On Sunday 3ed March 2019, I went out on a bitterly cold, wet and stormy day to Dun Laoghaire with Carol to see Young Picasso: Exhibition on Screen in the Pavilion Theatre. It was the first time since late 1992 that I had been to Dun Laoghaire, when I had given up my studio in the area within a few months, because my social anxiety made it so hard for me to paint outside the safety of my bedroom at home. Before that, the last time I had been in Dun Laoghaire had been when I had drunkenly returned to the Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design a few months after I had been expelled - because of my dismal performance and a fight I had with a young man in my class. I had thought my peers would welcome seeing me again - but it quickly became obvious they were uncomfortable and afraid of my reappearance and I was asked to leave.
My trip to Dun Laoghaire with Carol was one of my rare trips out and about - since I had given up all interest in contemporary art and had become contemptuous of the whole absurd, pretentious, effete, snobbish, vain, greedy, manipulative and hypocritical art world. Besides, I had not heard of a single exhibition in Dublin after the Emil Nolde exhibition in the National Gallery of Ireland in March 2018 - that I wanted or frankly needed to see. I only wished to leave my house and travel to Dun Laoghaire to see Young Picasso because since my youth I had been obsessed with Picasso and in particular with his early work and development - and I doubted if I would ever have the money or energy to visit his museums again. The 85-minute documentary highlighted the early work of Picasso in the Picasso museums in Malaga, Barcelona and Paris as well as other museums like MoMA and showed his progress from child prodigy to moody painter of the Blue and Rose Periods and ended with his creation of the iconoclastic Modernist masterpiece Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. I had visited the Musée Picasso in Paris in August 1990 and February 2001 and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona in August 1999. But I had never visited the Museo Picasso Málaga, though I had looked through its fat red catalogue raisonné in the NCAD library. At home I also had dozens of books on Picasso and many on his early work. So, I went to Young Picasso: Exhibition on Screen just to relive what I had already seen and studied.
When we arrived in Dun Laoghaire at about 3pm, we went to Starbucks and had coffees. Then we went to Dun Laoghaire shopping centre - which I had not been to since a teenager in around 1989 - and I was shocked by how small, drab and dated it was. Trying to kill time, we went in the pouring rain down to the pier and Carol photographed the stormy sea. Afterwards we went to Easons and I bought the magazine Bringing History to Life: Greatest Battles of WWII. In the late evening, we went to McDonalds and had Big Mac meals. Afterwards, we walked about the village as it started to snow! At 6pm, we went back to Starbucks and had coffees and killed time before the movie. Finally, we went over to the Pavilion Theatre to see the movie.
I had foolishly though that many young art students and artists would have flocked to see this story of youthful development - but the audience was overwhelming elderly men and women. In fact, there were only a handful of middle-aged people our age there - though there were some who had brought their well-behaved young daughters or granddaughters. It seemed that most young artists did not give a dam about Picasso! For me, the greatest documentary ever made on Picasso was the three-part one made by John Richardson in 2001 called Picasso: Magic, Sex & Death. Young Picasso was not as good as that, but it was very informative, and I even learned things I had not known before or had forgotten.
Picasso would be merely remembered today as realist child prodigy and minor Symbolist painter, if in 1907 he had not painted Les Demoiselle d’Avignon the single most radical painting of Modernism and then went on to invent Cubism with George Braque - the most revolutionary reorganizing of form since the Renaissance - which then became the most influential movement of Modernism. After Cubism, Picasso continued to startle, perplex and astonish the art world with his protean creativity and constant stylistic changes. But he also came to dominate the gossip pages through his charismatic persona and stories about his innumerable exhibitions, womanising, social climbing, immense wealth, pacifism, and hypocritical membership of the Communist Party. When he died in 1973, he had become the richest and most famous artist in history. And even before his death, his creativity was talked about mythically in divine or demonic terms. According to the ongoing Online Picasso Project, the most detailed and up to date catalogue of Picasso’s work, between 1891-1973 Picasso produced; 4,530 oil paintings, 864 gouaches, 1,039 watercolours, 363 pastels, 333 collages, 12,916 drawings, 1,660 uncategorised works, 3,194 engravings, 992 lithographs, 843 sculptures, 1,685 ceramics as well as 324 photographs. So, in an eighty-two-year period, Picasso made a total of 28,743 surviving catalogued works! Picasso as terrified of death, and compelled to constantly produce artworks - to prove his genius and win immortality.
Lost in the long story of Picasso the great artist, was his humble origins as Pablo Ruiz the young son of a mediocre academic painter of pigeons in provincial Spain. Most people were happy to laud Picasso the genius - without ever wondering how he became so great. If people did mention his early work, it was just to prove to philistines who thought Modern art was hoax – that at least Picasso could draw and paint conventionally. But as an ambitious teenage artist, I was obsessed with how Picasso became so brilliant and I thought that I could only beat him as a mature artist - if I mirrored his early development and earned the right to my own future iconoclasm. I recall that when I grew up in the 1980s in Ireland, art was still a very elitist activity, and for the general public and TV audiences alike, virtually all artistic people were considered idiotic con-artists and sexually dubious poseurs - apart from a tiny select few geniuses that might be included in magazine part-works like The Great Artists or Discovering the Great Paintings! And only children in artistic families or in rich private schools were given the kind of creative encouragement many young people enjoy today because creativity has finally been recoginsed as vital to contemporary advertising, branding and social media companies.
Personally my artistic ambition was regarded as a delusional embarrassment by most of my family and they did little to encourage me and mostly tried to ignore it - in the hope I would abandon it. In fact, until I got accepted on the basis of exceptional talent into Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design in September 1989 – my mother fought my ambition tooth and nail and belittled me constantly. So apart from the praise of a few of my art teachers, I had to motivate myself and sacrifice almost everything in my life to pursue my dream. Because so much of my artistic development was self-directed, I chose to look at the early work of artists I admired like Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Amedeo Modigliani and Egon Schiele and try to match their early efforts. And it was no coincidence that all my heroes were men – because the brotherhood of art - gave me relief from the terrifying and abominable presence of women. In my mind, I was in an imaginary classroom with my heroes and I thought that only by achieving the conventional skills they possessed at my age - could I earn the right to call myself an artist and later break the rules. Then I discovered the early work of Picasso and my heart was broken - because even at seventeen - I was an abject failure compared to the young Picasso! On the other hand, I suddenly had a visual textbook of youthful creativity from which I could learn. And even now, in bleak periods of artist’s block, I look at the work of the young Picasso for inspiration.
