact that he made some extraordinary, seismic art. The problem with Picasso is Picasso, not the paintings.