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.”