A sampling of portraits arising from the main relationships shows the shift from ingratiation and idealization of the women to fixing them in place with pictorial controls, to doubts, slurs and final degradation: from goddess to doormat when the relationship felt as though it were becoming “too close”. The typical course of events is from burning romantic idealism to destructive outbreaks of gynophobia. We cannot trace in full Picasso’s innumerable portraits of women as the “diary of a seducer”, though he fully accepted that they are a diary of sorts. The main subjects discussed, seen “from inside” as he believed, are Fernande Olivier, Eva Gouel, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar, Franqoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque, with glances at other brief attractions. The meaning of some of Picasso’s more enigmatic statements will become clearer in this review; for example, “a picture is a sum of destructions”, and “Fundamentally one always interprets the real, and everything is grist to the artist’s mill .... One swallows something, is poisoned by it and eliminates the toxic”.30 In other words, painting is an aggressive means of maintaining the artist’s own interior condition, of discerning mood in order to regulate it by adjusting those relationships causing highest risk of anxiety. For Picasso portraiture is a self-regarding activity, responsive to external objects but limited by underlying fears and guarded by watchfulness of the avoidant detachment style. In view of the high risk of engulfment (emotional binding reminiscent of relations with mother), the controlling pictorial responses needed to be extreme, even the “sum of destructions”. Picasso’s revolutionary stylistic innovations thus begin to make sense, as he denied that mere “experimentation” was his main purpose and affirmed that the painter makes his own “diary” from “necessity”. A primitive element of superstition entered. He had hoped that paintings such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon might allow him to break free of evil spirits by giving them shape, thereby exorcizing demons as a shaman might do. This explanation of motivation is less bizarre than it may sound.
Fernande
Fernande Olivier, whom Picasso met in Paris (1904) while occupying a Montmartre studio, the Bateau-Lavoir, was a highly vulnerable young woman. As she explains in her Journal, she had escaped to be an artist’s model amongst Bohemians , fleeing a “loveless marriage” to an “insensitive man”.31 Her lively, candid journal states: “I was an unwanted child, bom to a young girl and a married man, and I was brought up by a family who never accepted me”.32 Her refuge from the pain of rejection, and of sexual abuse by an uncle, was in fantasy—a sort of dreamy dissociated state which she cultivated.33 Fernande had a drifting, sexually risky existence, until meeting “the spanish painter who lives in our building”. Described as “powerful and deeply spiritual”, he gave off “a radiance, an inner fire”. She felt drawn to his “morbid” and “quite disturbing” paintings, continuing, “Picasso is sweet, intelligent, very dedicated to his art, and he drops everything for me”.34 Yet, she cannot love him, complying with his wishes only under the influence of opium. Picasso worshiped her, building a shrine for adoration of her beauty, and he became jealously watchful of her whereabouts. Despite tenderness, she was frightened by “obsessive jealousy”, and a tendency to violence when frustrated; he had a revolver.35 Fernande’s later summary in the context of the animals he kept was: “There was a childish, tender side to his nature, which he seemed to fight against. ... He was someone who wouldn’t allow himself to be deeply touched and, as a result, he undoubtedly missed out on many pleasures without ever suspecting they were there to be enjoyed”.36 Despite such insights, Fernande’s journal contains no explanation of what led to the unexpected breakdown of their relationship.
In a depressed letter to Gertrude Stein of August 24, 1907, she wrote only that Pablo “has had enough” and on September 2, she added: “Pablo is taking the idea of our separation very lightly. The few years we’ve lived together will leave no impression on him, and I think he’ll greet my departure with no regrets and a huge sigh of contentment. And yet, as he says himself, I’ve never restricted his life or hindered his work. So, don’t you think it’s a bit hard to accept that one has been toyed with, been the victim of caprice?”.37 They were more than casual bed mates but there is little contemporary reference to how Picasso treated Fernande, although the biographer Roy MacGregor-Hastie charges that he “abused” her.38 There is no doubt that Picasso kept from her his new amour Eva Gouel, with whom his friends thought him to be fully in love. Little did Fernande know the deeper ways in which she had “restricted his life”, his anxiety and fear arising from her becoming too close, finally throwing them apart in l912.
It is remarkable that Fernande had so little to say in her journal about the physical transformations through which Picasso successively manipulated her visage. Perhaps temperamental passivity explains the acquiescence with which she took the metamorphoses that produced Picasso’s first and most decisive series of cubist portraits. It is well known that these paintings changed the curves of flesh into flat, dislocated rectangular surfaces. As would be expected, early impressions such as the 1906 oil Portrait of Fernande (Zervos I, 254) is more charmingly idealistic than seductive, with no hint of what was to come. It is the sort of image he might have put into a “shrine” celebrating new romance. Nudes of 1906, such as the bronze sculpture Woman Plaiting her Hair (Zervos I, 329), are more distant and physical than the quick facial portraits but they honour the female image rather than manipulate it.39 By 1908 the distortions had begun with facial flattening in pencil portraits and primitive facial and bodily modifications. The subject is no longer recognizable, nor is she in the famous 1909 bronze head of Fernande (Zervos II**, 375) in which the surface is given an eerie corruscation of planes. The same is true of painted images, prelude to the disturbing cubist break-up of flesh into craggy geometric chunks seen in Two Heads (Zervos II* 162), also of 1909.40 There are enough such determined exercises in cubist dehumanizing of Fernande to show that Picasso had made it a special project. The creative process seems very cerebral and calculated, with little given away about Picasso’s actual feelings towards his subject other than a will to manipulate. Indeed, in Femme au bouquet of 1909 (Zervos II*, 156 ), Fernande’s face, twisted almost as if a victim of stroke, remains recognizable in a particularly unflattering way. Picasso had found a formal strategy to deal with a presence he could feel comfortable with only when she was asleep. He had invented cubism wilfully to cut loose from the portraitist’s usual obligation to realism. cubism was “to paint seeking a new expression, divested of useless realism, with a method linked only to my thought .... It is my will that takes form outside of all extrinsic schemes, without considering what the public or the critics may say”.41 He neglected to say that cubism cloaked hostile enactments especially against the feminine principle.
In psychological terms, following the Avoidant/Coercive (A/C) defensive scheme proposed by Patricia Crittenden, Picasso’s removal of affection from Fernande was avoidant, while disfiguring her beauty by transforming it into geometric shapes was coercive. In other words, it was punitive under cover of inventing a new style of painting which he specified should be discussed only in its own terms, regardless of public reaction. The cycle of attraction to an idealized female leading to an affair, followed by the onset of avoidance and final dismissal of her will be repeatedly observed. When his “will” was exerted in this way, visual damage was more or less severely inflicted upon the female subject of Picasso’s portraiture.