Free Museum Sunday With Picasso’s Psyche

With so many fabulous museums in Paris to choose from, the decision can be a tough one, on the first Sunday of each month.  I had been putting off going to the Musee Picasso for various reasons that I will explain below.

If it’s between October and March, I will generally gravitate returning to the Louvre, which like our psyches, can never be fully explored, as new discoveries are always on the horizon.

Don’t ever think you can “do” the Louvre in one visit, nor in several!  Same for the Musee d’Orsay.

There is just way too much to see.  Even if well planned, and streamlined, you will end up with art overload.

However beautiful each marvelous painting and sculpture may be, after about two hours, ours brains experience an overcharge of beauty, that starts to diminish the excitement and enjoyment.

It’s like too much sex, too much chocolate or too much wine!  Enjoy in moderation is the key word here.

That’s when free museum Sundays are blessings for those of us go can’t get enough of art, curiosities, historical sites and culture.  It is the same all over France, which is really wonderful, as there are fantastic places to see for free.

With around 130 museums in Paris,  23 are free everyday and many others on the first Sundays of the month, with the exception of the Louvre and a few others who are free during the winter months.   That does not mean that the free everyday ones are less interesting by the way!

For example, the Musee Carnavalet is one of my favourites, specializing in the history of Paris.  Same goes for the Musee Cognacq Jaÿ, which has the fabulous collection from the founder of the Samaritain department store.

In the end, I decided to go to the Picasso Museum. Frankly, not so much because I had any great desire to take in Pablo Picasso’s works, but more because it is a museum that I have not visited since it reopened two years ago.

Honestly, I have never been drawn to or enamoured of Picasso’s art, except a few pieces from his blue period.  We all have our artistic preferences and for me, my personal feelings about the artist is definitely influential as well.

He is not the only artist that affects me this way either.  Paul Gauguin , who abruptly abandoned his wife and children to pursue his  obsession of prepubertal Polynesian girls, is another example.

The same with Rodin, who used and abused  poor Camille Claudel, stealing her style and glory to the extent that exacerbated her mental demise, is another artist that colours my perception of his work.

As a sensitive empath, I can be touched beyond the physicality of  any work of art.  If I am porous to the energy of others,  then I am sensitive to the residual energy of the artist who created a piece.

To me, art is an expression of someone’s personality and unconsciousness, even soul,  put on canvas or carved in matter to reflect that which emanates from within.

With Picasso, I can appreciate his creativity and contribution to the world of art, including “cubism”, but on a personal level I am more affected by his  pathology redolent in his paintings and his sculptures.

I am not being critical of his art, as that depends of the eye of the beholder, but demonstrating in my opinion how his art reflected his emotional turbulence and perversion that wrecked havoc in his personal life.

I sense it was during his so called “blue period” that he was vulnerable enough to let his guard down enough to see glimpses of the man he was before his emotional and sexual perversion towards women controlled him and splattered his art  with his unconscious violence he felt towards them.

 

Picasso had a very hostile dependency on women throughout his life.   He vacillated between momentarily idealizing them as objects of his lust and sexual desires, but when they reciprocated his feelings, he tortured them with emotional abuse, anger, and blatant infidelity ad nauseam.

His infidelities were so numerous and constantly overlapping that they  served to insulate him from having any long-term intimacy with any female, wife or lover, as seen in any sexual addict.

As many narcissists, his inner image of himself was riddled with his own self despise and devoid of positive feelings about himself.  He, therefore needed to constantly have a string of admirers, especially lovers who could inflate his self esteem.

Narcissists can not generate any valid positive self regards from within, so they are totally dependant and obliged to obtain it from others non stop.

He often said that women were either “goddesses or doormats” to him.  Even if they were initially allotted into the Goddess category, none of the women he was ever involved with remained too long, before they were devalued, abused and abandoned.

It was a lifelong pattern up into his death at 92. He was as prolific in creating  his art as he was in bedding ever more youthful lovers to inflate his perpetual sagging machismo, that he desperately clung to.

