Picasso’s Portraits

NARRATOR: Welcome to our sonic essay about a single room of magnificent Picasso portraits at LACMA.

To find the Picasso gallery at the museum, go to the third floor of the BCAM building. Pause until you arrive on the third floor lobby near the large elevator. Are you there now? Take a left to enter the Modern Art galleries. Pass through the first three rooms of German Expressionism. The Picasso gallery is a large room.

Ready? You should be standing in the Picasso gallery. Before we look at some of the individual paintings here, take a moment to take in the whole of the space, and to appreciate the great leap in creativity here. Nothing we can say about a painting can replace the experience of just looking at it, as an artist does.

Picasso is the most famous artist of the 20th century, known for his explosive dissembled figures. It is extraordinary to have this many Picasso portraits in one place. Picasso’s fame makes it difficult to come to the paintings without preconceived ideas. But we’ll try to do that today.

Ahead and to your right is a blue-toned painting of a couple seated at a café table. We are going to talk about Picasso by looking at his work in more or less chronological order, so let’s start there.

[Navigate to  Pablo Picasso,  Portrait of Sebastián Juñer Vidal]

NARRATOR: Picasso’s friend and roommate, Sebastián Juñer Vidal, stares back at us. He and Picasso had recently relocated from Barcelona to Paris. Picasso was a rebel, a radical, and very self-confident, but he was also desperately poor, and Sebastian, who had some family money, helped him stay afloat. Around this time in his life, Picasso was fighting depression, and he painted almost exclusively with shades of blue and green. The effect is a mood of loneliness and subdued emotion.

Conservators here at LACMA studied this painting using xrays. Beneath the surface, they discovered that, originally, Vidal was seated next to a dog. Picasso later painted over the dog with this portrait of a French prostitute. Unlike the image of his friend, who is depicted in detail, Picasso makes the female figure little more than an accessory.

Assessing Picasso now, his tormented relationships with women raise a host of questions. We’ll talk more about those questions and new scholarship on Picasso as we go. When we get to Picasso’s more experimental cubist portraits where the figures are barely recognizable as human, remember that he was very proficient at making more realistic pictures like this one. He just wasn’t satisfied, churning through different styles and influences, restlessly seeking the new. Now turn to the right, and look for a small painting of a woman’s head.

[Navigate to  Pablo Picasso , Head of a Woman

NARRATOR: Here is our first of many portraits in this room that Picasso painted of the women in his life. Mask-like and moody, this painting is a likeness of his girlfriend, Fernande. But this is a more interpretive, less realistic, likeness. Her forehead is huge and round, her ears are enlarged, her nose elongated, and her chin comes to a tiny point. Her inscrutable expression makes her look like a sculpture carved of wood. In fact, she looks much like the art of ancient Iberia. Picasso had two Iberian sculptures in his studio around this time, both stolen from the Louvre. Eventually, he returned them, but not before they had woven its way into his imagination and influenced his ongoing evolution as an artist.

In her memoir, Fernande, who lived with Picasso for several years, recalls the first time she met him in his studio:

FERNANDE: “There was a mattress on four legs in one corner, a little iron stove covered in rust with a yellow earthenware bowl on it, served for washing; a towel and a minute stub of soap. In another corner, a pathetic little black-painted trunk made a pretty uncomfortable seat. A cane chair, easels, canvases of every size and tubes of paint were scattered all over the floor with brushes, oil containers, and a bowl for etching fluid. There were no curtains. In the drawer of the table was a pet white mouse which Picasso tenderly cared for.”

NARRATOR: This painting and most of the others that you see in this room were part of a single gift to the museum by a Los Angeles couple named Janice and Henri Lazarof. Overnight, that gift brought more than 100 great works of modern art to the museum and transformed our collection.

STEPHANIE: “We’re very fortunate that they believed in giving back to the public. These were very, very private collectors, not really known to people. They didn’t lend works from their collection.”

NARRATOR: Stephanie Barron has been curating the modern art collection at LACMA for nearly fifty years.

STEPHANIE: “It took me about thirty years to land this collection for the museum and I’m incredibly grateful to them for having made this donation to Los Angeles. One of the stunning aspects is the whole suite of portraits all around us…one absolutely grand Picasso extravaganza…the largest presentation of Picasso west of Manhattan.”

NARRATOR: Look for a bronze sculpture of a woman’s head in a case nearby.

