20. Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (New York: W.W.Norton, 2003), pp. 8-12; 19-20. For the ongoing essential relational function of eye contact see, for example, “Parents and Children,” chap.17, and “Making Eye Contact,” chap.8, in Peter Marsh, ed.,. Eye to Eye: How People Interact (Topsfield, MA.: Salem House, 1988).
21. Schore, Affect Dysregulation, pp. 231; 186f. See also. Affect Regulation, pp. 24, 123.
Pablo Picasso
Too Close: Picasso’s Adoring and Damaging Portraits of Women
It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.
—Pablo Picasso Picasso on Art, p. 45
What There is to See
Pablo Picasso was undoubtedly the modern era’s most prolific and innovative painter of women. Claiming to paint from “necessity”, he broke with conventional flattering female beauty to invent some of the most expressively distorted portrait images ever seen.1 They were meant to shock, but the art world accepted, even celebrated them, and some have become iconic. Are Picasso’s female portraits mainly adventures in style, or are they assaults on women out of some unexplained “necessity”, or both? I want to examine why Picasso felt it necessary to portray women as he did, breaking with empathic portraiture from Rembrandt to Renoir. Picasso’s long history of repeating erotic excitements and misfortunes can be shown to have been shaped by a narcissistic and obsessional personality organization he brought from infancy and childhood. This is the unsettling argument I wish to pursue. Picasso’s portraits of successive lovers, whom he first idealized and later denigrated by savage distortions, call for interpretations beyond those of conventional art historians, critics and biographers.
Picasso’s expressive distortions have always invoked psychology, but serious attempts to discover developmentally based reasons for Picasso’s extraordinarily damaging images of women are few. Psychologists such as Carl Jung and Mary Gedo have pointed out pathology in Picasso’s work and assigned more or less convincing reasons for it. Picasso’s biographers and critics, however, remain reluctant to adopt such psychological insights, not wanting to devalue the massive cultural investment western civilization has in Picasso’s life and work. As there is general agreement that his life and work are inex-
tricably connected, it is risky to say too much about the origins of Picasso’s life-long flagrant womanizing, or his relational and marital treachery. A cultural icon might be damaged and the huge market in his works undercut by evidence that it was founded on serious emotional disorder. But trying to protect Picasso from psychological scrutiny is, in the long run, futile and there is greater cultural advantage in seeing his portraits of women as expressions of developmental trauma and consequent emotional impairment rather than simply as daring products of the twentieth century’s greatest creative genius.
At first glance, Picasso’s treatment of women looks like classical Don Juanism, as might be expected from a Spaniard of his generation. Don Juan originated in Spain as El Burlador de Seville by Tirso de Molina, published in Barcelona in 1630. The legend of libertine Don Juan, who refused to repent domination of successive women lovers, had many incarnations, including Mozart’s masterpiece Don Giovanni. As a leading cultural theme, it also attracted psychological study, the most important being Otto Rank’s Don Juan Legend (1924). Rank thought that while Don Juan struggles with the father as Oedipal rival, his real wish is to subdue the mother in what he called “the mother complex”.2 While there may be a wish to return to the womb, dread of the mother and attempts to control her are the stronger motives. Thus, should Don Juan be an artist, he uses imagery to reduce anxiety generated by wishes to subdue the mother who, as giver of life and nurture, leaves him both guiltily indebted and also denying negative feelings towards the woman who is indeed his mother. His unscrupulous treatment of women is displaced fearful maternal attachment which, in recent attachment theory, is seen as the defensive avoidant mode.
We will examine avoidance in due course, first noting Mary Gedo’s insight of l980 taking us beyond primitive Don Juanism. Gedo observes that “repeatedly [Picasso] selected women who demonstrated extreme psychological or physical frailty, or who were so much younger that their very youth implied a dependent, unequal cast to the relationship”.3 This claim of excessive vulnerability (sometimes associated with mental illness and suicide) will be useful in discussing portraits of his most important female partners. Gedo raises the question of whether Picasso’s “mother may have demonstrated similar personality problems during his early childhood”, explaining “his vulnerability in self-esteem”. She adds, “More often than not, people who suffer from this narcissistic defect have had mothers whose own personalities revealed difficulties of a similar kind”. Such mothers “seem particularly prone to aggrandize their young male children, and to involve them in a kind of symbiotic enmeshment from which the child cannot extricate himself .... This constellation occurs all the more readily if a young mother is married to a man many years her senior, as was the case with Picasso’s parents”.4 These observations prepare for a theory of Picasso’s deviant creativity, using more recent studies of the genesis of narcissistic personality. The work of Phil Mollon in The Fragile Self (1993), augmented by basic developmental research in attachment theory, will clarify what Picasso’s portraits of women were really about. i hope that the psychobiographical method will enhance rather than reduce the meaning of Picasso’s portraits of women placing them more firmly in our culture as deviant and dangerous guides to loving relationships.
Evidence
Persuasive psychobiography requires a reliable fund of biographical data, especially concerning Picasso’s mother’s alleged “vulnerability”, together with as much detail as possible about early relations with her only son, Pablo. His father, a cousin who was seventeen years older than his mother, must also be considered for his supporting role, or lack of it. While biographical data have improved greatly in recent years, especially through the reconstructions of John Richardson, we would like a fuller early mother-child account than he provides. Richardson remarks that there may indeed be fuller resources forthcoming that are now closed: “the hundreds of letters that the artist’s parents (principally his mother) wrote their son while he was away from Barcelona”. Some of these letters may be trivial, but not all; Richardson comments: “A pity—these letters would provide badly needed insights into the seemingly unclouded relationship between mother and son ...”.5 Detecting nothing irregular about Picasso’s relations with his mother, Richardson seems not to encourage the psychobiographer, or draw inferences from such observations as: “Picasso had come to regard his father [Don Jose, an artist and teacher] as insufferably reactionary and ‘bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois’ ... But he never lost his love and respect for his mother: Dona Maria grew more open-hearted, genial and gypsy-like as her husband grew more bitter, crotchety and blind”. Until death at eighty-four she is said by a relation to have been “magnificent, intelligent, lively, tolerant”, her “pride and passion” being her son: “He could do no wrong in her eyes”.6 Nothing is said about early difficult mothering, though Richardson remarks on “Picasso’s typically Andalusian upbringing at the hands of a doting mother and grandmother, abetted by two doting maternal aunts, a succession of doting maids ... and on occasion by Don Jose’s no less doting spinster sisters .... ” This is held to be sufficient explanation for Picasso’s “subsequent alternations of misogyny and tenderness toward women: his insatiable need for their love and attention on the one hand, his affectionate though sometimes heartless manipulation of them on the other”.7 Richardson is surely correct as far as he goes, but more detail can be supplied and better inferences drawn.