5Picasso, unlike De Chirico, did not suffer actual filial bereavement. His transition to matriarchal dominance was a trajectory informed by rejection. Initially his self-proclaimed rejection of the stultifying weight of bourgeois traditions in late nineteenth-century art, examples of which were very much in evidence in his local Art Museum in Malaga, which according to Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, “…contained all sorts of hackneyed paintings by Malaga artists, friends of Don Ruiz, Picasso's father”. (Brassaï : 355) Hence, the tradition Picasso sought to reject was epitomised by his father’s Oedipal shadow as John Richardson astutely put it, and its unconditional acceptance of contemporary bourgeois values. (Richardson, Vol 1: 49) His father was a painter, art teacher and picture restorer, who practiced within the traditionally accepted norms of late nineteenth-century art and produced rather bland still-life and landscape paintings. Whilst still a very young child his father encouraged or “pushed” him to draw like an academician, which was something that Picasso came to regret, as he later pointed out to George Brassaï. “My very first drawings could never have appeared in an exhibition of children's drawings. The child's awkwardness and naiveté were almost completely absent from them. I very quickly moved beyond the stage of that marvellous vision. When I was that kid's age, I was doing academic drawings. The attention to detail, the precision in them frighten me. My father was a drawing teacher, and it was probably he who pushed me prematurely in that direction.” (Brassaï, G 1999: 115)
Picasso to commit the ultimate patricidal act, not by cutting of the claws of his father’s pigeon, his father did that for him so that he could study them better, but by painting them so well that his father handed his brushes over to his young son never to paint again. This no doubt apocryphal story illustrates Picasso’s problematical relationship with bourgeois art history and his father’s emblematic relationship to it. The pigeon claws reappeared years later in his cubist paintings, along with cryptic references to his father. Having metaphorically castrated his own patriarchal lineage, the young Picasso then transferred his libidinal exigencies to the female line and not just in name only. When his father did appear in his art it was invariably in the guise of a bearded old man. Later in life, Picasso revealed to the photographer George Brassaï the thought that overwhelmed him when he painted bearded men: “……I accidentally think of my father. For me, man is Don José and that will be true all my life. He wore a beard. All the men I draw have more or less his features". (Brassaï, G. 1999: 66) What is perhaps even more telling in terms of following the matriarchal line is that paintings and drawings of his mother and women vastly outnumber those of his father and men.
Women, in all their manifestations: mother, wife, mistress, sister, lover, etc., came to be the most dominate theme in Picasso's work. In fact, virtually all of his visual narratives can be distilled into two primary themes: women as muse or protagonist (Figs.1-4); and self-image (Figs.5-7). All of his other narratives, in one way or another, feed this diptych. This sexual imbalance in Picasso’s oeuvre is reflected in a set of drawings he produced in 1933, which went on to significantly impact on the development of twentieth century sculpture. They were published in the first edition of the Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1933 under the title Une Anatomie. The drawings feature 26 totemic skeletal-like female figures and one male, represented as a penis on legs, reminiscent of a Greek ithyphallic figure (Figs.8-9). A superficial reading of these figures might lead the viewer to conclude that they signify a Dionysian gathering of women around a single omnipotent male. This could not be further from the truth.
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