[Navigate to Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman

NARRATOR: This sculpture, also of Fernande, is important because it was made during a moment when Picasso was experimenting with cubism, breaking a face up into a series of shapes that could be reassembled in a startling way. Her hair is a series of thick interwoven tubes. Her cheek joins her jaw in a steep angle and the bags beneath her eyes jut out like folded saucers. Picasso cut into the clay with a knife to create these facets and sharp planes. He was working during a summer vacation in a mountain village in the Catalan region of Spain. Some people see the influence of the mountain landscape and the angular roofs of the small village in this sculpture. As we look at the later portraits, you’ll see Picasso take this cubist approach to new extremes. But before we move on, find the painting of a woman in a blue veil against a red background.

[Navigate to Pablo Picasso,  Woman with Blue Veil

NARRATOR: There is an obvious shift in style here, a retreat to something surprisingly traditional. In the 1920s, Picasso experimented with a style derives from antique Greek and Roman art. Why? There are many possible explanations. The First World War had just ended, and the artist, like so many others exhausted by the destruction of Europe, may have hungered for this kind of tranquility. Then again, his first child had been born right around this time, and his work from this period often features maternal and idealized images of women. It was a time of relative calm and stability in his personal life. The figure in this painting also looks a lot like an American named Sarah Murphy, with whom Picasso had been spending the summer. Compare this painting to the wilder more imaginative portraits in this room. It’s almost as if they were done by different people. Picasso’s period of tranquility and traditionalism was short-lived. His characteristic restlessness returned, and he said toward the end of this phase of his work that he had had enough of bourgeoise domesticity and wanted to hang a sign on his door that read “I am not a gentleman.” (Greenfeld 122) To the right, you’ll see a collection of portraits in an entirely different far more experimental style.

[Navigate to Pablo Picasso , Bust of a Seated Woman]

[Navigate to Pablo Picasso,  Weeping Woman with Handkerchief]

[Navigate to Pablo Picasso , Head of a Woman with a Hat (Dora Maar)]

[Navigate to  Pablo Picasso , Bust of a Woman (Dora Maar)]

NARRATOR: We’ve taken a huge leap here, to a mature Picasso. Again and again, he would withdraw and push himself to come up with something new, strange ways to turn the image of a person into a portrait of psychological complexity. These portraits were completely polarizing for the artists and art critics who saw them at the time and they are still shocking today. How is it possible for an artist to look at a model and see her in this way? The faces are twisted, distorted. Eyes point in different directions, noses appear like snouts. It is impossible to say from what angle we are looking at the face.

The sitter for all of these paintings is Dora Maar. When they met, she was at the height of her career, as a very successful commercial photographer and Surrealist artist. They were together for nine years. He physically abused her, provoked her jealousy, made her compete for his attention, commanded her to paint in a style that he dictated, and depicted her over and over again as a tragic figure. He once said, “I could never see her, never imagine her, except crying.” She didn’t appreciate the depiction, saying that his portraits of her were Picassos, they were not Dora Maar.

And she was right. Around this time, Picasso was deeply upset by the rise of fascism in Spain and the assault on the left-leaning Basque region. He projected onto his images of Dora Maar his anguish and that of the Spanish people.

Take in this grouping of pictures, which are both political and personal. Picasso’s explosive creativity, his political passion, his poetic idealism and his sometimes brutal misogyny are all on view here. His granddaughter Marina wrote of his relationships with women “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.”

There are no easy answers regarding how to think about misogyny in the context of Picasso’s art. The art critic for the New Yorker Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “Is there something tedious about Picasso’s bullying machismo? There certainly is--when you are not looking at his art. When you do, he’s got you by the scruff of your instinctual being.”

Now look for a painting of a woman with blonde hair against a blue background.

[Navigate to  Pablo Picasso , Portrait of Hélène Parmelin]

NARRATOR: This is the French journalist and author Helene Parmelin, who wrote several books and documentary films about Picasso. It is rare to see a Picasso that depicts someone who was not one of his romantic partners and perhaps this portrait lacks the depth and complexity of the ones he painted of Dora Maar. Picasso allowed Helene into the studio to watch him work, a privilege afforded to very few people. She recounted that as he painted, he told her “I have a feeling that Delacroix, Giotto, Tintoretto, El Greco, and the rest, as well as all the modern painters, the good and the bad, the abstract and the non-abstract, are all standing behind me watching me at work.” In her writng about Picasso, Helene recalled that he lived with paintings by artists whose work you can see in the galleries up ahead: Matisse, Cezanne, Degas, Braque, Modigliani. She noted that he also had an excellent collection of Etruscan and African and Eskimo sculpture. And he kept trash and found objects – bits and pieces that other people would throw away, but that had a shape or a texture that inspired him. (From Greenfeld, pp 146-147)

Turn to the very large painting of woman’s head, in grey and blue.

