picasso

a piece 'honouring' the fiftieth anniversary of his passing

“women are machines for suffering”

he said as he unfolded them geometrically and stretched their faces onto canvas, immortalising pain so it calcified and hardened as the decades went past, a scab unpicked but still hiding many small wounds, small wounds

we talk about separating the art from the artist like it’s logic, like you can peel the skin off of it and discard it like an orange and we talk about

educating and raising awareness so people can look at beautiful and/or horrifying things and place distance between themselves and it and we talk about

pushing boundaries as if it were an exercise in intellect and avant-garde curiosity and not the work of a man

who once put out a cigarette on a woman’s cheek and who brutalised a seventeen year old at the age of forty-five 

(allegedly, my apologies, allegedly)

and to make up for indulging a man who tortures himself and others with his genius

the brochures will make vague references to a “tumultuous home life” like misogyny is just a rough sea to be sailed through; unfortunate of course, but ultimately temporary

what’s a teenager after all, but low hanging fruit waiting to be plucked and split open? and

I love an excuse for violent men who weaponise creativity and the way they must crush a woman (or seven) and smear their mistreatment into ground-breaking work, win awards, win accolades, win tributes

we all know the name of the man who used women to change the world

but I still have to google the names of the muses who made him famous. whose work? whose power? whose fame?

what kind of world coronates a man who left behind two suicides and a nervous breakdown?

(allegedly, my apologies, allegedly)

what kind of world concludes that transgression is tragic, thoughts and prayers with the living, but

there must be ways

to redeem art made from knifing

asterisk after asterisk until you could fill a room with caveats 

what kind of world balls up the truth in cotton wool and turpentine until it’s small, too small even for the tiny fine print in the exhibitions? picasso the legend! picasso: love, fame, tragedy and genius! picasso of Guernica, the truth-sayer, the corrector of injustice! picasso, the artist who bled women onto tarpaulin and promised to burn them.

picasso, the abuser who warned us, after all, when he said, so tenderly,  

“every act of creation

begins with an act of destruction.”

Picasso died on April 8th 1973, making today fifty years since his death.

The women who were known as his muses were artists, photographers, dancers, mothers, writers and models in their own right. Their names were: Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque and Fernande Olivier. I’ll be doing a piece on each of them in the next several months.

The Spanish and French governments have worked together to put on a year-long program of exhibitions and events called the ‘Picasso Celebration: 1973-2023’. 50 exhibitions have been programmed most of them in Spain and France, and others in the US, Germany, Switzerland, Monaco, Romania and Belgium.

The schedule implies these exhibitions will be celebratory.