Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism. But underneath all that great talent, a cruel personality was hidden.
“Not all that glitters is gold," my mother used to say.
Pablo Picasso occupies a particular place in the history of art and was known as one of the most famous geniuses of the 20th century.
Picasso created his pictorial world, where his work is a reflection of his life. He frequently painted his loves, muses and models, whom - according to his feelings of the painter at the time - he captured on canvas, sometimes with subtlety, but also with great cruelty, because he always exposed his misogynistic spirit and was cruel against women.
Olga Khokhlova, beautiful and talented Russian dancer, first wife of the painter from 1917 to 1935, suffered a permanent emotional deterioration due to physical and mental abuse and the infidelities of the painter.
In one of the first portraits where Picasso paints Olga sitting in an armchair, he presents her as an elegant and beautiful woman. With the passage of time, the pictures she painted showed her as a being with deformed faces and mutilated bodies.
When Picasso painted "Olga Pensive", Khokhlova was no longer alone. Picasso had already met Marie Therese Walter, a 17-year-old girl with whom he initially had secret sex, since she was a minor. The Greek writer Arianna Stassinopoulous tells in her book "Picasso and Women", that the 17-year-old girl came to accept sadistic relationships with burns on her neck.
The writer comments that Picasso was very enthusiastic at the beginning of his relationships, at the same time that they awakened his creativity; but when the relationship no longer interested him, the image of the painted woman deteriorated until she became a grotesque.
Through various sources of information it was discovered that one of the women who suffered the most from the painter's misogyny was the surrealist photographer Dora María. The sexual violence that Picasso exercised against her reached unimaginable extremes. On many occasions he left her unconscious on the ground after beating her.
Picasso's sick personality can be seen in Robert Capa's famous photograph that shows the great gentlemanly genius and attentive with Dora María, his love of the moment.
In Arianna Stassinopoulos's book one reads - through her sources of information - as Francois Gilot, one of the battered women; Maya, Picasso's first daughter, and many others very close to the painter, how the dark portrait of the "primitive and miserable dwarf" who lived hidden behind the great artist came out.
His personality, his pathological diseases and his eccentric whims, destroyed those close to him.
His last wife shot herself in the temple under the covers; one of his lovers hanged herself; another went crazy; a son was poisoned ... and so goes a list of the people who lived and loved this character.
I want to specify that Picasso maintained this type of relationship with his wives and lovers within a context of the early twentieth century, in which women depended a lot on men and they allowed it.
Can a bad person be a genius?
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