Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...meant to be the true story of Picasso turns out to be nothing more than an expression of Huffington's personal agenda. In the preface, she compares Picasso to Don Juan and the god Krishna and says that writing his biography was like having an intimate relationship with the artist. Until she broke up with him, that...
...black-and-white picture of the person it seeks to portray. To Huffington, Picasso was a destroyer and his art a negation of human values. Her evidence for this, however, is not drawn from the vast body of Picasso's works; it comes from the bitter testimony of the artist's former lovers and friends. His sex life, it would seem, was the expression of Picasso's true soul...
...evidence of Picasso the destroyer is tragic. The suicides of his second wife, of his grandson and of Marie-Therese Walter, his mistress of many years; the psychic disintegration of his first wife; the nervous breakdowns of Dora Maar, the brilliant artist who was his mistress during the time of Guernica--all are part of a formidable list of casualties among those who came too close to the destructive fallout of his personality...
...tone which infects the book. The author seems stunned to realize that Picasso ate, slept, drank, defecated, etc. And when she reveals that Picasso actually did mean and petty things, Huffington writes with a disdain and lack of comprehension that only reveal how deeply she still sees the master artist as a mythic figure...
...there is still an Art that transcends sexual foibles and the quirks of personality, then Huffington's book--and her approach to the subject--is a failure. Her critique of Picasso the publicity seeker and sadist makes no contribution to our understanding of the artist at work and very little to our understanding of the artist at play...