The Museum of Fine Arts, in Montreal, has a show, "Picasso Érotique," that will give you fresh thoughts about the twentieth century's definitive artist. Here's one of mine: all Picasso's pictures are dirty. They are rooted in lust and cultivated with glee. Love has very little to do with them, and forget romance. The word "gallantry" will do for the finer gestures of Picassoid amour, such as the exquisite pathos of his "rose period" carnival folk and the august monumentality of his neoclassicism. But even when he is at his most refined the Spanish rooster crows. Picasso said that for him sexuality and art were the same thing, leading us to believe that he made love as he made art—that is, with domineering audacity and gloating pride. I imagine that his every kiss was signed "Picasso." Certainly, his every work of art memorializes self-delight: "Picasso is doing this!" As a practical matter, he required consenting others—willing women, attentive viewers—but to indulge them was beneath him. I'm accustomed to feeling used up after any Picasso show: shaky with pleasure and not so much sent on my way as seduced and abandoned. Sometimes I despise him. But I'll always go back to him.
"Picasso Érotique" is not just another Picasso show. It is the most illuminating of the many I've seen. It is extensive, with about three hundred and fifty works, and it brings into vivid focus three previously blurry periods of crisis for the artist: youth (until 1905 or so), midlife (the Surrealist phase, starting around 1927), and old age (several years before his death, at the age of ninety-one, in 1973). The show persuasively argues that Picasso's successive styles, including Cubism, are more or less transparent masks or costumes for his sexual avidity, whatever else they are, too. If "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" were present, the case would be clinched by that revolutionary nexus of the obscene and the analytical—a handshake between the Marquis de Sade and Pythagoras. (Studies for "Demoiselles," along with related works, fill in well enough.) The show's candor is overdue and refreshing. It cuts through the miasma of gossip about the artist's mistresses that has long been Picasso scholarship's expedient for coping with the sex in his work. "Picasso Érotique" does provide a time line of photographs and capsule biographies of his seven leading ladies, from Fernande to Jacqueline, but the art on display quickly confirms that his chief passion was always for himself in action as an artist and as a lover.
The show opened at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, last winter, and it will travel to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona—its last stop. It will not visit the United States, for reasons that I'm afraid are self-evident. It begins with a fabulously effective coup de théâtre by the Montreal curatorial team, led by Jean-Jacques Lebel—a reproduced, full-scale fin-de-siècle brothel bedroom with a projection of ancient, highly explicit porn films—that would be inconceivable in a public museum south of Quebec unless accompanied by a politically earnest wall text. The installation posits the sort of sexual experience that was routine for the teen-age Picasso in Barcelona. The room is not just squalid and hot; it's cheerfully so. It assumes a worldly, resilient maturity in viewers. How often does anything made in America do that? Well, there's something to be said for the joys of shockability. The musky European allure of "Picasso Érotique" gave me a madeleine hit of nostalgia for the art house in Minneapolis where I first tasted espresso and beheld Brigitte Bardot onscreen, more than forty years ago. The Montreal show delivers what those old, subtitled films only hinted at. The first picture is a sketch of two donkeys in flagrante that Picasso made when he was twelve years old, and the show proceeds with works that are graphic in more ways than one. The drawings range from trivial, raunchy caricatures of his friends dallying with prostitutes—images that affirm the social, men's-clubby aspect that brothels had for the artist's circle—to sensitive renderings of sexual activity that breathe a quiet intensity. In a delicate drawing in blue ink, a lover of uncertain gender performs oral sex on a woman who covers her eyes with her hands, perhaps the better to concentrate on her delight. The lovely image conveys a truth—that sexual sensation is internal and invisible—that Picasso would spend a lifetime combatting. The whole course of his art is marked by the devising of one pictorial strategem after another for turning bodily consciousness inside out.
