Picasso the misogynist

[python_regius]

                                                   Woman with a Flower, 1932

When I saw this current exhibit, I noticed that it is difficult to get a sense of the women's personalities from the paintings.  They have vacant stares (if they aren't horrifyingly grotesque).  Yet when I look at the men he painted, I have a sense of who they might have been.  I can make up a story about their personalities.  It is usually positive. 

Picasso once explained that "in art one must kill one's father," and his life as told by Richardson plays out as a series of these little metaphorical murders. Artists whose work Picasso is unable to dismiss (not many: he once described the Sistine ceiling as "a vast sketch by Daumier") he cannibalizes. He sketches one of Gauguin's Tahitian women and signs the portrait "Paul Picasso." He copies the signatures of Steinlen and Forain over and again like some angry shaman. A friend describing Picasso racing back and forth between the Greek and Roman rooms in the Louvre says he "paces around and around like a hound in search of game." <...> The life and the work are bound together by this single character trait: not so much the instinct to create as the compulsion to erase.