However, I did not realise at seventeen, how perverse and artistically nïave I was to seek to emulate the dated late nineteenth century realism of Picasso in 1988 - rather than reflect the nature of my own time. (Though ironically, it could be argued that ideologically Ireland in the 1980s was similar to late nineteenth century Spain with its Nationalism, insularity, provincialism, dire poverty, petite-bourgeois conformity, medieval Catholic hatred of sex and the flesh, paternalistic censorship, moral restrictions on almost every aspect of life, hatred of rebellious youth, misogyny and ambivalence towards both modernity and Modernism.) I also did not realise that by 1988, Picasso was considered an irrelevant dinosaur in the contemporary art world abroad that believed that the anti-art ready-mades and proto-conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp were far more important.
What I also did not know at the time, was that by trying to emulate Picasso’s early development - I was making things far more difficult for myself - than if I had just arrogantly painted whatever way I felt like and just bluffed it like so many others. I also did not know that no matter what technical achievements I made in my art – they would be undermined and warped by my arrested development, psychological defects and growing mental illness. At seventeen, I had no idea how alienated I had already become from both society and reality and how that would limit the humanity of my art and reduce me to drawing and painting mostly from second-hand media images throughout my life - rather than engaging in the real world with real people like the young Picasso had done so thoroughly. Nor did I realise then, how the damage done to me in childhood would seep into my art - making it anti-social, misanthropic and misogynistic - and guarantee that few people would ever accept it. I also had a totally naïve idea that all an artist had to do was make great artworks and the world would come running. I had no idea how much bravado, hype, salesmanship, seduction, manipulation, arse-licking and social-climbing were involved in promoting one’s art and getting people to believe in and collect it.
What I did know, was that art was literally the only thing I lived for and after making a vow at the age of ten to become a great artist - I would die trying to achieve my dream. Art was the only thing I excelled at as a teenager, it was the only thing I was ever praised for, and most importantly it was the only thing that eased my agonising mental pain and gave me a sense of purpose and mastery. And I foolishly thought that if I became a great artist like Picasso, I would finally be loved, respected, valued and understood. But I did not realise that I was asking for things art could never satisfy, that my childhood neglect could never be made up for, and that most people did not give a dam about art, knew nothing about it and only took notice when fame and money were involved.
If I had seen the Young Picasso documentary in 1988 at the age of seventeen, I might in desperation, have considered throwing myself in front of a train on the way home! Because I totally lacked Picasso’s talent, preternatural skill, work ethic, self-confidence, mental-strength, happy childhood, family support and encouragement and his father’s artistic training and guidance. While Picasso had a cast-iron extrovert self-confidence and self-belief – my mind was shattered and weak and I was an anti-social introvert. On the other-hand, I also lacked the casually arrogant defensiveness of the talentless and unambitious who just cynically shrug at the triumphs of others, make absurd excuses for their own abject failure and make personal attacks on those who have achieved greatness. So, for me as a youth it really did matter to me how crap I was compared to the young Picasso. And as a teenager, I felt like I was wading desperately through a tar-pit in a darkened cave - while the young Picasso danced freely above me on the sunny uplands surrounded by adoring groupies.
Night after night, I would try through sheer force of will, to match Picasso - but he had never had to force his genuine talent. But it is notable that while I mimicked some of his styles and subjects - I was more obsessed by his sheer production numbers - so I sought to produce as many pornographic paintings as I could and bizarrely thought that I could become a better artist than Picasso by being obscener. I was even driven to backdate my work from early January 1987 to late January 1993, to make it seem that I was more precocious than I was. And my obsessive-compulsive backdating was such a shameful and mortal secret to me - that when I finally admitted it to my therapist - I tried to kill myself later that night. But when I survived, I thankful gave up my backdating and shuck off my obsession with Picasso’s productivity.
Now as a fifty-year-old failure, I am still a wreak of a man, but I am also more realistic about myself, my art and the nature of life. I continue to paint, because I vowed as a child to never quit, but really, I continue to make art more as a form of therapy than out of any real hope of success. Besides the idealistic vision I had of art as a boy has been destroyed for me by contact with its reality - and I feel I belong even less to the world now - than I did as a boy.
I also have a more mature and pragmatic understanding of the nature of artistic prodigies and their frequent ultimate mature failures. Because as Edgar Degas observed, "Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty". And graveyards around the world are filled with the anonymous, forgotten and overgrown graves of arrogant prodigies - who thought they would become historically significant. Moreover, given the nature of today’s art glut - they will continue to be filled for decades to come. But Picasso was rare amongst child prodigies, because he continued to excel and innovate throughout his life and in fact vastly outperformed his early promise. So, while I later abandoned many of my childhood heroes, I continued to be inspired by Picasso and considered him the greatest artist of the twentieth century.
Not only are the combined early childhood artworks of Picasso in the Museu Picasso Barcelona, Musée Picasso Paris and Museo Picasso Málaga the largest for any major artist in art history, it is doubtful if any significant artist will ever bequeath such a body of youthfully painted and drawn work again - given that most children today spend so much of their time indolently and passively watching TV and computer screens and have the attention spans of houseflies. Moreover, while art may never die, and will no doubt exploit the vast new technologies like virtual reality - for me, art has been in terminal decline since the late 1990s and the rise of politically-correct art. Because art it is now so much a part of the global and anti-democratic liberal élite committed to progressive fantasies and no longer willing to say anything honest, troubling or transgressive because art has become so much about reputations, status, money and conformity. So, like a fanatical monk who has abandoned religion and become an aggressive atheist – I no longer believe in the manipulative farce of the art world and only revere a few exceptional geniuses.
