• About
  • Books
  • Contact
  • Ebooks
  • Media Appearances
  • Videos

Fineartebooks's Blog

~ Fine Art Blog

Fineartebooks's Blog

Tag Archives: modernism

A Toxic Love: Gilot describes her Life with Picasso

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in A Toxic Love: Gilot describes her Life with Picasso, aesthetics, art blog, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, Françoise Gilot, Francoise Gilot Life with Picasso, Life with Picasso, Pablo Picasso, Picasso as psychopath, postromantic art, postromanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism

≈ Comments Off on A Toxic Love: Gilot describes her Life with Picasso

Tags

A Toxic Love: Gilot describes her Life with Picasso, aesthetic philosophy, art, art blog, art criticism, art history, Claudia Moscovici, fine art, fineartebooks, fineartebooks.com, Françoise Gilot, Francoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso, Francoise Gilot Life with Picasso, history of art, Life with Picasso, modern art, modernism, painting, Picasso as psychopath, psychopahty, Romanticism and Postromanticism

Gilot life with Picasso

A Toxic Love: Gilot describes her Life with Picasso

by Claudia Moscovici

There are dozens of biographies on Picasso, but his psychological profile comes to life with nuance, insight and sensibility in the autobiographical writings of his long-term partner, Françoise Gilot. In Life with Picasso, Gilot illustrates that there’s no contradiction whatsoever between being a great and innovative artist, or an “artistic genius” if you prefer, and being an irredeemably bad and selfish human being, or a psychopath. Although Gilot doesn’t use this clinical label, I believe that this is the psychological profile that emerges from her personal accounts of Picasso’s personality traits and behavior. She also offers unique insight into the artist’s immense creativity and resourcefulness, which doesn’t in any way contradict the image she sketches of his emotional poverty.

My point here is not to clinically diagnose Picasso, since I’m not qualified to do so. Nevertheless, I’d like to offer from an informed lay perspective a vivid and high profile example of the manifestations of psychopathic traits in someone with extraordinary artistic sensibilities and intellectual acumen. I will rely upon Gilot’s autobiography to dispel the popular misconception that being gifted, cultured and sensitive implies that you can’t be evil. Of course you can. As Hannah Arendt illustrates in her work on the banality of evil, during the Holocaust tens of thousands of intelligent, educated and seemingly “normal” men and women participated in Nazi crimes against humanity. Most of them probably had a conscience and felt some remorse. Some, like Eichmann, did it of their own volition, for their benefit and completely remorselessly. That smaller subset of cruel men and women do not prove, pace Arendt, the banality of evil. They were not ordinary human beings who fell prey to extreme external pressures during extraordinary times. Instead, those shameless individuals prove the banality of psychopathy: namely, of being born with the psychological drive to use and destroy others.

The German people, like the Russian people, have no particular character traits that made them more likely to commit genocide. Unfortunately, psychopathic rulers rose to power in their midst. They encouraged other similarly disordered individuals, as well as the rest of society, to behave ruthlessly towards fellow human beings. Such evil individuals have existed throughout human history, everywhere around the world. They become particularly dangerous and influential in certain social circumstances, such as during war, civil war or in totalitarian societies, when crimes against humanity are condoned and even encouraged.

Analogously, I’m surprised to hear people interviewed on the news about a violent crime remark that “Such horrible things don’t happen in our neighborhood.” Why would they not? Disordered, conscienceless individuals exist in every kind of neighborhood. Until they’re caught and sentenced for their crimes, they’re free to live wherever they want. I also sometimes hear people express great surprise when the vicious murderers turn out to be educated men and women: teachers, professors, doctors, scientists, lawyers, musicians, writers or artists.

Picasso

Psychologically speaking, there’s no contradiction whatsoever between being naturally gifted in all sorts of ways and being a psychopath. Psychopathy constitutes an emotional deficiency that leads to lack of empathy for others. It’s not an intellectual or artistic deficiency. If anything, as Robert Hare observes in Without Conscience, the opposite logic applies. The more charming, educated, refined and talented a psychopath is, the better his camouflage. Such an individual is more likely to get away with his misdeeds because others will give him the benefit of the doubt or excuse his bad behavior. If you look at evil people throughout history, you’ll see that they cut through every culture, society, level of education, occupation and class. Most psychopaths, as we’ve seen, don’t achieve great success because they tire quickly of their endeavors. But some of them become rich, powerful or famous. A few can even be “artistic geniuses” like Picasso.

In Life with Picasso, Gilot describes Picasso in terms of nearly every key symptom of psychopathy: his total absence of empathy and love; his lack of remorse and facile rationalizations for hurting others; a lust for seduction as a form of exercising power over women; duplicity and manipulation as a way of life; the pattern of idealize, devalue and discard in every romantic relationship he’s had; the underlying desire for control; an unshakable narcissism and the drive to do evil by damaging the lives of the women who became his partners. I’ll now describe Picasso’s pathological behavior in greater detail by relying upon Gilot’s autobiographical account, coupled with relevant psychological explanations of how psychopaths and narcissistic controllers behave.

20kodak_picasso

1.  Seduction as a Power Game. Gilot describes how from the very beginning of their relationship, Picasso wanted to be the one in charge. He regarded seduction as a power game, in which he reserved the right to make all the key moves. When she refused to be a passive pawn and didn’t play the predictable role of a “respectable” woman who resists his advances, Picasso was taken aback. She states:

When he dropped the last piece back unto the table he turned abruptly and kissed me, full on the mouth. He looked at me in surprise. “You don’t mind?” I said no—should I? He seemed shocked. “That’s disgusting,” he said. “At least you could have pushed me away. Otherwise I might get the idea that I could do anything I wanted to.” I smiled and told him to go ahead… He looked at me cautiously, then asked: “Are you in love with me?” I said I couldn’t guarantee that, but at least I liked him and felt very much at ease with him and I saw no reason for setting up in advance any limit to our relationship. Again he said “That’s disgusting. How do you expect me to seduce anyone under conditions like that? If you’re not going to resist—well, then it’s out of the question. I’ll have to think it over” (Life with Picasso, 24).

It’s not surprising that Picasso subscribes to traditional gender roles and expects a certain behavior from a “proper” middleclass woman. After all, many men of his generation did as well. More striking is the manner in which he views courtship as a game of conquest with no real adversary. He expects his partner to play into his hand as a passive pawn. Of course, since psychopaths also enjoy a challenge, Gilot’s failure to conform to gender stereotypes also initially intrigued Picasso. In fact, it led him to pursue their relationship further.

2.  The Aesthetization of Erotic Experience as a Substitute for Emotional Bonding. Instead of bonding with their partners, psychopaths conduct sensory experiments. They explore how each woman responds to their touch. They sense her taste and feel the shapes of her various body parts. Of course, erotic experience commonly includes a sensual component. For psychopaths, however, the aesthetic and sensory appeal of sexual pleasure completely replaces establishing an emotional connection with their partners rather than supplementing it. Sensual and sexual experimentation is part of a psychopath’s general tendency to view others solely as objects to be used for his gratification. Gilot describes her first intimate experience with Picasso as follows: “He took his hands away. Not suddenly, but carefully, as though my breasts were two peaches whose form and color had attracted him; he had picked them up, satisfied himself that they were ripe but then realized that it wasn’t yet time for lunch” (26). To Picasso, his new girlfriend represents a beautiful, pleasurable aesthetic object meant to appeal to his senses and satisfy his desires when and where he wants her.

3.  The Assessment/Mirroring Phase. Robert Hare and Paul Babiak describe in Snakes in Suits how during the “assessment phase” of the relationship a psychopath will convey to his target four main messages: 1) I like you; 2) I share your interests; 3) I’m like you, and 4) I’m the perfect partner or soul mate for you. This process constitutes the “mirroring phase” of the psychopathic bond. Granted, most romantic relationships entail some aspects of mirroring. After all, that’s how couples discover their points in common. But with a psychopath the reflection tends to be instant and total. It’s a simulated bonding that’s way too fast, too soon and too good to be true.

This happens before any real emotional connection can take place. It occurs before the partners have gotten to know each other well, over time and in different circumstances. Instant bonding, as we’ve seen in Carver’s analysis, is a symptom of shallowness of emotions rather than of miraculous compatibility. It means that the psychopath will detach from you and latch on to another target as easily as he initially attached to you. Yet through their conversational glibness and innate charm, as well as through their extraordinary capacity to identify and reflect your deepest desires, psychopaths can initially make you feel like they’re your dream come true. They present themselves as the only partners who could possibly fulfill whatever’s been missing from your life. This is exactly how Picasso makes Gilot feel after only a few brief encounters:

It was in November before I had a chance to visit Picasso again. One thing stood out very clearly: the ease with which I could communicate with him. With my father there had been no communication for years. Even my relations with the one boy my own age I thought I loved were often difficult and complicated, almost negative. Now suddenly with someone who was three times as old as I was, there was from the start an ease of understanding that made it possible to talk of anything. It seemed miraculous. Seeing him after an absence of four or five months and across the filter of my summer’s experiences, I had the impression I was rejoining a friend whose nature was not very far from my own (31).

If you read other biographies of Picasso, you’ll notice that each of his partners felt this way initially, when he was in the process of courting her. Yet these women were radically different from each other. Picasso couldn’t have possibly been identical to them all. He only pretended to be like them in order to hook them emotionally. Then, after he lost interest in each one, he no longer mirrored her particular personality traits and interests. With Olga, the Russian socialite and ballerina, the subversive and misanthropic artist transformed into a social butterfly. For several years, he joined her at the parties of prominent politicians and aristocrats.

Until, that is, he tired of her after having met Marie-Thérèse Walter. She was a seventeen year-old girl who made the middle-aged Picasso feel young again. With her, he acted like a rebellious, sex-starved and in some ways sadistic adolescent. That role fit, since Marie-Thérèse was not only very young, but also sensual and submissive. With Dora Maar, his eccentric, demanding, unstable and artistic girlfriend who was a Surrealist photographer herself, Picasso engaged in stormy fights, intellectual conversations, joint artistic projects and heated aesthetic debates.

Until he met Françoise Gilot. To her, he revealed a more reserved and cynical persona. In his eyes, she was a somewhat timid, awkward and androgynous misfit. Having no deeper sense of identity and being motivated by an insatiable hunger for conquest and control, a psychopath will become whatever you want him to be in order to seduce you. He just doesn’t stay that way for long because this isn’t who he really is. Once he conquers you, his interest in you naturally diminishes. Consequently, so does his incentive to be, do or say whatever pleases you. In fact, after the seduction phase, the roles reverse. The target is increasingly pressured to do everything possible to please the psychopath, not the other way around.

4.  The Custom-made Mask of the Psychopath. Psychopaths instinctively know what it takes to seduce a woman. They not only reflect your identity, but also anticipate your desires and conform to your needs. With a promiscuous woman, a psychopath may cut to the chase. He’ll make the process short and sweet. By way of contrast, with a woman who presents a more “respectable” image, that same psychopath can be slow, gentle and disarmingly shy.

This is the role the usually impatient and assertive Picasso chooses to play with Gilot. “He stretched me out on the bed and lay down beside me. He looked at me minutely, more tenderly, moving his hand lightly over my body like a sculptor working over his sculpture to assure himself that the forms were as they should be. He was very gentle, and that is the impression that remains with me to this day—his extraordinary gentleness” (52). Picasso intuitively knows that he’s dealing with a reserved and intelligent woman. Making steamy declarations of love might have worked with more naive and sentimental targets. But with Gilot, he takes a slower, more cerebral, approach to seduction. This strategy pays off. She recounts with nostalgia and lyricism the seemingly promising beginning of their romantic relationship:

I lay there in his arms as he explained his point of view, completely happy without feeling the necessity of anything beyond just being together. . . We continued to lie there, without saying a word, and I felt it was the beginning of something marvelous—in the true sense of the word… If he had taken possession of me then by the power of his body or unleashed a torrent of sentiment in declaring his love, I would not have believed in either one. But as it was, I believed him completely… I had not thought before then that I could ever love him. Now I knew it could be no other way. He was obviously capable of sidestepping all stereotyped formulas in his human relations just as completely as in his art. One recognizes stereotypes even if one has not experienced them all. . . When I left there that day, I knew that whatever came to pass—however wonderful or painful, or both mixed together—it would be tremendously important (53-4).

Certainly, Gilot’s relationship with Picasso turned out to be very important to her. He became not only her lover, but also her life partner, her artistic mentor, her best friend and the father of her children, Claude and Paloma. But their relationship was not filled with mutual caring and respect, as she had hoped. By the end of their love affair, the pain Picasso caused her far outweighed the initial pleasure she experienced with him. In addition, her narrative shows that the relationship that she, herself, came to regard as the foundation of her life represented just another game of conquest to him. In clinical terms, she was his “narcissistic supply,” like all the other women in his life. As Dr. Roger Melton explains in his illuminating article, “Romeo’s Bleeding: When Mr. Right Turns out to be Mr. Wrong”:

Unlike men that can honestly struggle with their own uncertainties and confusions about a relationship, and recognize the part they play in creating problems and conflicts, there are other kinds of men that see love as a game and you as their pawn. In this cruelly covert contest, cunning is their watchword, deception is their fix, and control is their high. Just as addicts are unrelenting in pursuit of making the next score, these kinds of men are unyielding in their hunt for women that they can deceive and manipulate. Unlike emotionally sound men and women, who respect others as much as they do themselves, controlling men respect no one. To them, people are things. And things can be used (obgyn.net).

