Françoise Gilot—the only one of Pablo Picasso’s lovers who left him before he left her—wrote in her memoir that he once said all women are either “goddesses” or “doormats.” He fought (and lost) in court to prevent the publication of that book, I guess because he thought it would make him look bad. It does. But Gilot’s account only fills in the details of a general arc of misogyny that one can easily glean from his biography and oeuvre. He was a tyrannical romantic partner: two of his lovers committed suicide, one suffered a debilitating psychological breakdown, and others had any number of problems that fell short of those extreme fates. (A less than promising track record, even if we can’t cleanly blame him for all of it.) But perhaps the worst thing he ever did to women was paint them.
In his Cubist period, he reassembled their bodies into geometrical contortions, and even his more flattering portraits collapsed women into one of his signature styles. He ironed out the imperfections that inflect a lover’s face with individuality to align with his ideal—for example, by smoothing the features of Olga Khokhlova as if her skin were made of shiny rubber. Other times, he mutated women’s faces beyond recognition, as he did to Dora Maar in his fractured “weeping woman” series. He stole their beauty as if it belonged to him and held it captive so they could never have it back. Gilot knew this and refused to recognize herself in the paintings he made of her. “What I did see in it,” she wrote, “was him, not me.”
If Picasso were alive today, I have to imagine he would have been canceled by now. Some tried to do it post-hoc, on the heels of 2018’s #MeToo reckoning, and failed. The Brooklyn Museum’s 2023 exhibition It’s Pablo-matic, curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby, notoriously attempted a grand reappraisal of the man in light of his mistreatment of women, urging other museums to reconsider how they present him.
When celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death arrived that year, the question was whether criticisms like Gadsby’s would result in any lasting damage to his reputation or the critical reception of his work. Far from it, most institutions adopted a starkly amoral or even laudatory attitude, with the French and Spanish national governments sponsoring an official commission to support events around the world in honor of their shared national hero. An exhibition I attended at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2025 titled Picasso and Paper hardly acknowledged any of his transgressions—though it prominently featured Cubist drawings where women’s faces are folded inward like vulvas and prints that show nymphs ransacked and raped by burly men. The wall texts and catalog treated Picasso’s vulturine sketches in a matter-of-fact manner, mostly commenting on his biography and the larger projects they were in service of.
Yet there were also signs that the critiques had penetrated below the surface. Many curators and writers felt the need to, at minimum, allude to Picasso’s sexism. A typically ambivalent essay, published in the New York Times by the art critic Deborah Solomon, was subdivided into two sections: “I Love Him” / “I Hate Him,” entertaining both sides in equal measure. Another common, more forceful strategy was to center women in his place. Picasso: Drawing from Life at the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, focused on the muses and support network that made his art possible. The art historian Sue Roe did the same in her book Hidden Portraits, a group biography of sorts about the six most significant women in Picasso’s life. The artist Sophie Calle took this approach to the extreme at the Musée Picasso in Paris, removing almost all his work from the building and replacing it with her own.
But none of these attempts to challenge or complicate Picasso’s genius and stature did, or really ever could, change how we view his art as art. Part of the reason for this is that to lob accusations of moral shortcomings at his art does not chip away at its greatness. His work absorbs it too well. He knew he was a total dog with no inhibitions, and he relished it.
In Cleveland, the choice to foreground his works on paper (his most private mode of creation) and place them in roughly chronological order was enough to chart his growing consciousness of his predation. As Picasso approached middle age, he started to show an awareness that his behavior was wrong, even if he didn’t want or know how to stop it. But he could portray it. As with almost any artist, his drawings and prints offer a uniquely intimate entrée into his psyche. They are smaller and more quotidian than his works on canvas—less monumental, less committal—and often devoted to trying out ideas before solidifying them in oil. Hung behind glass in a museum, his drawings and prints seem like confessional artifacts. In these diaristic works, Picasso exhibits an unflinching willingness to stare down his dark side and put it on display. In doing so, he performs the almost impossible task, at once earnest and provocative, of transporting viewers into the mind of a monster, preserving his baseness and allowing us to empathize with him. Together, they form his most impressive and engrossing body of work.
