Part One: How Picasso drained the energy of his mistresses

So many of the artist’s portraits are the images of women reduced to husks by the creative will that they have nourished.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of a Woman, 1938

There were nine Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne, the personification of memory, with whom Zeus lay on nine successive nights. They became, fittingly, the companions of Apollo as god of poetry and music, since memory is indispensable to performance, and memory in its original and deepest meaning was not merely recollection but, to use a term weakened today by overuse, mindfulness.

No modernist artist was as fascinated by the figure of the Muse as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), or represented the relationship of artist and Muse as memorably as he did in the etchings of the Vollard Suite (1930-37). But it was also his personal relationships with a series of wives and mistresses that helped to establish in the popular mind the idea of artists being inspired not by a goddess but by a female companion in real life.

Relationships with women were central to Picasso’s life and work, and as I have suggested before, his case illuminates the interplay of the male and female principles, or what the Chinese call yang and yin, in artistic creation as in other domains. Clearly everyone, regardless of their biological sex, has elements of both yin and yang in their makeup, and both principles are required in varying degrees for any sophisticated or complex activity, from painting or writing to scientific research or even military command.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of a Woman

The yang principle is energy, force, will, determination, independence and originality; the yin principle is receptivity, sensibility, pliancy, sociability, the sense of continuity, coherence and conformity. A painter, to take just one example, needs receptivity and sensibility to apprehend the world, but also energy and will to persist with the difficult task of turning intuition into an image – at the same time finding a balance between independent vision and conformity to a language and tradition that will make the finished work intelligible.

Picasso is a fascinating case of an artist in whom the masculine or yang principle is not only dominant but almost exclusive. This is why he is so powerfully and restlessly original, but it also explains the unsatisfactory nature of some of his work and its failure to reach harmonious resolution. Unable to find the yin principle in himself, he seems to have been entirely dependent on deriving it from his female companions. The muse figure in his case is in no sense just a matter of biographical detail, but becomes central to his life and work.

This helps to explain the succession of mistresses: it was not enough to have a companion who would be a wife and mother, it had to be a vitally erotic relationship for him to assimilate the essential feminine energy, like those Hindu gods who mysteriously derive power from their ostensibly passive female partners. And this also explains, as I have suggested elsewhere, why so many of Picasso’s portraits or would-be portraits of his mistresses are so distorted and sometimes anguished: they are the images of women reduced to husks by the creative will that they have nourished.

Picasso is not simply a remarkable individual artist. He is in many ways the archetypal modernist artist, because modernism valued originality and innovation, fundamentally yang qualities, above all else. This is ultimately why modernism produced so many brilliant dead-ends, and failed to form a synthesis that could be taught or carried on from one generation to the next as had occurred in other centuries and other civilisations. And so the story of Picasso’s evolution as an artist is an exemplary one with lessons for the whole of 20th century art history.

Picasso, Woman in an Armchair, 1927

The Picasso Century, which comes from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, follows the artist’s development throughout his life, and includes a great many pictures by contemporaries, which will be discussed in a separate article. The juxtapositions are often useful, but the effect can sometimes be distracting and not all the pieces included are of equal interest. The exhibition has been designed as a series of quite small spaces which were densely packed when I visited on a Saturday.

The most intellectually and aesthetically complex work is in the early cubist period, from the years before World War I which were the most dynamic period of modernism. These are also the most dispassionate of Picasso’s works, since their subject is still life, not the figure which dominates in other periods of his career.

Analytical cubism continues the deconstruction of renaissance perspective begun by Cezanne, whose posthumous retrospective in 1907 had made a deep impression on Picasso and Braque. Of course this deconstruction was not merely a matter of style. Perspective was a founding step in the conceptualisation of modern science, so the practical critique of this way of rationalising visual experience was also an implicit questioning of rationality and the scientific model itself.

Matisse, as I pointed out recently, was also an heir to Cezanne, but he was content to let space collapse and allow everything to find its place in a decorative pattern on the pictorial surface.

Picasso’s approach was completely different: not only does he abandon the fixed viewpoint and the rational construction of space, he scrutinises the object itself until it dissolves and loses its objectivity: its solidity, body and definition in space.

What is left behind? Essentially, things that are inherently two-dimensional, and thus not affected by spatial deconstruction: labels on bottles, words on newspapers – Picasso’s still life subjects are the paraphernalia of a cafe table – and sometimes forms of three-dimensional things that register in our memory as two-dimensional contours: the silhouette of a bottle, the curve of a violin, the strings of a guitar.

