Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The curator of the "Erotic Picasso" show in Paris talks about why the artist's most ribald work probably won't come to the U.S.
May 10, 2001 | "Why not put genitals where our eyes are and our eyes between our legs?" Picasso once asked. It was a rhetorical question for a painter whose work was driven at times by an almost fetishistic interest in sex. Flesh, folds, phalluses, slits, holes (and what the surrealists called "the toothed vagina") -- Picasso painted a voluptuous, tumescent world of opposing forces and forms, a ribald pleasure palace of the senses. The "Erotic Picasso" exhibition currently at the Jeu de Paume in Paris is the first show ever dedicated to the master's libidinal soul.
The more than 300 works in the show map the erotic landscapes that made up Picasso's world, and half of them have never before been publicly shown. (They come from private collections.) Largely inspired by the bordello, the young Picasso sucked on the teat of his own sexual imagination and, one assumes, interests. More than just garden-variety sex is depicted here. There are orgies, oral sex, masturbation and lesbian love. The works are at once obscene and tender, vulnerable and bawdy. Not only is the sex heterosexual and homosexual, in some cases it's zoomorphic.
The naturalism in Picasso's early work quickly gave way to an extraordinarily diverse range of erotic symbolism. Bulls and centaurs came on the scene, along with his trademark polymorphously sexual Minotaur. The dualities of love and death loomed large on his canvas with the advance of age, as did a consistent theatrical strain of voyeurism, which reached an apex when Picasso was well into his 80s.
Sadly, this vast exhibition has been ignored by the American curatorial world, suggesting to its curator and others a certain consensual Puritanism about the role of public art. Says art historian Jean Clair, "You have to be American to believe that art must educate children and purify adults, that it is necessary for the welfare of an enlightened society ... the artist is a criminal, an outlaw, a pervert." Picasso put it differently. "Art is not chaste," he once said. "Yes, art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art."
To get the inside out on priapic Picasso, Salon spoke recently with Gérard Régnier, director of the Picasso Museum in Paris and curator of "Erotic Picasso."
How did the exhibition come to pass?
There's nothing original in the idea. I think everyone has always wanted to do an exhibition on erotic Picasso. All of Picasso's oeuvre is erotic, the most erotic that exists in the world. Doing a show on this subject is compelling, interesting and most exciting, in every sense of the word. When I became the director of the museum I realized that there had never been a show on the erotic Picasso. It was a totally virgin subject, so to speak.
And why?
It's interesting. Maybe a sociologist could understand why. Perhaps for two reasons. First, in the austere and serious museum world, approaching art through the angle of eroticism is always a bit provocative. You have to find accomplices to do this. You have to find a team with whom you share a certain spiritual complicity for the subject. And that's not always easy to find. I found that [accomplice] when Jean-Jacques Lebel (a French artist and culture maven) came to me and asked, "Why not?" I replied, "OK. Let's do it."
And there's another deeper reason for this. The history of art, particularly of modern art, has always been controlled by a formalist approach and not an existential or erotic approach. We're more interested in little squares than we are in meaning, in particular in Picasso's case. We've been hypnotized and fascinated by his little squares -- the cubism -- without realizing that essentially all of Picasso's work is about curves. If you look at Picasso's work in its totality, he spent his life drawing voluptuous curves and very little time making squares. In fact, Picasso's cubist period was very, very brief.
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