Gilot realizes early into their relationship that Picasso wouldn’t be able to give her any real emotional warmth and support in life. But before their children are born, she implicitly consents to participating in an unequal relationship. She gives him all the love and support she can while he gives her nothing but his artistic talent in return. It’s only after having kids together that Gilot realizes that she can no longer tolerate this fundamental asymmetry between them. It drains her strength and emotional energy. From that point on, the role of martyr no longer suits her. She explains, “At the time I went to live with Pablo, I had felt that he was a person to whom I could, and should, devote myself entirely, but from whom I should expect to receive nothing beyond what he had given the world by means of his art… During the next five or six years… I had had the children, and as a result of all that I was perhaps less capable of satisfying myself with such a Spartan attitude. I felt the need of more human warmth” (335).

5.  Cracks in the Psychopath’s Mask. As we’ve seen, psychologists who treat victims of psychopathic seduction state that it’s very rare for a psychopath’s mask of charm to remain seamless over time. Early on in the relationship—in fact, usually as soon as the manipulation phase begins—psychopaths tend to give out signs of their real selves. Unfortunately, victims tend to ignore those red flags because by then they’re already emotionally hooked on, or at the very least intrigued by, the psychopath. Picasso, for one, reveals the ugly aspects of his character. He tells Gilot that he regards other human beings as mere objects to be used and disposed of once their value has expired.

She recalls, “One day when I went to see him, we were looking at the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through one of the high windows. He said to me, ‘Nobody has any real importance for me. As far as I’m concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go’” (84). Obviously, this is not a very auspicious sign for Gilot herself. It signals not only Picasso’s underlying narcissism, but also his utter contempt for humanity. Yet by this point, she’s too smitten with her lover to leave him. She also mistakenly believes, as do many women who get involved with dangerous men, that she can improve his bad character through her good example and nurturing love. She’ll eventually discover that love can’t change everyone. Some people are irredeemably bad.

francois-gilot-picasso

6.  Psychopathic Possessiveness. When psychopaths want a woman, they become very possessive of her. Such men view their wives, lovers and children the same way that the rest of us view our cars or stereos: as objects they own, which nobody has the right to take away from them. When a psychopath is still in the idealization phase of the relationship, you’re like a hot new Ferrari in his eyes. When he’s tired of you and is ready to discard you, you become a beat-up Yugo to him. Either way, he regards you as his property, to do with as he wishes. Viewing Gilot as his possession, Picasso attempts to isolate her from others in order to control her more completely. She recounts: “‘You should wear a black dress right down to the ground,’ he had told me one afternoon, ‘with a handkerchief over your head so that no one will see your face. In that way you’ll belong even less to others. They won’t even have you with their eyes.’ He had this idea that if someone is precious to you, you must keep her for yourself alone, because all the accidental contacts she might have with the outside world would somehow tarnish her and, to a degree, spoil her for you” (81).

The need to keep the current object of their desire “pure” is not the only reason why psychopaths isolate their targets. More importantly, as we’ve seen in Carver’s explanation, once a woman is removed from others, the psychopath can manipulate and control her far better than when she has external sources of support. Needless to say, the opposite doesn’t hold true since psychopaths have double standards. You can’t really “own” or limit a psychopath’s contact with others as he does yours. At best, he will tell you what you want to hear and do whatever he wants behind your back anyway. Psychopaths strive to maximize their options in life—by being free to pursue anyone or anything at any time—while narrowing down the options of their targets, which they keep on a very tight leash. Picasso’s quite explicit about his intention to lock up his new girlfriend in this little box of an existence—living solely for and through him—when he tells her: “‘There’s one thing I’d like very much,’ he said, “and that is if you would stay there, beginning right now, up in the forest; just disappear completely so that no one would ever know you were there. I’d bring you food twice a day. You could work up there in tranquility, and I’d have my secret in my life that no one could take away from me… You’d be completely happy, because you wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the world, just about me’” (47).

Although Picasso couches his request in flattering and even romantic terms, he describes a gilded cage: the prison-like existence in which you might keep a household pet, not the woman you trust, respect and love. In addition, Picasso is quite explicit about the fact he doesn’t intend to return the favor. He’s not willing to limit his own freedom for her sake. In fact, he even voices the fear that having his girlfriend move in with him might restrict his movements, a downside which he’s not prepared to accept. Gilot recounts, “But then he began to think it over and he said, ‘I don’t know whether it’s such a good idea or not because it’s binding on me, too. If you’re agreeable to having no more liberty, that means I wouldn’t have any more, either’” (47). Only once she refuses to move in with him, does Picasso become very adamant about this idea. Living together becomes, as it often does for psychopaths, more about taking possession of and exercising control over his latest prey than about embarking on a promising new life together.

7.  Lack of Remorse for the Harm Inflicted on Others. As we’ve seen, research shows that the most dangerous quality of psychopaths is their ability to rationalize their misdeeds. When Picasso leaves his previous partner, Dora Maar, for Françoise Gilot, Maar suffers a nervous breakdown. Her close friends and even her casual acquaintances are genuinely worried about her. Some fear that she’ll commit suicide. But Picasso, her long-term lover, couldn’t care less. By now he’s in the midst of his hot pursuit of Gilot. He’s already done with Maar, ready to toss her away like an old sock. His callous attitude and actions show that he regards his former “soulmate,” who had been his partner in both life and art for several years, only as a handicap or (at best) as a potential back-up, in case he might wish to use her again. When a mutual friend, the poet Paul Eluard, reproaches him for the heartless manner in which he left his girlfriend, Picasso blames the Surrealist movement (to which Maar belonged) and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (whom Maar was seeing to cope with her anxiety and depression). Adding insult to injury, he also points fingers at the friends who try to help her. He sees everyone as a potential culprit except, of course, for himself. Picasso complains to Gilot:

“After Lacan had left with Dora, Eluard was so upset he accused me of being responsible for her state because I had made her so unhappy,” Pablo said. “I told him that if I hadn’t taken her up, she’d have reached that state long ago. If anyone is to blame, it’s you and the surrealists, I told him, with all those wild ideas promoting antirationalism and the derangement of all the senses. Eluard said that any influence they had had on her was indirect, since it was all theoretical, but that I had made her unhappy in a very concrete way. What I do know,” Pablo told me, “is that after she met me she had a more constructive life than before. Her life became more concentrated. I built her up” (89).

Psychopaths are so self-absorbed that they believe that even the women they’ve used, deceived, hurt and abandoned should feel grateful for the mistreatment. In their pathological minds, at least those women had the great privilege of being a part of the psychopath’s life. Of course, the inverse is never the case. If any woman dares to cheat on or leaves a psychopath, he harbors a grudge against her for the rest of his life. This sums up Picasso’s attitude towards Gilot, once she becomes the only woman to stand up for herself and eventually (after years of suffering and self-sacrifice) leave him. Normal people, however, can’t comprehend the psychopath’s callousness. When she hears her lover’s excuses for mistreating his former girlfriend, Gilot takes her rival’s side rather than Picasso’s: “I felt very upset by this story. I suggested that we had talked about it, he might like to be alone. He said, ‘No. The present always takes precedence over the past. That’s a victory for you. . . Life must go on and life is us’” (89). Gilot, however, doesn’t feel victorious. She refuses to participate in her rival’s humiliation. She insists that Maar deserves more consideration from Picasso even if he’s no longer in love with her.

Picasso dismisses her moral qualms as purely sentimental: “‘That kind of charity is very unrealistic,’ he said. ‘It’s sentimentality, a kind of pseudo-humanitarianism you’ve picked up from that whining, weeping phony, Rousseau. Furthermore, everyone’s nature is determined in advance’” (90). As we’ve seen, psychopaths are skillful sophists. They commonly present human values as useless, dated norms followed by sheep-like individuals. Using pseudo-intellectual arguments, they persuade their current partner to hurt their former partner. As a result, the women end up turning against one another rather than uniting forces against the psychopath, who is the real culprit. Such machinations also fulfill the psychopath’s sadistic tendency to inflict maximum emotional damage upon the woman he discards while turning into an accomplice the woman he currently pursues. Gilot recognizes this strategy. But she succumbs to Picasso’s pressure anyway. “He told me he had already given Dora to understand that there was no longer anything between them. He insisted they understood each other perfectly on that point. When I seemed reluctant to believe him, he urged me to go to her apartment with him so I could see for myself. I was even more reluctant to do that. But he kept on urging” (103).

When Picasso takes his new girlfriend to Dora Maar’s house to rub his newest affair in her face, Maar sees him more lucidly, as a person incapable of genuine love. Of course, since she’s jealous of Gilot, who has just replaced her, she also insults his current victim in the process: “‘You’re very funny,’ Dora said to him. ‘You take so many precautions in embarking on something that isn’t going to last around the corner.’ She’d be surprised, she said, if I wasn’t out on the ash heap before three months had passed, all the more so since he was the kind of person who couldn’t attach himself to anyone. ‘You’ve never loved anyone in your life,’ she said to Pablo. ‘You don’t know how to love’” (106).

Seeing her new lover without his mask of charm momentarily triggers Gilot’s self-preservation instinct. It makes her want to flee from Picasso’s grasp and end their relationship. After all, reasons Gilot, if her lover is capable of mistreating his former girlfriend, why wouldn’t he behave the same way with her once he tires of their relationship as well? But Picasso manages to turn this situation around. He makes Gilot feel “special,” both through her association with a man as talented and famous as he is and in her own right. He convinces her that she’s the woman he prefers to the one he’s just discarded. If he wants her and not Dora Maar (or anyone else), Picasso reasons, it’s because in his eyes Gilot is superior to Maar. Furthermore, if he mistreated his former girlfriend, he continues, it was only because he wanted to prove his love for Gilot. Yet even this declaration of love reveals his underlying sense of entitlement. It also hints, quite ominously, at physical violence. Gilot recalls:

“I did that for you,” he said, “just to make you realize there’s nobody else as important as you are in my life. And this is the thanks I get! You have no grasp of what life is really like. I ought to throw you I into the Seine. That’s what you deserve.” He grabbed me and pushed me into one of the semicircular setbacks on the bridge. He held me against the parapet and twisted me around so that I was looking down into the water. “How would you like it?” he said. I told him to go ahead if he wanted to—it was spring now and I was a good swimmer. Finally he let go of me and I ran down into the subway, leaving him behind me on the bridge (107).

With hindsight, Gilot admits that if she had not been deeply in love with Picasso, she’d have seen her lover’s behavior—not only towards Dora Maar, but also his bullying of her—as a terrible sign and run away from him. But by this point, she was too far-gone, under her lover’s hypnotic control, to heed the blatant red flags and escape the relationship unharmed. “I suppose I should have cooled off towards Pablo. But I didn’t. I was bothered by what had happened and its implications, but my feeling for him had deepened to the point where it was stronger than any of the warning signals” (107). Psychopaths bank on their victims’ emotional attachment once they gradually abandon the pretense of goodness and begin to show, more and more, their true colors.

8.     Psychopathic Manipulation. Many of the women who recount their life experiences with psychopaths on the website lovefraud.com state that the more they gave in to the psychopath’s manipulation and the more they colluded with his unprincipled acts against others, the more he demanded from them and the weaker they became to resist his bullying in the future. Placating a psychopath doesn’t buy anyone peace for long. In the long run, it only feeds his insatiable hunger for control and penchant for evil deeds. Françoise Gilot learns this painful lesson as she struggles to appease her lover by repeatedly giving in to his demands. After getting her to contribute to hurting her rival, Picasso strikes next much closer to home.

He asks Gilot to leave her ailing grandmother, who needs her attention and care, so that she can move in with him. In so doing, he asserts his power over his girlfriend and tests her loyalty to him. As we recall, psychopaths view their partners’ love and loyalty as a zero-sum game. If their partners care about their parents, grandparents, children or friends, to them that means less love and control for themselves. Only once their victims are both physically and emotionally isolated from everyone and everything else, do psychopaths feel like they’re “in charge.” At that point, however, they also become bored with their defeated targets and move on to new ones. Power isn’t always bad, just as charisma isn’t always dangerous. But psychopaths use the power of charisma for predatory purposes. As Roger Melton elaborates in his article on narcissistic controllers,

Unhealthy control originates in a desire to dominate another, either through words or actions designed to both charm and harm—to captivate while simultaneously damaging the emotionally captured. It is this pairing of charm with harm that is the hallmark of Controller manipulations. Preaching sugar while practicing poison, they are experts at concealing their true natures. Hiding bad intentions beneath polished appearances, they have perfected the art of ‘looking good.’ It is this uncanny ability of Controllers to alternate looking good with manipulative behavior that perpetuates tormenting emotional snares for those they target as victims (“Romeo’s Bleeding: When Mr. Right Turns out to be Mr. Wrong,” obgyn.net).

Picasso tries to convince Gilot that abandoning her grandmother isn’t really personal. After all, he generalizes, any action for yourself is bound to hurt someone else. There’s no way to live in such a way that doesn’t cause pain to others. Besides, he adds, Gilot’s romantic love for him should trump her familial love for her grandmother:

“Look at it this way,” he said. “What you can bring to your grandmother, aside from the affection you have for her, is not something essentially constructive. When you’re with me, on the other hand, you help me to realize something very constructive. It’s more logical and more positive for you to be close to me, in view of the fact I need you. As far as your grandmother’s feelings are concerned, there are things one can do and make them understood, and there are other things that can only be done by coup d’etat since they go beyond the limits of another person’s understanding. It’s almost better to strike the blow and after people have recovered from it, let them accept the fact” (100).

