Around fifty exhibitions this year mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the master of modern art, Pablo Picasso. One of them has attracted particular media attention in recent days.
Posted at 1:41 am. Updated at 6:00 a.m.
The exhibition It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso after Hannah Gadsby has been on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York since Friday. As the title suggests, this is not a homage to the Spanish painter. Rather, it’s a scathing look at Picasso’s “issues,” according to queer comedian Hannah Gadsby, which was his relationships with women.
Pablo Picasso said he believed there were two types of women: goddesses and doormats. On Nanette, the activist show that Hannah Gadsby brought to Netflix audiences in 2018, the comedian describes Picasso’s misogyny as a mental illness.
PHOTO MOLLY MATALON, THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
Comedian Hannah Gadsby
“He paints vases with flesh for his tail flower,” says Gadsby of the leader of Cubism, a movement the artist ridicules with a touch of demagogy. “I hate him, but we have no right to hate him,” adds the comedian, who has an art history degree from the Australian National University.
The reaction to the Brooklyn Museum’s recent exhibition seems to prove him right. Some see it as an affront to art history, an expression of neo-puritanism derived from the Woke ideology (trademark), and an attempt – trauma warning – to “annul” Picasso.
Certainly, Hannah Gadsby, who refuses to separate the artist from her art and the man from the artist, seems to let Picasso slip through a series of comments on his works that are caustic, childish, conventional and ill-advised, according to the reviewer of the New York Times.
PHOTO ED JONES, FRANCE PRESS AGENCY
Picasso’s Woman in Gray is on display as part of It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso after Hannah Gadsby.
Working with the Brooklyn Museum, Gadsby wanted to challenge the famed cult of the male genius by re-examining Picasso’s work through the prism of feminism while emphasizing female artists who did not benefit from the same positive prejudices as this self-proclaimed minotaur.
According to most critics, however, It’s Pablo-matic falls short of the mark, offering few smaller works by Picasso (eight paintings, seven of which are on loan from the Picasso Museum in Paris) and too few works by women to be considered in any way offensive shall serve him.
The exhibition annotated by Hannah Gadsby may be sloppy, it certainly does not aim to censor Picasso’s work. Growing, but growing equally, as my mother would say, a great admirer of the work of the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon painter.
“It’s like Pablo-matic isn’t trying to get Picasso canceled,” Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, told Art Newspaper. It’s quite the opposite. Cancel means to refuse to participate in a conversation. Avoid complexity. Our exhibition is an invitation to complexity. And I’m sure Picasso can handle some complexity. In fact, he always invited her. »
Raising the specter of abandonment culture because a museum is presenting a critical exhibition of a great master means he has become so petrified that he can no longer be questioned. To accuse Hannah Gadsby of ironizing Picasso’s phallic obsession is to accuse her of being a feminist.
Pablo Picasso refused to divorce Olga Kohkhlova, who died in poverty when he was very rich. The ex-ballerina left the artist after meeting the underage Marie-Thérèse Walter. As Picasso’s model, she was forced into sexual relations for years by the painter, who was 30 years her senior, and who finally forced his lover Dora Maar on her.
Dora Maar, who would have humiliated and beat Picasso, ended her days in the asylum. Marie-Thérèse Walter took her own life. In his book Living with Picasso (1964), his former partner Françoise Gilot, who died on Tuesday at the age of 101, described the painter as a “tyrannical creature”. Which led one columnist to say that “he didn’t approve of his blondes.” If the straight white man no longer has the right to spank his mistress without being blamed afterwards, it’s because the wake movement has gone too far (yes, that’s ironic) …
Guernica, a monumental painting featuring Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter, is a masterpiece. Picasso was no less a brilliant artist because he was a misogynist. His misogyny is no longer acceptable because he was great. To do without Picasso would be to deprive oneself of an extraordinary work. To ignore his misogyny is to turn a blind eye to the man he was and the artist who said he didn’t paint what he saw, but what he thought.
As in 2018 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and in 2001 at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, Picasso’s work is now placed in context, whether from the perspective of cultural appropriation or as nods to the #metoo movement. For too long we have downplayed the cruel and violent treatment he inflicted on women. Pointing this out doesn’t mean giving in to the abandonment culture, it means being transparent.
The It’s Pablo-matic controversy is once again the fruit of an ongoing misunderstanding between the culture of cancellation and legitimate criticism of behaviors and discourses that have been trivialized for too long.
Museums are full of works by brilliant artists who were not role models in their private lives. They didn’t become persona non grata. Paul Gauguin, in his late forties, knowingly transmitted syphilis to his young, prepubescent Tahitian lovers. The paintings of these 13 and 14-year-old Vahines can be admired in New York, Paris and elsewhere.
Pablo Picasso’s work, largely inspired by his toxic relationships with women, enriches the collections of the world’s greatest museums. I have never heard of anyone storing a Picasso painting due to censorship or self-censorship. Rumors of the cancellation were greatly exaggerated.