●
Picasso had many alter egos in his art, but the one dearest to him was the minotaur: half man, half beast, born as a result of a woman’s uncontrollable lust for a bull. Men try to conquer this animal—a symbol for unbridled virility in Spanish culture—in bullfights. These days, the man always wins. But not so long ago, the bull had a fairer shot; it was a time when men, too, could let the bull in them win, acting on sexual desire without being held accountable. Francisco de Goya, one of Picasso’s idols, created a series of prints of bullfights from that bygone era, called La Tauromaquia (1816). They show an agile bull galloping, turning on a dime and thrusting itself into men, who jump and spin in an attempt to spear the beast. Although the battle is often conceived as a fight between reason and brutishness, Goya’s men, howling and baring their teeth, seem no more levelheaded than his bulls—and the bull and the matador win in roughly equal proportion.
That’s the world Picasso grew up in. His father—an art teacher and painter famous (if that word isn’t too strong) for his portraits of pigeons—was known for his frequent patronage of brothels, sometimes as a treat after Sunday Mass, and Pablo followed suit starting at age fourteen. The boy was enamored of the machismo that hung like the odor of drunk breath over the culture around him. Picasso later made his own Tauromaquia (1957-59)—a series of cute, rough stick-figure sketches showing every stage of a bullfight—as an ode to the laddish Spanish sport (and probably to Goya, too). Most other times he attempted the subject, though, the matador (often a woman) and the beast collide and explode into a mess of chicken scratch. It’s not clear who’s winning, nor can you so easily discern where the bull ends and the person begins. Body parts shoot past each other: the corrida’s breasts burst over the bull’s back, her legs wrap around his jaw, small faces of spectators pepper the space between his charging legs. The might of this crazed animal creates a black hole of passion, sucking in everything around him. The primal urges that drive the bull to destruction seem almost external, harming the bull as much as the matador.
Even amidst such chaos, tauromachy—the art of bullfighting—posits a firm distance between the ferality of the bull and the maturity of the man. But the two become inextricable in Picasso’s minotaurs. His most famous treatment of the subject, the Minotauromachie prints (1935), shows an unwieldy minotaur staggering toward a girl holding a candle. He clutches his heart, possibly wounded by the female matador lying dead or unconscious before him. The minotaur’s head juts ahead of his body, too big for his torso, shrouded in an abyssal black mane. A man who is bearded like Jesus climbs a ladder to flee the scene but swivels his head back to watch, as if he’s running from the monster but can’t stop staring. Does he recognize its rage in himself? The little girl looks patiently at the minotaur—unafraid, understanding. And the minotaur returns a gentle though frighteningly blank stare. His lips are luscious, parted as if about to offer an excuse for the wreckage, but there’s not much he can say that explains his condition any better than merely looking at him can. Two women glance down from an elevated window, accompanied by one white dove and one dark pigeon—perhaps a confessional reference to the perennial conflict between the debauched model of manhood Picasso’s father exemplified in the brothels and the purity of women he defiles.
The Minotauromachie was a standalone print series, but the bulk of Picasso’s minotaur prints were published in a collection called the Vollard Suite (1930-37), which he made for the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in exchange for some Renoirs and Cézannes. The prints in this suite alternate in bipolar fashion between depictions of the minotaur as a soft, almost effeminate creature and scenes of rape and savagery. In one, a woman sits beside a bed, where the minotaur lies asleep, innocent and hidden behind a transparent floral curtain. Each of his hairs is drawn with a gentle flick, and his contour borrows the curves Picasso usually reserves for women’s breasts. The woman’s body, meanwhile, is cobbled together with the same rough linework Picasso uses for his beasts.
The minotaur rarely displays her restraint. In Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, he crouches over his lover, shoving his giant face into hers and kneeling on her chest, forcing her elbows together and her hands against her cheeks. He shuts his eyes with anguish and opens his mouth to release a scream. The title suggests all he wants to do is lay a kiss or softly pet her hair—to meet her gentleness with a caring touch of his own—but he can’t escape his own monstrosity. Even a sweet caress becomes a brutal attack. In another print, similarly called Minotaur Caressing a Woman, she lunges at him, burying her face into his fur. He catches her by the arms and swoops down to kiss (or bite) her neck. A muse and a musician watch from the side—the latter playing the flute, the other staring idly—both with flowers in their hair, as if adorning a pretty little love scene. The giant face of a man floats in a window behind everyone, wearing a vacant gaze and smile—unmoved by the violence right under his nose—as if accusing the work’s viewers of being willfully ignorant, rather than facing their own licentious desires with honesty.