Such nonsense doesn’t persuade Gilot. “I told him that sounded rather brutal to me,” she recounts (100). She counters that hurting those you love is, indeed, very personal. Furthermore, you can easily prevent it by not doing whatever it is that would hurt them. In response to her reasonable objection, Picasso presents a more metaphysical argument. He depersonalizes the whole scenario again. “‘But there are some things you can’t spare other people,’” he said. “‘It may cost a terrible price to act in this way but there are moments in life when we don’t have a choice. If there is one necessity, which for you dominates all others, then necessarily you must act badly in some respect. There is no total, absolute purity other than the purity of refusal. In the acceptance of a passion one considers extremely important and in which one accepts for oneself a share of tragedy, one steps outside of the usual laws and has the right to act as one should not act in ordinary conditions’” (100-1).

This argument gets to the core of a psychopath’s self-centered worldview. In the first part of his defense, Picasso stated in general terms that hurting others was unavoidable. But Gilot easily refuted this proposition by saying that she could, indeed, avoid it by staying with her grandmother. Picasso then flatters his girlfriend’s self-love. He tells her that she, and their love for each other, is extraordinary. They’re therefore above the pale of the moral codes that govern the rest of humanity. Some of the women who contribute to lovefraud.com have described in their testimonials how they have abandoned their partners, their friends and sometimes even their children for such an illusory cause as being considered “special” by their psychopathic lovers.

Picasso describes the supposedly unique bond between himself and Gilot in terms of a higher power, perhaps the hand of fate itself. “‘It’s a question of the recognition of one’s destiny and not a matter of unkindness or insensitivity,’” he tells her (101). What Picasso’s really saying here is that his needs are supremely important while those of others don’t matter. But he’s framing this egocentric assumption in seemingly ethical terms, which would sound more acceptable to his scrupulous girlfriend. Any savvy psychopath knows how to use the fact that most people have a conscience as leverage for his own selfish purposes. The appeal to moral standards, just like the histrionic simulation of love, constitutes yet another one of the psychopath’s many ruses. It enables him to get what he wants from others while making it his life’s goal to undermine both the moral and the emotional fabric that binds other human beings together. Above all, Picasso’s argument reflects his absolute selfishness. As Melton elaborates,

At his core, every Controller is monumentally self-centered. He is not just on an ego trip. He is on an expedition. In his mind, everyone orbits around him, as if people are his planets and he is their shining sun. What he wants he should have, simply because he wants it. He needs no other justification. Seeing himself as the center of everyone else’s universe, he is blind to the fact that anyone else’s wants or needs are more important than his own. Doggedly locked into this self-image of grand, “godlike” proportions, he may literally feel entitled to other’s worship (“Romeo’s Bleeding: When Mr. Right Turns out to be Mr. Wrong,” obgyn.net).

Gilot recognizes her lover’s argument as sheer nonsense covering up an act of immorality. “I told him that a primitive person could face up to that idea much more easily than someone who thought in terms of principles of good and evil and who tried to act on the basis of them” (101). When a psychopath can’t win an argument using his charisma, eloquence and sophistry, he usually falls back upon the strategy of bullying others. In this case, Picasso tortures Gilot by branding her with his lit cigarette. Needless to say, she doesn’t take it well. “I told him I often thought he was the devil and now I knew it. His eyes narrowed. ‘And you, you’re an angel,’ he said, scornfully, ‘but an angel from a hot place. Since I’m the devil, that makes you one of my subjects. I think I’ll brand you’” (101).

Since even physical violence fails to intimidate her, Picasso relies upon a purely emotional—and highly manipulative—appeal: whom do you love more? he asks her to choose. Your grandmother or me? He then turns the tables on his girlfriend and makes her feel guilty for not caring enough about him to sacrifice her relationship with her grandmother for him. “‘Don’t I count in your life?’” he demands. “‘Is this all a game for you? Are you so insensitive as that? … You should be worrying about me. I need you… And since I can’t get along without you, you have to come live with me’” (101). The repeated emotional blackmail eventually wears her down. Gilot moves out of her grandmother’s house to live with her lover. It’s a decision that she’ll soon come to regret.

9.  The Psychopath’s Mask Peels Off. Some people say that the best way to kill passion is by moving in together. While this cynical view may be only partially true of normal, loving relationships, it’s one hundred percent true of psychopathic bonds. In a Schopenhauerian perversion of love, once a psychopath establishes a dominance bond with a woman, he also starts to get bored with her. Not surprisingly, when looking back upon their life together, Gilot concludes that the only time she and Picasso seemed happy together was during the three years before she moved in with him and when she was carrying his children. She states, “As I began to think back on our life together, I realized that the only time I ever saw him in a sustained good mood—apart from the period between 1943 and 1946 before I went to live with him—was when I was carrying Claude. It was the only time he was cheerful, relaxed and happy, with no problems. That had been very nice, I reflected, and I hoped it would work again, for both our sakes. I knew I couldn’t have ten children just to keep him that way, but I could try once more at least, and I did” (212). If psychopaths often ask their partners to have children with them, it’s obviously not because they care about kids, since they can’t love anyone meaningfully. Psychopaths enjoy marking their women, whom they consider their property. Impregnating women makes such men feel more potent and virile, especially as they age, as was the case with Picasso, who was much older than Gilot.

10.  Stringing Women Along: The Psychopath as Puppet Master. Since, as we’ve seen in previous discussions, psychopaths enjoy sex and power—especially when the two are combined—they’re great jugglers of women. They especially relish creating rivalry and jealousy among their partners. They instigate feelings of mutual disrespect and even hatred. Watching several women fight over them validates their ego. It also offers priceless entertainment. Picasso unabashedly confesses to Gilot his delight in having women assault each other over him. He recounts how Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar had an altercation over who was his real girlfriend. Instead of diffusing the tension, he encouraged them to escalate from a verbal to a physical fight. Picasso tells Gilot, “‘I told them they’d have to fight it out themselves. So they began to wrestle. It’s one of my choicest memories’” (211). Jealous fights, as well as mutual insults and devaluation, offer an amusing spectator sport for psychopaths. It makes them feel in charge: like they’re the puppet masters manipulating all these women’s emotions. This rivalry also has the additional advantage of creating artificial barriers among the victims. The women’s aggression turns against one another rather than towards their real enemy, the psychopath who is using and mistreating them both, plus several others that they may not even know about.

Psychopaths tend to select trusting and trustworthy women whom they can manipulate and taint. They enjoy the thrill of getting them to collude in their lies and machinations against others, including family members and friends. They resort to emotional blackmail to get their victims, who are often decent human beings, to cooperate. This establishes a link of complicity in the psychopathic bond: something along the lines of, you lied to your family (or my family, or our friends, or your spouse) too, so therefore you’re just as bad and deceitful as I am. Furthermore, psychopaths need to have their sense of power over you constantly reaffirmed. Since they’re at core malicious human beings, the way you help confirm their power best is by colluding with their projects to deceive and hurt others.

By turning “their” women against one another, psychopaths make each of them simultaneously their co-conspirator and their dupe, the deceiver and the deceived. When she deflects her negative emotions towards other women, the psychopath’s wife or girlfriend remains blind to the real threat posed by her own partner. Emotionally, this perspective may be easier to accept than the truth: namely, that your supposed soul mate wants to destroy you and is using you as a weapon to hurt others and vice versa. Only when you’re strong enough to open your eyes and face reality do you begin to see the machinations of the psychopath as puppet master. Françoise Gilot describes this strategy with characteristic lucidity. She compares Picasso’s habit of stringing several women along to a Bluebeard complex and to a bullfight. Although these analogies may seem radically different, they describe the same phenomenon. In this process, the real enemy—the one who gores you in the end—is the man generating all the drama and rivalries among women in the first place:

Pablo’s many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar, as well as their continuing presence just off stage in our life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he had collected in his little private museum. But he didn’t cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. Even though he no longer had any feeling for this one or that one, he could not bear the idea that any of his women should ever again have a life of her own. And so each had to be maintained, with the minimum gift of himself, inside his orbit and not outside. As I thought about it, I realized that in Pablo’s life things went on just about the way they do in a bullfight. Pablo was the toreador and he waved the red flag, the muleta. For a picture dealer, the muleta was another picture dealer; for a woman, another woman. The result was, the person playing the bull stuck his horns into the red flag instead of goring the real adversary—Pablo. And that is why Pablo was always able, at the right moment, to have his sword free to stick you where it hurt. I came to be very suspicious of this tactic and any time I saw a big red flag waiving around me, I would look to one side of it. There, I always found Pablo (242-3).

Aside from the entertainment value and the sense of being in charge, the psychopath gets something else out of generating conflict among his targets. He also gets back-ups to his back-ups. Given that he’s bound to mistreat every woman he’s involved with, he certainly needs them. It seems as if psychopaths know, through both intuition and experience, that the honeymoon phase won’t last long no matter how exciting and promising a given relationship may seem in the beginning. I’m reminded once again of a beautiful quote by Gilot, who herself paraphrases Picasso:

He said, “We mustn’t see each other too often. If the wings of the butterfly are to keep their sheen, you mustn’t touch them. We mustn’t abuse something which is to bring light into both of our lives. Everything else in my life only weighs me down and shuts out the light. This thing with you seems to me like a window that is opening up. I want it to remain open. We must see each other but not too often. When you want to see me, you call me and tell me so” (53-4).

What a touching way to describe the whole process of psychopathic seduction, from the initial idealization to devalue and discard! It almost makes it sound appealing rather than appalling. If relationships with psychopaths are so fragile and delicate, like the sheen on the wings of a butterfly, it’s because they have no foundation whatsoever in reality. Or rather, because everything positive about them is based on illusion, manipulation and deceit. The psychopath knows this at all times. Yet he may sometimes engage in double think: which is to say, believe at a given moment that his love for you will last even though he knows from experience that every feeling, interest and relationship he’s ever had was ephemeral. Unfortunately, once you’ve fallen under his spell, you’re much more convinced than he is that your relationship’s solid and real, based on mutual caring and genuine respect.

As we’ve seen from Gilot’s juxtaposition between her feelings for Picasso and his for her, the difference in your attitudes is not necessarily one of intensity, but one of depth and duration. There’s a huge, unbridgeable gap between his forever “for now” and your forever “for always.” In fact, as you eventually find out, it’s a veritable abyss. When the relationship begins to crack once the honeymoon phase ends, you feel confused and wounded. What happened to all his promises of love and commitment? Were they offered in a parallel universe? You never realized that his “for life” really meant “for as long as you give me a buzz” or “for as long as I feel like it.” Given all those nice words, flattery and promises, and especially given the emotions, time and energy you’ve invested into the relationship, you couldn’t tell that he dwells in the shallowness of a perpetual present; that momentary sensations, desires and objectives is all that counts for him.

When one’s “love” has the lifespan of a butterfly—to use Picasso’s metaphor—one must find other flowers to pollinate. Given their restlessness and shallowness, psychopaths need to secure multiple sources of novelty, pleasure and excitement. And they’re quite good at lining them up. They place several women in reserve, filling their lives with back-ups to their back-ups. That way as soon as one relationship sours, it’s no big deal. They quickly move on to another. Besides, no woman will be pleasant and obliging every minute of every day. When one woman’s tired, unavailable or in a bad mood, a psychopath can always fall back on another one to console him. He feels entitled to it. After all, in his mind, he’s perfect all the time!

Picasso, for one, isn’t shy about sharing with Gilot the main intention behind his machinations. He wants to destroy the self-esteem of women who previously had a positive image of themselves: “‘For me, there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats.’ And whenever he thought I might be feeling too much like a goddess, he did his best to turn me into a doormat.’” This constitutes the raison d’être of just about any psychopath. As we’ve seen, an emotional predator’s goal is not to build a healthy and enduring relationship with his partner. Rather, it’s to amuse himself and feel more powerful by undermining her dignity before moving on to his next target. Picasso sampled several different types of women. He idealized each one at first as a “goddess,” but eventually treated all of them like a “doormat.” Gilot perspicaciously identifies the dualistic mindset behind using a woman as a temporary fantasy (the idealized new girlfriend) to displace another woman who represents mundane reality (the current devalued partner):

[Marie-Thérèse ] haunted his life, just out of reach poetically, but available in the practical sense whenever his dreams were troubled by her absence. She had no inconvenient reality; she was a reflection of the cosmos. Marie-Thérèse was very important to him as long as he was living with Olga because she was the dream when the reality was someone else. He continued to love her because he hadn’t really taken possession of her: she lived somewhere else and was the escape hatch from a reality he found unpleasant. But once he had, in order to take fuller possession of that form of hers for which he had such an insistent desire, sent Olga away, then reality suddenly switched sides. What had been fantasy and dream became reality, and absence became presence. Along came Dora Maar to take photographs of Pablo, and Pablo became very interested in her (235-6).

She goes on to recount how, following the same logic of turning each previously idealized “goddess” into a devalued “doormat,” Picasso discarded Maar once she, herself, caught his eye. Gilot realizes that there’s a certain predictable pattern to the way Picasso perceives his relationships with women. She sees that if she doesn’t escape of her own free will, he’s bound to step all over her as well.

11.  The Devaluation and Abandonment Phase. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what he sets out to do. Once Gilot moves in with him, Picasso begins to treat her as he did all of the other women who shared his life. Once she’s under his control, he becomes bored with her, cheats on her, bullies her and lies to her. He also imposes upon her humiliating double standards, which we’ll shortly examine in greater detail. He demands that her whole existence revolve around fulfilling his every need, yet nothing she does pleases him for long. At the same time that he controls every aspect of her life, he also begins to distance himself from her to pursue other affairs and flings. When Gilot confronts him with her warranted suspicions, Picasso becomes downright indignant. He refuses to admit the truth about his infidelities:

From the time I went to live with him in May 1946 until his trip to Poland with Eluard and Marcel, Pablo and I had never been apart a single day. After his return from Poland he began taking short trips to Paris without me…. Once when he didn’t come home… I dragged a mattress out onto the balcony and stayed there, sleepless, until I saw the car pull up in front of the garage just before dawn. When Pablo came up the stairs, he flew into a rage, accused me of spying on him and said he was free to come in whenever he wanted to—all this without my having said a word to him…. “Instead of sleeping in bed where you belong, you’re out here waiting for me. It’s obvious to anybody that you’re trying to take my freedom away from me” (336).

