“Au fond il n’y a que l’amour” [At bottom there is only love].  ~Pablo Picasso  

“The facts show that it was the heart—albeit the heart of an artist—that dictated Picasso’s actions.”                   ~Olivier Widmaier Picasso

When Pablo Picasso was in his early twenties, poverty-stricken and living in his studio in Montmartre, he sold his drawings for as little as twenty francs. In 1906, at 25, he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; four years later, married and a father, Picasso was relatively free from money worries. However it wasn’t until the autumn of 1923 that Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was finally sold. From age 38 he was wealthy. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had little effect on the artist (then 48), and the following spring he bought the Château de Boisgeloup near Paris as Europe fell into an economic depression. xxxxxx

During the early 1930s Picasso produced a plethora of artworks of his young mistress, frequently portrayed in seeming deep post-coital sleep. For the ancients sleep was a time to communicate with the gods; Homer described sleep as the “lord of all gods and of all men.” But for many of us today sleep is a empty occurrence separating moments of endeavor. Dreaming is a psychic activity, an important part of the realities of existence, of consciousness, possibly a temporary loss of ego. Imagination, like dreaming, presupposes an image. In Other Criteria, Leo Steinberg portrayed Picasso’s sleep as “…the interior privacy of the sueño … may be Picasso’s symbol of the innermost self.” [1] Objects of desire were not objects for the artist, they were part of the creative process; perhaps that dazzling and vital force we call consciousness was Picasso’s “symbol of the innermost self.”

In contrast to the standing posture of Paleolithic Venuses, such as the Venus of Willendorf (25,000- 20,000 BC), the “Ariadne Pose”, with its upturned throat and arm “throw-back-of-head”, was first pointed out by Frederick Antal [2], continued as a sleeping form in Antiquity. That theme, in the Vatican’s Hellenistic Sleeping Ariadne (second century BC), was abandoned during the Middle Ages, rediscovered by Giorgione and Titian in the 16th century, and re-appeared in the twentieth century, particularly in Matisse’s Luxe, calme et volupte and Joie de Vivre (Picasso’s Nude in a Black Armchair might have come from Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (above, left) rather than Titian’s. Velázquez’s, Goya’s or even Manet’s very wide-awake Venuses). Just as the antique Venuses and Ariadnes are not portrayals of individuals but a normative idea of the idealized woman, Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse, with her classic features and languorous body, are a normative idea of the loved one, as he celebrates erotic life in the manner of Ovid and Catullus: the poetry of existence and the veneration of the laws of nature.

Marie-Thérèse is portrayed as the recumbent female figure with the arm thrown back over her head, similar to the famous statue of the Sleeping Ariadne, a manifestation of the Dionysiac ecstasy. A single black line joins profile, breast and thigh. Her left hand fuses with a Calla lily, her fingers on the other hand form the letters M and T, Picasso’s coded allusion to his secret lover. The philodendrons (with cursive letter “T”s in the leaves). The white of the flower contrasts with black of the couch while the Calla lily in her hand (looking more vaginal than digital), is a traditional symbol of chastity. For the ancient Romans, flowers (the sex organs of the plant; plants as well as mammals procreate sexually) were symbolic of desire, love, lust, and sexuality, while in Christian iconography, the flower came to represent purity and virginity.

Picasso’s caressingly assertive black line in Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur joins profile and thigh (breasts and thigh serve as buttock-forms) while the teardrop shaped lock of hair fuses head to breast as though energy flows from one to the other. The picture is a visual expression of the stability and erotic fulfillment Picasso felt in his relationship with Marie-Thérèse; individuals, like atoms (“that which is indivisible”) are both apart and not-apart, they are entwined beings. Picasso’s quiescent mistress is a much-loved cohort.

Left: Pablo Picasso, ‘Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur’ [Nude, Green Leaves and Bust], 1932, 64?x52″ Private collection. Not in Zervos.

