Next year marks half a century since the death of Pablo Picasso, in April 1973, at the age of 91.
The Year of Picasso is going to fill the news and the screens with the exaltation of the work of the painter and sculptor.
But fortunately the revision of his work will also be accompanied by a debate that began many years ago.
Feminism has often been fiercely critical of Picasso's private behavior —sentimental, loving, sexual— in relation to women, particularly since the powerful protest wave that Me Too opened.
The list of couples damaged by a toxic relationship with the painter is long and includes well-documented traumatic episodes with some of them.
There is no inconsistency, quite the contrary, in that the current feminist gaze, 50 years later,
Cultural commemorations are often occasions for the present to take ownership of a work of the past in its own way: it is alive because we care.
It is possible that some of these commemorations deal in a non-canonical way with some of the aspects of the painter's work and life.
Today, the civil and moral status of women is light years away from the time in which Picasso lived, in Spain and outside of Spain, and the standard of demand has changed radically: Picasso will predictably come out badly when faced with accusations of manipulation or abuse about women he painted, drew or sculpted and they were also real.
The retroactive assessment of this behavior based on current criteria would inevitably lead to the cancellation of the painter for being sexist, heteropatriarchal, perhaps despotic and perhaps also cruel to women, or at least to some women.
The temptation to belittle his figure by uncritical submission to the (welcome) moral norms of the present leads to a presentist revisionism that ignores the material, educational, cultural and moral conditions of the past.
Neither the repudiation of the artist for misconduct or inappropriate behavior nor the punitive cancellation of his work or his figure seem intelligent responses to what bothers the past.
The exceptional nature of his work does not exempt the creator from having been selfish, possessive or sexist,
but the judgment that this conduct deserves does not cheapen the creator nor does it make the compulsive recreation of women in his work less enigmatic and intriguing.
The cultural beatification of Picasso does not help either to assume in his integrity a figure of his cultural and historical reach;
Only critical and informed knowledge will make it possible for us, after all the debates, to better understand the complexity of genius and the archipelago of its flagrant defects.
The more and better citizens know him today, the better prepared they will be both to understand him and to understand themselves.
Saints do not exist, even when they are great artists.
Only critical and informed knowledge will make it possible for us, after all the debates, to better understand the complexity of genius and the archipelago of its flagrant defects.
The more and better citizens know him today, the better prepared they will be both to understand him and to understand themselves.
Saints do not exist, even when they are great artists.
Only critical and informed knowledge will make it possible for us, after all the debates, to better understand the complexity of genius and the archipelago of its flagrant defects.
The more and better citizens know him today, the better prepared they will be both to understand him and to understand themselves.
Saints do not exist, even when they are great artists.
