What Picasso’s Legacy Looks Like through a Feminist Lens

“Cubism. All the perspectives at once! Any of those perspectives a woman’s? No! You just put a kaleidoscope filter on your cock.” So goes an incendiary line lampooning Pablo Picasso in Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 Netflix special Nanette, which turns humor into a battle ax as it defangs the fallacy of the male genius.

Five years later, Gadsby is taking on Picasso again—this time in a needle-pushing exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” (June 2nd through September 24th). Curated with Lisa Small, the museum’s senior curator of European art, and Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator at the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, visitors will be guided by Gadsby’s audio tour through more than 100 works by Picasso and women artists such as Cecily Brown, Käthe Kollwitz, Dindga McCannon, Ana Mendieta, Marilyn Minter, Joan Semmel, Kiki Smith, and Mickalene Thomas, offering a feminist dialogue with one of the 20th century’s most macho artists.

“It’s Pablo-matic” coincides with a worldwide celebration of Picasso to mark 50 years since the artist’s death in 1973 at age 92. It recenters the discussion around the inventor of Cubism and master of modern art, asking what it means to laud a male genius with a history of abuse after the #MeToo movement.

Picasso may have changed the course of European modern art, but he also assailed women with “his animal sexuality,” as Picasso’s granddaughter Marina Picasso—one of the first family members to speak out in public about the impact of Picasso’s abuse—told The Paris Review in 2017. “He tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.” The facts of Picasso’s abuse of women and misogyny, though widely known, are rarely acknowledged in institutional shows.

“It might be worth asking if yet another exhibition about Picasso is needed at all. And if so, should they all be business as usual?” Lisa Small, co-curator of “It’s Pablo-matic,” said. There have been countless major exhibitions on Picasso, with several taking place in this commemorative year, but as Small pointed out, “there haven’t seemed to be many that didn’t take a kind of hagiographic stance as a given starting point.” The Picasso Museum in Paris, for example, is staging “The Collection in a New Light” (until August 23rd)—enlisting the help of the white, British, 76-year-old fashion designer Sir Paul Smith for this “new” take on Picasso. The press statement suggests that “the visions of these two artists sometimes converge, for example around their shared love of objects.”

When Gadsby took on Picasso in 2018, the #MeToo movement was in its early, fervent throes; cancel culture was burgeoning, and a question was percolating: whether abusive men and their occasionally era-defining art could be separated. The current exhibition at Brooklyn Museum turns its attention to the way male genius operates and continues to center itself.

“Certainly there is an important examination in recent biography of his poor treatment of his partners, but we don’t forefront those stories in our exhibition,” Catherine Morris explained. “Instead, we see Picasso as perhaps the ultimate example of the myth of the modern male genius and our exhibition focuses on the framings of modernism that have ossified over the decades and which women artists, historians, and curators have effectively demystified and reframed as reductive and myopic in the 50 years since his death.”

Small added: “It seemed necessary to think about that in terms of the culture shift brought about by feminism over the past 50 years, as well as the ways in which powerful figures are being reexamined and questioned with the rise of the #MeToo movement.” Works by Picasso converse with those by women artists. So Woman in Gray (1942), thought to be based on Dora Maar, relates to Dindga McCannon’s Revolutionary Sister (1971), fashioned from pieces found in a hardware store. Both depict imaginary muses—only Picasso’s is based on a real woman, while McCannon’s is her own invention, reflecting on the Statue of Liberty and blaxploitation movies. Her warrior “doesn’t need a gun; the power of change exists within her,” McCannon wrote, in the Brooklyn Museum’s description of the work.