Perceptive as always, Zelda talks about her hero Picasso.
I HATE PICASSO
“Piz-Piz-Piz – lapis.” These were the first words Picasso uttered. Then he grasped the pencil
and didn’t let go. With pencil, brush and chisel Pablo Picasso smashed the classical tradition
and depicted the century he lived in.
Born in Spain, claimed by France, this man of the world was full of peasant superstitions. He
was the monumental egotist who threw the light of his genius on the depth of evil in man and
in our times.
His triumph was that he saw deeply and accurately. The tormented sexuality; the violence,
and the pain of our civilisation. His tragedy was that while consecrating destruction in his art,
he practised it relentlessly in life. He used his rage and his vengeance on people and
canvasses alike.
He could hide his fear, confusion and torment but he still had to live with it. He poured out in
the four powerfully moving etchings of the “Blind Minotaur” a symbol of himself being guided
by a beautiful girl, clutching a dove. There is an air of hopeless tragedy about the blinded
beast. So strong, yet so vulnerable.
The women in his life could truthfully have said, “I Hate Picasso.” The power he relished was
treating women as less than human, and then watching them gradually surrender. He, the
destroyer.
This short dark Spaniard with the mesmerising all-seeing eyes cut a swathe through women,
leaving a trail of destruction. His disastrous marriage to a Russian ballerina Olga Koklova
produced a son. On he went seducing and abandoning. In 1946, aged 65 he met Francois
Gilot, a talented 20-year old painter, and in she moved. This seven-year relationship
produced a son and a daughter. She moved on when Picasso found others with whom to
demonstrate his virility. She wrote a revealing autobiography and he finished a series of 180
tragi-comic scenes of nude women with the old painter, fauns, cupids and young girls.
He became interested in pottery and met a young potter, Jacquile Roque, who became his
last mistress. He worked in his obsessive way and produced 600 ceramic pieces in one year.
In 1961 the mistress became his wife, his keeper and mother figure.
Picasso had mastered the publicity game before the world knew such a game existed. He had
always recognised a correlation between the money fetched by a painting and the legend built
around the painter. Money was the clear-cut barometer to his success.
The legacy of his art has to be seen in conjunction with the legacy of our time. He brought to
fullest expression the shattered vision of the century. He brought to painting the vision of
disintegration that Schoenberg and Bartok brought to music; Kafka and Becket to literature.
He took it to the ultimate conclusion. The negative vision of the modernist world.
Pablo Picasso said: “Art is a falsehood through which one finds the truth. I am only a public
entertainer who has understood his times and has exhausted as best he could the imbecility,
vanity, and cupidity of his contempories.”
Will the age being born also say … “I hate Picasso?”