As for the nature of artistic prodigies - they are philosophically problematic for me today. They rarely innovate and tend to exploit the well-worn truths of an over-ripe period and style. Like annoying, pampered and displayed parrots - they often just spout prose others invented. So paradoxically, child prodigies are just as often sociologically and art historically the sign of an ending - rather than the heralding of a new beginning. More worryingly, recent child prodigy painters like Alexandra Nechita, Akiane Kramarik, Marla Olmstead and Kieron Williamson have been overexposed before their time, cynically marketed by their families, turned by into commercial and media pawns and uncritically praised - thus almost guaranteeing mature failure. While the ignorant public still think that art is either about painting realistically or with apparent wild and crazy abandon, the art world (at least since the Impressionists in the 1870s put personal, interpretive sensation ahead of objective reality and the tsunami of photography changed everyone’s understanding of the real and made most realist painting a waste of time) have considered realist painting redundant and since the late 1970s and Post-Structuralism and the so called ‘death of the author’ are even more sceptical of claims of autonomous and spontaneous expressivity. So, the art of the aforementioned commercially successful child prodigies is treated like a sad joke, similar to the self-love of brain-dead reality stars on TV, who actually think they are the revered authors of their own lives and think people are laughing with them - when in fact they are laughing at them!
In fact, today’s real, élite art world (which still upholds certain standards of originality, meaning and criticality) has turned aggressively against traditional manual skill and realist art which is considered elitist, reactionary and bankrupt. So, figurative painting and drawing has largely been pushed aside in favour of egalitarian abstraction, found-objects, assemblage, installations, performance, photography, multi-media, and ideas-based art. Besides, while it was quite common in the Renaissance for young teenagers to work full-time for up to ten years under a Master or in the late nineteenth century for teenage prodigies to attend art colleges full-time for years - today’s teenagers are lucky if they get to spend two hours a week in art class in high school. And because few Art Colleges today accept pupils on the basis of their portfolios alone - they also know that their only real chance of getting into an art college is to also do well in their other core subjects. So, in their brief art classes, they are encouraged to develop quick, catchy ideas which can be rapidly executed - rather than develop technical skills that require both aptitude and patience and may take years to mature. Meanwhile, if you are a contemporary conceptual artist today like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst and can’t draw for toffee - but you wish to create say photo-realist paintings or hyper-real sculptures - you can simply buy the souls of the vast unemployed proletariat of traditionally skilled artists and technicians - and instruct them to make what you want!
Then there is the great irony of Picasso’s career, he started as a respectable late nineteenth century prodigy but ended up as a late twentieth century Bad Painter of childlike obscene doodles anticipating Neo-Expressionism. As the arch-conservative art critic Brian Sewell wrote after viewing an exhibition of Picasso’s late artwork in 1988: “A thousand years hence, historians will strive to reverse the chronology, finding it inconceivable that such adolescent graffiti could succeed the intellectual weight of Cubism and the emotional power of the Pink and Blue periods – turn it on its head and it works much better backwards, for in his youth the brilliant Barcelona boy was never the nasty incompetent child he became in his senility”. (Brian Sewell, Late Picasso, Alphabet of Villains. London: Bloomsbury, 1995, P. 178.) The traditional devolution of Picasso’s career was unique in art history (though fatuously exaggerated comparisons between late Picasso and late Titian and Rembrandt were made by his lackies) and was only possible in the twentieth century because ancient skills and traditional standards had been replaced by an art market desire for the rapid turnover of novel styles and media need for sensation and scandal. But Picasso himself was well aware of his problematic relationship to tradition and late in life observed that: “Beginning with van Gogh, however great we may be, we are all, in a measure, auto-didacts – you might almost say primitive painters. Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each one of us must re-create an entire language. Every painter of our times is fully authorized to re-create that language from A to Z.” (Pablo Picasso quoted in Life with Picasso, Francoise Gilot & Carlton Lake, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964, P.67.)
So, the display of Picasso’s early work is theoretically problematic - because even though it is stunning as the work of a child and even though he was proud he was a prodigy - it also represents everything he later rebelled against. Because Picasso’s entire later career in all its various styles, subject matter and ideas was a defiant assertion all of the things restrictive 19th century provincial Spain and Picasso’s father could not dream of in their philosophy. Moreover, the lavish display of Picasso’s early work is now only possible because Picasso later became an infamous Modernist Master and then the most famous and wealthiest artist in art history.
It is notable that the last genuinely great and credible prodigy in art was the twenty-something Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1980s who was inspired by the late Picasso paintings so reviled by the likes of Brian Sewell. Basquiat inverted Picasso’s white Western pillaging of so-called ‘primitive’ Africa art. Basquiat deconstructed and reversed Picasso’s aesthetic colonisation and gave voice to the black lives, culture and history that had been excluded from Western Art History. He was the greatest Neo-Expressionist painter of the 1980s - but he was also a superb Conceptual artist whose first great idea was to draw like a street-smart psychotic child, and he relied more on stylistic ideas than conventional technical skill. Yet, technically Basquiat (who would have flunked any of the traditional academic test’s Picasso triumphed in as a teenager) also proved himself a virtuoso of the ‘primitive-look’ developed by the likes of Picasso and Dubuffet and he did so, in such a hip, Post-Modern and critical way that he avoided mere pastiche and contributed something genuinely new and telling. Like Picasso before him, Basquiat demonstrated that great art is about so much more than mere conventional talent or skill and requires many other things like creativity, original ideas, personality, awareness of both art history and artistic fashion and frankly something meaningful to say. Given the bankrupt and debased nature of contemporary art education, it is no surprise that far more young artists today, lazily try to mimic Basquiat’s ‘primitive’ and ‘child-like’ Neo-Expressionist mimicry of Picasso’s early ‘Negro’ Cubist mimicking of African ‘primitive’ art - than try to paint a large realist multiple-figure anecdotal canvas like The First Communion which Picasso painted at the age of fourteen. All three types of painting are of course now outdated and to copy them is a form of visual plagiarism. Yet, it is funny that while the vast majority of art students today cannot come up with an original idea, they can satisfactorily copy the African Tribal inspired early ‘Negro’ Cubist paintings of the twenty-six-year-old Picasso or the Neo-Expressionist paintings of the twenty-something Basquiat. Funnier still, is that virtually none of them can adequately copy the realist fourteen-year-old Picasso! And nor could I - even now at the age of fifty!