Never mind that Gilot can’t do anything without Picasso’s knowledge and approval, let alone travel by herself or engage in extramarital affairs, as he does. No doubt, Picasso’s attitude reflects the epoch’s double standards for men versus women. But it’s also a symptom of a psychopath’s sense of entitlement. It reflects the view that he’s far superior to his mate and therefore deserves to do whatever he wishes while she’s to remain under his thumb. The “doormat” phase of the psychopathic bond has clearly arrived for the former “goddess.” Gilot offers a moving description of her own devaluation: “In the weeks that followed, I saw that both spiritually and physically he was erecting a wall between us. At first I couldn’t believe it possible that he should want to stay apart from me at the very moment I was making the greatest effort to be close to him” (336).

If one takes into account the clinical information on psychopathy, however, the fact that Picasso loses interest in his partner precisely at the point when she’s most emotionally invested in him doesn’t seem like a coincidence. As we’ve seen, once a psychopath hooks a woman emotionally, she no longer presents a goal to him. He regards her as his rightful possession while feeling entitled to pursue other challenges by seducing other women. To psychopaths and narcissists, having such double standards is as natural as breathing. Which leads us to our next point.

12.  The Psychopath’s Double Standards. A psychopath will happily and with great ease leave his current partner for another woman or just because he feels like it. But he’s not likely to be as cavalier about a break-up when his partner chooses to leave him instead. That’s not, of course, because he loves her and would miss her. It’s because, as Roger Melton explains, psychopaths are narcissistic controllers. Being left by their partners wounds their inflated egos. Although he cheated on Gilot and neglected her towards the end of their relationship, when she finally decides to leave him, Picasso feels furious. Since the honeymoon phase of their relationship is long over, this time he doesn’t couch his argument in phony other-regarding terms. Instead, he explicitly reminds her of her inferior position: “Your job is to remain by my side, to devote yourself to me and to the children… Whether it makes you happy or unhappy is no concern of mine” (355).

Picasso attempts to prevent Gilot from leaving him not only to reassert his power over her, but also because, as we’ve seen, psychopaths like to have numerous pawns at their disposal. They dwell in what’s been called in literary studies, following René Girard, “the triangulated space of desire,” or more aptly, of duplicity. They need to be cheating on someone to enjoy a given target. They need to gossip with the woman they’re chasing about the woman they’re dumping. They need to find yet another woman to deceive the girlfriend with and enjoy the double, triple or even quadruple duplicity. Each relationship is triangulated. It consists of the psychopath, his current target to whom he’s criticizing his previous victim, who’s now become his back up.

Feeling confused? Then try putting yourself in the poor psychopath’s shoes! If there’s nobody to gossip about, nobody to complain about, nobody to deceive, nobody to conquer from another man, nobody to cheat on, nobody to hurt, nobody to malign, then sexual relationships lose their spice. Romantic partners become as familiar as old shoes. Normal life, believing in moral standards, having genuine emotions and lasting relationships is really boring from a psychopath’s perspective.

13.  The Emotional Vacuum. If ultimately Gilot can no longer be persuaded by Picasso’s arguments to stay with him, it’s because his actions have spoken louder than his occasional declarations of love. After all, it’s very easy to tell a woman that you love her. It’s much harder and more meaningful to prove your love by treating her with the consideration and respect that she deserves. Initially, when Gilot saw how Picasso mistreated his former partners, she found some comfort in the hope that he would treat her better. She believed his claim that he loved her more and that she was more compatible with him than any other woman in his life. But after awhile, Gilot realized that she wasn’t the exception that confirmed the rule. She was just another link in his pattern of idealizing, devaluing and discarding women:

They all had different kinds of failures, for different reasons. Olga, for example, went down to defeat because she demanded too much. One might assume on that basis that if she hadn’t demanded too much and things that were basically stupid, she wouldn’t have failed. And yet Marie-Thérèse Walter demanded nothing, she was very sweet, and she failed too. Then came Dora Maar, who was anything but stupid, and artist who understood him to a far greater degree than the others. But she too failed, although, like the others she certainly loved and believed in him. So it was hard for me to believe in him completely. He had left each of them, although each of them was so wrapped up in her own situation that she thought she was the only woman who counted for him, and that her life and his were inextricably intertwined. . . There was no means, ever, of really coming close to him for long (340).

Understandably, once she confronts the sad reality that Picasso is no more capable of loving her than he was of caring about any other woman, Gilot becomes visibly depressed. Even when he sees the suffering he’s caused her, however, all Picasso thinks about is how he can use her sorrowful expression for his paintings. “I cried a good bit of the time,” Gilot recalls. “Pablo found it very stimulating. ‘Your face is wonderful today,’ he told me while he was drawing me. ‘It’s a very grave kind of face.’ I told him it wasn’t at all a grave face. It was a sad face” (337). Not only is Picasso impervious to Gilot’s pain, but also he criticizes her for having lost weight due to the hardships he imposed on her. He tells her, “You look like a broom. Do you think brooms appeal to anybody? They don’t to me” (337). While his cruelty towards the woman he supposedly loves is nothing short of astonishing, when it comes to his own suffering, with characteristic double standards, Picasso expects from her the utmost compassion and devotion.

By this point, however, Gilot can no longer offer him anything but discouragement and sadness. She sees the writing on the wall. She senses their mutual alienation. She also realizes that her usefulness to him has nearly expired, just as it did for all her precursors. Robert Hare and Paul Babiak document in Snakes in Suits that when psychopaths have used up their targets, they manifest an emotional emptiness that’s almost beyond description or comprehension. Their tone and behavior become mechanical. Their demeanor becomes cold and distant. Months or even years of shared experiences become effaced from their minds, as if they never existed.

Some women feel so emotionally invested in their psychopathic partners that they take refuge in denial. They cling to false hopes, refusing to acknowledge the palpable alienation. Gilot, however, courageously confronts it: “But our relationship continued to deteriorate to the point where the usual personal and emotional fulfillment a woman derives from a man’s love was no longer possible” (338). Unfortunately, it takes her two more years of suffering, from 1949 to 1951, to fully absorb this realization and leave him.

14.  Deception and Gaslighting. Like most psychopaths, Picasso was a master of gaslighting. Even though, as mentioned, he repeatedly cheated on Gilot, he vehemently denied having affairs. He even called her “crazy” for suspecting him of infidelity. Martha Stout and Robert Hare both state that a psychopath can be so convincing in his dramatic denials that his victim begins to question her knowledge of the truth and even doubt her own sanity. The classic strategy of gaslighting plays itself out in the following scene between Gilot and Picasso: “When Pablo returned, I asked him if he waned to tell me about the change in his feelings toward me. I said we always had been very frank with each other and I felt we should continue on that basis. Deciding, doubtless, that too much talk on the subject would complicate things for him, he said, ‘You must be crazy. Nothing at all is going on.’ He sounded so convincing, I believed him, preferring to think that perhaps the journalists had been badly informed” (345). Yet once Picasso’s infidelities intensify and become more flagrant, Gilot can no longer accept his lies. She finally wakes up from the psychopathic spell: “I had been under his spell, but I was no longer. I had waked up and I was disenchanted” (348).

15.  The Psychopath’s Rage. As we’ve seen, psychopaths regard their partners as their personal property. While they reserve the right to juggle multiple relationships and find pleasure with others, they become downright furious when their devalued partners dare to move on with their lives as well. Picasso expresses his possessiveness quite bluntly when he tells Gilot: “I prefer to see a woman die, any day, than see her happy with someone else” (351). By the time Gilot decided to leave him, Picasso was already practically living with his new girlfriend, Jacqueline Roque, whom Gilot describes as slavishly submissive to him. But the fact that he had already replaced her did not in any way prevent Picasso from viewing Gilot as rightfully his: “‘You owe me so much,’ he said, ‘This is your way of thanking me, I suppose. Well, I’ve just got one thing to say. Anybody else will have all of my faults and none of my virtues. I hope your life is a fiasco, you ungrateful creature’” (366).

Picasso’s statement would ring true only if Gilot would have replaced a talented psychopath like him with a garden variety psychopath—your ordinary Loser—who lacked his ambition, accomplishments and abilities. But, in fact, she didn’t trade one kind of psychopath for another. She replaced Picasso with a real, functioning man who truly loved her. Psychopaths hate the sense that they have not succeeded in destroying their former partners. They don’t want “their” women to regain their strength and lead much happier lives without them.

Picasso admits as much when he tells Gilot, “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I’d be rid of them… You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents” (349). In fact, he partially accomplished this goal. He more or less succeeded in psychologically destroying all of his former partners: except, that is, for Françoise Gilot. No matter how hard he tried, he could not conquer her. He experienced her freedom as a betrayal. In his article on narcissistic controllers, Melton explains that psychopaths and narcissists don’t understand betrayal the way normal people do. They don’t regard it as a violation of mutual trust. After all, they don’t trust others and aren’t trustworthy themselves. Instead, they view betrayal as an assertion of independence by those who were formerly under their control:

For most people, betrayal usually means a deep violation of trust inflicted by someone with whom a close, personal relationship exists. But, to a Narcissistic Controller, betrayal simply means that someone stopped pandering to his every want and need. In other words, when someone breaks away from his control, he feels betrayed. Since Narcissists do not have the capacity to develop close, trusting personal relationships, there can be no deep violation of real trust. When a Narcissistic Controller feels betrayed, contempt dominates his facial and verbal expressions. The insolent, aloof sneer commonly accompanies expressions such as, “He didn’t know who he was dealing with!” Or, Doesn’t he know who I am?” His real complaint—if he had the ability to see it—should be, “Don’t you know who I think I am?” (“Romeo’s Bleeding: When Mr. Right Turns out to be Mr. Wrong,” obgyn.net).

To reassert dominance, Picasso attempts to undermine Gilot’s self-esteem, so that she’ll lack the confidence to leave him for good. He tells her that she’s nothing without him. He asks her, “You imagine people will be interested in you?” as if the very idea were preposterous (355). Fortunately, however, this time she doesn’t believe his insults. She chooses instead to believe in herself. She doesn’t see herself as only his shadow. Perhaps her own lucidity saves her. Most people made exceptions for Picasso’s bad behavior because he was, indeed, such an exceptional artist. Because Gilot saw who Picasso was as a human being—the emptiness within him—she moved on to a better life without him. Ultimately, Picasso didn’t rob her of real happiness with another man. He also didn’t succeed in making her bitter towards the rest of humanity, or even towards him, for that matter. Instead of hating her former lover and rejecting their past together, Gilot saw her years with Picasso as a painful learning experience that enabled her to mature. They gave her an inner strength that lasted for the rest of her life:

Pablo had told me, that first afternoon I visited him alone, in February 1944, that he felt our relationship would bring light into both our lives. My coming to him, he said, seemed like a window that was opening up and he wanted it to remain open. I did, too, as long as it let in the light. When it no longer did, I closed it, much against my own desire. From that moment on, he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past that I shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that (367).

coverLifewithPicasso

I can only hope that those who read Françoise Gilot’s moving autobiography take away from it her message of survival, resilience and strength. Her account of her relationship with Picasso also illustrates that one can run across evil individuals in every wake of society and life. If you expect psychopaths to be the ugly monsters you see in thrillers rather than the cultivated, charming and seemingly sensitive artists, doctors, scientists, teachers or lawyers that they sometimes are, then keep on watching them in movies and reading about them in novels. But remember to also watch out for them in all their guises, talents and professions in real life, which is where you’re likely to encounter them.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Why We Love Brancusi

17 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in aesthetics, art blog, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, postromantic art, postromanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, The Kiss

≈ Comments Off on Why We Love Brancusi

Tags

aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, art, art blog, art criticism, art history, Bird in Space, Brancusi, Claudia Moscovici, Constantin Brancusi, contemporary art, Endless Column, fine art, fineartebooks, fineartebooks.com, history of art, modern sculpture, modernism, modernist sculpture, postromantic art, postromantic movement, postromanticism, postromanticism.com, Princess X, Romanian art, Romanian sculpture, Romanticism and Postromanticism, sculpture, The Kiss, Why We Love Brancusi

Brancusi

Why we love Brancusi

by Claudia Moscovici

Like his magnificent statues, for Romanians, the artist Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) is a national monument. To extend the metaphor, he’s also one of the pillars of Modernism. A favorite in his host country, France, he even has, like his mentor Auguste Rodin, his own museum in Paris.  Like many art lovers, I’m a big fan of Brancusi’s sculpture and, like many native Romanians, I also take a certain pride that one of my compatriots has made such a big impact on art and culture. It seems obvious why so many people appreciate Brancusi. But as an art critic and aesthetic philosopher, I’m tempted to examine in greater detail answers to the question: Why do we love Brancusi?

ConstantinBrancusi5

1)   He’s got Fame

This question of why we love Brancusi might not even come up if people didn’t know about the sculptor and weren’t exposed to his art in museums, galleries, and books about Modernism and the history of art. One of the most famous Romanians—up there with Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran (in philosophy and the history of ideas) and Eugen Ionesco (in drama), Constantin Brancusi is well known and much appreciated internationally. Almost every major museum in the world exhibits his art nowadays. But Brancusi achieved both fame and notoriety during his own lifetime.