In this painting the black couch that was in Nude in a Black Armchair has morphed into a bondage-like scarf that insouciantly twists and ties Marie-Thérèse’s pallid body to the white bust and column above. Picasso’s black profile and Marie-Thérèse as bust on a pillar (recalling the Surrealists’ fascination with the plinth and its symbolic authority); coalesce into one. To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the statue of a god surmounting a pillar, symbol of spiritual strength, indicated he dwelt in the heavens. The drapes are possibly a token memento of Picasso’s trip to the classic art of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1917. The letters M and T are secreted in the curtain folds above while her fingers are a small M.

Right: ‘The Dreamer,’ Boisgeloup, July 1932, oil on canvas, 39?x36¾ in. [101.3×93.3 cm.], Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, 1997.

In, The Dreamer, Marie-Thérèse’s head, almost detached from her body, floats on a black and white chaise longue with a vary-colored red and orange uterine-like cushion within a green garden of white flowers and a blue sky above. Like a pair of first leaves from a sprouting seed, her arms sprout from her head into that erotic organ known as the heart. The heart, an emblem of self-abnegation, has such a close relationships with our psychic processes, our emotional life, it has become a symbol of what is individual in humankind that in the last analysis binds psyche and soma into a unity. A reclining, epigeous odalisque, Marie-Thérèse’s tear-shaped strand of hair is a germinating seedling fertilizing oviform breasts, one above the other, rhyming with the two bulbous steatopygic derrières as her legs come to a tapered end or point.

The pose is reminiscent of the prehistoric Sleeping Lady of Malta, left [Museum of Archaeology, Valletta, Malta], who is also lying on a couch, and head resting on a pillow; “Her buttocks are double-egg shaped suggesting the symbol of regeneration,” explained archeologist Mariji Gimbutas.[3]

Venereal flowers, seeming to sprout from Marie-Thérèse’s body, are messengers of love as well as symbols of the beloved object, a traditional offering of worship. Flowers and blossoms are metaphors for the female organ; their placement here suggests a homage to fecundity and seasonal fertility, or perhaps anal eroticism. The image of flora in the erogenous zone is not too different from the couple deploying flowers in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s, circa 1500, Garden of Earthly Delights (detail, right), or even the fallen pink rose in Boucher’s, Miss O’Murphy (below).

Anal sex was considered “one of the last taboos” when it was listed in Dr. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex in 1962, although it has played a major role in sexual behavior (not always with penetration) in countless cultures for centuries. Aristophanes mockingly alludes to the practice in his comedies; it exists in both the Kamasutra (400 BC- 200 AD) and the Chinese Rou Pu Tuan (1657); and it was René Descartes who concluded his Treatise on the Passions (1649) with the blanket approval that human passions were all good. Freud theorized, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), that it “. . . succumbs in the first instance to the ‘organic repression’ which paved the way to civilization” (p. 100 n).

Picasso shows the natural fecundity of the botanical world as a cache of visual artifice and oblique symbolism in Nude In Garden, with Marie-Thérèse innocently asleep in a narcissi-flowery garden by a stream, evoking a “trysting place”, the Elysian Fields, or possibly the Roman de la Rose* -his own garden of earthly delights.

*Author’s note: The rose of Roman de la Rose was a symbol of female sexuality in a medieval French poem set in a garden or locus amoenus [pleasant place] with overtones of the regenerative power of the human libido.

The symbolism of water, a female principle symbolizing birth and life, and one of the four ancient elements, reaches back into the dawn of history, from Venus rising from the sea, to the concept of baptism, to the washing of the body of a deceased. Her pointed legs give the impression of diagrammatic lips, or schematic labia majora, while the head, thrown back in Dionysiac ecstasy, seems enfolded in labial arms.

Right: Pablo Picasso, ‘Nude In Garden,’ [Femme nue dans un jardin], Boiseloup, 4 August 1934, oil on canvas, 63?x50¾ in. [162×130 cm], Musée Picasso, Paris. (MPP 148. Not in Zervos).

Paul “Rosenberg had been out of favor with Picasso for having declared that he did not want any more culs (assholes)** in the paintings he showed” in his gallery, according to John Richardson.[4] The female form and the revelations of the body are therefore simultaneously treated as Picasso?s subject and object.

