Picasso's
Depiction of Women by Hannah Cherian
| After viewing the works of several
great 20th century artists in this class, no artist
has amazed me as much as Picasso. Picasso changed styles and moods
numerous times over his long career, and Picasso himself has said
that sex and women had an enormous influence on his work, the
female nude being his obsessive subject. The painter's rapid and
often dramatic changes of style are frequently attributed to the
presence of a new love interest, the waning of an old one, or
both. Picasso's infamous remark that women are "goddesses or doormats,"
has rendered him detestable to feminists, but during Picasso's
life, women were never in short supply and his charm was apparently
legendary (Hughes). |
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Picasso's first period was his
two-and-a-half year "blue period" from 1901 to 1904 that he
spent between Barcelona and Paris. Picasso looked for his subject
material in the brothels of Paris, and frequently visited women's
prisons that provided him with free models. All of the characters
in these works are lonely and sad, almost desperately so. In
Paris, Picasso met Fernande Olivier in 1904 that is thought
to have shifted Picasso's work from the "blue" to the "rose
period". Picasso's "rose period" was between 1905 and 1906.
During this time Picasso painted more cheery paintings, of families,
children, and circus caravans, and shifted his colors from blues
to reds.
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Portrait of Gertrude Stein,
1906
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During this time, Picasso
painted the portrait of Gertrude Stein, an art dealer who
was one of the first to recognize Picasso's genius. Gertrude Stein
reputably posed for her portrait over 90 times during the winter
of 1905 - 1906. Stein bought Picasso's work up until 1914, giving
him financial support when others had not yet recognized his work.
Picasso and Stein "were phenomenal together," wrote the painter
Gerald Murphy. "Each stimulated the other to such an extent
that everyone felt recharged witnessing it." Stein was upper middle
class, a trained scientist, a non-practicing Jew, a lesbian, over-educated,
American and, in 1905, shy with accented French; Picasso, by contrast,
was bohemian, a lapsed but highly superstitious Catholic, vigorously
heterosexual, self-educated, and a Spaniard with accented French.
But their attraction to each other was immediate. They in fact
were similar in many ways. "Both were direct, a little rough with
company, greedy, childish in their enthusiasms and petulant in
their dislikes," writes Janet Hobhouse. On a purely physical
level Picasso saw in this fat, eccentric woman a clue to something
pictorial that he was looking for, which can be seen in the beauty
that shines through the stern coarseness of Gertrude Stein's portrait.
(Rodenbeck). |
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In 1906 Picasso moved to Grosol,
Spain where he once again changed his style. His works were
now influenced by Greek, Iberian, and African art, and by Fernande
Olivier. Often regarded as Picasso's "true love" this elegant
Frenchwoman was the model for numerous of his works, erotic
and otherwise in the early 1900s. In The Harem, an erotic
painting done in 1906, Fernande appears in a variety of nude
poses while a powerfully built nude man, seated in the foreground,
looks on.
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The Harem,
1906
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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
1907
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The most famous work from this period
was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, which began as a
depiction of five prostitutes that Picasso encountered in the
red light district. This painting is said to have introduced the
world to modernism; it gave a modern representation of women:
Picasso's work questions the way society looks at women, by depicting
nudity in a way that strays from reality. The women's facial features
are similar to African masks, as Picasso was greatly influenced
by the "raw expressive power" of African and Oceanic tribal arts.
The edges of the women's bodies are sharp, depicting them as almost
objects, making Picasso a sympathetic commentator on the plight
of the prostitute and of women in general. |
| During World War I, from 1914 to
1918, Picasso worked in Rome where he met his first wife, Olga
Koklova, a Russian ballet dancer. Olga dominates his paintings
from l917 through the 1920s. In this period, Neoclassical images
were challenged by Cubist abstractions. During the beginning of
their relationship, Olga's portraits are gracefully drawn and
delicately colored. |
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Portrait of Olga,
1917
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Seated Bather,
1930
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By the end of their tumultuous
marriage, which coincides with the launch of his relationship
with the young and blonde Marie-Thérèse Walter,
these classically inspired portraits are gone. Now, Olga has
a skull-like head with jaws; her image emerges from mechanical
and animal forms as in Seated Bather of 1930. Picasso
even referred to Olga as "the castrator". With Olga, Picasso
had his first child, a son named Paulo.
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The next phase of Picasso's work
was a series of highly erotic works that Picasso produced in
a house he bought in Boisgeloup, his inspiration being Marie-Thérèse
Walter. Picasso was now fifty and Marie was twenty-nine
years his junior. After the unhappy ending of his marriage with
Olga, Marie provided Picasso with a new sexual and artistic
lease on life. In such paintings as Siesta (1932) and
Recumbent Nude (1932) Marie's sleeping form is painted
in voluptuous sweeping curves and flat areas of gay colors.
In the somewhat later Nude in a Garden (1934), described
as one of the ultimate artistic expressions of sexual joy, “
her body is abstracted and rearranged according to his desire,
becoming a series of delicately painted pink breasts and orifices."