Born in 1881, Picasso was lucky to be born into a family that considered art important, were convinced of little Pablo’s genius and who later did everything to preserve his earliest efforts. He was also born at a time in art history when the study of juvenilia had become fashionable and thought to provide vital clues to the development of artistic genius. Before the youth revolt of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, the only work considered preserving was the work of mature masters and the idea of glorifying the efforts of children or teenagers would have seemed presumptuous and absurd. So, the early works on paper of student artists were rarely preserved and the oil paintings or sculptures they had worked on that were preserved were usually workshop or academic pieces made under the instruction of a Master - so despite being technically skilled even brilliant, they often lacked a sense of personal authorship. For example, while the early oil paintings of Anthony van Dyke and Théodore Chassériau were technically more complex and accomplished than Picasso’s early work, much of their work that has survived from their youth was produced either in the factory system of Rubens or the academy of Ingres and so they can lack individuality.
Like so many talented and prodigious young artists, Pablo benefited from the fact that his father was an art teacher, who both encouraged his talent and taught him the tricks of the trade. His father also bought him art materials, set him tests and hired and paid for models. First taught by his father, Picasso went on just before his eleventh birthday to study at the Corunna School of Arts where his father taught, then at the age of fourteen he was accepted into the Provincial School of Fine Arts (La Llotja) in Barcelona and finally he was accepted at the age of sixteen into the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Later in life, Picasso liked to downplay the influence of his father and the various academies he studied in - which went down well in an age that had come to despise both patriarchy and academic art and extolled the virtues of youthful rebellion. Now while there is no doubt that Picasso was a prodigy and he achieved things most children of artists never go on to achieve, it is naïve to believe that his training did not help sharpen his skills - even if he later went on to break them. And if Picasso was later to claim with sadness that he had never drawn like a child - and tried to paint like a child in his later life - it was because the period after World War Two exalted innocent childish creativity in opposition to the catastrophic maturity that had brought about war.
As it is, we have virtually nothing made before Picasso turned nine and some like John Richardson think Picasso destroyed this early work because it was so childlike and unremarkable. And far from being some kind of rebel, Picasso happily learned first from his father and then in the aforementioned academies until the age of sixteen and a half. So, throughout his academic training, Picasso produced a lot of brilliant and conformist academic work and proved that he had the talent, skill, craftsmanship, work ethic and ambition to succeed as a fine academic painter – but ultimately, he had different ambitions. It was only in the summer of 1898 that Picasso began to question what all this traditional training meant in the age of Modernism and his work from mid-1898 until late-1901 was marked by a restless search for a style that had meaning and modernity.
From the moment Picasso left the academy and started to try to make a name for himself as an artist he shrewdly ingratiated himself with other young artists and used portraits of them to create bonds of trust. He also cunningly befriended intellectuals and writers who would champion his art. Picasso had been born after the seismic revolution of Impressionism with its stress upon the immediacy of the sketch, personal sensation and touch. So, one of the most distinct and modern qualities of Picasso’s early work was its often, unfinished, impetuous quality, whether that was in dramatic and intense realist portraits on canvas or on pages teeming with tiny little drawings of street life. Even in his early academic work Picasso rebelled against traditional expectations of finish and he seemed to be loathed to bring an artwork to a conventional conclusion.
It was in Picasso’s many and various portraits, nudes, figure studies and landscapes made in all kinds of mediums and mostly made from life or taken from him memory and imagination - that his tremendous innate creativity was revealed. A naturally fluent and effortless talent, Picasso was thus able to create a youthful visual diary unparalleled in art history. Even more than his oil paintings, highly finished academic drawings, and spontaneous studies in various mediums on loose sheets of larger paper, Picasso’s seventeen small sketchbooks from 1883-89 reveal his omnivorous and constant study of life around him. Few of these drawings have the wow factor of his more substantial works on loose leaf paper, but they formed the bedrock of his extremely strong realist training. In page after page of these notebooks, we find Picasso draw and redraw hands, feet, faces, and bodies both clothed and naked. They are also incredibly humble and delicate works that show a humble youthful desire to learn about the complexity of the visual world that is surprising considering the braggadocio of his later work. In fact, if there is one thing that I am constantly trying to reiterate in my writings about artistic training, it is that no matter how great the natural talent or passion of young artist, it is useless bluster without diligent hard work over years even decades. The general assumption that ‘genius’ is merely a fluke of nature or fate, is just an excuse lazy and unmotivated people use to avoid work.
Even today, Picasso’s quick oil sketches, watercolours, pastels and drawings reminiscent of Rembrandt and Eugène Delacroix and made for his own pleasure and self-realisation retain a freshness and vitality that is exceptional - and prove that he had the creativity needed to succeed as an innovator in the Modernist age.
It should also be noted for those unfamiliar with the various drawing and painting mediums, that they all have their own special qualities, difficulties and best practice. So, Picasso’s effortless youthful switching between mediums was remarkable. As was the lasting conservational quality of most of his work - which shows none of the disastrous technical errors that have plagued the conservation of the work of so many other Modern artists - who ignorantly and recklessly made their mediums do things that they were never made to do.
Yet, as I have suggested above, the question of how relevant Picasso the child prodigy was to Picasso the Modernist Master remains debatable. Many Modernist painters from Cézanne to Pollock were technically traditional cripples and countless others from the 1910s onward as members of movements like Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract-Expressionism, Pop Art and Conceptualism had absolutely no traditional artistic talent or education - but they were still able to achieve recognition through eccentric showing-off, iconoclastic gestures and media stunts. However, following on from T. S. Eliot there have been many critics like Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes who have argued that many of the lasting greats of Modernism like Picasso, Henri Matisse, Max Beckman and Willem de Kooning were first and foremost traditionally trained artists with a respect for craft, who combined a reverence for tradition with a Modernist need to recast the human condition in new forms. Although the public often thought they were crude incompetent frauds, the truth was they were very sophisticated artists who had de-skilled themselves so as to make eloquent and original modern works that avoided the traps of academicism and kitsch. Personally, despite what people may think from my anti-social and pornographic subject matter, I have always been philosophically and technically on the latter conservative side of art history. So, I don’t think that Picasso’s traditional grounding was incidental to his later greatness. But at the same time, I recognise that had Picasso not been so willful and radical and not sought to break away from the provincial realism of his youth, he would have just ended up like all those tediously stupid, unoriginal, facile and kitsch painters that fill the walls of shopping-mall galleries around the world with bucolic landscapes, jaunty cityscapes, chocolate-box still-lives and simpering female nudes. As a devastating iconoclastic rebel, Picasso first gained the authority of tradition - only to then repudiate it and thus his rejection was all the more profound. He chewed through all the subjects of realism and proved his genuine talent for it and then systematically deconstructed it and all its pretensions to meaning, value and truth.
