How does he do it?
Forget art for a moment, let’s talk sex. Picasso was a womanizer like a salmon is a swimmer. In our era of Tailhook conventioneers and Antioch rules, such boundless heterosexual enthusiasm (Picasso had two wives, a half-dozen mistresses and countless affairs) doesn’t play that well. But in his paintings (and impish photographs of himself) Picasso makes the old male-gaze/female-object shtik seem as healthy and joyful as a picnic in Antibes. Even art-world feminists concede there’s something dangerously cute about Picasso. Of course, Picasso wasn’t very nice to the ladies, but who wants a painting by Alan Alda?
“My mother said to me,” Picasso once remarked, " ‘If you become a soldier you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso." He also was a Spaniard who became a French institution, an academically trained realist who became the avant to end all gardes and a communist who left a $260 million estate. “He had only one problem,” says his grandson Oliver, “thinking about death. It’s part of Spanish culture to play with death, as in the corrida.” Duncan, who photographed the artist frequently in the 1950s, recalls encountering Picasso in the studio, staring at an old painting of a woman with a strange, striped creature floating overhead. “I told him that was the saddest painting I’d ever seen and he said, ‘Don’t you know? This is Olga.’” Picasso’s first wife had been in a Swiss sanitarium, and the hovering being was Olga’s disembodied spirit, looking down at the woman who would soon die of cancer. Picasso didn’t kill Olga but he made her–and every woman in his life except Franoise Gilot–miserable by rejecting her. When Picasso’s grandson Pablito was spurned by the artist in 1972, he killed himself. Picasso’s widow, Jacqueline, committed suicide in 1986.
Although director James Ivory was initially lukewarm about an artist as a movie subject (“It’s hard to do a movie about any thinker, but at least painters and sculptors move around”), the sex-and-death drama surrounding Picasso made him too juicy a character to pass up. Then there was Hopkins’s talent. “He’s a tremendous actor in that chameleon way,” Ivory says, “and he looks like Picasso–the head, the neck, the barrel chest. We don’t use much makeup. We tried various noses and rejected them. The most important thing we did was to give Anthony some dark brown contacts.”
But back to modern art. The three most influential artists of the century have been Picasso, Duchamp and Warhol. But Du- champ subverted art into an intellectual stand-up routine, and Warhol merely converted Duchamp’s irony into fashionable art objects. Picasso helped invent difficult–and often ugly– modernism with his cubist paintings. To those who complained that he ripped off African sculpture and hogged the cubist spotlight from Georges Braque, Picasso replied, “When there’s anything to steal, I steal.” What kept his art alive is the genuine spirit of a mischievous childan odd thing for the emblematic artist of our technological century.
Deep in almost every painter, however, lurks the hunch that getting the look and feel of a particular person down on canvas is the real test of ability. In about 230 works at MoMA (like a good movie’s running time, it sure seems less than that), the portrait format provides a clear measure of Picasso’s–from a wistful 1906 nude of Fernande Oliver (Picasso’s first love) to a skull-like drawing of the artist at 90. Curator William Rubin says, “Probably less than 10 percent of the portraits were painted from a sitter. Much of the time the most realistic ones were painted from memory.”
The biggest worry of the Picasso gatekeepers these days is how to tread the fine line between glorification and exploitation. Picasso Administration, the corporate arm of his estate, worries about unlicensed “Picasso” wine, shoes and champagne. PA has spent more than $1 million on trademark lawyers in the United States alone over the last two years. In New York for the Web site opening, Oliver said sarcastically, “I saw a Coca-Cola store, a Warner Brothers store and a Disney store. Why not a Picasso store?” Answer: shows like “Portraiture” are the real Picasso theme experience. To hell with varsity jackets and T shirts; we’ll see you at MoMA.
