‘I feel like Pablo when I’m workin’ on my shoes,” declared Kanye West in a line – from his 2015 tune No More Parties in LA – that became a slogan. “I feel like Pablo when I see me on the news / I feel like Pablo when I’m workin’ on my house / Tell ’em party’s in here, we don’t need to go out.”
Eight years on, the reputation of Picasso – the Pablo in question – might not quite be as comprehensively trashed as West’s, but it has nosedived nonetheless. When Picasso died at the age of 91, 50 years ago tomorrow, the Guardian called him the most influential artist of the 20th century. Today, Picasso is more often talked about as a misogynist and cultural appropriator, the ultimate example of problematic white guys clogging up the artistic canon.
This summer, the Brooklyn Museum will mount an exhibition called It’s Pablo-matic (geddit?), co-curated by Hannah Gadsby, whose 2018 standup special Nanette includes a riff on how much the Aussie comic hates Picasso. (“Cubism. All the perspectives at once! Any of those perspectives a woman’s? No! You just put a kaleidoscope filter on your cock.”) In Paris, meanwhile, the Picasso Museum has enlisted fashion designer Paul Smith to make the morally dubious genius more palatable to Gen Z.
Yet can Picasso’s torrential output – 14,000 paintings and drawings; 100,000 prints; 24,000 book illustrations; 300 models and sculptures – really be cut down to size in this way? Do his offensive views outweigh masterpieces like Guernica? Does Picasso’s undeniably terrible treatment of women mean that we can cast aside the quantum leaps that shifted the course of art? We asked critics, artists, collectors and curators for their verdicts.
‘He turned lovers into caricatures of suffering’
Adrian Searle, Guardian art critic
Picasso can be viewed as a monstrous, larger-than-life character in a novel that spans almost a century. His appeal is as a picaresque who left a trail of destruction in his wake: abandonments, betrayals, suicides. We have the vampire, the Andalucían macho, the charismatic manipulator, the sociopath, the narcissist. Then there’s the minotaur who preyed on young girls, the rapist of the Vollard suite, the thief of African tribal masks, the cubist who wrecked the room and patched it back together again. We see the Picasso who laid waste to women, who fed his art with body parts and turned lovers into parodic and pneumatic toys, caricatures of suffering. If not for his art, he’d just be another monster, treating women terribly.
Everything bad you hear about Picasso may be true. But what of the constant innovation, formal and stylistic? The jaw-dropping complexity of his work? Difficulty, as well as pleasure, is embedded in his art. For some, this can never be enough. He paid witness to the tumult of the 20th century. Picasso was a sentimental communist, both modern and superstitious. Born in Málaga in 1881, he was a child of 19th century provincial Spain, and he brought the upbringing with him. His indisputable awfulness as a human being is part of that complexity. There is no going back on the difficulties. You can’t have Picasso without Picasso.
‘He wears his imagination on his sleeve’
Aaron Curry, artist
Picasso still inspires young artists, because he worked through so many styles. He’s a textbook of freedom: “Hey, you can try all this stuff. Use your imagination – and push boundaries.” Which is good because, at art school, a lot of things are taught through the lens of Duchamp: this idea that anything can be art as long as you, as an artist, say it is. Whereas Picasso wears his imagination on his sleeve. You can see it in the work.
I got really interested in the works from 1915 to 1917. That’s when he created assemblage: there’s a piece of wood, hang it on the wall with another piece of wood, and is that sculpture – or a painting? I found those exciting when I started moving from painting to sculpture. You don’t have to take a stone and carve it, or model something from clay. You can just pick up things around the studio and put them together.
As for the cultural appropriation, I think an artist’s job is to take culture and make something of it. It’s our job to appropriate. I don’t feel there should be rules saying: “There’s only a certain sort of material you’re allowed to use.” It’s not what artists do. They’re not politicians. Once something’s done, it’s out there for people to respond to.
‘Wanton disregard for the women he painted and slept with’
Eliza Goodpasture, critic
Picasso’s brand of greatness is characterised by loudness, scale, grit, originality, celebrity and overall shock-and-awe value. It is also distinguished by a macho, lusty masculinity. His notorious cruelty and misogyny are arguably as famous as his paintings. Picasso’s life and art were made possible by the work of women: his wives and mistresses who cared for him and organised his life, and of course the models and muses who fill his paintings. These women could not have stood where he stood behind the canvas, in brothels and bars and on battlefields, thinking of nothing but work. The lurid radicality of his art rests on a wanton disregard for the humanity of the women he painted and slept with.
Even as other “great artists” are beginning to be held to account, Picasso has clung on to his status as the most important, and most famous, artist of the 20th century. Genius transcends misogyny, apparently. It is impossible to separate Picasso’s work from his life, and equally impossible to escape the legacy of his enormous oeuvre. But we can escape the narrow definition of “great” that limits the history of art to men like Picasso.
The canon is not fixed and unchangeable: it is constantly being re-evaluated. What if great art included work that is subtle, nuanced, quiet, small, challenging and complicated? Imagine if a great artist could be any gender, any race – or even a person who valued the humanity of others. Who else might be a household name?
‘To live with a painting is to live with its painter’
Helly Nahmad, gallerist and collector of Picasso’s work
When you live with one of Picasso’s paintings, you might rush past it on the way out. Or you’re waiting for something, you’re on the phone, or you’re arguing – and it’s there. A Picasso painting is a meditation so infinite you need years to discover it. All that in a work he made in 15 minutes.