Picasso’s minotaurs (which he openly identified as stand-ins for himself) form his most charitable portrait of sin. Several Vollard prints show him wounded, writhing in pain. In one, he is collapsed onto himself while the perpetrator, a man with a dagger, kneels over him, and a woman from the audience reaches over the barrier to touch him. When Picasso showed this picture to Gilot, he told her in a hushed voice, “A minotaur can’t be loved for himself … At least he doesn’t think he can. It just doesn’t seem reasonable to him, somehow. Perhaps that’s why he goes in for orgies.” The minotaur is Picasso’s bid for compassion—a victim of his own nature, filled with care at his core, only driven to violence by the animal half of his nature.
●
If Picasso were merely overcome by compulsion without a second of mediating thought, we could at least contain the problem by attributing it to forces outside of his control—something potentially pitiable. But, of course, no matter how many bullfights he watched, Picasso was cien por ciento human. He could have and did know better. As Donald Trump, a fellow minotaur, recently said, “There is very little difference between a mad man and a genius.” Picasso agreed—both types are overcome with compulsions that they can’t shake, some of which lead to creation and others to rampage. But as Picasso got older, he stopped depicting evil as a force that possessed him and started depicting it as a trait he cultivated.
He returned to the “artist and his model” perhaps more than any other motif in his work, often portraying the male artist as a pervert next to the perfect women posing for him. Interspersed among the minotaurs in the Vollard Suite are just as many prints that depict Rembrandt as a poster child for “the artist.” Classicized women stand around him like statues, while his face twists into a tortured, scribbled mess—his lips pursed, hair swirling, wide-eyed and staring down the viewer like a madman—portraying the archetypal artist as a haggard beast, no matter how elegant the art he produces. Either that, or it’s a hit piece on an old master Picasso seeks to dethrone. Probably both.
He continues to insist that all artists are perverts in his print David and Bathsheba (after Lucas Cranach the Elder) (1948-49), modeled after a a painting by the German Renaissance artist. Cranach’s version of this biblical story, in which King David pursues a young woman after seeing her bathing outside, is modest—a posse of women in stiff formal dresses accompanies Bathsheba as her maid washes her feet. King David peers over a ledge with furrowed brow, in an ever-so-slight nod to sexual frustration. Picasso’s version pumps up the perversion, unveiling the underlying psychological reality he detects in Cranach’s restrained depiction. The whole composition is black except for the shining face of King David above—ogling Bathsheba with a plotting smile and a lion’s mane of hair—and the maid—with her bursting bosom smushed against her head. Bathsheba sits patiently with her features shrunken into a small portion of her face, her body tied up by her corset.
But dirty as artists may be, Picasso also exalted them. Plenty of his prints portray the painter or sculptor just as tastefully as their female models, with Greek noses, soft forearms, naive expressions and godly beards. In some prints, the artist and model both look reverently at one of the artist’s works, as if it had been delivered to Earth by divine force. When inspiration strikes out of nowhere, it can feel like you’ve been visited by God. If this happens enough times, as it did for Picasso, you might start to think you are God. Indeed, Picasso told Françoise Gilot, “When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
Picasso set himself in a separate category from everyone else—and in many ways, he was. He was the richest and most famous artist in the world during his lifetime, and if the riveting, grotesque pathos of his prints is any indication, he remains a strong contender for the greatest of all time. He expected people to treat him as such, even before he reached his peak. He made dealers beg him for the right to buy his paintings, sending them around to perform little errands to prove their worth. He expected his lovers to devote themselves exclusively to him, and when they expressed the slightest degree of independence, he would lash out in jealousy.
