Word: huffington
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...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...
Such an approach to Picasso renders the book simplistic and biased. Huffington bases a large part of the last sections of the book on her interviews with Francoise Gilot, the woman who left Picasso after bearing him two children. And Huffington is so unabashedly admiring of Gilot that the reader wonders if a biography of her wouldn't have been a more appropriate subject for the author...
...that Huffington makes no interesting points about Picasso the man, only that she wants too much to thrust her conclusions upon the reader. To break down a myth is a difficult thing, though, and Huffington is not an effective enough demagogue to accomplish the task...