When Picasso arrived in Paris in 1900, he quickly assimilated many of the styles then fashionable to produce a kind of proto-Fauvist body of work that was quickly and deliberately made to cause a sensation and attract buyers - which it did. But after his best friend Carles Casagemas’s committed suicide - Picasso was left feeling devastated and began to paint increasingly in blue to express his grief. These new works were not popular with dealers and soon Picasso was plunged into poverty because of his new artistic vision. The Blue Period was the most difficult and inward-looking of Picasso’s entire life. For the first time, his commitment to his art was really tested. Suffering poverty and depression, Picasso painted the poor and destitute as though they were Medieval saints or melancholy and tragic characters in a silent movie. Cynics have suggested that Picasso painted in blue because blue paint was cheap. But some of the blues he used like cerulean blue were very expensive and there was also passages of yellow, red, green and mauve in his Blue Period work. What was true, was that given his poverty it was cheaper to paint monochrome paintings than full colour ones. Nor were his blue paintings unique. In fact, many Symbolist painters had shown a similar infatuation with blue. Given Picasso’s poverty at the time, it is also notable that many of his best works of the Blue Period were on paper in watercolour, pastel or ink.
Picasso’s Blue Period artworks revealed his youthful sympathy with the fate of his fellow human beings and his sadness for the plight of the poor, destitute, insane and marginalised including the desperate life of prostitutes who often became unmarried mothers and died young of syphilis. Yet, his introverted Blue Period was also notable for its lack of political engagement, tragic fatalism and realisation that there was little that Picasso himself could do about the situation - other than record it for posterity. Thus, the young Picasso never descended into the kind of adolescent political slogans and rants so typical of lesser artists - especially today.
In August 1904, Picasso fell in love with Fernande Olivier his first significant lover. When she first met Picasso, Fernande noted that he was very shy, and she was reluctant to be with him because she had already married unhappily as a teenager and had numerous affairs with other artists. At first Fernande simply referred to Picasso as “the Spanish painter” and complained that young Picasso’s personal hygiene was awful. It was only when Picasso introduced her to opium that she fell in love with him. Fernande thought Picasso was a repressed-Classist who had decided that no one would take him seriously if he revealed what a virtuoso he was. So, he had de-skilled himself in order to be fashionably Modern. Slowly, the blues in Picasso work gave way to pinks and ochres as things in his life improved. The happier mood of the Rose Period was not only a result of his happy romantic relationship with Fernande Olivier, it was also due to the languid dreaminess of opium, his growing band of champions like Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire and his growing success with collectors like Gertrude Stein and dealers like Ambroise Vollard. The cast of characters in his work also changed from the hopelessly poor and doomed to the free-spirited acrobats and harlequins of the circus. These were poor people on the edges of society who lived by their own rules and created beauty out of virtually nothing. Picasso liked to depict himself as a harlequin who had made a beautiful costume out of rags and was constantly changing his style. Picasso was also fond of the dark side of the harlequin who hid his true self behind a mask.
Picasso’s Rose Period was his sweetest and most beautiful period and was so androgynous and feminine that one might have thought that these works had been painted by a woman. Except that, despite all the ranting Feminist propaganda today for the abilities of female artists dead and alive - no woman has ever painted as beautifully or poetically as this. Nor has any woman ever painted young men more handsomely, dreamily, sympathetically and with such humanity as Picasso did during his Rose Period.
The vast majority of artists would have continued to paint these pleasing pictures - which were both critically praised and commercial successful - and continued to rake in the cash and settle down to a comfortable life of artistic repetition. But not Picasso! He constantly took risks with his own career by changing and even repudiating profitable styles - regardless of the cost.
Seeing the success of Matisse and the Fauves who since 1905 had begun to be hailed as revolutionaries - Picasso realised that he was insignificant to the growing story of Modernism. So, in August 1906, he began to work on a huge canvas that would be his bid for the leadership of Modernism. At 96” x 92” (or 243.9 x 233.7cm) it was the largest canvas he had ever painted and because he preferred to work on fine grained canvas more suited to smaller works - he had it backed with a heavier canvas. Picasso decided to paint a brothel scene at first entitled The Wages of Sin - which was inspired by his memories of himself as a teenager visiting prostitutes in brothels in Calle d’Avinyó in Barcelona. One can only imagine the five-foot-four-inch Picasso, toiling on the massive canvas as his nearly eight-foot-tall prostitutes stared back at him. If Matisse and the Fauves had revolutionised colour in painting - he would revolutionise form. Over the course of three-quarters of a year, Picasso made no fewer than 809 studies for this new canvas which ranged from quick scribbles in sketchbooks to large drawings and even a couple of small painted studies. And the canvas itself underwent a number of transformations as he painted it. This vast quantity of studies and prolonged period of working would be astonishing for the average artist. But for an artist of such quicksilver creativity as Picasso - they signified an incredibly obsessive intellectual and creative process. Which is why historians and academics have written about its almost daily developments and argued over their possible dates and meanings.
Picasso initially sought to create a rather stage like looking allegory of Eros and Thanatos in which a sailor was surrounded by five prostitutes - while a young medical student entered stage-left with a skull in his hand. It was supposed to be a dramatic tale about the dangers of promiscuity and syphilis and in many ways - it harked back to Picasso’s youthful realist anecdotal paintings like The First Communion and Science and Charity. But quickly Picasso realised how dated it looked. So, he removed the sailor and medical student and zoomed in – to create a pervert’s eye view of the prostitutes. All of a sudden, we are no longer the audience at a stage play set in a brothel – we are the paying customer being asked to choose which of the five brash prostitutes who stare at us provocatively we want to fuck - in a knowing nod to the Judgement of Paris with all its tragic consequences. Thus, we are implicated in the sexual scene in a way even more radical than Manet’s Olympia’s single haughty prostitute.