For Picasso, being an artist was not so dissimilar from being a dictator. Both figures have the authority to level culture and build it back up again. In The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), a satirical print series about Francisco Franco, Picasso depicts the fascist leader as a demented artist riding a horse through the countryside. He starts by marching along with a smiling sun shining above him. Then he walks a tight rope with an erection larger than the rest of him. In the next frame, he stands beside a statue with a pickaxe and a crazed smile—either because he just made it or he’s about to destroy it. He prays on his knees to a mirror. He fights a bull. And, in the end, he presides over a field of ruins and mangled corpses—mapping a life that seems roughly similar to Picasso’s. Depicting Franco as an artist and a matador has the flavor of game-recognizes-game—and there’s only enough room for one dictator in Spain. I get the sense that Picasso did not object to Franco’s means so much as his ends.
Perhaps he was attempting to fashion himself into a martyr to show the rest of us the truth. I’m more inclined to believe he was just horny. But regardless of his intentions, his superlative shamelessness and talent let him make art that faithfully relayed the experience of monstrosity. He draws viewers into the fold, sharing in the shameful passions that sneak into the mind uninvited. Then he shows what it would mean to take those passions seriously—to confront them on their own terms rather than swatting them away.
In other contexts, we delight in works of art about what it’s like to be bad: The Godfather, In Cold Blood, Lolita, even Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. These works let us live out our nastiest impulses in an imaginary sandbox; we get the frisson of transgression without the consequences. Not so with Picasso. When his work deals with his own monstrosity, there’s no enjoyment. It is tortured, embodying both the moral weight of his sins and the difficulty of living with them. While his more famous works of art are notable for their artistic achievements—radical innovations in technique and form—his efforts to portray himself at his worst are even more profound human achievements. They give voice to the unresolved desire to tear everything up and let yourself go that I, at least, feel scratching on the walls of my conscience. I’ve tried to get at this in my own paintings, but there’s a block that stops me—a lack of clarity, a difficulty in articulating such taboo feelings and, of course, a fear of being so vulnerable. But Picasso dives in, wrestles with the devil and brings back a chunk of flesh.
Image credit: World History Archive / Alamy.
Françoise Gilot—the only one of Pablo Picasso’s lovers who left him before he left her—wrote in her memoir that he once said all women are either “goddesses” or “doormats.” He fought (and lost) in court to prevent the publication of that book, I guess because he thought it would make him look bad. It does. But Gilot’s account only fills in the details of a general arc of misogyny that one can easily glean from his biography and oeuvre. He was a tyrannical romantic partner: two of his lovers committed suicide, one suffered a debilitating psychological breakdown, and others had any number of problems that fell short of those extreme fates. (A less than promising track record, even if we can’t cleanly blame him for all of it.) But perhaps the worst thing he ever did to women was paint them.
In his Cubist period, he reassembled their bodies into geometrical contortions, and even his more flattering portraits collapsed women into one of his signature styles. He ironed out the imperfections that inflect a lover’s face with individuality to align with his ideal—for example, by smoothing the features of Olga Khokhlova as if her skin were made of shiny rubber. Other times, he mutated women’s faces beyond recognition, as he did to Dora Maar in his fractured “weeping woman” series. He stole their beauty as if it belonged to him and held it captive so they could never have it back. Gilot knew this and refused to recognize herself in the paintings he made of her. “What I did see in it,” she wrote, “was him, not me.”
If Picasso were alive today, I have to imagine he would have been canceled by now. Some tried to do it post-hoc, on the heels of 2018’s #MeToo reckoning, and failed. The Brooklyn Museum’s 2023 exhibition It’s Pablo-matic, curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby, notoriously attempted a grand reappraisal of the man in light of his mistreatment of women, urging other museums to reconsider how they present him.
When celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death arrived that year, the question was whether criticisms like Gadsby’s would result in any lasting damage to his reputation or the critical reception of his work. Far from it, most institutions adopted a starkly amoral or even laudatory attitude, with the French and Spanish national governments sponsoring an official commission to support events around the world in honor of their shared national hero. An exhibition I attended at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2025 titled Picasso and Paper hardly acknowledged any of his transgressions—though it prominently featured Cubist drawings where women’s faces are folded inward like vulvas and prints that show nymphs ransacked and raped by burly men. The wall texts and catalog treated Picasso’s vulturine sketches in a matter-of-fact manner, mostly commenting on his biography and the larger projects they were in service of.