But the reason that these pictures are so visually interesting is that Picasso never loses sight of the matrix of the picture plane: his austere world of traces and vestiges is organised pictorially around an architecture of horizontals and verticals which in turn make lines that deviate from these axes strongly expressive. This remarkable, almost infallible, sense of pictorial composition is one of Picasso’s strengths throughout his career, together with the extraordinary and perhaps above all uninhibited graphic facility demonstrated in an excerpt from Henri-Georges Clouzot’s documentary Le Mystere Picasso (1956).

Pablo Picasso's Figures by the sea (Figures au bord de la mer) 12 January 1931. Musée national Picasso-Paris/RMN-Grand Palais// Mathieu Rabeau

His interest in the figure reaches its first mature phase just before the cubist interlude with the mask-like heads of the period leading up to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). This painting is not in the exhibition, but a couple of other works show the same interest in primitivism, and particularly in the simplified and schematic images of the human features produced by cultures that have not yet developed a sense of the individual or of personal psychology.

Living in a civilisation that had taken the psychological analysis of the individual and the minute study of personal subjectivity to an extreme, Picasso and other modernist artists were drawn to the idea of a much simpler mode of existence, without self-analysis and almost without self-consciousness, ruled by a combination of instinctual drives and the simple but enduring social norms and archetypal beliefs.

We can see an early expression of this interest in Mother and Child (1907), which is very close to a 13th-century Romanesque sculpture of the Virgin and Child now in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, even to the redness of the faces, although this is exaggerated in Picasso’s version.

Pablo Picasso Spanish 1881–1973 Mother and child (Mère et enfant) summer 1907 . Musée national Picasso-Paris/Picasso/Copyright Agency, 2022 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Adrien Didierjean

From tribal fetishes to the Catalonian Romanesque, folk art and even Classical Antiquity, Picasso was always willing to draw on any tradition that could offer an image of universal experience transcending personal subjectivity.

This fundamental interest in the impersonal or general will persist in all of his images of the figure, even when they are ostensibly portraits. He was not happy with his early portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905-06) until he had generalised it and rendered it, in one sense, less literally like its ostensible subject. He famously declared that Stein would come to look like his image of her, and she wrote that it was the portrait in which she recognised herself.

The impersonal has many faces in Picasso, from the colossal serenity of the neoclassical The Spring (1921) to the equally enormous Figures by the Sea (1931) in which monstrous and barely human forms couple writhing on the beach. The focus is on the act of kissing, also evoked in several nearby images, and always with a sense of a primal and savage act.

There is a similar feeling in his most reductive images of women, like the monochromatic Figure (c. 1927) in which the features are rearranged with the nostrils at the top, like a sniffing dog, and the mouth turned vertical, evoking sexual connotations. From a year or two later comes the The Studio (1928-29) in which the artist’s own shadow appears as a menacing presence on the right, while in the background a distorted and almost equine version of a female head seems to scream hysterically.

The same distorted features and vertical mouth appear in Woman in an Armchair (1927), the wall label of which quotes Picasso’s famous remark “les femmes sont des machines à souffrir”, women are machines for suffering. There is no doubt that in saying this, Picasso was sensitive to the deeper etymological connotations of the word: to suffer is not only to be in pain – though that is certainly part of what he had in mind – but even more fundamentally to be passive, to endure rather than to act one’s own existence.

One sign of this passivity is the shrivelling of the figure’s arms, as though atrophied from disuse, into mere lines with three stick-fingers at the end. Her body is flat and without substance, and she is set against a background of harsh and threatening silhouettes.

The depiction of arms is clearly also significant in Portrait of a Woman (1938), in fact a portrait of Dora Maar, who is also the model for the NGV’s Weeping Woman (1937). The head, with Picasso’s familiar – indeed overused – fusion of three-quarter and profile, is vivid, as though still imbued with the spirit of the weeping pictures of the year before. But the body is barely sketched, and indeed the chair – which Picasso also suggested was a symbol of age and mortality – has far more substance.

Again, the arms and hands are almost formless, without articulation or energy, suggestive of passivity rather than activity. But if we look more closely, we notice an even stranger thing: only the right hand is actually represented at all, even if rudimentarily. Dora Maar was left-handed, and the right hand here must recall her strange little masochistic display of stabbing a penknife between the fingers of her gloved hand – her right, evidently – with which she impressed Picasso at their first meeting. Missing a few times, she drew blood and afterwards, at Picasso’s request, gave him the blood-stained glove.

The Picasso Century (Part 1), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until October 9.