He studied with the legendary sculptor Auguste Rodin but was smart enough to leave his famous teacher after only two months to seek recognition in his own right, famously stating: “Nothing can grow under big trees.” Soon he became one of the “big trees” himself, becoming known throughout the world for his sculptures The Kiss (1908), variations of Bird in Space (1928) and, of course, his chef d’oeuvre in Tirgu-Jiu, Endless Column (1938). Wealthy investors, including John Quinn, bought his sculptures. He exhibited his works in prestigious places, including the Salon des Indépendants in Paris and the Armory Show in New York.

constantin-ef

One of the premier Modernist artists and a bohemian at heart, Brancusi kept company with some of the most influential artists, poets and writers of his time, including Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Amedeo Modigliani, Ezra Pound, Guillaume Appollinaire, Henri Rousseau and Fernand Lèger. His list of acquaintances and friends reads like a Who’s Who of famous Modernist artists, poets and writers.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

2)   He’s got Personality

The artists that make it big often do so not only through their artistic accomplishments, but also through their magnetic personas and promotional antics. It’s difficult to say if Pablo Picasso would have had such an impact without being able to manipulate art deals and shape the public taste or if the Surrealist movement would have become so prominent without Salvador Dali’s zany antics, which weren’t completely random. For instance, to underscore the lobster motif in his art, Dali gave a talk in New York City with his foot in a bucket and a lobster on his head.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Similarly, Brancusi stood out from the crowd through his quirky combination of bohemianism (his free-spirited thirst for life, women and parties)  and severe asceticism. The apparent contrast between his simple, Romanian peasant roots and his sophisticated tastes and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity (he was interested in mythology, art, craftsmanship, music and transcendental philosophy) also drew attention. Furthermore, sometimes retreating at the pinnacle of your success can be a good career move. After creating the monumental Endless Column—which marked the apex of his artistic career—the artist became reclusive and created very few works of art.

ConstantinBrancusi9

While prolific and sociable up to then, during the next 19 years of his life Brancusi created fewer than 20 works of art, all of them variations upon his previous works. The former bohemian socialite also retreated from public view, while, paradoxically, his fame continued to grow. In an article in Life Magazine (1956), the artist is described as an eccentric hermit: “Wearing white pajamas and a yellow gnomelike cap, Brancusi today hobbles about his studio tenderly caring for and communicating with the silent host of fish, birds, heads, and endless columns which he created.”

Years earlier, Brancusi also attracted attention through the shocking novelty of his art: particularly his sculpture called Princess X (1920), a phallic sculpture representing Princess Marie Bonaparte, which created such an uproar at the Salon of 1920 that it was eventually removed from the exhibit. In a clever and rather accurate pun, the art critic Anna Chave even suggested that it should have been named “Princess Sex” rather than “Princess X”.

Brancusi found himself again in the limelight in 1926, when he shipped a version of Bird in Space to the American photographer Edward Steichen. Not viewing the sculpture as a work of art, which would be duty-free, the customs officials imposed taxes upon the piece for its raw materials. Although both of these incidents got Brancusi international attention—or notoriety, depending upon your perspective–artistic magnetism goes beyond mere shock value or even publicity stunts.

Such magnetism is perhaps best described by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche when he urges every person to live his or her life as a work of art: “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” Artistic fame happens when both the artist and the art are able to intoxicate us, as Brancusi clearly does.  A peasant and an erudite artist and intellectual; a bohemian and an almost saintly aesthete; a socialite circulating in Paris’s most elite artistic circles and a recluse, Brancusi’s paradoxical and enigmatic personality attracted almost as much attention as his truly innovative art. Which brings us to the next—and most important– factor: Brancusi’s talent.

ConstantinBrancusi7

3. He’s got Talent: Brancusi’s Originality, Exemplarity and Inimitability

a)    Brancusi is Original.

Although this doesn’t always happen in the history of art, I’m not alone in believing that Brancusi’s fame is very well deserved and that he’s a very talented artist. However, it’s tough to dissect or explain talent philosophically: usually people say they know it when they see it. Sometimes we need to appeal to aesthetic philosophy to understand more closely the reasons behind something that seems obvious or intuitive. In this case, I believe that Immanuel Kant’s second aesthetic criterion from The Critique of Judgment (1790): namely, his definition of artistic “genius” (or what we would call today, somewhat more modestly, “talent”), offers us helpful ways of evaluating the merit of Constantin Brancusi’s art.  This brief digression into Kant’s aesthetic philosophy will help us understand why Brancusi’s art is original, exemplary and inimitable or, simply put, why he’s got talent.

Kant defines artistic talent as “the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art.” (The Critique of Judgment, 225) In other words, talent is partly innate, not just acquired by training and practice. Moreover, producing a work of art is an inherently creative endeavor that requires talent. It’s never just generating a mirror image of reality, but rather a creative interpretation of that reality (or what he calls “nature”). Furthermore, Kant maintains, not all artistic creations are equal. Some stand head and shoulders above the rest, even generating new artistic movements. He offers three main criteria that distinguish artistic talent. First of all, for a work of art to show real talent, “originality must be its primary property” (The Critique of Judgment, 225).

Brancusi is, without a doubt, original. His first major work is The Prayer (1907), a minimalist sculpture that reflects the artist’s unique and eclectic mixture of influences: Romanian folkloric peasant carvings, classical sculpture, African figurines and Egyptian art. A very talented craftsman and woodcarver, Brancusi also innovates a new method of creating sculptures: carving them from wood or stone as opposed to modeling them from clay or plaster, as his mentor Auguste Rodin and many of his followers were doing at the time. Most likely deliberately named after Rodin’s The Kiss (1908), Brancusi’s second major sculpture (by the same name) effaces the realism of the lovers, as they embrace to form one rounded, harmonious monolith: quite literally, a monument to love.  Years later, in Bird in Space (1928), the artist conveys movement, altitude, aerodynamics and flight rather than the external features of the bird itself. The pinnacle of his career and the logical conclusion of capturing feelings and concepts through essential forms, Endless Column  (1938) represents the soaring spirit and heroism of the WWI Romanian civilians who fought against the German invasion. It’s a monument for which, incidentally, Brancusi refused to accept payment.

One of the most innovative aspects of Brancusi’s art is that his sculptures capture the essence rather than the form of objects. Relying upon the Platonic and Aristotelian definitions of forms, the artist distinguishes his minimalism from abstraction. Brancusi protests: “There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.” For Plato, Forms are the original, essential perfect models—such as goodness, virtue or humanity–for concepts and objects. Aristotle transformed this Platonic notion of Forms, distinguishing between the essential and the contingent, or essence and accident. The essence of the object defines what it is no matter how much it changes its appearance or state. Relying upon this Aristotelian concept, Brancusi was one of the first and best known Modernist artists who sought to capture the essence of the emotions and objects he conveyed: be it love and sensuality or heroism and courage.

b)   Brancusi is Exemplary

But originality–in the sense of producing an artifact without imitating other artifacts and without learning how to produce art–does not suffice to qualify an artist as a genius (or talented). An artist may create, as Kant puts it, “original nonsense” that nobody cares about or likes. Taking this possibility into consideration, Kant argues that, secondly, artistic objects must also be “exemplary; and, consequently, though not themselves be derived from imitation, they must serve that purpose for others, i.e. as a standard or rule of estimating.” (The Critique of Judgment, 225) When one produces truly innovative works of art, other artists tend to follow suit. Brancusi set the standard for Modernist sculpture, influencing tens of thousands—if not millions–of artists, many of whom continue his tradition today.

c) Brancusi is Inimitable

Yet there is only one Brancusi. As an anonymous art critic writing for the art website Brain-Juice.com aptly states: “The sculptures of Constantin Brancusi blend simplicity and sophistication in such a unique way that they seem to defy imitation. Yet it is impossible to think of an artist who has been more influential in the twentieth century. Almost single-handedly, Brancusi revolutionized sculpture, invented modernism, and shaped the forms and concepts of industrial design as we know it today.” (Brain-Juice.com on Brancusi) This brings me to the third criterion of aesthetic value that Kant offers to explain artistic talent: inimitability. Although good art is exemplary—in motivating other artists to imitate it—it is also difficult to copy because each talented artist has his own unique style. Brancusi has a signature style that many may emulate, but nobody can replicate.

His host country, France, has long recognized his genius and set up an Atelier Brancusi at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Many of us who love Brancusi’s monumental art are eagerly awaiting a Brancusi Museum in his native country, Romania, as well. In the meantime, we’ll continue to enjoy the Brancusi exhibits throughout the world and his newly restored Endless Column in Tirgu-Jiu.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Ivan Minekov and the Modernist Tradition

08 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in aesthetics, art blog, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, Ivan Minekov and the Modernist Tradition, postromantic art, postromanticism

≈ Comments Off on Ivan Minekov and the Modernist Tradition

Tags

Academy of Fine Arts Nicolae Grigorescu, aesthetics, Alberto Giacometti, art, art criticism, art history, Auguste Rodin, Bulgarian sculptor Paul Minekov, Claudia Moscovici, Constantin Brancusi, contemporary art, contemporary sculpture, fine art, fineartebooks, fineartebooks.com, history of art, Ivan Minekov and the Modernist Tradition, modern art, modern sculpture, modernism, Paul Minekov, Paul Vasilesku, Romanticism and Postromanticism, sculptor Paul Minekov, sculpture

Ivan Minekov represents the rich and diverse tradition of Modernism in contemporary sculpture. Born in Bulgaria, he’s a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Nicolae Grigorescu in Bucharest, Romania. A student of Paul Vasilesku, Ivan Minekov quickly distinguished himself throughout Eastern Europe in the domain of sculpture.

Versatile in terms of material, subject and style, Minekov’s wood and bronze sculptures range from elongated figures reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti‘s art, to the more minimalist and essential forms associated with Constantin Brincusi, to comparatively realistic figures similar to Auguste Rodin‘s. The sculpture featured above, for instance, resonates with Brincusi’s famous Platonic saying that sculpture captures the essence of forms rather than their external appearance:

“There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.”

Sometimes highlighting the essence of objects, at others capturing the realism of forms, Ivan Minekov is a contemporary master of  modernism, in its multitude of styles. Few sculptors have the talent to pull off so successfully so many different artistic traditions while shining through as unique in their own right.

Minekov’s versatility developed not only from his natural aptitude and diverse artistic influences, but also from his international success, as the artist adapted to his international patrons. Between 1975 and 1990, he was commissioned to do a series of monumental sculptures in several Bulgarian cities, including Pazardjik, Burgas, Rousse, Lovech, Dorkovo.

My personal favorite, the sculpture Ballerina (featured at the top of the page), was offered as the award to the winner of the 23rd International Ballet Competition in Varna. Reminiscent of Degas’ famous dancers, Minekov’s statuette is gracefully elongated rather than realistic in style, capturing the fragility of youth and the fluidity of movement. In 1990, Minekov was asked to do a realistic portrait of Professor Denton Cooley, the founder of the Texas Heart Institute.  Not surprisingly, Ivan Minekov’s works are popular with collectors throughout the world, including Europe, Japan, Israel, and the United States. You can see more of his art on his personal website:

http://ivanminekov.com/
Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Artistic Legacy of Georges Yatridès

02 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in aesthetics, art blog, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, Georges Yatridès, modernist art, postromantic art, postromanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, The Artistic Legacy of Georges Yatridès, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on The Artistic Legacy of Georges Yatridès

Tags

aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, art, art blog, art criticism, art history, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fine art, fineartebooks, fineartebooks.com, Georges Yatridès, history of art, modern art, modernism, modernist art, postromantic movement, postromanticism, postromanticism.com, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Surrealism, The Artistic Legacy of Georges Yatridès

There is something other-worldly about the paintings of the French-American painter Georges Yatridès. Although the artist was influenced by Gaugin and the Fauve movement, Yatridès’ work stands apart, on its own. Painted during the height of modernism, it also seems very contemporary in feel, prefiguring  Japanese pop art influenced by comic books.

Luminous, colorful and evocative, these mythical, fantasmogoric paintings bring to mind classical heroism in a modern pictorial translation. They straddle the divide between pop culture and high art, fitting in perfectly with both.

There are several unique artists in the history of modern art that defy categorization–such as Mondigliani and Balthus–whose works are enjoying a contemporary revival. The time has come for a look back at the forward-looking artistic legacy of Georges Yatridès.

http://www.yatrides.com/anglais/index.htm 
http://www.yatrides-21st-century.com/ 
Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Jonathan Root’s Memorable Portraits

19 Thursday May 2011

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in art blog, art criticism, art education, art history, artistic photography, British photographer Jonathan Root, Claudia Moscovici, David Hockney, famous portraits, fine art, fineartebooks, Jonathan Root, Jonathan Root photographer, Jonathan Root's Memorable Portraits, Jonathan Root's Portraits, Philippe Starck, photographer Jonathan Root, Ron Arad

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

aesthetics, art, art blog, art criticism, art history, artistic photography, British Journal of Photography, British photographer Jonathan Root, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, contemporary photography, David Hockney, famous portraits, fine art, fineartebooks, fineartebooks.com, history of art, Jonathan Root, Jonathan Root photographer, Jonathan Root's famous portraits, Jonathan Root's Memorable Portraits, Jonathan Root's portraits, memorable portraits, modern art, modernism, New Design, Philippe Starck, photographer Jonathan Root, photography, portraits, portraiture, postmodernism, postromantic art, postromantic movement, postromantic painting, postromanticism, postromanticism.com, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Ron Arad, Spaces Magazine, the art of portraiture, the photography of Jonathan Root, the portraits of Jonathan Root

The art of portraiture is as old as human civilization itself. Until relatively recently, a portrait used to be, above all, a statement of cultural value. It revealed who, in any given society, had enough value that his or her image was worth being captured and preserved for posterity. While being a general statement of cultural importance, a portrait is also the most intimate and personal art form. A good portrait reveals a unique personality and captures the essence of a person.