Yet there were also signs that the critiques had penetrated below the surface. Many curators and writers felt the need to, at minimum, allude to Picasso’s sexism. A typically ambivalent essay, published in the New York Times by the art critic Deborah Solomon, was subdivided into two sections: “I Love Him” / “I Hate Him,” entertaining both sides in equal measure. Another common, more forceful strategy was to center women in his place. Picasso: Drawing from Life at the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, focused on the muses and support network that made his art possible. The art historian Sue Roe did the same in her book Hidden Portraits, a group biography of sorts about the six most significant women in Picasso’s life. The artist Sophie Calle took this approach to the extreme at the Musée Picasso in Paris, removing almost all his work from the building and replacing it with her own.
But none of these attempts to challenge or complicate Picasso’s genius and stature did, or really ever could, change how we view his art as art. Part of the reason for this is that to lob accusations of moral shortcomings at his art does not chip away at its greatness. His work absorbs it too well. He knew he was a total dog with no inhibitions, and he relished it.
In Cleveland, the choice to foreground his works on paper (his most private mode of creation) and place them in roughly chronological order was enough to chart his growing consciousness of his predation. As Picasso approached middle age, he started to show an awareness that his behavior was wrong, even if he didn’t want or know how to stop it. But he could portray it. As with almost any artist, his drawings and prints offer a uniquely intimate entrée into his psyche. They are smaller and more quotidian than his works on canvas—less monumental, less committal—and often devoted to trying out ideas before solidifying them in oil. Hung behind glass in a museum, his drawings and prints seem like confessional artifacts. In these diaristic works, Picasso exhibits an unflinching willingness to stare down his dark side and put it on display. In doing so, he performs the almost impossible task, at once earnest and provocative, of transporting viewers into the mind of a monster, preserving his baseness and allowing us to empathize with him. Together, they form his most impressive and engrossing body of work.
●
Picasso had many alter egos in his art, but the one dearest to him was the minotaur: half man, half beast, born as a result of a woman’s uncontrollable lust for a bull. Men try to conquer this animal—a symbol for unbridled virility in Spanish culture—in bullfights. These days, the man always wins. But not so long ago, the bull had a fairer shot; it was a time when men, too, could let the bull in them win, acting on sexual desire without being held accountable. Francisco de Goya, one of Picasso’s idols, created a series of prints of bullfights from that bygone era, called La Tauromaquia (1816). They show an agile bull galloping, turning on a dime and thrusting itself into men, who jump and spin in an attempt to spear the beast. Although the battle is often conceived as a fight between reason and brutishness, Goya’s men, howling and baring their teeth, seem no more levelheaded than his bulls—and the bull and the matador win in roughly equal proportion.
That’s the world Picasso grew up in. His father—an art teacher and painter famous (if that word isn’t too strong) for his portraits of pigeons—was known for his frequent patronage of brothels, sometimes as a treat after Sunday Mass, and Pablo followed suit starting at age fourteen. The boy was enamored of the machismo that hung like the odor of drunk breath over the culture around him. Picasso later made his own Tauromaquia (1957-59)—a series of cute, rough stick-figure sketches showing every stage of a bullfight—as an ode to the laddish Spanish sport (and probably to Goya, too). Most other times he attempted the subject, though, the matador (often a woman) and the beast collide and explode into a mess of chicken scratch. It’s not clear who’s winning, nor can you so easily discern where the bull ends and the person begins. Body parts shoot past each other: the corrida’s breasts burst over the bull’s back, her legs wrap around his jaw, small faces of spectators pepper the space between his charging legs. The might of this crazed animal creates a black hole of passion, sucking in everything around him. The primal urges that drive the bull to destruction seem almost external, harming the bull as much as the matador.
