a weird scene from Gilot’s book

The closer Picasso feels to Gilot, the more he wants to show her scenes from his past life.

The weirdest scene of them all is when they return to Picasso’s former marital residence where he had lived with Olga, his Russian ballerina wife and mother of his first child.

It’s 1947, and it turns out that no one has entered the house since 1942. Due to various legal complexities, Picasso and Olga were unable to get an actual divorce (under French law at the time, marriages between two foreigners could end only according to the laws of the husband’s home country, and Franco had more or less ended divorce in Spain by then). So, they’re technically still married and the home is joint property, but for whatever reason, neither Olga nor Picasso has been in to look after the place.

Five years’ worth of dust covers everything. There are priceless Matisse paintings on the wall. Someone had left in a hurry… there is a five-year-old breakfast on the table, and in the bedroom of Picasso’s son, toy cars are still scattered all over the floor.

But then they enter a tiny storeroom, the weirdest scene of all. Picasso was apparently a bit of a pack rat, so there is all kinds of sheer junk in the storeroom. But mixed in with the junk is a watercolor by Seurat, notes from Picasso’s maid mixed in with important early correspondence between Picasso and Apollinaire and Max Jacob, as well as a 17th century Italian puppet, and– a box filled with gold pieces!

They then open a closet. It contains a half-dozen of Picasso’s old suits, eaten down to transparent fibrous outlines by hungry moths.

As Gilot describes the house:

“The chance accumulation of so many unrelated objects, end to end, had achieved a result that was more Picasso than anything he could have put together consciously. In fact all these objects seemed so obviously and intimately related to his work that I had the impression of having entered the cave of a very familiar Ali Baba, but an Ali Baba who would have preferred looting an alchemist’s shop…”

Egypt telecom blackout was planned since April 2008

HERE.

Most disappointingly, all three mobile phone companies operating in Egypt (Etisalat, local favorite Mobinil, and Vodafone) were in on the the rehearsals for it.

Granted, I’m sure none of them were given much choice in the matter, and it would have taken an utterly heroic CEO to probably give up all of the company’s investments in Egypt to date to take a stand on principle. Nonetheless, it gives one a sickened feeling about having to use any of the three companies at all.

Egypt claims arrest of Iranian spy

HERE.

I had to chuckle a bit at first, since even my very very American-looking friend GRAEME WOOD was captured during the Revolution and accused of being an Iranian spy. But the current accusation sounds more credible. And Iran would be foolish not to be trying to spy inside Egypt right now.

Here’s an interesting Graeme Wood flashback, by the way: his eyewitness report of THE BATTLE OF THE CAMEL in Tahrir on February 2.

one other Bassiouny article

HERE.

Includes a rather heartbreaking photo of Ahmed with his wife and son.

radio station reminder

A place to sometimes hear Bassiouny’s music is THIS ONLINE STATION, which features Arab electronica. It’s my most frequent office music, eerily enough.

Often the music on the station sounds Muslimgauze-influenced, but today it’s more like Burial with Arabic rather than English sound samples.

Zewail denies Presidential ambitions

Ahmed Zewail of Cal Tech, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for inventing a laser camera with a mind-boggling shutter speed of 1 femtosecond to enable him to photograph chemical reactions pretty much step-by-step), DENIES AMBITIONS TO BE PRESIDENT OF EGYPT.

He claims instead to be interested in sparking an industrial revolution in this country.

Zewail generally seems quite popular here. He’s on our Board of Trustees and shows up for Commencement every so often, and the students always go crazy as if he were a rock star (not the usual reaction to chemists in the U.S.A.).

However, my understanding is that a law was passed since the Revolution requiring that the Egyptian President must have an Egyptian spouse. This law was widely believed to be aimed at Zewail personally; his wife is from Syria.

Nonetheless, Ayman Nour recently got out of the legal jam preventing his candidacy (when he was granted a retrial on the bogus charges that landed him in prison some years ago) and perhaps Zewail can do the same, assuming he’s interested in the Presidency and just being coy with his denials.

more on the Ahmed Bassiouny exhibit in Venice

HERE.

The more I learn about the guy, the more tragic the loss. Seeing him on film was really an experience: a magnetic, absolutely unique personality, with the Helwan students completely spellbound by his classroom presence.

Some thug is still out there free on the streets, having ended his life with sniper fire on Friday, January 28.

My past posts on Bassiouny can all be found HERE.

a few more thoughts on Gilot’s Picasso

It’s really an addictive book, one of sufficient value that it could be read for centuries as a classic portrait of mid-20th century Paris no less than of Picasso himself.

I think it was Clement Greenberg who said that Cézanne was more theoretically insightful about the act of painting than any other painter, something along those lines. Picasso may be just as good in that respect, if Gilot’s recollections of his long speeches are to be trusted (and the words all sound like Picasso, not like Gilot herself). He can stand in front of one of his still-incomplete canvases and give completely convincing theoretical accounts of why this oval needs to be slightly elongated, or why this piece of cheese plastically rhymes with the skull in the other part of the painting.

That’s one thing that really sticks out. The other is just how charismatic Picasso was, as best witnessed by how much terrible treatment people were willing to put up with from him.

A prime example… Gliot’s best friend comes to visit her and Picasso in the South of France. The friend and Picasso dislike each other. Gilot goes out for a walk, and when she returns her friend claims that Picasso threatened to rape her. (Picasso makes the counter-claim that she had tried to seduce him, but in context his story has no credibility at all.) Gilot’s friend warns her to leave him, but she consciously decides to stay.

Shortly thereafter, Gilot calls Picasso the devil. He responds that this makes her his property, and he thinks he should brand her. He holds a burning cigarette up against her cheek.

These incidents would be probably deal-breakers for most relationships. But Gilot, who is very intelligent and no doormat, can’t resist staying around for a decade to see what he’ll do next.

And we do the same, in lesser fashion. We as readers and viewers of paintings keep sticking around to see what he’ll do next, and don’t really hold these incidents against him, even though he left a trail of broken people through his life.

One thing that occurs to me is that we’re more likely to let artists get away with this than philosophers. It’s not that we expect philosophers to be saints, but that we somehow expect them to be a little bit repressed. By contrast, we expect artists to open the floodgates on the unconscious and we want to see what washes down the river, whatever it may be.

Who is the worst-behaved important philosopher? I’m not talking about Heidegger’s Nazism, but about generally poor behavior towards others in everyday dealings. Heidegger is probably still on that list. Schopenhauer, pushing his maid down the stairs. Francis Bacon, doing the queen’s work in the torture chamber and travelling with his pre-adolescent boy companion. There aren’t too many.

Try to imagine reading in Edmund Husserl’s biography that he held a burning cigarette to his wife’s cheek and threatened to rape her friend. We’d be a lot more startled in that case, I think, and not quite so forgiving. It would seem a bit more of a blight on his legacy somehow, whereas in Picasso’s case it all just seems to add a bit of color to genius, even if we verbally condemn it. This is one of those double standards that gives insight, but life is full of them.

Below: Gilot painted by Picasso as “La Femme-Fleur.”