Picasso, abuser

One day in 1938, Dora Maar arrived at the workshop of the surrealist painter Víctor Brauner with a black eye.

He asked what had happened to him.

"I've had a fight with my father," said the photographer.

As strained as father-daughter relations were at the time, it's hard to imagine her father punching him.

There is no other explanation than to attribute the attack to Picasso, her lover at the time.

More than physical, Picasso was above all a psychological abuser, and not only with women, but also with men.

Christian Zervos, the author of the catalog raisonné of Picasso's work, explains in a letter to Siegfried Giedion that, after a failed deal with the painter, he did not want to see Picasso: "I know the pleasure it gives him to see people suffer."

And he adds: "The work and the man are never the same."

"The artist is huge, the man very small."

Many other episodes of the psychological abuse of Picasso are known: everyone wanted paintings by the artist, and his strategy was to summon two of his great dealers together to make them nervous by waiting for an hour in the anteroom, wondering which of the two would enter first.

To Françoise Gilot, who narrates hundreds of these anecdotes, I said at the beginning: “I don't know why I allowed her to come.

It would be very nice to go to the brothel.”

She also loved to match two of her lovers to provoke her jealousy: this caused Dora Maar and Marie-Therèse Walter to meet one day in Picasso's studio, which ended up physically fighting.

Picasso declared years later that this was one of his most precious memories.

Victims of psychological abusers often take many years to report it.

And more if these are great artists or writers.

Vanessa Springora recently wrote a book titled Her

in which she tells the story of a pedophile writer named Gabriel Matzneff, famous in France, who seduced her (with her consent) when she was 14 years old.

Not only do the victims truly fall in love, but the abuser usually acts as a "teacher of life" or fills them, in return for his contempt, with gifts or advice.

That is why it is so difficult for them to overcome the stage of admiration and recognize that they have been victims of abuse.

But Picasso was also the best painter of the 20th century, no matter how hard someone now insists on discrediting him as such.

He invented the

he invented cubism, he invented sculptures with everyday objects (although Victor Hugo had already signed a simple river pebble).

Almost always "stealing" some idea from others, whether it was this Braque, Julio González or any other.

But his results are more alive, more radical, more varied, and always exploring infinitely more plastic possibilities.

He was also extremely intelligent, likeable and when he wanted, generous: he gave 200,000 francs for the starving children of the Republic during the Spanish civil war;

he helped many refugees, he gave away 1,000 dollars (from the fifties) to pay for the surgery of Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein's partner, and he helped several artists, only those he liked.

So what to do with Picasso?

Now with the fiftieth anniversary of his death, radical feminists will want to abolish it and, however, as Daniel Rico wrote, "we have uncomfortable patrimonies but, a little we dig, they all are."

To give other examples, Hitchcock was also great, but it is known that he told Tippi Hedren that it would ruin her career by refusing his advances.

For his part, Dalí performed sexual acts with ducks, which were first killed in front of him.

Simone de Beauvoir herself, an icon of 20th century feminism, was unmasked in a book entitled

, which explains how the writer always denied her sexual experiences with young people, some of them her students.

But what is impressive about the book is not so much that she denied it but how she, in her letters to Sartre, with whom she shared some of them, she treats them as mere sexual objects.

We cite these examples because they are famous people, but we can remember that in those times —and also now— these cases of abuse were very common.

What has changed is not only the mentality, but the denunciation.

What to do, then, with the violent, the pedophiles, the fascists, the manipulators?

Remove them from museums and libraries?

Obviously not.

Surely, we will see a reconsideration that will separate life and work, and the reprehensible episodes or behaviors will be explained in catalogs, articles and history books.

In this reconsideration, which we are already seeing, it is not fair to practice presentism —to judge past acts with present criteria— nor, on the contrary, to overlook arguments as sexist as those that state: “Picasso liked women.

So, what's wrong about it?".

Victoria Combalía

is a writer and art critic.

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