16 The Sunday Times April 10, 2022COMMENT
Rod Liddle
T
here’s a Picasso painting due to
be auctioned at Sotheby’s
shortly, if you’ve got a spare
50 million quid lying around.
It’s called Femme nue couchée
and depicts one of his
mistresses, a woman called
Marie-Thérèse Walter. “Don’t
fancy yours much, Pablo, mate,” may
well be the immediate impression
gained from this work of art, as
Mademoiselle Walter would appear to be
an obese octopus with eyes like
distressed fried eggs.
But then this was more or less par for
the course, as you will be aware. Model
for Picasso and you’ll end up looking like
a penis, or a demented horse, or you’ll
have one eye on your shoulder and the
other poking out from your lady garden.
That’s cubism for you — or misogyny.
One of the two.
Old Pablo is on his way to being
cancelled for the reason that he seems to
have been an extraordinarily foul human
being. He subjected his sexual conquests
to violence, mental torture, intimidation
and degradation, saying: “For me there
are only two kinds of women —
goddesses and doormats.” He treated
both kinds with pretty much the same
lack of respect, kindness and decency.
Should we cancel Picasso? It is
perhaps surprising that he hasn’t been
vilified by the leftie cancel crew already,
given his appalling behaviour, but that
may be because he also did that fairly
hideous and very large painting of
Guernica being bombed by Franco’s
planes, which secured his reputation as
an icon of the left and therefore beyond
criticism. Not any more. Recent
exhibitions of his work in Paris have
been, uh, “contextualised” by women
explaining what a bastard he really was.
It is a genuinely difficult issue, light
years away from the moronic cancelling
of people from history because they may
have had a second cousin in the slave
trade, or were possessed of views which
in 1830 were commonplace but now
seem a bit gamey. There is Picasso theman — a leering, sex-obsessed,
misogynistic, bullying tyrant. And there
is Picasso the artist, in whom all those
qualities are very plainly on display. It is
impossible to separate the Spaniard
from his work. Along with superlative
execution, it is almost why his art is
striking.
In this sense he is a little different
from the many other villains from the
world of art, such as the loathsome Paul
Gauguin, who stayed in Tahiti for
precisely the same reason that late-
middle-aged German businessmen now
stay in Thailand or the Philippines, and
showed no great remorse for infecting
his 13 and 14-year-old conquests with
incurable syphilis. Or indeed
Caravaggio, who was by all accounts a
kind of 16th-century lager lout, amurderous, drunken, querulous thug
and braggart.
Picasso’s case resembles far more
closely that of his compatriot the
surrealist Salvador Dali, whose
abominable personality provoked
George Orwell to write one of his
greatest essays: “Benefit of Clergy —
Some Notes on Salvador Dali”. The
fastidious Orwell, not noted for his sense
of humour, found almost everything
about Dali morally repellent. Whether it
be biting fly-ridden dead bats in half or
mentally torturing women or revelling in
gore, filth and self-promotion, nothing
about Dali commended itself to Orwell
(still less the painter’s politics, which
were self-serving and tilted to the right).
In the late 1940s Dali was the centre of
a debate very similar to that which
attaches to Picasso today, but Orwell was
unimpressed by either side of the
argument. Those who wished to see the
artist censored were unable to accept
that there was a huge talent at work in
those paintings; but, by the same token,
the intelligentsia gave Dali a free pass for
his manifest misdemeanours and could
not accept that his work was, beyond
question, morally depraved. In the end
Orwell merely asked that we examine
why we find such paintings alluring.
The answer, I think, is that we are not
always attracted to the good and the
wholesome — in fact rarely so, which is
why both realist Soviet art from the
1920s and Norman Rockwell’s homely
apple-pie depictions of American family
life are rightly the object of some
derision. The purpose of a work of art is
to uncover something within us, to
reveal to us something we did not know,
or perhaps knew but dared not express.
The human condition being what it is,
those are quite frequently morally
dubious revelations.
So it is with Picasso. We recognise a
heightened sense of the darker sides of
ourselves in those paintings. To expunge
them, to hide them from view, may be
expedient and comforting, but it is also
deluding and cowardly.l“New hope for infertile men”,
the morning newspapers
proclaimed, heralding the
excellent news that scientists
have managed to create sperm
from the stem cells of rats.
I hope they are right. Just as Ihope that, moments after its
birth, the baby doesn’t scuttle
up the nearest drainpipe and
start chewing through the wiring
in the attic.
I trust I have understood this
story correctly.PM reassures Zelensky
PHOTOBUBBLE: NICK NEWMANPicasso, a foul maniac who revelled in sex and
degradation. Or what you and I call ‘an artist’
I remember that ten or so years ago Ben
Summerskill — then boss of the LGBT
campaigning organisation Stonewall —
made what I thought was a very simple
but nonetheless fairly strong argument
in favour of gay marriage.
Addressing those who were angry
about the issue, he said: “If you don’t
agree with homosexuals getting
married, then don’t marry a
homosexual.” Or words to that effect. I
am no libertarian, but Mr Summerskill’s
intervention seemed to me to have a
certain rough logic about it.
So I would say this to Ben — and the
rest of the campaigners, and indeed the
government — about gay conversion
therapy: “If you don’t agree with gay
conversion therapy, then don’t attend
gay conversion therapy.” The principle
is surely exactly the same.Should we
cancel him?
It’s difficult,
because you
can’t separate
the Spaniard
from his workThe conversion
of Mr StonewallLast week I suggested defrauding the
Revenue as a means of coping with the
cost-of-living crisis. It was tongue in
cheek and I didn’t expect it to be taken
up — in spirit, at least — by, er, the
extravagantly minted missus of the
chancellor of the exchequer.
Living full-time in a very nice
residence courtesy of the British
taxpayer while telling HMRC you live in
India may well be technically legal
(although I don’t understand how). But it
is also what is known as “taking the
piss”. As well as being very, very greedy.
Now we learn that both Rishi and Mrs
Rishi are also residents of the USA. Are
there any other places where they
“live”? And when it comes to my income
tax returns, can I “live” there too?International man
of mystery at No 11There IS a
no-fly zone
— it’s called
Gatwick