Surrealism advocated the reconstruction of one's imaginative
fantasies, and for Picasso, these fantasies were often of a
sexual nature. As he said, "Why not the sex organs in place
of the eyes, and the eyes between the legs?" This leaves a result
of hybrid and often playfully erotic creatures. With Marie,
Picasso had a daughter, Maya, whom he painted during this period
as well.
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Nude in a Garden,
1934
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Portrait of Dora Maar,
1942
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The "Marie-Thérèse Walter era,"
which represents Picasso's art during the late '20s and early
'30s, ended when he met the surrealist painter-photographer
Dora Maar in l936. Because these relationships overlapped, there
is a set of portraits depicting both women in the same pose
that Picasso painted from memory on the same day. Although they
are in similar reclining poses, in the same setting, and on
canvases of the same dimensions, they expose Picasso's dissimilar
feelings. While Marie-Thérèse Walter is depicted
with a tender expression with her almond-shaped blue eyes as
the dominant element in her face, the seductive Dora has an
exotic conflicted face exaggerated by the heavy makeup and her
body is composed of cubist forms. As in the previous trends
of Picasso's relationships with women, the first portraits of
Dora are intimate. They are then followed by a series of classical
and somewhat melancholic canvases. From them, Dora's dark features
violently contorted are depicted in acidic colors, and the cubistic
and surrealistic forms emphasize her anguish. Connected to the
history of Guernica, the works from Dora's cycle is,
for many Picasso scholars, "one of the greatest moments" of
his oeuvre. Unlike the portraits of Marie-Thérèse
Walter, those of Dora display intense emotion and turbulence.
The sexual desire and pleasure are replaced by a fragmented
woman with a tormented expression. For Picasso she was "the
weeping woman." The last painting Picasso did of Dora Maar,
"Portrait of Dora Maar," differs from all others in its
realism and glowing austerity. One factor that separates Dora
Maar from the rest of Picasso's women is that she was also a
successful painter and had a photographic style that earned
her recognition. One of her most famous works, "Weeping Woman"
was painted in the surrealist style, probably around the time
that she and Picasso broke off their relationship.
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In 1943, Picasso met his next love,
the artist Francoise Gilot. Francoise would turn out
to be the only woman to leave him, and she bore him two children,
Claude and Paloma. The overall feeling transmitted by Picasso's
paintings of her are those of independence. She carries a certain
unemotional gaze in her large eyes, and her full mouth is usually
heavily outlined. The erotic works during this period, when
Picasso was now at the peak of his fame, often reflect an increasing
awareness of his own mortality and the waning of his sexual
powers. Picasso was 62 when they met and Francoise was only
21. Long after their breakup, Gilot wrote a book Life
with Picasso that was published in 1964 despite opposition
from Picasso. Gilot depicts Picasso as a man with an imperial
ego who often made the women in his life his victims or his
martyrs. "Pablo's many stories and reminiscences about Olga
and Marie-Therese and Dora Maar," she wrote," as well as their
continuous presence just offstage in our own life together,
gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex
that made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he
had collected in his little private museum." A screenplay entitled
"Surviving Picasso" was made out of Gilot's book in 1996.
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Portrait of Francoise,
1946
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Seated Nude (Jacqueline),
1959
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Picasso's last relationship was with
Jacqueline Roque, whom he met in 1953 and who became his
second wife in 1961. There are more portraits of her then of anyone
else in Picasso's work. In Picasso's last works, the contours
are often jagged and the paint is thick and applied with certain
urgency. Picasso's last work was a nude of a grotesquely aged
woman, with sagging breasts and elephantine legs, slumped against
the wall. She gazes at us with one wide, staring eye, while below,
like a second eye, are the slashing lines of her genitals. In
his last years he said, "I think about Death all the time. She
is the only woman who never leaves me." In 1965 Picasso underwent
a prostate operation but then continued to paint, draw, and do
a series of 347 etchings until his death in 1973 at the age of
91. |
I did not realize the true greatness of Picasso
until I took this class and did the research for this paper.
As a true genius, everything was complex in his life, including
his pursuit for love. Many depict Picasso as a manipulator
and abuser of women. In his art women were not trivial objects
- they were his inspiration. Granted, he was probably not
the best of companions, considering his first wife Olga went
insane, Marie-Therese Walter hanged herself, Dora Maar sank
into temporary madness, and Jacqueline shot herself after
his death. Picasso did everything with passion, including
loving his women. Without them, we probably would not have
the vast array of art in the multiple styles of Picasso.
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Works Cited
Gilliland, Cory. Picasso's Biography:
An Artist for our Time.
http://www.thebrogan.org/picasso/biography.html
Hilson, Hary. Picasso. c. 1998. http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/study/hilson.html
Hughes, Robert. "The Artist Pablo Picasso." Time 100 Artists and Entertainers.
http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/picasso.html
Picasso Erotique (The Show). http://www.picasso.com/
Rodenbeck, Judith. Insistent Presence in Picasso's Portrait of
Gertrude Stein. 1993.
http://www.showgate.com/tots/picasso/picstein.html
Sichel, Berta. The Muses Are Women: Picasso At the Museum of Modern
Art.
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/sichel/sichel5-31-96.asp
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