Yet, that was just the mere subject of his canvas. Picasso’s ambitious were far greater. He wanted to do nothing less than sum up the entire history of figuration in the West and then deconstruct it. None of the prostitutes in the painting were painted from life - instead they were lifted from famous nudes of art history. When Picasso started the painting, he was obsessed with the languorous, beautifully idealised and somewhat abstract nudes of Ingres. So, the central prostitute with one arm raised behind her back was taken from a nude in Ingres’s The Source from 1856. And the incredibly flat pink modelling of the bodies of the prostitutes in the early stages of Les Demoiselle d’Avignon - may also have been inspired by Ingres. But then Picasso came under the sway of Cézanne and his oddly blocky nudes in nature and multiple viewing points - which inspired Picasso to make it seem as though the figures of the prostitutes were moving in space. The squatting prostitute on the lower right-hand side may have been a reference to a seated female figure in Cézanne’s paintings like Three Bathers from 1879-82. On the other hand, in early April 1907, Picasso and Ferdinand adopted a thirteen-year-old orphan girl called Raymonde. That we know about this comes mainly from André Salmon’s autobiographical novel La Négresse du Sacré-Coeur in which Raymonde is called Leontine and Picasso named Sorgue. Writers suggest that Ferdinand became jealous of Picasso and suspected him of being attracted to the girl. So, she was sent away. There is no indication that Picasso ever abused the girl. However, Picasso’s possible illicit desire for the young girl may have influenced the crisis of desire and representation in Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. And some cite a quick drawing Picasso made Raymonde Examining Her Foot (in which the seated Raymonde’s spread legs revealed her sex to Picasso’s gaze) as a possible inspiration for the squat figure on the ottoman in the lower righthand corner. Meanwhile, Picasso became aware of 4th to 3ed Century BC Iberian sculptural figures which inspired him because they were part of his own heritage. In the canvas’s first version, Picasso painted all the faces of the prostitutes in an Iberian manner but subtly painted the four frontally facing faces with noses drawn in profile. Meanwhile he also became obsessed with El Greco and in particular El Greco’s squarish canvas Apocalyptic Vision from 1608-14 which he saw in a Spanish painter’s studio in Paris. One can detect El Greco’s influence in both the dimensions of the canvas, its apocalyptic vision and the glass-like shards in the centre of the canvas - that echo the spiritually torn looking skies of El Greco.
The traditional consensus says that Picasso finished the first version of the canvas around the spring of 1907 - but he remained unsatisfied with it. The painting lacked something for him. Since around 1902, Picasso had been passionate about the work of Paul Gauguin who was the first major artist to bring awareness of ‘primitive’ Polynesian tribal culture to Paris and marry it with his own Post-Impressionist work. Picasso had also probably seen African tribal masks and totems in the studios of artists like Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain and Henri Matisse in Paris where they had become fashionable to collect and muse over. But Picasso thought he might actually have some practical use for them. So, he did not simply stumble into the Musée d’Ethnographie at the Palais du Trocadéro – he was searching for a revelation! And he found it the African and Oceanic tribal artworks. Historians still debate how much Picasso actually copied from African art. Some suggest that it simply confirmed for him things he had already started doing to his faces and figures. As early as the Blue Period, Picasso had been begun reducing faces to mask-like constructions - a tendency that reached a peak with his portrait of Gertrude Stein in the autumn of 1906. And although the face of the prostitute squatting on the lower right-hand side was clearly influenced by African tribal art, historians argue that the way Picasso painted the mask-like face frontally but with a nose that could be seen in profile was his own invention. The way this squatting prostitute’s head swivels around to look at the viewer is like something straight out of The Exorcist. Notice too, the way he blinded the eye of the prostitute with the African mask on the upper far right holding open the curtain. However, it also seems that Picasso was egotistically reluctant to later give credit or too simplistic an explanation for his greatest achievement to African artists. The traditional consensus say that it is all too clear that in July 1907, Picasso’s was influenced by African tribal art to vandalise the Iberian faces of the two prostitutes on the right-hand side - with over-painted African tribal like masks. He also gave the face of the woman on the far left a face that was both Egyptian and African looking and although her face was seen in profile Picasso made her eye appear frontally which was another of his innovations. Yet, he stopped short of transforming the whole canvas in accord with this new influence and simply abandoned it. He may or may not have wanted to go back and finish it - but he never did. Perhaps he recognised that its psycho-sexual psychotic look - had achieved what he had want. Years later, Picasso admitted that the tribal artists of Africa had taught him that art was about magic - and that it could be used to make manifest one’s terrors and desires so that one could exorcize them. African tribal art gave Picasso a ‘primitive’ version of form that could transform his twisted but still benign prostitutes into figures of real sexual dread.
But that was not the end of the story, in the late 1990’s new sources for Picasso’s imagery in Les Demoiselle d’Avignon were discovered. Anne Baldassari found black and white photographs of semi-naked African tribes’ women in Picasso’s photographic archive - whose poses were strikingly similar to those of the figures in Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. Yet, when Picasso had acquired these photographs and how much they influenced Les Demoiselle d’Avignon remains debatable.
Moreover, the exact stage, at which Picasso painted the heads on the righthand side with African mask like faces, is now also contentious. Recently Suzanne Preston Blier, in her book Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece, published in 2019, revealed a photograph from 1907 taken by Picasso of Guus and Dolly van Dongen, in front of the unfinished canvas which appears to show that the two female figures on the right-hand side of the canvas were painted early on with African mask like faces. But that would still have be after many months of preliminary sketches, studies, and rumination. Moreover, Picasso was never a confessional artist and exercised total control of his art and sexuality. So, it would be entirely in keeping with his academic approach to the realisation of this canvas for him to have worked it out long before in studies and his mind. Nor does it change the psychosexual meaning of the work.
Usually, such a dogs-dinner of influences would have resulted in total disaster and a painting that was merely a collection of pastiches. So, it is a mark of Les Demoiselle d’Avignon’s greatness that it only added to its mystique and made it one of those rare paintings that so many things can be read into.
If Picasso thought that his brothel painting would be hailed as masterpiece - he was sadly disappointed. Most of the artists, intellectuals and dealers he showed the work to thought he had lost his mind or that the painting was some kind of sick joke. But though no one knew it at the time the twenty-six-year-old Picasso had just changed the course of art history. Meanwhile, it was André Salmon not Picasso who gave the picture its acceptable title Les Demoiselle d’Avignon or The Young Ladies of Avignon. Picasso himself preferred the title Le Bordel d’Avignon or The Brothel of Avignon. Because it was so poorly received, Picasso put it away and it was not exhibited until 1916 and it was only in the early 1920’s that Surrealists like André Breton hailed its ground-breaking importance. And since then, it has been seen as a prophetic canvas that foresaw developments in Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism and Abstract-Expressionism.
