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Pablo Picasso
Some people try to pick up girls and get called asshole
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street and girls could not resist his stare
And so Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
The Art Institute has a wonderful exhibition of Pablo Picasso's drawings from across his life. Chicago has a somewhat paradoxical relationship with one of the 20th century's greatest artists. In 1967, Picasso grandly entered the city's aesthetic with Mayor Richard J. Daley’s installation of a massive fifty-feet high steel sculpture in the middle of the Civic Center. It was not without some irony the second generation, Irish Catholic, only son Mayor, exhibited this monumental piece of radical art in the city's center. A year later, only blocks away, the Mayor unleashed his police force to bust the long-haired heads of anti-war protesters and avant garde cultural revolutionaries. The sculpture’s meaning was inscrutable for much of the city's culturally conservative, industrial working class population. Pablo Picasso may never have been called an asshole in New York, but Chicago, plenty.
The present exhibit did provide an amusing chuckle. The label of a Minotaur with a woman sketch stated it represented Picasso’s “self-perception of being a womanizer.” OK, let's do a brief deconstructionist dive. Womanizer? Phew, doesn't womanizer correspondingly imply woman as whore, or in our popular cultural politics woman as victim? Immediately, the teachings of Mother Sinead popped into my head. One of her greatest beefs against the Roman Church was the preaching of sex as sin. She was more aligned with the views of the great artist and feminist Maude Lebowski, that sex was “a natural and zesty enterprise.” Aside from reproduction, every other meaning assigned to sex is cultural. Here in one of America's greatest institutions of culture, six decades into the great American Cultural Revolution, puritanism still abides, but in many ways this revolution always retained deep puritanical streaks, by no means just with sex, though pornographically obsessed it has become. You can take the Puritan out of New England, but you can't take puritanism out of America, or something like that.
The Minotaur as sexual beast was an invention of Picasso's. The classic Greek myth found the Minotaur entrapped in Minos' labyrinth, where he was fed sacrificial children from Athens. Today, there are no such children eating myths, only the brutal reality of child slaughter at the edges of the Pax Americana, for example, Gaza. In this regard, two excellent pieces of the exhibition were 1937 plates used to print fundraising postcards against Spain's tyrant Franco. The plates are titled, “The Dream and Lie of Franco.”
The first paints a Quixotic clad Franco praying, parading, jaunting, woman adoring, and defending against beasts in the sun – the dream.
The second shows the actual brutality of despotic rule, the cruelty, blood, suffering, terror, and most gruesomely the mother with dead child draped across her arms — the lie.
Some of these images would be used later that year in his sublime painting, “Guernica,” representing the destruction inflicted by aerial bombing of the Basque town by German and Italian forces. Using classical and the most modern imagery, Picasso exposed the violence and brutality necessary for all tyranny from the Greeks to America's National Security State — classical themes overflowing in the 21st century.
The exhibition shows the greatness and variety of Picasso’s works, who like every great artist had a seemingly mystical, almost anticipatory sense of their times. With Picasso this was best exemplified in his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a painting of the women of a brothel, considered the beginning of Cubism, the unhinging of singular, linear perspective of space and time. Einstein simultaneously wrote it “will hereafter be called the 'Principle of Relativity.'” It was the end of single hierarchical perspective or patriarchal order in the limited, the always less insightful idea promoted by our cultural revolutionaries. Fifty years later, McLuhan described the exploding technological age of electrodynamics as a revival of communication in mosaic form, instead of the narrative linearity imposed by print, a multiplicity of simultaneous views, in the most classical sense, democratic.
Walking out of the Art Institute, heading directly into the cold wind, first a couple blocks west and then a couple more north, you enter the now renamed Daley Center, there stands The Picasso. Maybe Richard Daley was an artist in his own right, leaving in the heart of his city a modern monument to democratic perspective.
Oh well, be not schmuck, be not obnoxious, be not bellbottom bummer, or asshole
Remember the story of Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street and girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
— Johnathan Richman