Feminizing Picasso's Art

It's an analysis on Picasso's Art and its Feminist implication

 

No doubt Picasso was a genius of Artistic creation. His Art has progressed through various periods. While reading his biography one understands that he had many women in his life and he treated them like doormats.  Picasso’s art portrays neurotic romanticism on the one hand and it also shows his affinity for sexuality as stemming from the Oedipus complex. Let’s examine how Picasso’s Art depicts neurotic romanticism. For it I have taken two pictures, one belonging to the blue period (la vie) and one a picture of Dora Mar seated. The picture belonging to the blue period casts our eyes on Picasso’s developing mental thoughts and its attitude as being an incurable romantic. The painting belonging to the Blue Period shows a couple who are nude and being watched over by a Mother carrying a baby. In one dimension the painting is symbolic of realism in its meaning as an awakening of Eros. But then in another dimension there is also a symbolic portrayal of the attitude of Picasso towards the understanding of the Oedipus complex. The painting belonging to the blue period I would dare to say represents more of naturalism. There is Picasso’s thought as understanding but at the same time there is no maturity to usher Art to a new plane of development which characterizes Picasso’s later Art. Picasso’s later development in the artistic field realizes an aim to showcase art in an experimental form and that period shows the development of Art to Cubism. I have taken two paintings to present my explanation. One of the paintings is Les Demoisellses d’ Avignon or the Ladies of Avignon. I would like to say it is a depiction of a Brothel of Ladies. The ladies are cubistically busty and buxom and they are caricatured as grotesque.   In this stage Picasso has learned to manipulate the Oedipus complex, exaggerate it to a symbolism of monstrosity. But does Picasso escape from the thrombosis of the original showing of Mother Goddess as a symbolic fertility Goddess of earlier religions? Does it show Picasso’s need to be intimate and vulnerable to the narcissism of an archetype of fetishes? Can Picasso’s portrayal be an exploitation of the libidinal subjectivity of the feminine, possessed, owned and diabolically caricatured in a frenzy of madness. Picasso becomes an entity who is cardinalizes his libido to a religious, sexual and mystical enterprise that disintegrates the democratic ethos of feminine sexuality. Picasso sad to say has not mastered the Oedipus complex but has become an addict to its objectivity which is no longer in the arena of poetic justice. Art of the feminine has to evade and avoid a phallo-logo centric discourse and become a subjective manifestation of a lesbian democracy. Next I would like to take up Picasso’s ‘seated Dora Mar’. From his biography I understand that Dora Mar is one of Picasso’s lovers. Dora Mar’s face is garangatuanized to a presence of artistic captured. In it one can visualize the choking horror of ugliness. The search of Picasso to be an incurable romantic is over. Romantic takes on the dimension of the neurotic. Picasso becomes disenchanted with the realism of romanticism.