Even amidst such chaos, tauromachy—the art of bullfighting—posits a firm distance between the ferality of the bull and the maturity of the man. But the two become inextricable in Picasso’s minotaurs. His most famous treatment of the subject, the Minotauromachie prints (1935), shows an unwieldy minotaur staggering toward a girl holding a candle. He clutches his heart, possibly wounded by the female matador lying dead or unconscious before him. The minotaur’s head juts ahead of his body, too big for his torso, shrouded in an abyssal black mane. A man who is bearded like Jesus climbs a ladder to flee the scene but swivels his head back to watch, as if he’s running from the monster but can’t stop staring. Does he recognize its rage in himself? The little girl looks patiently at the minotaur—unafraid, understanding. And the minotaur returns a gentle though frighteningly blank stare. His lips are luscious, parted as if about to offer an excuse for the wreckage, but there’s not much he can say that explains his condition any better than merely looking at him can. Two women glance down from an elevated window, accompanied by one white dove and one dark pigeon—perhaps a confessional reference to the perennial conflict between the debauched model of manhood Picasso’s father exemplified in the brothels and the purity of women he defiles.
The Minotauromachie was a standalone print series, but the bulk of Picasso’s minotaur prints were published in a collection called the Vollard Suite (1930-37), which he made for the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in exchange for some Renoirs and Cézannes. The prints in this suite alternate in bipolar fashion between depictions of the minotaur as a soft, almost effeminate creature and scenes of rape and savagery. In one, a woman sits beside a bed, where the minotaur lies asleep, innocent and hidden behind a transparent floral curtain. Each of his hairs is drawn with a gentle flick, and his contour borrows the curves Picasso usually reserves for women’s breasts. The woman’s body, meanwhile, is cobbled together with the same rough linework Picasso uses for his beasts.
The minotaur rarely displays her restraint. In Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, he crouches over his lover, shoving his giant face into hers and kneeling on her chest, forcing her elbows together and her hands against her cheeks. He shuts his eyes with anguish and opens his mouth to release a scream. The title suggests all he wants to do is lay a kiss or softly pet her hair—to meet her gentleness with a caring touch of his own—but he can’t escape his own monstrosity. Even a sweet caress becomes a brutal attack. In another print, similarly called Minotaur Caressing a Woman, she lunges at him, burying her face into his fur. He catches her by the arms and swoops down to kiss (or bite) her neck. A muse and a musician watch from the side—the latter playing the flute, the other staring idly—both with flowers in their hair, as if adorning a pretty little love scene. The giant face of a man floats in a window behind everyone, wearing a vacant gaze and smile—unmoved by the violence right under his nose—as if accusing the work’s viewers of being willfully ignorant, rather than facing their own licentious desires with honesty.
Picasso’s minotaurs (which he openly identified as stand-ins for himself) form his most charitable portrait of sin. Several Vollard prints show him wounded, writhing in pain. In one, he is collapsed onto himself while the perpetrator, a man with a dagger, kneels over him, and a woman from the audience reaches over the barrier to touch him. When Picasso showed this picture to Gilot, he told her in a hushed voice, “A minotaur can’t be loved for himself … At least he doesn’t think he can. It just doesn’t seem reasonable to him, somehow. Perhaps that’s why he goes in for orgies.” The minotaur is Picasso’s bid for compassion—a victim of his own nature, filled with care at his core, only driven to violence by the animal half of his nature.
●
If Picasso were merely overcome by compulsion without a second of mediating thought, we could at least contain the problem by attributing it to forces outside of his control—something potentially pitiable. But, of course, no matter how many bullfights he watched, Picasso was cien por ciento human. He could have and did know better. As Donald Trump, a fellow minotaur, recently said, “There is very little difference between a mad man and a genius.” Picasso agreed—both types are overcome with compulsions that they can’t shake, some of which lead to creation and others to rampage. But as Picasso got older, he stopped depicting evil as a force that possessed him and started depicting it as a trait he cultivated.
He returned to the “artist and his model” perhaps more than any other motif in his work, often portraying the male artist as a pervert next to the perfect women posing for him. Interspersed among the minotaurs in the Vollard Suite are just as many prints that depict Rembrandt as a poster child for “the artist.” Classicized women stand around him like statues, while his face twists into a tortured, scribbled mess—his lips pursed, hair swirling, wide-eyed and staring down the viewer like a madman—portraying the archetypal artist as a haggard beast, no matter how elegant the art he produces. Either that, or it’s a hit piece on an old master Picasso seeks to dethrone. Probably both.