His artistic persona slowly unraveled to become a truer expression of himself.  He boldly and unwittingly allowed us peeks into his perpetually conflictual and tormented soul.

Picasso’s works were as dominated by women as he was in his personal life.  Women were a focal point of reference and served as the primary source of his conflicts.

These statues carved in black marble are all grotesque; dangerous, dark and unfathomable as Picasso saw women.

His huge monstrous stone sculptures reflect the deformity of female regard with displaced eyes, and huge bulbous nasal prominences, that he often painted on canvases as well.

Domineering and powerful, yet invasive and demanding is how he saw women.   He couldn’t live without female companionship, yet abhorred how they cringed upon him and invaded his sexual freedom.

I imagine he saw his wives and lovers as constantly “nosing about” his affairs, that he would flaunt in their faces in a tantalizing and cruel manner as punishment from trying to interfere in his extraconjugal sexual exploits.

As primitive and sophomoric as that of an adolescent male openly defying his mother to prove his independence from her.

An even more revealing sculpture is the Woman with Outstretched Arms, who looks like a ghostly figure of death.  Women generated the life force in Picasso, but they also conjured up fears of annihilation from them.

Hence we see the tormented and conflictual dichotomies of his psyche around women; need versus fear, love versus hate, and life versus death.

The small sculpture called The Bather lying in the sand with tentacle like long arms waiting to capture and snaggle with  feminine allures, much like octopi catching their prey to be devoured is very reflective of how he viewed women.

In stark contrast is his portrayal of little girls as he sculpted them with more life-like lines and much less deformity as seen in The Little Girl Skipping Rope.

His portrait of Marie Therése, whom he met when she was 17 and he 45, and became one of his longest lovers, is more demonstrative of a slightly more balanced perspective and the pastel colours are beautiful and feminine.

She and Picasso had a daughter, named Maya, and sadly Marie Thèrése would go on to commit suicide.

I most appreciated the beauty of his paintings from his blue period. Depressed and guilt ridden over being the cause of his best friend’s suicide, his paintings are mostly in blue sombre colours.

Afterwards, he internalized more of his self disgust, blame and anger which he then projected onto females as portrayed in his art.

His conflictual and perverted view of females started in childhood.  He coveted the mother child Madonna like devotion he sought from his mother, yet reviled in his father’s obsessive seeking of prostitutes.

I suspect to the young Picasso, who so wanted to distance himself from his father, that he took his mother’s maiden name, grew up seeing women as either madonnas or whores.

As he grew into manhood and began to sink into the same sexual perversions that he hated in his father, his attempts of denial failed and he had to face the growing disgust within himself.

Caught in this vortex of denial and disgust he developed defense mechanisms to protect his psyche primarily through projection.

These misogynistic  feelings were acted out his entire life and were a major theme in his  art. With one of his wives,  and one of his lovers  eventually killing themselves, and with many others sunk into depression from his callus rejections, he left a string of emotionally mutilated women behind.

None escaped his emotional abuse and  all were used like pieces of Kleenex, then tossed aside for a younger model.

After viewing his art, I yearned to seek the fresh air outside in the very pleasant garden in back, resplendent in lovely roses and pastel coloured flowers.

It was cool and drizzly with few milling around, so I had the impression of having the garden to  myself.

The 17 century mansion is impressive, especially the central staircase with ceiling carvings and motifs.  There is also a cafe on the front terrace overlooking the entrance with the magnificent curved arch that frames the front of the mansion.

Picasso would have been inclined to think it is too classical of setting for his abstract work, and there were many squabbles with his son and the curator during the renovation, that held up the reopening.

Who knows; perhaps he was behind these conflicts from beyond.  Either way, the sedate elegance of this lovely mansion holding his disjointed forms, bright colours and  bizarre abstract paintings and sculptures mirrors the man himself, whose psychic dissonance created the art that made him famous.