Pablo Picasso’s figure has once again become the center of criticism from feminists, in this case, the French, who, in line with the #Metoo movement, denounced the actress as a “minotaur” and a “violent genius” who ruined the lives of their partners, a criticism made last year by a group of art students at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, ​​where they revealed the lack of a gender perspective in the cultural space that’s about the artist’s misogyny.

This lapidary observation about the artist was gathered in a podcast created last year by Art graduate, Julie Beauzac, which has more than 250,000 downloads, for which journalist Sophie Chauveau paid off that theory by of a 2017 book, very critical, called “Picasso: the appearance of the minotaur”.

That work attacks “the artist’s irresistible and destructive control over all who love him,” explains Chauveau, who described Picasso, who in his lifetime created more than 45,000 works, as a “genius” and at the same time a “violent” and “destructive” person.

Picasso was in a relationship with eight women throughout his life, two of them, Marie-Therese Walter and Jacqueline Roque committed suicideyears after the artist’s death.

The new director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, Cécile Debray, considers that “#MeToo has splintered the artist and this podcast proves it”, considering that “the attack is more violent if you will because “Picasso is the most famous and popular figure in modern art. An idol that must be overthrown,” the AFP news agency reported.

Based on what happened last year at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, ​​where a group of students led by artist and professor at the Massana School and Center for Art and Design, María Llopis, were denounced, with legends stamped on their t-shirts, the artist with the phrase “Missing Picasso”, a path to examine the figure of the artist from Malaga began at that institution, through a workshop entitled “Decreasing libido of minotaur: we face Picasso’s masculinity ”, and an international symposium is being prepared on the subject for next month.

“This reflection on Picasso, and the feminist or feminine view of his work is an eminently current debate, which should not be avoided and should not be caricatured,” explains the director of that Barcelona museum, Emmanuel Guion.

During that intervention and through an Instagram account, which was trolled and then blocked, Spanish activists denounced that most of Picasso’s partners were “artists whose careers were cut short when they met the artist. Picasso played the role of Bluebeard who swallowed the creative power of each of them ?.

An example of this is the Frenchman Dora Maar, a successful surrealist photographer whose career was delayed at the beginning of her relationship with Picasso. He remembers history as the artist’s muse? said Llopis.

“On many occasions – the creator of the iconic and pacifist‘ Guernica ’ – left Dora Maar unconscious on the ground after she was hit ?, as noted in the book“ Picasso: creator and destroyer ”Arianna Stassinopoulos.

According to experts, the artist’s work shows that women promoted Picasso’s artistic transitions, influencing him to seek new directions which in turn marked the history of contemporary art.

Picasso covered the young women, but the accusations of abuse “were statements that had no historical reference, approximate and anachronistic,” Debray said.

“Picasso had almost no interviews and certainly nothing about his personal life,” said Olivier Picasso, the artist’s grandson, and argued that “through his works we can trace his emotional itinerary (included) , more violent acts, others more lenient. “.

In this sense, the fact that in 1907 Picasso painted a portrait of collector and writer Gertrude Stein, who promoted Picasso when he was a 19-year-old actress and unknown in Paris, is paradigmatic. . Stein was a lesbian, and his picture was a true artistic birth for Picasso.

American professor Robert Lubar, from the University of New York, who participated in courses at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, ​​explained a thesis that taught that Picasso could not paint a character too strong for him. , the opposite of women as a matter of artistic contemplation, or sexual possession.

That struggle of Picasso “shows the artist’s anxious confrontation (…) with the question of sexual difference” Lubar explains in a 1995 essay, considered one of the germs of Picasso’s current historical revision.

But other experts, such as artist and biographer Gilles Plazy, believe this painting is an internal struggle, exclusively artistic, by Picasso.

The painter couldn’t paint Stein’s face because he felt he needed to change course in his works. After that painting, Picasso painted one of his most famous works, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), a portrait of a group of prostitutes who gave way to Cubism.

Source: Telam