He continues to insist that all artists are perverts in his print David and Bathsheba (after Lucas Cranach the Elder) (1948-49), modeled after a a painting by the German Renaissance artist. Cranach’s version of this biblical story, in which King David pursues a young woman after seeing her bathing outside, is modest—a posse of women in stiff formal dresses accompanies Bathsheba as her maid washes her feet. King David peers over a ledge with furrowed brow, in an ever-so-slight nod to sexual frustration. Picasso’s version pumps up the perversion, unveiling the underlying psychological reality he detects in Cranach’s restrained depiction. The whole composition is black except for the shining face of King David above—ogling Bathsheba with a plotting smile and a lion’s mane of hair—and the maid—with her bursting bosom smushed against her head. Bathsheba sits patiently with her features shrunken into a small portion of her face, her body tied up by her corset.
But dirty as artists may be, Picasso also exalted them. Plenty of his prints portray the painter or sculptor just as tastefully as their female models, with Greek noses, soft forearms, naive expressions and godly beards. In some prints, the artist and model both look reverently at one of the artist’s works, as if it had been delivered to Earth by divine force. When inspiration strikes out of nowhere, it can feel like you’ve been visited by God. If this happens enough times, as it did for Picasso, you might start to think you are God. Indeed, Picasso told Françoise Gilot, “When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
Picasso set himself in a separate category from everyone else—and in many ways, he was. He was the richest and most famous artist in the world during his lifetime, and if the riveting, grotesque pathos of his prints is any indication, he remains a strong contender for the greatest of all time. He expected people to treat him as such, even before he reached his peak. He made dealers beg him for the right to buy his paintings, sending them around to perform little errands to prove their worth. He expected his lovers to devote themselves exclusively to him, and when they expressed the slightest degree of independence, he would lash out in jealousy.
For Picasso, being an artist was not so dissimilar from being a dictator. Both figures have the authority to level culture and build it back up again. In The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), a satirical print series about Francisco Franco, Picasso depicts the fascist leader as a demented artist riding a horse through the countryside. He starts by marching along with a smiling sun shining above him. Then he walks a tight rope with an erection larger than the rest of him. In the next frame, he stands beside a statue with a pickaxe and a crazed smile—either because he just made it or he’s about to destroy it. He prays on his knees to a mirror. He fights a bull. And, in the end, he presides over a field of ruins and mangled corpses—mapping a life that seems roughly similar to Picasso’s. Depicting Franco as an artist and a matador has the flavor of game-recognizes-game—and there’s only enough room for one dictator in Spain. I get the sense that Picasso did not object to Franco’s means so much as his ends.
Perhaps he was attempting to fashion himself into a martyr to show the rest of us the truth. I’m more inclined to believe he was just horny. But regardless of his intentions, his superlative shamelessness and talent let him make art that faithfully relayed the experience of monstrosity. He draws viewers into the fold, sharing in the shameful passions that sneak into the mind uninvited. Then he shows what it would mean to take those passions seriously—to confront them on their own terms rather than swatting them away.
In other contexts, we delight in works of art about what it’s like to be bad: The Godfather, In Cold Blood, Lolita, even Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. These works let us live out our nastiest impulses in an imaginary sandbox; we get the frisson of transgression without the consequences. Not so with Picasso. When his work deals with his own monstrosity, there’s no enjoyment. It is tortured, embodying both the moral weight of his sins and the difficulty of living with them. While his more famous works of art are notable for their artistic achievements—radical innovations in technique and form—his efforts to portray himself at his worst are even more profound human achievements. They give voice to the unresolved desire to tear everything up and let yourself go that I, at least, feel scratching on the walls of my conscience. I’ve tried to get at this in my own paintings, but there’s a block that stops me—a lack of clarity, a difficulty in articulating such taboo feelings and, of course, a fear of being so vulnerable. But Picasso dives in, wrestles with the devil and brings back a chunk of flesh.
Image credit: World History Archive / Alamy.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.