The critical reader is bound to look for limitations right at the start, and they had better be acknowledged. While I believe that visual art provides a more powerful demonstration of abusiveness against females than literature usually does, its very spontaneity, immediacy and often joie de vivre may blunt criticism. Whereas Picasso, Balthus and even Bellmer often “play” with daring visual effects, I am taking seriously their basic relational imagery—the implied relation between the artist and his female subject, as it reflects his developmental history. For me the more powerful the work of art, the less it is an arbitrary contrivance but rather a communication of an “anxiety theme” from the artist’s own unconscious. The reader needs convincing that “anxiety themes” in art are truly discovered and not imposed because of the interpreter’s personal wishes or because theory dictates them. Modem art, especially Surrealism, attacked taboos and censorship, freeing the creative unconscious to find imagery for its urgent contents. This called for a new description of what the artist does, most eloquently set out in Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924). Restrictive reason was put aside in favor of unbridled imagination: dreams, hallucinations, illusions and the “confidences of madmen” became the stuff of art. Childhood was valorized as a source for the artist: “he cannot help turning back towards his childhood which, spoiled though it was by his trainers, seems to him no less full of charms”.3 While we cannot be quite so idealistic about childhood as Breton, his instruction will be followed to consider how the “trainers” (parents) actually “spoiled” innocence. Breton himself may not have fully envisaged it, but a new art criticism was also taking shape from the teachings of Freud, Jung and their followers.
Freud thought he saw a universal developmental truth in the Oedipus complex and his art criticism was governed accordingly. With shifting emphasis from Oedipal to pre-Oedipal development, and the revival of the trauma theory of emotional disorder (which Freud so controversially had replaced with children’s fantasies of sexual attraction to the opposite sex parent), we have a new set of possibilities. The writings of the Freudian revisionist Otto Rank gave a lead. Following the philosopher Schopenhauer, Rank proposed that “pleasure is not only nourished from positive sources but may even be just a condition characterized by the absence of fear or guilt ...”.4 In other words, the origin of pleasure, including esthetic pleasure, is not mainly sexual, as Freud believed, but the result of dispelling fear and guilt. Rank states: “From this view of esthetic pleasure we should thus arrive at the general formula: pleasure is the result of a successful “partialization” in which avoidance of fear, which element would necessarily be present in a totality of experience, acts to enhance pleasurable emotions. Every pleasurable feeling would therefore include, besides positive satisfaction (successful partialization), a being-spared from fear, totality, life, and so on.”5 This view of the task of art is adopted here—art manifests the artist’s own “anxiety themes”, derived from childhood traumas at the hands of his “trainers”, and by invoking pleasurable esthetic forms attempts to remove, or at least reduce, attendant fear and guilt. Infant and childhood nurture give some combination of pleasure and pain, of acceptance and rejection, with lasting consequences in the formation of personality. Rank holds that on the “artistic plane of illusion” the artist “finds it possible to conquer creatively this fundamental human dualism and to derive pleasure therefrom”.6 Again, we may question the optimism of conquering, in some permanent way, the psyche’s dualism. While the intent of our subjects can be so described, realization is another matter as appears in the repetitive failures of art’s “will to form” as a means of overcoming anxiety. However, at least temporarily, artistic creativity is quite capable of elevating the artist’s own mood, and ours, as it derives esthetic pleasure from anxiety-laden subject matter. When the chosen creative means fail to produce permanent relief, and there is no new insight into motivational factors, more radical experiments with form are likely to occur. This suggests a reason why Picasso, for instance, went to the extremes he did of distorting the female form.
When Rank speaks of “avoidance of fear”, he touches on the basic theory of these studies: that “avoidant attachment” characterizes the artists’ address to their fear-inducing subject matter. Study of the life and work of a fourth artist, Joseph Cornell, is introduced to make the point that avoidance of women can have remarkable esthetic results without being nearly as abusive as in the other examples. A detailed account of attachment theory is necessary to lay the groundwork for these discussions. But, in anticipation, another objection to psychobiography arises: how can we ever know enough about an artist’s infancy and childhood to make assessments according to the stringent requirements of attachment theory?
This is a problem unlikely to be solved to everyone’s satisfaction, yet taking its measure will be useful. The gap may seem huge between the human biology of attachment theory and representations of states of mind in painting, but the attempt to close it should be made. Attachment theory is a scientific discipline based on controlled observations of mother-infant behavior, as will be seen in discussing its most revealing instrument, the Strange Situation procedure. It is well to remember that the Strange Situation test is a recent innovation yielding intricate observational results unlike any hitherto seen. There could be no comparable data for any historical or even recent life of an artist. The second major instrument useful in studying attachment, this time in adults, is the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), a retrospective assay of the long-term consequences of various styles of parenting. While it is possible that some creative persons have been research subjects, I don’t know about them, nor could any of the artists here studied psychobiographically have been subjects. The only option is to glean as much information about artists’ infancies and early childhoods as attachment theory holds to be relevant to personality formation. This calls for consultation of every available published biographical source. Sometimes there are letters, brief autobiographical statements, interviews, films, reports of spontaneous remarks and the like, the usefulness (and trustworthiness) of which will be assessed. But mainly I rely on the formulations of biographers who are more or less ready to credit the importance of each artist’s earliest developmental experiences. There is the occasional psychoanalytically informed study of an artist, such as Mary Gedo’s of Picasso and Sue Taylor’s of Hans Bellmer, giving important leads to follow. But mainly the biographies of my subjects, including John Richardson’s admirable study of Picasso, provide only chance retrievals of raw early attachment data and don’t do much with their interpretation. Nevertheless, some important motivational insights into the pictorial manipulation of women can be offered.
While searching assiduously, I cannot claim to have picked out everything from my sources bearing on why these male artists enacted attraction-avoidance, leading to actual and represented strife with women. I work with what seem the salient facts, presenting the “hot button” attachment issues suggestively, perhaps not always conclusively. Wide ranging reading in psychoanalysis and psychiatry has informed me about the classification and formation of character disorders, and I have made special studies of depressive and obsessional disorders in imaginative persons. The result is a combination of inferential findings arising from attachment studies and phenomenological observations based on studies mainly from the object relations school of psychoanalysis. The problem of credibility will have to be decided by others. My hope is that these psychobiographies will add to enlightenment about why men and women seem so seriously at odds as revealed in the contemporary arts, defending against each other to little constructive purpose. The rich but disturbed fantasies of heterosexual men injected into culture with such power by Picasso, Bellmer, Balthus, and Cornell have a generalized diagnostic usefulness that so far has not been examined. They give evidence of personal pathology and cultural sickness that needs facing up to. I believe that these artists have an undisclosed message of personal suffering that calls out for a clear statement that will render their creative efforts more useful to culture than by art alone.