Word: huffington
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...aside from facile parallels that Huffington draws between Picasso's treatment of his current lover and that woman's appearance in his work, there is no effort made to probe the source of Picasso's artistic wellspring. The biographer has taken Andy Warhol's dictum that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes too seriously, and, angered by Picasso's constant fame, she has tried to steal a few precious moments in the spotlight for herself at the artist's expense...
What is 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...
...HUFFINGTON is determined to fit Picasso into a symbolic context--showing him to be alternately creator, then destroyer. But any biography with so rigid a framework invariably paints a 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...
...seamy and often sadistic sex life that Huffington chronicles in her book. From the age of 15, when Picasso discovered women in the brothels of Barcelona, to the antics of a 77-year old man, fighting back death with a continual succession of faceless women, Picasso had an infinite capacity to take and an inability to love, according to the book...
...grasping and selfish, manipulative and impenetrable, mischevious and arbitrary. He had affairs with women half his age and he was incapable of breaking anything off, so he would string his admirers along even after he had found a replacement. Huffington cites these pyschological traits as evidence of Picasso's fatally flawed nature. But her analysis stems as much from animosity as from psychological insight...