In the pictures from the 1960s onwards, he uses negative space a lot, that is to say unpainted canvas. He’ll paint – very quickly – the space under the chin, jaw and neck, then the hair, then two blobs. And yet you look at it and think: “That’s a portrait.” The actual marks can be nothing really, more like abstract blobs. Yet through them he gives you a portrait. It’s shocking. It’s mindboggling.
To live with a painting is to live with its painter – because they’re putting their deepest thoughts on canvas. So you’re in the presence of his soul, in your home. It’s intense! Many years ago, I sold my apartment and the art came out six months beforehand. As soon as it left, the house just became concrete.
‘Objectifying women? He was damn good at it!’
Lisa Small and Catherine Morris, curators of It’s Pablo-matic at the Brooklyn Museum
Lisa Small: I wouldn’t want to have been married to him.
Catherine Morris: Hannah Gadsby says there’s a lot that’s easy to hate about Picasso – but if the goal was to cancel Picasso, we wouldn’t be doing this show and Hannah wouldn’t be participating. However, I would say, as a curator of feminist art, that you can only look at Picasso today through a lens of feminist critique.
LS: We’re not tearing him down. We wouldn’t be putting his works on the wall if we were dismissing him or saying he’s irrelevant. His influence is so solid across the entire culture that it would be a fool’s game to say we’re not going to talk about his work any more. It’s been interesting, in terms of the feminist artists who make up the largest part of this exhibition, to learn from their thinking around Picasso – and how he still has an effect on them, not necessarily negative. The idea of objectifying women in art and the male gaze – he did not invent that by any stretch of the imagination.
CM: He was damn good at it!
LS: He brought it to an accomplished conclusion. A work of art is an object that is apart from a person – it’s out in the world, open to interpretation. Picasso was always painting the women with whom he was involved: he talked about how his personal life intersects with his art – but that doesn’t mean that’s what we’re limited to.
CM: The endgame of modernity after Picasso’s death was to exclude biography, but that becomes part of the reason to go back into it, because it’s annoying. Female artists, disabled artists and artists of colour have always been reinserted into history through their biography, and male artists of the modern period somehow set themselves outside that. In the 50 years since Picasso’s death, female artists and women art historians have changed the world. Picasso wouldn’t recognise it – and he’s part of that conversation whether he wants to be or not.
‘Africans were ahead of the game and all its players’
Rianna Jade Parker, critic and curator
Picasso was famously pictured in his Paris studio in 1908, surrounded by African masks – not decoratively, or even appreciatively, but as an obsessive collector, intrigued and possibly contemptuous of them. His historians insist that his “Africa period” was short-lived, running from 1907 to 09, but exactly when and how does influence formally end?
In the spring of 1907, Paris’s Palais du Trocadéro ethnographic museum boasted works by African, Native American and Oceaniac artists that had been acquired through less than just means, categorised as “primitive arts”. Picasso recognised there was nothing primitive about any of these.
After seeing this exhibition, he confessed: “I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.”
Idols of pictorial beauty, statuettes and masks are made using multiple perspectives, with bulbous and inverted shapes utilised to make monumental and expressive faces – these signature Picasso hallmarks were all part of an intuitive African art. Inspiration is for free and is circular but credit is always due. African American painter Faith Ringgold made numerous trips to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to view Guernica where it hung for a period. This spurred her to make her famed 1967 painting American People Series #20: Die.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is seen as the touchstone of modernism and further credit is given to the cubists Braque, Matisse and Gauguin. It is, then, fair to say that Africans were ahead of the game and all of its players, acting as primary contributors to the avant garde.
‘At times, his women seem to look down on men’
Erika Verzutti, artist
As a child in São Paulo, I didn’t have any contact with contemporary art, but everyone had heard of Picasso. When I finally got to know his work, it gave me so much. I like it more today than I did in my student days because it keeps moving. I believe the truth in the work. My feeling is that he’s pointing at African culture, at the truth that is there. He’s saying: “There’s another perspective and language – they’ve got it already.” So I’m an enthusiast.
Despite Picasso’s biography, some of his paintings show women who at times seem to be looking down on the man, subverting the male gaze. Sometimes the gaze changes and the body is no longer sexual – it is very dynamic. I cannot let that contradiction go because it informs my work, it informs everything.
‘Using Africa as inspiration made for great art’
Aindrea Emelife, curator at Edo Museum of West African Art, Lagos, Nigeria
One of my favourite works is Massacre en Corée, or Massacre in Korea, from 1951. But Picasso means more to me than favourites. As he looked to African art, via the Trocadéro in Paris, he saw a religious depth and ritual purpose that both startled and moved him. The sophisticated use of flat planes and bold contouring was unlike anything he had encountered. This understanding of African art aesthetic is reasonably simplistic, but as a source of inspiration, it made for great art.
Today, I’d say my favourite works are two studies: Head of a Woman (Study for Nude With Drapery), and Study for the Head of Nude With Drapery. Both remind me of Fang Ngil masks from Gabon rendered in subtle cross-hatched beauty. The fact that Picasso saw beauty and drama in the elegant abstractions of the forms, as well as in the elongated facial features of African masks, could have catalysed a moment of intrigue and investigation into African art and aesthetic. It could have fostered authentic curiosity in the art world. Fifty years after Picasso’s death, if I want to complete the limited story of modernism we have been told, I look to Africa.
• Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light is at the Picasso Museum, Paris, until 27 August. It’s Pablo-matic is at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2 June to 24 September.