Award-winning British photographer Jonathan Root is a master of the art of portraiture. He has photographed some of the most famous artists and designers in the world, including David Hockney, Philippe Starck and Ron Arad.  In each shot, he’s able to capture each person’s uniqueness and accomplishments through a careful orchestration of so many elements: setting, lighting, color scheme, facial expression and pose. The subject and his environment become reflections of each other, yet remain distinct. The setting mirrors who that individual is as much as his expression and pose blend in perfectly with his surroundings. This art of portraiture as simultaneous expression and camouflage makes each of Root’s portraits stand out. No two portraits are alike because no two individuals he has photographed are alike.

One of Root’s most famous portraits is the one of  Philippe Patrick Starck (see image above), a French designer known for the New Design style. He has furnished some of the most posh hotels around the world, including the Mondrian in Los Angeles and the Delano in Miami. Designing everything from furniture to toothbrushes and houses, Starck is innovative, avant-garde and flippant about his creativity. In an interview with Spaces Magazine, Root recounts the (in some respects fortuitous) adventure of photographing him:

 “This turned out to be one of my most enjoyable shoots. I had to go to Venice and then onto the island of Burano. Unfortunately, my tripod had been damaged in transit which I was worried about. When I arrived on the island I went to a restaurant only to discover that everyone was celebrating because they had just won the famous annual rowing competition. No one spoke any English but with lots of sign language one of the guys there came out with some tools and mended the tripod. He arrived in this crazy Agnes B suit and I thought ‘what have I let myself in for’. He found the Wet Floor sign and wanted to use it in the shot so we wandered around for a while and found a brilliant orange wall. I used one of his Ghost chairs in the picture and got him leaning backwards, which is very hard to do for any length of time.” (Spaces Magazine, April 2008)

The picture turned out phenomenal: a modern, avant-garde treasure of design in itself. Every element expressed Starck’s persona (which, for an artist and designer, may be far more important than his actual personality!): the zany, colorful clothes; the orange background; the Wet Floor sign; the comical, almost clownish pose, and despite it all, the stylishness of the image, evident even in significant details like the sunglasses, red gloves and toppled ghost chair. This portrait really screams, rather than subtly hinting, Philippe Patrick Starck! But, at the same time, it also expresses Root’s own signature style. That style constantly changes because, like a chameleon, it adapts to both subject and setting alike.

Take, for instance, Root’s portrait (above) of a more understated but equally creative artist: the Israeli-born designer and architect Ron Arad, who creates everything from showers to chairs. This picture is starkly black and white, modernist, topological: similar to Arad’s designs themselves.  Root captures his friend’s relaxed yet confident pose; his trademark hat and Crocs; his designer chair. Arad’s studio environment becomes a reflection and an extension of his identity and creativity, just as his image gives meaning to the carefully chosen objects that surround him.  Jonathan Root has stated in an interview that “some of [my] best shots have come about by chance” (British Journal of Photography). What wasn’t left up to chance, however, is a fluid style that adapts perfectly to each subject and setting, creating memorable portraits that speak volumes about each individual they come to represent. You can find out more about Jonathan’s portraits on his website, www.jonathanroot.co.uk.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com 

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Barna Nemethi’s AllHollow: A New Dada Springs from the World of Marketing

27 Wednesday Apr 2011

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, Alina Huza, AllHollow, Andy Warhol, art blog, art criticism, art education, art for art's sake, art history, art movements, artistic photography, avant-garde, Barna Nemethi, contemporary art, Curtea Veche Publishing, curteaveche.ro, Dada, Dadaism, fashion, fine art, fineartebooks, Griffon and Swans, griffon.ro, Grigore Arsene, Hugo Ball, Iren Arsene, Iulia Cirstea, l'art pour l'art, modern art, modernism, modernity, Neo-Surrealism, new Dada, new Surrealism, Oana Paunescu, originality in art, Patru Paunescu, photography, pop art, postmodern art, postmodernism, postromanticism, postromanticism.com, Romanian art, Romanian Association of Editors, Romanticism and Postromanticism, surreal art, Surrealism, Surrealist art, The Hunt, Tristan Tzara, Vlad Fenesan, Will Vendramini, Wonderland, Zuzanna Buchwald

≈ Comments Off on Barna Nemethi’s AllHollow: A New Dada Springs from the World of Marketing

Tags

aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, Alina Huza, AllHollow, allhollow.com, Andy Warhol, art, art blog, art criticism, art history, avant-garde, Barna Nemethi, Barna Nemethi's AllHollow: A New Dada Springs from the World of Marketing, Claudia Moscovici, Curtea Veche Publishing, curteaveche.ro, Dada, Dadaism, fine art, fineartebooks, fineartebooks.com, Grigore Arsene, history of art, Hugo Ball, Iren Arsene, Iulia Cirstea, Laura Cosoi, modern art, modernism, Neo-Dada, Neo-Dadaism, new Dada, Oana Paunescu, Patru Paunescu, photography, pop art, postmodern art, postmodernism, postromanticism.com, Romanian Association of Editors, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Surrealist art, Surrealist film, Surrealist photography, The Hunt, Tristan Tzara, Tzara, Vlad Fenesan, Will Vendramini, women in art, Wonderland, Zuzanna Buchwald

Newton’s third law of physics postulates that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. However, things don’t work out as neatly in the world of art. There are some rules that govern the world of art, but as they say, those are meant to be broken by new and innovative artists. One of the most creative and irreverent art movements was Dada, founded by a Romanian poet, Tristan Tzara. Like Surrealism, which later sprung from it, Dada was a broad cultural movement, involving the visual arts, poetry, literature, theater, graphic design and–inevitably–even politics.

Born in the wake of the devastation caused by WWI, Dada rejected “reason” and “logic,” which many of its artists associated with capitalist ideology and the war machine. Despite becoming internationally known for so many visible artists and poets, the Dada movement could not be pinned down.  Its aesthetic philosophy was anti-aesthetic; its artistic contribution was anti-art. As Hugo Ball stated, “For us, art is not an end in itself… but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.”

For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction? Even in the anti-rationalist world of art? Maybe so. But what actions might we be speaking of, today? It’s hard to pick and choose among the many dangers facing the contemporary world: the ever-present threat of terrorism; the backlash of democratic superpowers sometimes even against the innocent and the helpless; the plutocratic mentality threatening to engulf the free world; the homogenizing reign of pop culture; the standardization and what Marx would call the “object fetishism” that has reached unimaginable proportions in the globalized capitalist market.

Looking at the world through critical eyes can reveal a very discouraging picture. But maybe we need such so-called “nihilist” reactions from artists to avoid the bland conformity that threatens to normalize even phenomena which should, by all rights, shock us. Few would know about these modern phenomena better than Barna Nemethi: a young Romanian artist who grew up in a new capitalist market, which developed rapidly under his eyes, largely due to the efforts of his generation. By chance (or good fortune), as the son of Iren and Grigore Arsene, Barna also grew up at the center of Romanian culture. His adoptive father is the President of the Romanian Association of Editors and, along with his wife, Iren, the head of Curtea Veche Publishing, one of Romania’s most prestigious and largest publishing houses. Barna followed in his parents’ footsteps by becoming the Managing Parter at Curtea Veche Publishing (http://www.curteaveche.ro/) and the Executive Manager of the Advertising Company Griffon and Swans  (http://www.griffon.ro/). He’s also a very talented film director and photographer.

But perhaps Barna Nemethi’s most ambitious, subversive and dynamic project is AllHollow (http://www.allhollow.com/), a new online magazine that combines photography, journalism, (anti)aesthetic philosophy, fashion, film and art. In the April issue, Laura Cosoi pays tribute to the legendary pop artist Andy Warhol by dressing like him and shooting video clips in which she imagines and recreates how he’d react to contemporary gadgets, such as the ipod.

The clips are quite stylish, but there’s a good measure of irony and humor in the tribute, as Laura emulates Warhol’s slow, meticulous style, in the vimeo clip below:

http://vimeo.com/21645424

The April issue of AllHollow also includes Wonderland (Concept by Oana Paunescu, produced by Alina Huza and filmed by Patru Paunescu, directed by Vlad Fenesan and photographed by Barna Nemethi).  The film and the photo shoot both mediate the boundaries between high fashion (modeled by Iulia Cirstea) and new Surrealism/Dada images and scenes.

The set itself has dream-like inconsistencies and juxtapositions. A spectacularly beautiful woman, dressed in a combination of nightgown/ballerina outfit and black fishnet stockings, lies on a metal bed above which hangs…a giant fish. She’s surrounded by three manechins, which seem evocative of feminine and masculine roles.

http://www.allhollow.com/#1168104/Wonderland-Motion

The “heroine”  moves with the mechanical, slow and sometimes sensual abandon of someone trapped in a dream, or perhaps unwittingly trespassing the boundaries between dream and reality. The images and the model are so hauntingly beautiful that they belong in a high-fashion shoot. Yet, at the same time, the incongruous setting and absurd array of props surrounding the model makes the entire scene evocative, open-ended in meaning and surreal. There is no dominant theme, no obvious plot: nothing to trap the model in any structure other than the aura of the fantastic itself.

I can’t write about AllHollow without also alluding to The Hunt, a series of photographs taken by Barna Nemethi in Manhattan, which features the models Zuzanna Buchwald and Will Vendramini. Like Wonderland, there’s a Surrealist mood and more than a touch of Dadaism in these images. The handsome man sometimes wears a funny animal mask, sometimes not. He’s simultaneously presented as a stalker/predator in search for his languid prey and as an attractive potential date for the beautiful woman.

The Hunt makes  light of–while also making viewers attuned to–the strange (yet normalized) mating/dating rituals  that men and women commonly engage in. But, simultaneously, like practically all of Barna Nemethi’s  series, this set of images could easily function as a high fashion photo spread that seamlessly combines impeccable stylishness and subversive creativity.

For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. This happens in the laws of physics and sometimes also in the more erratic world of art. In the case of Barna Nemethi’s innovative AllHollow project, however, the action and the reaction come from the same source. Barna Nemethi’s film and photography represent a new Dadaism full of artistic innovation and subversion at the heart of the marketing world that it simultaneously perpetuates and transforms.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Modern and Whimsical: The Art of Helene Lopes Codrescu

01 Tuesday Feb 2011

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in art blog, art criticism, art history, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, fineartebooks, Helene Lopes Codrescu, modern art, Op Art, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, pop art, postromantic art, postromanticism, postromanticism.com

≈ Comments Off on Modern and Whimsical: The Art of Helene Lopes Codrescu

Tags

art blog, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, Cubism, Cubist painting, Dora Maar, finartebooks, fine art, Helene Lopes Codrescu, La Danseuse Voilée, modern art, modernism, New York from the Sky, Op art, Pablo Picasso, painting, Paul Klee, pop art, postromanticism.com, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Veiled Dancer, Woman in a Box

The artist Helene Lopes Codrescu describes herself as “a free electron.” She finds inspiration in numerous traditions in modern art, spanning the globe and reshaping them according to her own talent and perspectives. The painting La Danseuse Voilée (Veiled Dancer), below, has something of the whimsical playfulness of a Paul Klee doodle.

But New York From the Sky, on the other hand, with its geometric shapes and mosaic angles and refractions, bears some similarity to the New York Op Art movement of the 1970’s.

Finally, what art lover can fail to recognize echoes of Pablo Picasso, during his Dora Maar phase, in the tortuous Cubism of Woman in a Box, featured below?

Helene Lopes Codrescu paints outside the box, however. She freely finds inspiration in numerous rich traditions of modern art, but makes them her own, with the independence and internationalism of the free electron that she is. You can see more of her art on the website artquid, on the link below:

http://www.artquid.com/artist/lopesco/about

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

In all Seriousness: Playing with Toyism

23 Sunday Jan 2011

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, After the end of art, art and activism, art blog, art criticism, art education, art history, art movements, Arthur Danto, Claudia Moscovici, Dada, Dadaism, Dejo, fine art, fineartebooks, Miro, pop art, postmodern art, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Surrealism, Toyism

≈ Comments Off on In all Seriousness: Playing with Toyism

Tags

aesthetics, art criticism, art movements, Claudia Moscovici, Dada, Dadaism, Dejo, In all Seriousness: Playing with Toyism, Miro, modern art, modernism, pop art, postmodern art, postromanticism.com, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Surrealism, Toyism, toyism.com

In modern art, there are a number of movements that placed playfulness and fantasy at their center: Surrealism, of course, but also Dada and pop art. Toyism is the latest movement in this tradition: it subverts the canon to put the fun back in art. What’s interesting about this game-like movement is the fact that it’s rule-bound. In this respect, it goes against the postmodern assumption that anything goes in art. Since the 1960’s, we’ve come to believe that art is what the artists and public make it to be: it’s a realm with consecration (since some artists become better known than others), but no formal rules or boundaries.

Toyism has some affinities with postmodern pop art, but it’s more quirky, introspective and rule-bound. In the early 1990’s, Dejo, a Dutch artist and musician, introduced Toyism to the public. The membership of this group oscillates, usually between 13 and 20 members, but it cannot exceed 26 members: one for each letter of the Roman alphabet. The artists, including the founder, all work under pseudonyms, to allow for greater creativity and freedom.

