Speaker A
Call this video a Cubist painting because you really can't decide if it's as bad as you think it is or if it's kind of just all over the place. Hello, it's almost National Women's Month, and we're going to celebrate that fact today by talking about yet another man. This is not the video that I wanted to release this week. That would be a video talking about the greatest cold case in art history. That one's coming next week, but until then, you're stuck with me. I don't have the patience to use any sort of teleprompter or write an actual script today, so instead, you get my unfettered rage and my absolute lack of any filter because it's very late at night, and I'm not going to apologize for it except for one time. Sorry. Moving on. So, the real question of the day is, why do I hate Picasso so much? And the answer to that is multitudes of reasons. Why do I hate Picasso? There are many reasons, but the foremost in my mind is the concept of, can you really separate an artist from their art? With a lot of people, they say yes. They say, well, of course, you can separate out Picasso from his art. Picasso was not a good person. I'm going to go into that in a second. Picasso was obviously not a great person, but he was a nuanced person. It's not that he was just an awful, terrible human being. He was an awful, terrible human being who did at least oppose fascism, so there's that. It's been a long day, and I'm tired, so let's get into it, shall we? Heli Namad, who's a gallerist and collector of Picasso's work, said that to live with a painting is to live with its painter. And if that's true, then we're living with a lot of garbage when it comes to Picasso. And the first thought that I have about this that a lot of people don't know or don't recognize is that Picasso, he wasn't just really sexist, he was also a predator towards women and children in more than one way. Please don't demonetize me. And arguably caused the deaths of a lot of people who were close to him throughout his life. So, we're going to go through some of these circumstances today, a sort of 10 Things I Hate About You, greatest hits or perhaps greatest misses of Picasso's life, and you can tell me how you feel about Picasso when we're done here. But first, a little bit of context. First, a quote from the master artist himself: "For me, there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats." What he didn't say is that for Picasso, all of the goddesses eventually and inevitably became doormats. Picasso's first marriage was to a woman named Olga Kova, and they had one child together. The two separated after she discovered that Picasso was having an affair with a 17-year-old girl named Marie Teresa Walter. Excuse me, he was 45 years old at the time, and the only thing that I have to say to that is yikes. Naturally, Picasso went on to father a child with Walter but moved on to other lovers a few years later. Turns out, you know, once they get too old... I can't even make a joke about that. It just feels so DiCaprio in. So later, he began dating an art student named Francois Jelo in 1944. She was 23 years old. Picasso had just turned 63. Jelo and Picasso had two children together, but their relationship ended when Picasso began yet another affair, this time with a woman who was 43 years younger than him. After they separated, Jelo published a book called Life with Picasso, which revealed his long list of sexual flings and sold over 1 million copies. Out of revenge, Picasso refused to see either of his two children that he had with Jelo ever again because that seems like a fair exchange. All of this, by the way, is from different sources that I'm going to throw up on the screen because this video is a mess, as I stated. Picasso had a lot of lovers, and if this is any indication of how bad a lover he was, two of his lovers passed away from mental health complications, arguably because of his continual abuse and mistreatment. Look at the little man. Oh, look at how they are sleeping. Speaking of which, yeah, you know how when he was 45 and he was having an affair with a 17-year-old? Yeah, so he defended himself during that time, which, by the way, is still not normal. During the time, like, we like to defend people in the past by saying, like, oh, it was normal for that context. It was normal for that time period, and that's a really valid criticism of a lot of different circumstances, and I think it's always important to keep in mind the context of the situations that we're discussing. But in this one, the context was that Picasso was a sleazeball. But anyway, Picasso defended his affair with the 17-year-old girl, making light of his actions' criminality by saying that they were both in his prime. Yikes again. Yikes. But here's the thing: with all of his exploitations of women, he also seemed like he was somewhat afraid of women. We look at a lot of his portraiture of women, and he's painting women as objects, but he also seems to have an inherent fear of liberated women, especially in a sexual sense. So, here's the thing. Here's the real thing that really bothers me about Picasso. A lot of this video is just endless ramblings, and honestly, I'm probably going to cut out 95% of this video, and it's going to end up being like two minutes long. But what's really interesting and important to remember, I think, in this case, is that Pablo Picasso is celebrated and venerated despite his identity. And a lot of these female artists and artists of color and artists that have been dragged into the background that we're now just starting to receive recognition are often receiving that recognition within the context of their biography included. But what it feels like is that instead of saying, well, Pablo Picasso is an artist that we should view through the lens of his biography and his life, it feels like we do exactly the opposite, but only with male artists. And I think that's something that's a persistent problem in art history, and you don't just see it with Picasso. Obviously, there are a lot of different artists that have interesting issues to talk about in art history. I mean, Jelo is a great example of another artist who was famously a little bit of a poopy pants, not a very good guy. But the thing that upsets me so much with Picasso is that it feels like we're constantly making excuses and saying, oh, his art is incredible and it's revolutionary and he's a genius. And to be completely honest, if I didn't acknowledge that fact in this video, it would be disingenuous. Picasso was a genius, and I'm not saying that to inflate his ego. Obviously, you're dead. You can't do anything now, Picasso. I say that because it would be a lie not to. Looking at his contributions to art, it is absolutely undeniable that he is a behemoth in the art world for a reason. He has beautiful, expressive paintings. But the problem is, in this case, I would argue it is nearly impossible to separate the artist from the art. And that's because when people are purchasing a Picasso, when they have something that's branded as a Picasso, they're purchasing it in large part because it is a Picasso. If you erase Picasso's name off of his works, for a lot of people, they lose all value. And that, to me, is a great sign that you can't separate the art from the artist. In this case, Picasso, to a lot of people, represents this idea of unfettered creativity, of kind of wild ambition and drive. But for every coin, there's two sides. And in order to acknowledge Picasso's genius, we also need to acknowledge that his art was a lens on his life and that a lot of the things that he painted were in response to how he felt about people, about women, and a lot of these things that he felt were extremely demeaning. I don't know, man. I guess what it is more than anything is that it's about to be Women's History Month, and there are so many brilliant female artists that you never hear about. And I think it would be nice to feel like I'm recognizing an artist with a holistic view. You know, I love the concept of hearing about an artist's life and recognizing their work and recognizing their psyche in...
