The Picasso problem | The Press

Some fifty exhibitions around the world highlight this year the 50^e anniversary of the death of the master of modern art, Pablo Picasso. One of them has been attracting particular media attention for the past few days.

The exhibition It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby has been on display since Friday at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. We understand from its title that it is not a tribute to the Spanish painter. Rather, it is a scathing look at what “problems” with Picasso according to queer comedian Hannah Gadsby, namely his relationship to women.

Pablo Picasso said that he believed there were two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats. In Nanettethe activist show that brought Hannah Gadsby to Netflix audiences in 2018, the comedian describes Picasso’s misogyny as a mental illness.

“He paints vases of flesh for his tail flower,” Gadsby says of the leader of Cubism, a movement the artist derides with a touch of demagoguery. “I hate him, but we have no right to hate him,” adds the comedian, who earned a degree in art history from the Australian National University.

The reaction to the Brooklyn Museum’s most recent exhibit seems to prove him right. Some see it as an affront to the history of art, the expression of a neo-puritanism derived from the ideology woke (registered trademark), as well as an attempt – trauma warning – to “cancel” Picasso.

Certainly, Hannah Gadsby, who refuses to separate the artist from her art and the man from the artist, passes Picasso through the mill, it seems, in a series of comments posted near his works which are acid, childish, conventional and ill-advised, according to the critic of the New York Times.

In collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, Gadsby wanted to challenge the famous cult of male genius, revisiting Picasso’s work through the prism of feminism, while highlighting female artists who did not benefit from the same favorable prejudices as this self-proclaimed Minotaur.

Gold, It’s Pablo-matic misses the mark, according to most critics, by offering only a few minor works by Picasso (eight paintings, seven of which were borrowed from the Picasso Museum in Paris) and too few works by women who are supposed to give him some kind of cue .

The exhibition commented by Hannah Gadsby may be sloppy, it certainly does not aim to censor Picasso’s work. Grows, but grows equally, as my mother would say, a great admirer of the work of the painter of Ladies of Avignon.

” It’s Pablo-matic not trying to get Picasso canceled, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak told the newspaper Art Newspaper. It is rather the reverse. Cancel means to refuse to engage in a conversation. Refuse complexity. Our exhibition is an invitation to complexity. And I’m sure Picasso can handle a bit of complexity. In fact, he always invited her. »

Raising the specter of cancel culture because a museum presents a critical exhibition of a great master, it is to imply that he has become fossilized to the point of no longer being able to be questioned. To reproach Hannah Gadsby for ironizing Picasso’s phallic obsession is to reproach her for being a feminist.

Pablo Picasso refused a divorce to Olga Kohkhlova, who died in poverty when he was very rich. The ex-ballerina left the artist after meeting Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was a minor. Picasso’s model, she was forced for years into sexual relations by the painter, 30 years her senior, who ended up imposing his mistress, Dora Maar, on her.

Dora Maar, whom Picasso would have humiliated and beaten, ended her days in the asylum. Marie-Thérèse Walter took her own life. In his book Living with Picasso (1964), his former companion Françoise Gilot, who died Tuesday at the age of 101, described the painter as a “tyrannical being”. What made a columnist say that “he was not fine with his blondes”. When the heterosexual white man no longer has the right to beat up his mistress without being reproached for it a posteriori, it is because the movement woke has come too far (yes, it’s ironic)…

Guernica, a monumental painting in which Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter appear, is a masterpiece. Picasso was no less of a genius artist because he was a misogynist. His misogyny is no longer acceptable because he was awesome. To do without Picasso would be to deprive oneself of an exceptional work. To ignore his misogyny would be to close one’s eyes to the man he was and to the artist who said he did not paint what he sees, but what he thinks.

As was the case in 2018 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and in 2001 at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, Picasso’s work is now placed in context, whether from a perspective of cultural appropriation or echoes of the #metoo movement. Because for too long we have minimized the cruel and violent treatment he reserved for women. Pointing this out isn’t giving in to the cancel culture, it’s being transparent.

The controversy surrounding It’s Pablo-matic is once again the fruit of the misunderstanding that persists between the culture of cancellation and the legitimate criticism of behaviors and discourses that have been trivialized for too long.

Museums are filled with works of genius artists who were not exemplary in their private lives. They did not become persona non grata however. Paul Gauguin, in his late forties, consciously transmitted syphilis to his young prepubescent Tahitian mistresses. The paintings of these 13- and 14-year-old vahines can be admired in New York, Paris and elsewhere.

The work of Pablo Picasso, largely inspired by his toxic relationships with women, enriches the collections of the greatest museums in the world. I haven’t heard of anyone having stored a Picasso painting because of censorship or self-censorship. Rumors of its cancellation have been greatly exaggerated.