Les Demoiselle d’Avignon was a schizophrenic and unfinished painting that made no conventional sense – but it was the also the very antithesis of stylish kitsch with spoon-fed meaning - which is why it has provoked so much debate and speculation. Rather than telling one story it tells numerous ones. What started out, as yet another conventional anecdotal academic picture titled The Wages of Sin – quickly became a vast laboratory used by Picasso to deconstruct Western figuration and confront the geometry of his own sexual fears. Yet Les Demoiselle d’Avignon was not a hot and heavy confession – it was more like a cold and dispassionate philosophical dissertation. Rather than being painted in one style it was painted in three or more. Rather than being a conventional ‘masterpiece’ that was the summation of all he had learned it was an experimental work that expressed all Picasso’s doubts about traditional figuration, the nature of reality and Westerns Arts idealistic, passive and innocent vision of femininity. It was not only Picasso’s bid for leadership of modern painting it was a challenge to the growing ubiquity and authority of photography and film. Thus, Les Demoiselle d’Avignon was both the summation and repudiation of all the assumptions of Western Art before the twentieth century. It marked both the explosive end of the Western figurative tradition and the start of a completely new understanding of reality and what art could be. Instead of presenting answers – it asked endless questions. It was the two-dimensional record of aesthetic thought - radically changing through the passage of time and psychological awareness. In the past, there had been plenty of preliminary drawings by Old Masters that had been re-worked with changes of composition and emphasis - but no one had ever turned a huge oil on canvas into a thought-process artwork like this. That is why there is even a conceptual quality to it - and why it is so demanding on the viewer who has to think through all its implications.
In late 1989, in Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design, I had written an essay on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and got an E. Which was only fair since I had put so little work into it. But the major problem I had was that I simply did not understand the painting or how I felt about it. I knew perfectly well how formally Picasso had painted it and how it gave birth to Cubism. But psychologically, I did not understand the painting or why Picasso had painted it. Looking back on this essay, I am reminded of how I also felt about having to study things like King Lear in school. Namely that it was utterly pointless to ask a teenage boy to write about the tragedies of maturity. At nineteen, I had no understanding or even believed in the castration complex or understood how much the fear of emasculation, impotence and castration lay behind macho bravado. It was only in middle age that I understood it and empathised with it. Nor as a virgin, had I any idea whatsoever what sex was like with a woman never mind a prostitute.
Now I realise, that the myth of Picasso the macho lover has obscured the reality of Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. Not least because, Picasso like most men of that generation never revealed any psychological weakness to others - and maintained a macho front. But behind the strutting machismo of every man - lies the dread of impotence and failure. As Camille Paglia has observed: “An erection is a thought and the orgasm an act of the imagination. The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man. He must perform, or the show does not go on. Social convention is irrelevant. A flop is a flop.” (Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, London: Penguin Books 1990, P. 20.)
The early writings on Picasso - which were overwhelmingly written by friends indebted to him - are mostly just a long series of tall-tales about how amazing Picasso was at everything. So, Picasso’s stories retold by his lackeys suggest that he lost his virginity aged fourteen to a prostitute in a brothel in Barcelona’s notorious Barri Xino and then continued to regularly visit these brothels. Writers like John Richardson recall these events as though the young Picasso was a stud. Apparently, there was no loneliness, no sad longing, no embarrassing moments, no awkward fumbling’s, no premature ejaculation, no impotence, no guilt and certainly no fears. The young Picasso was apparently as great a prodigy at fucking as drawing and painting. Yet, despite Richardson’s awe for Picasso and even crush on him, the young Picasso was just a pampered, teenage, bourgeois painter boy and these prostitutes were fully grown man-eaters! Richardson even went so far as to suggest that since Picasso had very little money but was very charming - the prostitutes might have offered to fuck him for free! The trouble is, the sexual ability of most young boys is laughable to most grown women - and it seems absurd they would take pity on him and fuck him out of charity rather than getting a paying customer - which is the only reason prostitutes fuck strange men or boys. Unfortunately, everyone who got close to Picasso were in such awe of him and so afraid to anger him, that they rarely had the guts to question him about his private life and then challenge his answers – so we are left with just macho myths. But when Fernande Oliver an experienced artist model, muse and lover met Picasso aged 23 in in 1904, and they began dating, she was struck by his shyness, poor hygiene and artless and clumsy fucking and she only fell in love with him because she was on opium!
What is not a myth, is the reality of Les Demoiselle d’Avignon a twisting, gyrating group of compliant prostitutes offering up themselves for Picasso - who turned in the process of its long making into mostly vicious towering medusas' surrounding him. The nudes in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon have been described by some - as like slabs of meat that Picasso has violently dissected. Yet, one could also see the torsos and flesh of the prostitutes in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as the dangerously jagged and articulated weapons of Amazons. Frankly, would any man want to advance naked into this vicious melange of scissoring flesh? No endless lists of Picasso’s stylistic influences and all the movements Les Demoiselle d’Avignon later influenced, or blow-by-blow accounts of how its composition changed from page to page of his sketchbooks from a stage set with actors in a dated allegory about the dangers of promiscuity and syphilis, or how it was finished as an Iberian influenced harem of eager prostitutes that looked like it could have been taken from the page of an erotic comic book and was then repainted with three of the women turning into tribal influenced monsters - can obscure what happened psychologically to Picasso as he spent three-quarters of a year making it. It may have started as a macho painting of phallic power - but he literally could not keep it up - and it became a horrific image of voyeuristic trauma, post-coital tristesse, fear of castration and abject terror of the feminine. And we all know it! Which is why it has remained on public view with little socio-political controversy since the late 1930s in MoMA - when other far more straightforwardly sexist and misogynistic works have been relegated to the storerooms of museums. Writing about two later prominent bad boy painters of women in the twentieth century Jean Dubuffet and Willem de Kooning, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl noted that: “A paradox of bad boy drawings of Woman is germane: trying to reduce the female to a derisory cipher invests it with such devouring force and confesses the boy’s puniness.” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Women” by Willem de Kooning and Jean Dubuffet, Village Voice, 8th January 1992.) So, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a painting that appears to pander to macho ideology – but actually reveals masculine weakness and impotence - and the greater and more constant sexual power of multiply-orgasmic women. As Camille Paglia noted: “Sex as portrayed in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a gateway to an impersonal world of pure biological force where man is nothing and where woman, a mother goddess splitting into her weird sisters, is everything.” (Camille Paglia, Heaven and Hell: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, New York: Vintage Books, 2013, P.105.) If the painting’s castration-fears are not talked about much and mostly passed over in silence - it is because emasculation is such a shameful thing for men - and even for women who as mothers and lovers spend their lives stroking men’s fragile egos. Moreover, most Feminists who naïvely believe macho propaganda and politically insist on being victims - refuse to see the truth behind so called phallic power.
