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That Beast Picasso
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14672 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1988 |
2,639 Words |
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Michael Marshall
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PICASSO--
Creator and Destroyer
Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988
522 pp., $22.95
This book might have been called Picasso: A Passionate Encounter. At one point during the five years she worked on it, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington was told by Francoise Gilot, Picasso's companion from 1946 to 1953 and mother of two of his children, "It should not be a biographer writing at arm's length about Picasso, but you, Arianna, in a living, present relationship with him."
Huffington took this advice to heart ("disastrous" advice, said John Golding in the New York Review of Books, July 21, 1988), grappled with Picasso at close quarters--perhaps too close--and was overwhelmed by the dark side of his nature. She took up this project after David McCulloch had abandoned it; he said later that he had not wanted a monster in his life for five years. In one of the films on Picasso that the Tate Gallery in London showed in conjunction with the exhibition Late Picasso, 1953-72, Picasso was described as a "marvelous monster." There is, however, nothing marvelous about the monster portrayed in this book: Picasso could be deceptive, manipulative, and cruel, and examples of such behavior are chronicled at length and in detail.
Picasso treated his friends abominably at times. He maintained that real friendship was so precious to him that it had to be tested. He did not, however, expect such testing to be reciprocal and in his later years became increasingly intolerant of anyone who dissented from his views and wishes. Thus his friendship with Giacometti was severed, with the latter declaring, "I'm not interested in having a relationship with you if I cannot say yes or no as I please." The art historian Douglas Cooper was banished from Picasso's court for raising the subject of Picasso's children, whom Picasso refused to see in his later years.
No Aid to His Friends
More troubling are Picasso's refusals to lift a finger to help Max Jacob when the Nazis arrested him in 1944, or to help Endre Rozsda, the painter, when he was trying to flee communist Hungary. Much of Picasso's international fame beyond the world of art rests on his Dove lithograph and on his painting Guernica, which protests the destruction of the town of that name by German bombers during the Spanish civil war. And having joined the Communist Party in 1944, he lent his fame to the support of communist causes in the postwar period. But he world not sign the petition organized by Jean Cocteau for the release of Jacob--who was Jewish and en route to an to an extermination camp--despite the fact that Jacob was one of his oldest friends and had been his patron and protector during Picasso's early struggling years in Paris. "It's not worth doing anything at all," said Picasso. "Max is a little devil. He doesn't need our help to escape from prison."
In Rozsda's case, Picasso offered neither help nor sympathy. Rozsda, Gilot's former art teacher, wanted to leave Hungary and return to France, which he had left during the war. He was an abstract-surrealist painter, and the regime had forbidden him to paint in that style. When Gilot asked Picasso to intervene on
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