“I am the greatest collector of Picasso in the World”

by  Candy Hisert

“If my husband painted me like that, I’d kill him.”

“I don’t care if it was in a ballet, those women are fat.

“I see a pitcher.  Where do you see Picasso?”

People were talking at the preview party for PICASSO: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris, now on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Ca.  The exhibition, which runs through October 9, includes more than 150 works of art, all of which were once a part of Picasso’s personal collection. The crowd fueled by the open bar were both entertained and entertaining.  Everyone had an opinion.

“He must have gotten bored with her,” one patron said of Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (1918), a painting of Picasso’s first wife, which had large patches of  unfinished canvas.  “That’s why she looks so unhappy,” his wife replied meaningfully.

 Man with a Guitar, a cubist painting from 1911, produced looks of frustration.   A docent patiently tried to explain how the artist was reducing his subject to simple shapes and then painting them from multiple perspectives.

“He’s wrestling with three dimensions on a two dimensional canvas. What do you see?”

One man cautiously approached the large canvas and finally volunteered, “I think I see half a moustache.” 

“For what he charged, you’d have through he would have painted the other half,” another guest muttered.

Works from Picasso’s early years attracted the most favorable comments.

La Celestina, painted in 1904, represented the artist’s Blue Period.  Viewers were fascinated and repulsed by the old woman with a diseased eye. Picasso claimed she was the most reliable madam in Barcelona.

A gouache from Picasso’s Rose Period, The Two Brothers, drew many curious questions as to whether the boys performed their circus act in the nude. (They didn’t).

Ultimately, the patrons wanted to know the stories of Picasso’s many women, most of whom were represented in the exhibition.  Much was made of the numerous paintings and bronze busts of Marie-Therese Walther, who became Picasso’s mistress when she was seventeen and he was forty-five.  The massive bronze heads with huge phallic noses and the erotic paintings of Marie-Therese reclining on a divan left little to the imagination. 

In contrast, the paintings of Dora Maar, who replaced Marie-Therese in Picasso’s affections in 1937, revealed a woman prone to tears and long, red fingernails. 

“Nothing sexy about her,” was the consensus of the crowd.  “And what’s with that nose?”  The obscene nose was a reminder that Picasso often remarked, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

There were cheers from the more militant women when they came to The Shadow. Begun in 1953, the painting was the artist’s reaction to the departure of Francoise Gilot, the only mistress who voluntarily walked away from Picasso.   In the painting the artist’s grief is palpable. Picasso’s shadow falls on a large abstract canvas of Francoise in the nude.  A child’s pull toy serves as a reminder that Francoise has taken the couple’s two children with her. 

The last woman to enter Picasso’s life was Jacqueline Roque, the woman who ultimately became the second Mrs. Pablo Picasso. The Kiss from 1969 shows Jacqueline and Picasso mouth to mouth, Picasso looking extremely vigorous for a man who is celebrating his eighty-eighth birthday.  Cynics pointed out that Picasso’s head looms over Jacqueline’s. In fact he was shorter than she.

Ultimately, the exhibition offered something for every viewer.  Those familiar with the artist’s great paintings stared at the studies for Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica.  Art historians pointed out the Picasso’s tributes to Manet  and Matisse.  The political contingent praised Massacre in Korea, Picasso’s bitter reaction to the Korean War.

And those fortunate patrons who actually possessed a Picasso of their own did not hesitate to make comparisons.

“Maybe we should take ours out of the john,” one man whispered to his wife.  “It’s a helluva lot better than this one.”