There were probably many reasons for the psycho-sexual breakdown of Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. Picasso had started taking opium in the summer of 1904 and was still using it in 1907. While an opium user can at first feel euphoria, relaxation, reduced anxiety, a sense of detachment and like they are floating outside themselves. Long-term use can produce mental deterioration, difficulty concentrating, anxiety and impaired vision. Then there is the fact that Picasso tried to sum up the entire history of the nude in Western Art and load too much other content into one painting. While at first his vision was fresh, bold, energetic and optimistic - it could easily have become worn-out, plagued by myopic details, pessimistic and tortured. As a result, he may have become technically and psychologically fatigued and anguished - and subconsciously allowed that agony infect his work. I think it was this inner anguish that made Picasso transform the brothel scene into an involuntary confession of primal masculine terror in the face of primitive, insatiable, female sexuality. And for me, as a pornographic painter, obsessed with sexuality, this is what is far more important about Les Demoiselle d’Avignon than its formalist innovation and art historical significance as the mother of Cubism - which is now as old-fashioned as the unicycle, is irrelevant to contemporary art and has proved a dead-end.
In my experience, many prostitutes in brothels have a knowing fearlessness of most men - as a result of their vast experience of men of all ages and of all shapes and sizes, awareness of what weakness frequently lurks behind macho bravado and personal experience of men’s vulnerability and inadequacy. Reviled, marginalised and even brutalised they also have the freedom and fearlessness of the damned. As Camille Paglia noted: “The prostitute is not, as Feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture.” (Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays, London: Viking, 1992, P. 18.)
It seems unquestionable to me that at any time in art history - Picasso would have found a way to excel. However, the flaws and limitations to Picasso the prodigy and later virtuoso manipulator of style were many. He could be thoughtlessly happy just to fill canvases with glib painted forms merely for the sake of productivity and he could be facile and verge on pastiche at his worst. While, his development of so many styles was dazzling and in the case of Cubism historically momentous – it also left the question of who the real Picasso was hanging over his oeuvre - and promoted the likes of Carl Jung to speculate that he was schizophrenic (though the term was used much more broadly at the time than it is today). Not only was Picasso’s work on a strategic level stylistically diverse – it was also tactically diverse on the level of the fracture of his individual paintings as he constantly varied his drawing technique, thinness and thickness of paint, brush marks and colour combinations. Thus, even in individual paintings we can see how he was never satisfied with a routine and formulaic approach. He constantly sought to surprise himself and question the architecture of drawing and painting. This was also the way he avoided the kind of rote technique and slick virtuosity that had become so discredited through nineteenth century academicism and Belle Epoch portraiture. So, Picasso’s art displayed an incredible variety of visual ideas not only in his various artistic periods or his individual paintings but also in the space of a few square inches in single artworks.
My favourite Picasso periods were from 1891-1901 and from 1961-1973, or his work as a stunning prodigy and his work as an impotent man raging against death. In other words, his most immature, personal and emotive periods. Although Picasso was the co-creator of Cubism, it can be argued that Georges Braque was the finer Cubist painter and more innovative. As a colourist and Modernist painter Picasso lacked the sophistication of Henri Matisse. Nor was Picasso ever a painterly painter who could allow the paint to tell its own story and he was not a natural colourist, so his brushwork, paint and colour mostly just served his draughtsmanship. And while he was undoubtedly the greatest draughtsman of the Twentieth century - because of the quality, size and duration of his oeuvre and because of the variety of mediums, styles and moods he explored - he never possessed the shooting-star brilliance and stylistic explosiveness of Egon Schiele. Nor did Picasso ever achieve the transcendent humanism of Rembrandt or visionary feeling of van Gogh. As the sexually normative, pampered, adored and well adjusted-child of a middle-class family, Picasso could never - nor would have ever wanted to - produce the kind of truly sexually perverse and transgressive work made by the likes of Egon Schiele, Salvador Dalí or Hans Bellmer. Nor did Picasso have the capacity for the violent expression of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckman or Jackson Pollock. And because he was so gifted as a figurative artist, Picasso could never bring himself to fully developed his art abstractly like Wassily Kandinsky or Piet Mondrian. Because his talents were so instinctive and grounded in traditional mediums and craftsmanship, Picasso could never play with pure ideas like Marcel Duchamp. And because he was so in love with art and his own abilities - Picasso was never an anti-artist. Finally, because he was so self-confident and macho, played the art game so well, was so critically and commercially successful and so famous - his life and art largely lacked the tragic drama and visionary grandeur of artists from Michelangelo to Rembrandt, van Gogh, Pollock and Basquiat.
And now in the post MeToo era with all its self-righteous morality and lynch-mob mentality Picasso has been attacked as a misogynistic abuser of women whose work should be ignored. But frankly, if you removed Picasso from the story of Modern art - it would be like removing the foundations to a vast skyscraper - the whole era would collapse into total meaningless. Yet, many contemporary Feminists with their cheap sophomoric morality would probably prefer that - than try to achieve even a tenth of what Picasso did. Personally, as an artist with a reverence for the achievement of the Old and Modern Masters - I refuse to avoid the challenge of the Canon. And as a student of both history and art history since my youth, I find morality is too often used by ignorant people who can’t be bothered to understand the complexity of life – which is far removed from childish notions of goodies and baddies. We are all fallen creatures, but we only study the work of people who made something significant out of their fallen state.