Pablo Picasso and His Victims: An Artist Who Didn't Know How to Love, But Loved to Artistically Torment

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

According to accepted ideas, an artist needs women in order to inspire: with their beauty, with a word of support, simply by providing the rear. But the famous painter Pablo Picasso was looking for inspiration in completely different things. If a woman became his muse, one could immediately say that she was unlucky.

Here are two confessions of the artist, which immediately shed light on the properties of his nature and on his relationship to his "muses". “I think I’ll die without ever loving anyone,” he confessed once, and on another he said: “Every time I change a woman, I have to burn the last one. This is how I get rid of them. They will no longer be around me and complicate my life. This, perhaps, will also return my youth. By killing a woman, they destroy the past that she personifies. " But the latter is too streamlined. We are not talking about a big fight that puts an end to the relationship. We are talking about a slow psychological "murder" that can drag on for years.

In his youth, Pablo Picasso changed women every time he needed new sensations. It was his favorite technique to deal with the next moment of creative impotence, which sooner or later happens to everyone. Moreover, it was a very popular way to overcome such crises, so if Picasso was different in his search for new sensations, then we will not know. There is only one nuance that definitely distinguishes the artist's relationship with the muses: about each of them, he believed that she did not love him enough.

When at thirty-six years old, Picasso married the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, many thought that he had finally settled down. Unless his mother never harbored illusions: she bluntly said that no woman would be happy with her son. Pablo sought Olga for a long time and stubbornly. A son was born in marriage. Approximately after that, as often happens, Picasso cooled down to his next muse. A ballerina fluttering across the stage and a tired, sleepy mother seemed to him radically different people.

It is usually customary to reproach Olga for being jealous of her husband, but she, presumably, had reasons. Pablo was too accustomed to promiscuous sexual intercourse and very quickly began to behave as if he was looking for a new woman. And I found it.

READ ALSO: From love to satiety: Russian muse Picasso and his first wife

Marie-Therese was seventeen years old. She was just walking down the street when a middle-aged man grabbed her hand and said: “I am Picasso! You and I will do great things together. Marie-Therese had no idea who Picasso was, but she had an indecisive, gentle character. Having succumbed for the first time, she provoked Pablo, and he enjoyed seizing more and more power, bending, pushing, breaking the psyche of a young girl, reveling in how obedient a toy comes out of her.

With a teenager who did not know how to fight back, it turned out to do what not every previous woman probably agreed to. Picasso physically tortured Marie-Thérèse, set up more and more sadistic experiments. He was especially excited by her still childish face and manners, childish tears and the fact that their relationship should be kept secret.

Here it is worth mentioning one more key installation of the artist in relation to women. He believed that all women are divided into goddesses and rugs for the feet, and the greatest pleasure is to take the first and turn into the second. He did not consider human relations with a woman in principle. As in his paintings, the depicted one fell apart into "cubes", so under his gaze each woman was not a person, but a set of details that promised an interesting game.

I must say, by the way, that, either harboring a prejudice against contemporary art, or I feel this psychopathic note in Picasso's cubist portraits, his wife strictly forbade him to portray her otherwise than in a realistic manner. Naturally, having found Marie-Therese, Pablo did not even think of throwing another toy. Why divorce when you can torture both women and use each as a tool to torture the other? He did it with delight. He liked the psychological breakdown even more than the physical torture. When he said that he needed to kill a woman, he was not joking. Killing as a person. Destroy as a person. This is what inspired him and replaced him with love.

When Marie-Thérèse became pregnant (and the artist considered it unnecessary to use contraception), Picasso settled her in his home. Olga, unable to bear it, went with her son to nowhere. She never stuttered about the divorce. She didn't want to talk to Pablo about anything anymore.

Marie-Therese gave birth to a daughter. World War II broke out shortly thereafter. Picasso went to live in Switzerland. His house was soon occupied by martial law, and Marie-Therese had to find a rental apartment. After the war, Pablo did not even think to return to this toy. She was already too broken. He had to break a new one.

Returning to Paris, Pablo met Dora Maar, unmistakably choosing a woman with an unstable psyche and a labile nervous system. In a relationship with Picasso, Dora suffered from prolonged depressive periods. Pablo blamed them on her, but in general he was unhappy with how quickly and without resistance he managed to break the victim's psyche. He found a new woman, Françoise Gilot, a young artist.

The painter kept each woman on a firm leash of codependency, masterfully achieving that, even suffering, the woman concentrated on him and ceased to imagine life without him. Pablo was too old to play with Françoise the way he did with Marie-Therese, and chose to torture her purely psychologically. To do this, he read her fresh love letters from Dora, who still could not jump off the hook on which he caught her.

Françoise, of course, also became pregnant. When it was time to give birth, Pablo said that first the car should take him on business and only then deliver Françoise to the hospital. I must say, Françoise gave birth at the insistence of Picasso. He probably guessed that women become more vulnerable with a small child in their arms. The woman's vulnerability and a sense of power over her had warmed his old blood for a long time.

As a typical family rapist, Picasso constantly expressed dissatisfaction and made mutually exclusive demands. Zhilot recalled: “I came to the conclusion that Pablo hated the presence of a woman. I realized that from the very beginning he was burdened primarily by the intellectual side of our relationship and my somewhat boyish way of life. He didn't like the fact that there was little femininity in me. He wanted me to bloom, insisted on a child. However, when we had children and I became a real woman, mother, wife, it turned out that this change was not to his liking. He himself made this metamorphosis, but immediately rejected it himself. She, however, turned out to be the strongest of the women of Picasso, and after the birth of her second child, she left him … To become a famous artist and happily marry a normal man.

Françoise was lucky, as other women of Picasso usually went crazy. This happened to his first long-term muse, Fernanda. Olga Khokhlova became very emotionally unstable during her communication with her husband. Marie-Therese committed suicide. After breaking up with Picasso, Dora Maar was treated with electroshock in a psychiatric clinic (by the way, she was also an artist). Somehow, Pablo miscalculated by choosing Gilot. She did not become his usual victim.

Next, he chose a submissive young girl from a poor family, single mother Jacqueline. In general, Pablo disdained women who already gave birth not from him, but obedience, weakness attracted him so much that he did not remain faithful to his principles. But this sacrifice turned out to be a tough nut to crack. Kissing the hands of her beloved, she surrounded him with such care, so enveloped him that soon Pablo himself became addicted and fell into anxiety if he did not see or hear Jacqueline.

READ ALSO: Interesting facts about Pablo Picasso - the artist whose paintings are most often stolen

Without Jacqueline, he felt helpless and even moved with her to a separate castle in order to precisely isolate her from the world that could steal her. Jacqueline was too calm, too simple-minded to react to his games, but he himself did not understand how he fell into the ancient trap of complete dependence. She became the second woman he decided to marry. He almost stopped drawing anyone (and anything) other than her.

At the same time, he played with Gilot. She tried to get Pablo to recognize his own children. Picasso promised that he would officially sign with Gilot - only to give his last name to the children - if she divorced. Françoise divorced, and … learned from the newspapers that Pablo had married another. Probably, Pablo was very sorry that he did not see her face at that moment.

In the end he died, as all men die. Leaving behind him not only an artistic legacy, but also a wide trail of destruction that he brought into other people's lives, he brought in deliberately and with pleasure. There were few who were closely associated with Picasso and were able to say something good in his memory. Is that Jacqueline. But she soon committed suicide. As did Marie-Therese. Picasso wanted to kill a woman - he killed a woman.

Picasso was not the only famous man known for his cruelty towards women. "Why do I need you?": Sophia and the evil love of Leo Tolstoy.

Text: Lilith Mazikina