The Montreal selection of Picasso's early pornographic images covers the standard repertoire of sexual tastes, plus bits of bestiality and a vision of murder by strangulation. Only male homosexuality is excluded—except for one crude cartoon joke in which an artist, as he grasps the hand of a naked woman labelled "Glory," is buggered by a critic. Odd symbolic motifs include a female nude who nestles inside a god-faced phallus and a woman who displays her vagina while reclining in another, gigantic vagina. In this context, works of beauty startle. "La Toilette" (1906), a masterpiece from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which shows a willowy nude doing her hair in a mirror that is held by a clothed woman, demonstrates Picasso's transmutation of randiness into erotic poetry. It also marks the onset of his confidence as a master. Bouts of insecurity seem to have triggered his reversions to explicit sexual themes after 1927—when, miserably married, he took up with the young Marie-Thérèse Walter—and toward the end of his life. In the first instance, he reëngineered the female body as an ensemble of strictly erogenous parts and projected himself as Jupiter or the Minotaur, for whom love and rape are interchangeable pursuits. Many of these works are familiar, but some that are in the show, depicting penetration, are new to me. And I never suspected the profusion, in Picasso's last phase, of coital grapplings, often attended by male voyeurs.
It is sometimes presumed that those voyeurs represent Picasso in impotent decrepitude, but there seems to be no evidence for the notion. Indeed, the funniest, most sweetly sexy works of the artist's career take up the theme of voyeurism. A special treat of the Montreal show is a suite of twenty-five marvellous etchings—made in the course of twelve days in 1968—that imagine the painter Raphael doing the deed with his model and mistress La Fornarina under the eyes of a male watcher, usually Pope Julius II. The sex is necessarily athletic, because it doesn't occur to Raphael to let go of his brushes and palette for convenience's sake. The Pope sometimes lurks but more often sits at ease on a throne or on a chamber pot. In some of the pictures, he seems disapproving. In others, he appears to be having a whale of a time. (If anyone in attendance is grumpy, it's Raphael's rival Michelangelo, who is occasionally shown hiding under the bed.) If the eighty-six-year-old Picasso was ruing his senescence at the time he did these etchings, he forgot it in the course of spinning hilarious fantasies with sensual panache. The series celebrates a delirious conflation of art and sex, of looking and doing—a higher mathematics of eroticism that consigns the usual physical measures of conjugal performance to the status of dull arithmetic.
Sex served Picasso as an indestructible substitute for the social agreements and systems of belief that had previously grounded art in the world. Not for him the utopian or Arcadian, progressive or quasi-religious programs of other modern artists; he scorned both abstraction and contemporary subject matter. Not that he made choices in these matters. His temperament was his destiny. (Despite his intentions for "Guernica," that great painting fails as propaganda by dissolving a topical outrage into timeless myth. His later attempts to be a good Communist, with images of peace doves and the like, account for perhaps his only truly bad work.) As a result, his art can never become dated, let alone old-fashioned. A virtuosic modernizer in form, he was a skulking primitive in content—not only premodern but prehistorical, revelling in primal mud. Like the makers of the Lascaux petroglyphs, he was essentially a graphic artist. He was a swordsman of the thrusting line. His curves often ache to straighten, as if they were bent springs; and the caress of his paint-handling is no smoother than a cat's tongue. No matter how attenuated the sexual charge of his work became, it guided his choices of mark and color. Is there something tedious about Picasso's bullying machismo? There certainly is—when you aren't looking at his art. When you do look, he's got you by the scruff of your instinctual being.
We make a mistake when we imagine that genius must be complicated. It is the opposite. We ordinary citizens are complex, using much of our biological energy just to keep our fragmented selves in working order. Albert Einstein reported that his theories were born in fantasies of "visual" and "muscular" activities; only when these fantasies felt satisfying and could be reproduced at will did he begin doing the math. Compare this to Picasso's famous boast that he never sought but only found. What the intellect of each man required was already present in his body, whose dark knowledge had unimpeded access to the dials and levers of abstract reason. "Picasso Érotique" gives teeming evidence of a process by which low-down impulses modulate, as they rise, into prodigies of intelligence. The mechanism has a minimum of moving parts. (Picasso can seem to have had just two, of which one was his brush.) Most art education relentlessly emphasizes the great artists' loftiest achievements—which, like _E=mc_², reduce us to clueless awe. Picasso's goatish stuff in Montreal takes us down the scale, making the germination of his art matter-of-factly apprehensible. The phenomenon is no more or less mysterious than any other fact of nature—and is as little answerable to our approval or disapproval. We needn't live with Picasso, thank goodness, but only brain surgery could stop him from living in us. ♦