Their works are figurative and narrative: they represent recognizable objects and every picture or sculpture tells a story. They tend to use bright and distinct colors, rather than mixtures, for greater contrast and visibility. For this reason, Toyist art is very eye-catching. Although a lot of it looks playful and fun–similarly to Miro’s Surrealist doodles–it often deals with serious themes. The Toyists work in many media and genres–including paintings, silkscreens, giclees, prints, jewelry and sculptures–so if you think this kind of art fits with your style or vision, give them a try on http://toyism.com/.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Pushed to the Extreme: Beyond Picasso’s Modernism

21 Sunday Nov 2010

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, After the end of art, art blog, art criticism, art for art's sake, Arthur Danto, Duchamp, Edouard Manet, fineartebooks, Has Modernism Failed, modern art, modernism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Suzi Gablik, Warhol

≈ Comments Off on Pushed to the Extreme: Beyond Picasso’s Modernism

Tags

aesthetic philosophy, aesthetics, After the end of art, art criticism, Arthur Danto, beyond modernism, Claudia Moscovici, Duchamp, Gautier, Has Modernism Failed, Manet, modern art, modernism, Picasso, postmodern art, postmodernism, Pushed to the Extreme: Beyond Picasso's Modernism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Suzi Gablik, Warhol, Zola

In most of his work the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto explains the rise of conceptual art. His artistic heroes are Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, who arguably contributed most visibly to make art what it is today: aesthetic in the critical and reflexive ideas it raises about art, not in the way it represents objects. Duchamp’s urinal and Warhol’s brillo boxes, Danto argues, are not artistic in their materiality. There’s nothing intrinsic to these objects that makes them different from ordinary household objects; from the latrine that Gautier had associated with ugliness and functionality. Their aesthetic qualities, Danto suggests, lie in the way their make us question the nature and existence of art in a radically new and provocative way.

The millennia-old Platonic tradition of understanding art as some kind of inferior mimesis or imitation of reality is clearly gone in such ready-made objects and pop assemblages. Gone is also the equally old tradition, famously initiated by Plato and resurrected by the Romantics and even by Gautier, of art as a special, almost daemonic, inspiration that leads to the creation of beauty. Last but not least, in reading Danto we get the impression that the notion of creativity and originality, defended heatedly by Zola, remains in artists such as Duchamp and Warhol, but it’s hard to match after them. Once originality is pushed so far as to eliminate the intrinsic qualities and extrinsic social functions of art, what’s left of aesthetics? Does art even continue to exist as a separate domain of creativity? Even Danto, the philosophical defender of pop art before it became popular, is not optimistic about the future of art. In After the End of Art and almost all of his other numerous books on the subject, Danto sees no innovation possible after the destruction of the aesthetic object. Tracing the path to this destruction and seeing if it can be, in some ways, reversed or pushed beyond the current impasse hence presents a real challenge.

This is precisely what Suzi Gablik attempts to do in Has Modernism Failed? This book offers a bird’s eye view and critique of Modernist art, focusing in particular upon the effects of claming that art is autonomous from society. Gablik argues that Modernist emphasis upon artistic autonomy—which originally, in the works of Gautier and Zola, claimed nothing more radical than that the artist’s vision should not be subordinate to a social function—has turned into a ceaseless search for formalist experimentation and pushing the envelope of originality as far as it can go. Yet the envelope has become unfolded and, Gablik argues similarly to Danto, it has nowhere further to go:

“Modernism—the term that has been used to describe the art and culture of the past hundred years—appears to be coming to an end. As we live through the unsettling moral and intellectual consequences of what the American critic Irving Howe has called the ‘decline of the new,’ it has become harder and harder to believe in the possibility of yet another stylistic breakthrough, yet another leap into radical form… As long as we are willing to consider anything as art, innovation no longer seems possible, or even desirable.” (13)

Gablik regrets this trend in modern art much more so than Danto, who, as a philosopher, enjoys its conceptual moves. She’s more sympathetic to the general public who, she claims, tends to view modern and contemporary art as “a loss of craft, a fall from grace, a fraud or a hoax. …It remains one of the most disturbing facts about Modernism that a sense of fraudulence has, from the very start, hung round its neck like an albatross.” (13) Given that so many people still crowd into museums of contemporary art and that connoisseurs still pay millions of dollars for Modernist and postmodern art, Gablik’s claim may seem an overstatement. Yet her point remains valid in the sense that she’s not arguing that modern and postmodern art are no longer consecrated or that museums featuring such art are empty. Rather, she suggests that the consecration of conceptual art is regarded by the general populace with skepticism and even disrespect: the phenomenon of looking at the Emperor’s new clothes. Such skepticism is not incompatible with the social and cultural consecration of modern and contemporary art described, for instance, by Bourdieu. In fact, what the general public can’t appreciate is usually all the more revered by the critics and by the intellectual and artistic elite. The fact that mostly they are able to see its merit enhances its value even more (as well as theirs).

Gablik attributes the rise of conceptual art to an excessive emphasis upon artistic originality and autonomy. Zola critiqued the rigid teaching of the Ecole de Beaux Arts and praised Manet and the Impressionists for loosening them up a bit; Gablik maintains that they’ve been loosened so far that nowadays they’re practically non-existent:

“The overwhelming spectacle of current art is, at this point, confusing not only to the public, but even to professionals and students, for whom the lack of any clear or validating consensus, established on the basis of a common practice, has ushered in an impenetrable pluralism of competing approaches. It is not easy any more to picture to oneself clearly what art is, or how it got that way, or more importantly, how it can be justified. … Until the modern period, art and artists had always been imbued with a quasi-religious as well as a moral and social mission, and art was very much integrated with the social and spiritual orders.” (13-14)

We took the arguments for the autonomy of art which were used by nineteenth-century critics such as Gautier and Zola to defend some artistic independence and originality to an extreme which renders originality impossible. When art is subservient to social function, Gautier and Zola plausibly showed, it becomes predictable, standard, rigid. Yet, Gablik counters, when art is altogether removed from social functions—even for the beauty, stimulation and pleasure both Gautier and Zola sought in art—it becomes an exercise in futility:

Ever since the advent of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, singularity has been the norm instead of, as in the past, mastery over technique, or skilled knowledge. The overarching principle of Modernism has been autonomy. Liberation from rules and restraints, however, has proven itself to mean alienation from the social dimension itself; and perhaps the time has come against its present condition of arbitrariness and fragility. (24)

According to Gablik, artists and critics of the twentieth-first century need to rethink the relation between art and the social world and abandon the notion of art’s radical autonomy, which has gone far enough, and has nowhere left to go. She defends the return to some homogeneous aesthetic standards in the schools of Fine Arts, warning: “The freedom from all determinants leads to an indeterminacy so total that, finally, one has no reason for choosing anything at all. Pluralism is the norm which cancels all norms.” (77)

To return to some shared criteria and rules and to think about art’s function in society, Gablik suggests, is not to return to the old, rigid and irretrievable criteria of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. It is to revive the notion of art by linking it—without subordinating it—to society. It is to pick up where Gautier and Zola left off in their critique of originality without dismantling the relevance, beauty and meaning of art. In finding rule and measure in old yet updated Romantic aesthetic standards and ideals, this is precisely what postromanticism aims to do. For, to end with a citation by none other than Picasso—arguably the most subversive and original modern artist—even subversion cannot exist without tradition, nor can originality exist in the absence of aesthetic standards:

“Today we are in the unfortunate position of having no order or canon whereby all artistic production is submitted to rules. They—the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians—did. Their canon was inescapable because beauty, so-called, was, by definition, contained in those rules. But as soon as art had lost all link with tradition, and the kind of liberation that came in with Impressionism permitted every painter to do what he wanted to do, painting was finished. When they decided it was the painter’s sensations and emotions that mattered, and every man could recreate painting as he understood it from any basis whatever, then there was no more painting; there were only individuals. Sculpture died the same death. … Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each one of us must recreate an entire language from A to Z. No criterion can be applied to him a priori, since we don’t believe in rigid standards any longer. In a certain sense, it’s a liberation but at the same time it’s an enormous limitation, because when the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains by way of liberty he loses in the way of order, and when you’re no longer able to attach yourself to an order, basically that’s very bad.” (My life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot, 21)

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 


Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism, Autonomy and Originality in Art

18 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in art blog, art criticism, Auguste Renoir, autonomy of art, Claudia Moscovici, Edouard Manet, Emile Zola, fine art, fineartebooks, Impressionism, individualism in art, modernity, originality in art, painting, postromantic art, postromanticism, Romanticism and Postromanticism, scandal, the Impressionists

≈ Comments Off on The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism, Autonomy and Originality in Art

Tags

art, art blog, art criticism, Autonomy and Originality in Art, autonomy of art, Claudia Moscovici, Edouard Manet, Emile Zola, fineartebooks, Impressionism, Impressionists, individuality of art, Luncheon on the Grass, Manet, modern art, modernism, modernity, Monet, originality in art, Renoir, Romanticism and Postromanticism, the Impressionist movement, the Impressionists, The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism

If any art collection can be said to have a profound impact upon the history of art and aesthetics, the paintings exhibited at the Salon de Refusés in 1863 would certainly be on a top ten list. This collection of paintings marks both a change of views about what counts as good art and a liberating shift in the institutions that consecrated French art to begin with. Before this crucial moment, the production of good art was heavily regulated. From the seventeenth-century, when Colbert instituted the first Salon that would display the art of the painters of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, the Salons and the Academy largely determined artistic standards. Even when the Salon was opened to all artists in 1791, the rules by which they were judged did not become less rigid, even though the number of artists who could display grew substantially as did the public patronage of the arts.

When in 1863 the official Salon rejected 3000 pieces out of the 5000 submitted by artists, with hindsight we can safely say that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a half-mocking, half-appeasing gesture towards the rejected artists, Napoleon III authorized a Salon de Refusés in a space that was distinct from the prestigious Salon sponsored by the Académie.

Like Napoleon I, the Emperor utilized art to express the glory of the French empire. The standards of the official salon were set by the traditional Count Nieuwerkerke, who was the Intendant of the Beaux Arts. He lived in a seventeen room suite in the Louvre and regulated all artistic life at court. By the 1860’s, however, artists and intellectuals–especially in more liberal newspapers– began to object to the rigid standards of the Academy and the Salon. Many of them demanded inclusion in the Salon for a wider range of talented artists.

Napoleon III paid a visit to the Salon and told Nieuwerkerke–perhaps in part to clip his wings–that many of the works rejected were just as good as those accepted. He then ordered that all the works rejected by the Salon be shown in the Palais de L’Industrie in its own show that would be called, condescendingly, the Salon de Refusés. This created the opportunity for new artists such as Manet, Pissaro and Whistler –the generation that had a profound influence upon modern art and especially upon the Impressionist movement–to become more visible in the public eye.

Manet also proved to be a key factor in the dissolution of the Salon de Refusés, however. Once the Emperor saw his Dejeuner sur l’herbe, he was shocked by its undisguised sexuality and agreed with the Academy that the first Salon de Refusés should also be the last. Nonetheless, the controversy stirred a heated debate over the nature of modern art and eventually opened the way for the Salon des Indépendants, galleries, and other institutions that soon rivaled and eventually exceeded the official Salon’s influence upon art.

In fact, in a surprising reversal of aesthetic values, less than twenty years after the Salon de Refusés, the artists associated with this controversial exhibit, particularly Manet, would be enshrined as the founders of modern art. Conversely, the official Salon art would fall into disrepute as mechanical, uninventive, formalistic: in short, l’art pompier, a pejorative term used to describe David’s Roman headgear, which resembled the helmets of firefighters (pompiers).

Judging by his naturalist novels, socialist leanings, journalistic polemics and particularly by what he says about literature in Le roman expérimental, Emile Zola (1840-1902) would appear to be an implausible spokesman for the autonomy, originality and individuality of art. In Le Roman expérimental, a collection of articles that relies upon some of the ideas developed by Claude Bernard in the biological sciences to explain the principles of naturalist literature, he proposes a view of literature as exposing the underlying temperament of human types. If anything, his literature taps into the deterministic currents of the human condition—its maladies, obsessions, addictions and inherited traits—rather than offering a model of human freedom or any kind of individualist ethos.

Nonetheless, throughout his earlier defenses of Manet and of the Impressionists in the art criticism of the 1860’s, Zola is one of the staunchest proponents of individualism and originality in art. True art, he claims, is individuated, original and, above all, autonomous. Individuated, in the sense of bearing the imprint of the personality and temperament of the artist who created it. Original, if it stands out from the rest. Autonomous, in not being subservient to any social function. It is with these premises in mind that Zola became one of the most visible supporters of Eduard Manet’s art and of the work of the Impressionists and postimpressionists.

Zola uses Manet as a counter-example and ammunition against the official Salon art. It’s not that Manet did not also exhibit in the official Salon, but that he and the Impressionists had an ambivalent relation to academic art because their innovations were not fully accepted by either the Salon or (in the beginning) by art critics. It is these very innovations–Manet’s originality and difference–that Zola wishes to defend against academic standards. These standards, he claims, are best represented by painters such as Cabanel, whom Zola regards as a representative of officially consecrated art. Cabanel’s voluptuous nudes, often allegorized as nymphs and angels to simultaneously hide and reveal their erotic appeal, were consistently embraced by the Salon critics as the epitome of high art. At the height of Cabanel’s popularity, Zola predicts in the Salons of 1866 and 68:

“I know that the crowd would scorn me if it heard me but I affirm that the canvases of Cabanel will pale and die of anemia before more or less twenty-five years from now, while the paintings of Manet will flourish throughout the years with the eternal youth of original artworks.” ( Pour Manet, Emile Zola, Le Regard Litteraire, Editions Complexe, 1989).