[Navigate to Pablo Picasso , Head of a Woman (Jacqueline)]

NARRATOR: Picasso has cropped this picture tightly, so that the upper edge of the canvas interrupts the figure’s hairdo and the face takes up most of the frame. She is over life-sized, and she almost appears to be two people. The expression in the eye on the left is quite different than that of the eye on the right. Picasso’s cubist portraits depict a face as if from different vantage points and moments in time, seen all at once.

Picasso was 79 years old when he painted this portrait of his second wife, Jacqueline. They were together for twenty years, until his death and for most of that time, she was the only woman he painted. They lived together in a medieval castle in a remote part of France where they were both devoted entirely to his work. For long periods of time, he would shut himself away in an upstairs studio and she would be the only one allowed to enter as he worked on some of his masterpieces. He painted more pictures of Jacqueline than he did of anyone else.

[Navigate to Pablo Picasso,  Young Woman in Striped Dress]

NARRATOR: This portrait is from 1949. It has an undeniable feeling of joy and brightness common in the paintings Picasso made after Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation. He was also in a new relationship. Toward the end of the war, he met Francoise Gilot, the subject of this portrait. She was forty years his junior. They lived together in the South of France for ten years, and had two children together. The painting may reflect some joy he found in their family life, or perhaps the sunny climate of the town where they lived on the French Riviera. Regardless, this love ended when she took the children and left, fed up with his infidelity and abuse. She wrote a memoir about him, describing him as brilliant but tyrannical, jealous but neglectful. In reviewing her book, the New York Times wrote “The myth of his genius must now contend with a frank depiction of his entitlement, immaturity and ego.” In the study of art and art history, we’re always contending with how to think about an artist’s personal life, and what that has to do with their work. Because his personal relationships were his subject matter in so many ways, that is a particularly complex question in the case of Picasso.

[Navigate to  Pablo Picasso , Man and Woman]

NARRATOR: Picasso lived a long and prolific life. If you see something oddly child-like in this otherwise hyper-sexual painting from 1969, so did he, saying that it took him a lifetime to learn to draw with the natural abandon of a child. He was driven to rude and explicit displays of sexuality, particularly when he was feeling insecure, as he may have been here, toward the end of his life. (Note: speculative, but based on the New Yorker piece.) That energy is apparent in this picture, of a male figure penetrating a reclining woman with exaggerated proportions. The sexual energy is undeniable if not overstated. The art critic for the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, has said “All Picassos are dirty, rooted in lust and glee. Love has very little to do with them, and forget romance…the Spanish rooster crows.” That’s a joke Picasso shared; nearby, you’ll see a rough-hewn sculpture of a rooster. Take a closer look at it now. Having spent so many years studying works by Picasso, our curator Stephanie Barron made a surprising discovery, she thinks.

 [Navigate to Pablo Picasso,  The Cock]

STEPHANIE: “If you could go around and look at it, something that I found just quite recently when I was looking at a lot of Picassos at the Picasso Museum in Paris is a little, I think, I’m pretty convinced by this, a little kind of secret joke perhaps that Picasso is sharing with us if we know how to look at it. So we see a sculpture in bronze of a rooster, doing impossible acrobatics, kind of twisting and turning, but look at the void, look at the form of the void, and if you follow me….it’s actually the profile of his girlfriend Marie Therese. And it was done at the time, 1932, that he was juggling being married to his wife Olga but also had an active relationship with his girlfriend Marie Therese. So he was doing this sculpture but tucking in there the portrait of Marie Therese. That’s a new discovery!

NARRATOR: To follow what Stephanie is talking about, look at the open space created by the outline of the rooster’s feathers and his hind leg.

STEPHANIE: “You see the outline of the forehead, the nose, the chin. She had a very distinctive profile, a very high forehead. Once you see that, it’s very hard to unsee it!”

NARRATOR: This is the end of our exploration of Picasso’s portraits. A critic once wrote after seeing a Picasso exhibition: “I’m accustomed to feeling used up after any Picasso show…seduced and abandoned…Sometimes I despise him, but I’ll always go back to him."

With that, we’ll end! But if you have time, you may be interested in our sonic essay on revolution and rebellion. It covers many of the artists up ahead who knew Picasso, shared his politics, and learned from his paintings.