Objects of desire were not objects for Picasso, they were part of the creative process, his poetry of existence. The contemplation of the unencumbered female form as an ideal state should not preclude one from reflecting on all its implication; as Picasso said, “Rien n’est exclu” [nothing is excluded].

**Arthur’s note: My French dictionary renders cul as: backside, rear, bottom, posterior, etc.; but Richardson knows better what was meant. For Picasso, as with many artists, his “woman” is an archetype, a muse to be explored and celebrated as the psychic symbol of his innermost self. His nudes were the pleasures and realities of life that he wanted to preserve. As he said: “Au fond il n’y a que l’amour” [At bottom there is only love]; the body in all its corporeality being a carrier of that idea.

Picasso remained close to Marie-Thérèse, but “she was gradually displaced by Dora Maar, and then Francoise Gilot while Pablo continued to declare that she was the only one, despite all the others.”[5] “Women were to Picasso what paint is to the brush: inseparable, essential, fatal,”[6] explained his grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso. However Picasso supported family members financially long after he stopped seeing them. ”He fulfilled his natural obligations as spouse, companion, father and employer,”[7]

On the day Olga died, in 1955, Picasso telephoned Marie-Thérèse and asked her to marry him; but Marie-Thérèse, comfortably situated, with a young daughter to raise, although usually acquiescent, chose not to. She would see Picasso only when she delivered Maya for holidays, or occasionally when he was in Paris. However, she continued to write him passionate letters for a time. Picasso never saw Marie-Thérèse again but Maya remained a link between them; perhaps in order to be close to him, Marie-Thérèse rhapsodized, many years later, that sex with Picasso was “completely fulfilling,” describing him as “very virile.”

The female form is simultaneously treated as Picasso?s subject and object. The nude is a genre of art, like landscape and still life, and part of the creative process. For Picasso, as with many artists, the nude is an archetype, a muse to be explored and celebrated as the psychic symbol of the innermost self. His nudes were the pleasures and realities of life that he wanted to preserve. As he said: “Au fond il n’y a que l’amour” [At bottom there is only love]; the body in all its corporeality being a carrier of that idea. Men and women are biologically, symbiotically and psychologically dependent on each other; one has sex, but making love is a creative process.

Right: Pablo Picasso, ‘Woman with Vase’ (Femme au vase), Boisgeloup, summer 1933 (cast 1972–73). Patinated bronze, 220 x 122 x 110 cm. One of two proofs, cast by C. Valsuani, Paris. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Bequest of the artist. © 2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Archivo fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

After a lifetime of miraculous good health, Picasso’s body began to fail. In November 1965 (age 84) he underwent prostate surgery; in time he became deaf and had trouble with his eyesight. Yet he continued to paint until the day he died in 1973. He was interred at his Chateau of Vauvenargues with the celebrated Woman with Vase over his grave (his preference; this monumental sculpture had been modeled after, and inspired by, Marie-Thérèse). Unable to go on living after the charismatic Picasso passed away, Marie-Thérèse took her own life in 1977, fifty years after they had first met.

By Martin Ries, Contributing Writer

Notes:

In 1930, Picasso purchased a 17th-century chateau in Boisgeloup, situated northwest of Paris, where he sculpted a series of female figures and monumental heads in clay and plaster. It is there that he created the imposing and emblematic sculpture Woman with Vase (1933) based on the physiognomy of Marie-Thérèse Walter, a beautiful young woman whom he had met in 1927, who would eventually become his mistress and the mother of his first daughter.

[1] Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art, “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers,” Oxford University Press, 1972, p.102.

[2] Frederick Antal “Maenad Under Cross”, Journal of Warburg Institute, Vol. I, No. 1, July 1937, p.71 ff. See also Edgar Wind. “Some Examples of the Role of the Maenad in Florentine Art of the Later Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries” (I, pp.71-73)

[3] Mariji Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe, Harper San Francisco, 1991, p.288, figure 7-105.

[4] John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, vol. III, Knopf NY 2007. p.373.

[5] Olivier Widmaier Picasso, Picasso, The Real Family Story, Prestel Publishing, 2004, p.52.

[6] Ibid, p.24

[7] Ibid, p.209.