The author’s distaste for official art was so intense that, ironically, the socialist representative of the working classes even delivers a classist blow below the belt at Cabanel, declaring in the Salon of 1875:

“It’s a composition without defect or merit; the most inimical mediocrity speaks through it; it’s an art made up of all the old formulas, renewed by the able hand of a worker’s apprentice.” (Emile Zola, Ecrits sur l’art, Gallimard, Paris, 1991)

Zola’s prediction about Manet’s success turned out to be accurate, but the question remains: why? Or, otherwise put, what made Manet seem so original to his contemporaries and even to us and how did the aesthetic standards he helped institute come to inaugurate the modernity of art in general? For history, as they say, is written by the winners. So is the history of art, such that now, in hindsight, Zola’s prediction appears to be historically inevitable and his artistic judgment, at least as far as Manet is concerned, infallible. In the attempt to avoid this deterministic outlook, let’s examine how such a view of art emerged as triumphant and whether — or to what extent — its triumph is a positive outcome.

Manet, Impressionism and Postimpressionism have become analogous with the subversion of official academic standards and thus also with artistic modernity. It is said that Impressionism entailed a rejection of the principles taught by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and esteemed by the academic judges of the official Salon. This idea of the subversiveness of Manet and of the Impressionists has been, since Zola, deliberately overplayed to draw a firmer marker that separates old traditions from new art. For not only did Manet and the Impressionists regularly exhibit at the official Salon—with Manet and especially Renoir seeking its approval to the very end of their lives–but also they were influenced, along with the officially sanctioned artists, by the most famous Renaissance artists as well as by the masters of Romanticism and Realism: Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet.

Yet, without a doubt, Manet and the Impressionists did violate some of the important rules of what is called the “Beaux-Arts system.” The Beaux-Arts system was instituted to meet the requirements of the Academy, which were taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. These included the following principles:

1. A respect of the hierarchy of genres which privileged, in descending order, history paintings, religious themes, portraits and still-lifes. Of course, principles are always somewhat different from public taste and practice. Even during the eighteenth-century, when Chardin’s still-lifes were extremely popular and defended by notable philosophes such as Diderot, the hierarchy of genres instituted during Louis XIV’s reign was being called into question. During the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of realism and the representation of every-day subjects and life, it was even more radically altered. Although some well-respected artists, such as Cabanel and Bouguereau, continued to observe its rules, many artists did not. As Théophile Gautier announced in the 1846 Salon, “religious subjects are few; there are significantly less battles; what is called history painting will disappear… The glorification of man and of the beauties of nature, this seems to be the aim of art in the future.”

2. Drawing is more important than color. The reason behind this rule was that the drawing of forms was considered more abstract because it was not already found in nature. Thus, it was assumed that it took greater artistic talent to convey forms by drawing their shapes and outlines rather than by blotting, from nature, their colors.

3. Drawing from live models in conformance to the study of anatomy, not in order to convey nature as is, but to improve it by rendering it more noble, elegant and beautiful. During the seventeenth century, Neoclassicism perpetuated this improvement of nature, or capturing la belle nature.

4. Painting in the studio, as opposed to in the open air, since the studio was a place where the source and intensity of light and, more generally, the whole painting environment could be controlled to suit the aesthetic needs of the artist.

5. Paintings had to be elaborately detailed, meticulously executed and, above all, look polished and finished.

6. The overarching and unspoken framework behind the Beaux-Arts system was verisimilitude: or representing in painting—through shading, foreshortening, sfumato and the observance of one-point perspective–the three-dimensionality of objects as seen by the eye.

The Impressionists’ greatest contribution to art was not so much to change the notion of painting as representing what the eye can see—or the standards of verisimilitude that had been dominant since the Renaissance—but to alter what the eye should see as well as where and how it should see it. Their violation of the rules of the Beaux-Arts system was not revolutionary—in the sense of transgressing its underlying premises or goals–but it was thorough, in the sense of changing almost all of the means of reaching those goals. The Impressionists considered that the best forum to observe and represent nature would be in the open air—which is why their works were called plein air paintings–where the play of light and shadows would be most natural, striking and intense, rather than under the dim and artificial lighting of the studio.

Furthermore, as noted, the art students in the academies conveyed the three-dimensionality of forms by means of the subtle shading which was first perfected by the Renaissance masters. The Impressionists, on the other hand, evoked a sense of three-dimensionality by representing the dramatic contrasts of color which can be observed in vibrant sunlight. In seeking to capture visually the play of light and shadow—and its transformations—the Impressionists used rapid brushstrokes to produce paintings that looked rushed and unfinished as opposed to the well-rounded, glossy and polished forms and subtle shadings respected by the Beaux-Arts system. Similarly, rather than depicting a posed or characteristic angle of the objects painted, Manet and the Impressionists showed objects from uncharacteristic, and often, truncated perspectives. This truncation of subjects and objects, which is especially obvious in the paintings of Renoir and Degas, openly acknowledges the incompleteness of our field of vision and powers of representation.

Although he was Cézanne’s childhood friend, Zola became particularly fascinated with Manet. In Manet he identified the harbinger of a new kind of art. One mark of Manet’s originality for Zola is the painter’s frequent rejection from the official Salon whose standards, as we have seen, the novelist considered too rigid and retrograde. The (future) Impressionists were of course also rejected from the Salon—even the widely popular Renoir suffered some setbacks—but it’s Manet’s rejection in particular that drew attention. His painting Déjeuner sur l’herbe divided and riled up the public on the grounds I alluded to earlier: its sketchy and seemingly unfinished style; its minimal use of shading and bright color-contrasts to show perspective; its unadorned and decidedly non-allegorical or idealized depiction of sexuality. A few years later, in 1866, Zola vocally came to Manet’s defense. Of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe in particular he states:

Mr. Manet’s talent is made up of simplicity and justice. Without a doubt, before the incredulous nature of some of my compatriots, he will have decided to interrogate reality, all alone; he will have refused all acquired knowledge; all traditional experience; he would have wanted to take art from the beginning, which is to say, the precise observation of objects. (M. Manet, 1866, p65, quatrième article du Salon, 72)

To highlight the painter’s originality and make more general points about autonomy and originality in art, Zola focuses upon Manet’s difference from the art of the official Salon and uses Cabanel as a foil to Manet. And in many respects Manet does, indeed, violate the official rules. When under the apprenticeship of Thomas Couture, who was considered to be a modern, nonconventional painter himself, Manet is said to have told his models to pose more naturally. One model, the story goes, refused, saying that one of the works she posed for was sent to Rome (she was probably referring to a submission to the famous Prix du Rome). Manet replied: “We are not in Rome! And we do not wish to go there. We are in Paris. We intend to remain here.” (Manet: The Influence of the Modern, Francoise Cachin, tr. Rachel Kaplan, Discoveries, New York, 1995). Yet at the same time Manet, like more traditional painters, trained himself by copying the works of the Italian Renaissance masters, including Tintoretto’s Self-Portrait (1588) and works by Titian. Furthermore, art critics find in his Déjeuner the influence of a Rococo painting by Boucher, Diana and the Bath (1742).

Zola’s main argument for Manet is primarily one explicitly against the official Salon. But in defending Manet’s art, Zola also takes a stand against contemporary utilitarian theory, particularly the aesthetic philosophy of Taine and the social philosophy of Proudhon, who argued in very different ways for the same goal: the social utility of art. Taine used deterministic arguments, Proudhon proposed utilitarian ones, but both critics wanted art to serve the function of improving humanity. In arguing against this model of art, Zola and Gautier likewise share a common enemy and goal. In the essay “Proudhon et Courbet” (1866), Zola argues vehemently against Proudhon’s Du principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale, which was published posthumously in 1866. He takes issue in particular with the philosopher’s definition of art as “an idealist representation of nature and of ourselves, which has as a goal the physical and moral improvement of our species”” (43). While this seems an adequate description of Zola’s own naturalist fiction, the novelist sees art as fulfilling a radically different function: “Art perfects in its own way, by challenging the mind, not by preaching or addressing itself to reason.” (43)

The very purpose of art, Zola suggests, is to challenge and surprise, not instruct or indoctrinate. Originality and newness are art’s raison d’être—its impact upon the senses and emotions—rather than its contributions to our understanding. The notion that art should be original, emotive and surprising, however, depends upon an even more basic assumption: that of artistic freedom. For Zola proclaims the individuality of art to defend the artist’s right to express his unique aesthetic vision. In so doing, like Gautier, Zola expounds forcefully the notion of artistic autonomy. Whereas Proudhon elaborates a more traditional view of art in which the artist serves his patrons and the public—under the updated guise of serving “humanity” in general–Zola and Gautier both sever the direct link between art and society. In Proudhon’s aesthetics, Zola objects, “By himself the artist is nothing, he is all by humanity and for humanity. In a word, the individual sentiment, the free expression of a personality are forbidden. One must only be the interpreter of the general taste, work only in the name of all to please everyone.” (44)

In so far as an artist attempts to produce art to please others—even something as abstract as humanity or society—his creativity and freedom are constrained. The only art that’s true, Zola suggests, is the kind that fulfills his modern expectation of originality and artistic genius. Art that cannot be separated from religious and political artifact—as in the case of Egyptian tomb statues and papyrus paintings or the gothic cathedrals erected to glorify popes and kings—ceases to be artistic. The novelist thus rejects Proudhon’s aesthetic standards and preferences, whereby “Art attains its degree of perfection once the artist effaces himself, when the work no longer bears his name, when it is the product of an entire epoch, of a nation, as are the Egyptian statues and the Gothic cathedrals.” (44) With this emphasis upon artistic freedom and autonomy that is articulated in slightly different ways by Gautier and Zola, we see the birth of a modern aesthetics from which there would be no turning back.

Interestingly, Zola cites Michelangelo as an example of an autonomous artist, despite the fact that his art, like that of his contemporaries, was a social and religious artifact sponsored by prominent patrons and popes. So it appears that Zola conflates the notion of artistic autonomy with that of artistic originality. Yet he gets out of this logical bind by claiming, more modestly, that art is autonomous not if it’s completely removed from all social use, but if the artist himself is a free spirit—regardless of who pays for his art—and exhibits originality:

I declare in principle that a work of art lives only by its originality. I must find a man in each work of art, or the work doesn’t move me. I clearly sacrifice humanity to the artist. My definition of a work of art, were I to formulate one, would be: ‘A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.’ What do I care about the rest! (44-5)

Later, in his typical demagogical style, Zola asks: “I ask you, the people who allowed themselves to have genius without consulting humanity; the Michelangelos, Titians, Veroneses, Delacroix, who had the courage to think for themselves and not for their contemporaries, to say what was in their guts and not what the imbeciles of their times had in theirs!” (49) If Michelangelo, Titian and Delacroix could be considered autonomous artists by Zola and Gautier—both of whom mention these artists to illustrate the principle of autonomy in art– it’s because, significantly, these nineteenth-century authors do not mean by artistic autonomy what the notion has come to signify during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Nowadays autonomy means that art serves no social purpose whatsoever. Gautier and Zola, despite their bold, polemical language, don’t push the non-utility of art to such an extreme. Gautier doesn’t wish to conflate art and morality, but he still expects that art be beautiful, pleasing and entertaining to its public. Similarly, Zola defends autonomy as the motivation, not as the effect of art. Good art, his examples suggest, can be placed in a Church or city square, can be accessible and enjoyed by a wide public, can illuminate and please the public. What he emphasizes, however, is that an artist should not produce art exclusively to fulfill a set of social goals, concept of beauty or particular ideology.

Seeing what Zola means by artistic autonomy, it makes sense that he uses Michelangelo as his prime example. Even in seeking patronage, Michelangelo was not subservient to the tastes and religious assumptions of his patrons. The Sistine Chapel may have been paid for by a Pope, but it was done according to Michelangelo’s artistic vision and, as the painter’s ceaseless delays indicate, sense of timing. Art may be solicited and bought by others, and it may even serve their social or religious purposes, Zola implies, but it remains artistic only in so far as it does not pander primarily or exclusively to prevailing views, social and political ideologies or public tastes.

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754

 


Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Recent Posts

  • Frédéric Jousset: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora
  • The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo
  • Darida Paints Brancusi
  • Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories
  • The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk

Top Posts

  • Diderot's Salons: Art Criticism of Greuze, Chardin, Boucher and Fragonard
  • Rodin's Muses: Camille Claudel and Rose Beuret
  • A Toxic Love: Gilot describes her Life with Picasso
  • Why We Love Brancusi
  • Daniel Gerhartz: The Beauty of Representational Art
  • The Escheresque Photography of Sebastian Luczywo
  • Richard Burlet and the new Art Nouveau
  • On saving European art from the Nazis and The Monuments Men
  • The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk
  • The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism, Autonomy and Originality in Art

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 272 other subscribers

Blog Stats

  • 453,790 hits

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Archives

  • July 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2019
  • September 2018
  • May 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • November 2015
  • August 2014
  • June 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • September 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 272 other subscribers
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Blogroll

  • Be Art Magazine
  • Catchy Magazine
  • Edson Campos
  • Edson Campos Art reviews
  • Fine Art E-book Website
  • Leonardo Pereznieto's art
  • Literatura de Azi
  • LiterNet
  • Litkicks
  • Postromantic art
  • Revista Hiperboreea
  • Support Forum

May 2023
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Jul    

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Fineartebooks's Blog
    • Join 272 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Fineartebooks's Blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: