Appreciating Great Art and Acknowledging the Artists Problematic Behaviour Are Not Mutually Exclusive

Art history is full of prodigies and genius’ and while their achievements may have been great and their art may have been revolutionary, contemporary historians, curators and cultural institutions find their greatest difficulty in achieving a balance between appreciating the greatness of the artistic ‘genius’ while also acknowledging and accurately representing their personalities that were so often rooted in sexism and misogyny. This is most notably seen in cultural institutions’ teaching of the life and work of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) who, despite extensive documentation, seldom broaches the subject of his problematic behaviour. Acknowledging this requires no paint be scraped off of a canvas and recalibrating the historical narrative to include opposing perspectives that challenge the artist’s legacy is crucial in educating viewers on the effects of both Picasso and of his art.

Figure 1: Picasso in His Studio, January 1, 1920.

Picasso is, undoubtedly, one of history's greatest artists whose work did what great art always does - trigger a revolutionary artistic movement while also challenging the viewer and our definition of ‘art’. However, many modern art galleries and museums have repeatedly been troubled by, and criticised for, their reluctance to engage with Picasso’s artworks while also accurately portraying the artist and his treatment of the women in his life, instead, institutions often choose to simply ignore this important area of consideration. Picasso was known to have an infatuation with women significantly younger than him. His first mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-77), met the then 45-year-old Picasso when she was just 17 and became the subject of at least 15 of his completed paintings.1 Their almost 30-year age difference, and the fact that Walter was a child, is a detail that many contemporary viewers, especially those from outside the artistic realm of knowledge and learning of Picasso’s work for the first time, may find alarming and accuse the institution of approving their age difference. In an effort to ensure viewers’ modern ethics remain separate from their interpretation of artworks, institutions usually neglect to mention the pair's age difference or simply include it as a minor footnote when discussing Walter and Picasso’s respective artistic practices and their partnership. 

Walter however, was not the first underage girl Picasso claimed to be his ‘muse’ and had model naked for his paintings. 'Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie' (1905), which was sold by Christie’s auction house in 2018 for a staggering $115 million, depicts a child believed to be named Linda, however, little more information is known of her and given that 'Linda' in Picasso's native Spanish translates to 'pretty', in English, it is entirely possible that this was simply a nickname the artist had given to her.2 Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie is seen as a transition piece from Picasso's ‘blue period’, which, as the name suggests, was relatively bleak, to the slightly brighter ‘rose period’. The subject of the painting is a young girl, ‘Linda’, who is standing naked, all except for a pink ribbon in her hair and a necklace, and holding a flower basket with red flowers in it. She is thin, pale and hairless with not yet developed breasts and, according to the auctioneer's lot essay, she lived on the “mean streets”, leading many scholars to believe she was in her early to mid-teens at the time of posing for the painting and supported herself by selling flowers and as an underage sex worker.3 

Figure 2: Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie (1905).

Historian John Richardson, who has dedicated his life to studying, researching and writing about Picasso, described Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie in his 2018 film ‘John Richardson: The Art of Picasso: 1927-1973’, wherein he characterised the child as being a, “sultry looking gamin”.4 In a similar disregard for the young girl’s clearly prepubescent age, Marc Porter, director of Christie’s auction house, reduces the child to being a mere sex object in his lot essay for the paintings sale and argues that, “she represents the themes that Picasso would wrestle with for his life — love, sex, beauty, tenderness, violence — and all that defines humanity”.5 The loss of Linda’s story is one of many examples of women like her, who pose for powerful male artists only to be objectified and belittled into a representation of ‘themes’ and whose perspectives are certainly not seen nor heard. 

Figure 3: ‘Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie' (1905), installed at Christie's Auction House, 2018.

In a similar show of the common objectification and belittling of the women used as subjects for Picasso’s paintings, historian Robert Rosenblum analysed ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907), one of his most famous artworks. Here, instead of describing the five female subjects as being compressed together in the frame of the canvas or as being contorted into jagged shards, Rosenblum opted to describe them as being, “five nudes [who] force their eroticised flesh upon us with a primal attack”.6 While such a violent lens may, at first, seem to be shocking, it is through a similarly sexually violent lens that Picasso saw these five women along with his many female models, lovers and muses, all of whom he separated into, “two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.”7 The latter were, of course, personally and artistically invaluable and therefore cast aside, but it was the women who he viewed as ‘goddesses’ that, like Rosenblum, he objectified, belittled and perceived as nothing more than “eroticised flesh”. For Picasso, these women existed only for him to impose the vital part of his creative process where he “submitted [them] to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas”, and it was only after “he had spent many nights extracting their essence…once they were bled dry” that Picasso could then, finally, “dispose of them”.8 

Figure 4: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

Demoiselles d’Avignon is one of Picasso’s most famous works and, having become synonyms with the cubist movement, he greatly profited both financially and artistically, the five women whose essence he extracted and crushed into its canvas however, saw no profit for the role they played in art history, instead, they remain nameless. As sharp as this reality is, Demoiselles d’Avignon, in all of its artistic greatness and importance, remains unaffected by criticisms of Picasso’s behaviour and institutions that exhibit his artworks without any recognition of the brutality he inflicted in the process of painting them, only further exsanguinate his subjects by ignoring their existence beyond the canvas. Acknowledging the reality of how and why they came to be immortalised in paint would only deepen the quality of exhibitions and of the audience’s learning opportunity and, crucially, requires no paint to be scrapped off of any canvas.

Historians have tried time and time again to dismiss voices that impart important criticisms from first-hand experiences with Picasso and to disregard the opposing perspectives of his artwork’s subjects. Despite dedicating his career to challenging Eurocentric and traditional approaches to social theory, historian George Katsiaficas typifies this approach in his, ‘In Defence of Picasso’ article by stating that contemporary critics of any given one of art’s “greatest artists”, particularly critics of Picasso, project their personal disparagement onto them and their work giving, “negative assessments of their character which often overshadow their talents”.9 Katsiaficas continues to declare that, despite the testimonies from several of Picasso’s long-time mistresses’, fellow artists, and many others who knew him, criticisms are conceived out of spiteful jealousy and in an effort to diminish his contribution to art history, not because of the simple truth that great art can be appreciated while also acknowledging the problematic behaviour of the artist, but because critics “all feel small in comparison to these prodigies” and there is no better way for critics to compensate for their jealousy than to project unto them “personalities unworthy of our envy?”10 Attempts to dismiss disapproval for Picasso’s treatment of women, and that of any ‘genius’ male artist, by declaring critics jealous or envious is a common tactic employed in order to forcefully return women to the role that men, like Richardson, Rosenblum and Katsiaficas, believe to be their rightful, and only, position of being mere objects upon which male artists and viewers may gaze. While contemporary institutions may choose to exclude criticism and voices of opposition from the narratives they are exhibiting for various different reasons, doing so only reinforces this belief and inserts it in the next generation of viewers, ensuring that women remain excluded beyond the canvas and that students never truly understand Picasso, his work or its effect. 

Figure 5: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon installed at MoMA's 'Selections from the Permanent Collection, Painting and Sculpture' exhibition, 1984.

Picasso was an objectively bad person with pedophilic behaviours and misogynistic views that defined his treatment of the women in his life, both on and off the canvas, and such acts cannot be justified with ‘art’ nor can these women continue to be sacrificed for the art he extracted from them. Institutions must acknowledge their power in changing the historical narrative and loudly reject historians who attempt to defend Picasso and continue to submit his subjects to the same brutal sexualisation that he did while painting them, only then, can the effect of his work be truly understood and studied. Changing the conversations surrounding Picasso and his artworks to acknowledge the torment he subjected these women to and reject the notion that women exist only to be gazed upon by men requires no paint to be scrapped off of any canvas, regardless of whether they are marked with Picasso’s signature or that of another artist, and allows institutions to educate their audience on the true depths and complexities of art history.

1 The Picasso Century. Edited by Didier Ottinger, Anna Hiddleston-Galloni and Miranda Wallace. Melbourne: The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2022.

2 Priscilla Frank, "Picasso's Nude Portrait Of A Pubescent Girl Sells For $115 Million Against Backdrop Of Me Too," Huffington Post, May 9, 2018 (updated May 10, 2018), https://www.huffpost.com/entry/picasso-nude-auction-me-too

Marc Porter, "Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie, Feature essay," Christie's Auction house, April 8, 2018 (of publication), https://www.christies.com/Features/Lot-15-Pablo-Picasso-Fillette-a-la-corbeille-fleurie-8995-6.aspx 

3 Porter, "Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Fillette à la corbeille fleurie, Feature essay."

4 John Richardson, performer, John Richardson: The Art of Picasso 1927-1973 (2018), Kanopy, online video, 1:16, https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/john-richardson-art-picasso-1927-1973?vp=metrolibrary 

5 Porter, "Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Fillette à la corbeille fleurie, Feature essay."

6 Robert Rosenblum, “The ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ Revisited,” Art News 72, no. 4 (1973): 45–48, quoted in Anna C. Chave, “New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism," in The Art Bulletin 76, no. 4 (1994): 597–611, https://doi.org/10.2307/3046058.

7 Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life With Picasso (United States: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

8 Marina Picasso, Picasso: My Grandfather, (New York: Random House Publishing, 2001).

9 Victor Wallis, "Eros Effect - George Katsiaficas," George Katsiaficas Biography, 2022 (date of publication), https://www.eroseffect.com/biography

George Katsiaficas, "In defence of Picasso", in New Political Science 1998, 20:1, 91-95, https://doi.org/10.1080/07393149808429814

10 Katsiaficas, "In defence of Picasso." 

Figure 1: Getty Images. "Picasso in His Studio." Document number 517725874. https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/pablo-picasso-in-his-paris-studio-news-photo/517725874

Figure 2: Pablo Picasso, Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie (1905). Oil on canvas. 154.8 x 66.1 cm. Private Collection.

Figure 3: Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie (1905) at Christie's 2018 auction.

Figure 4: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Oil on canvas. 243.9 × 233.7 cm. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Figure 5: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon installed at MoMA's 'Selections from the Permanent Collection, Painting and Sculpture' exhibition, 1984.