An exhibition at Reina Sofía brings the homoerotic Picasso out of the closet

But it is inevitable that in the middle Homophobia and misogyny that now characterize every Picasso-related project (an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by Hannah Gadsby, focused on this), draw attention to the Homoeroticism of the artist which Carmona highlights in this exhibition and which “is nothing anecdotal, but rather a category.” He lived it very committedly. Although it disappeared during Cubism, it reappeared in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to works by Picasso, all of his references from 1906 are represented in the exhibition: El Greco, Ingres, Corot, Cézanne, Gauguin…, primitive art, Greek, Egyptian, Etruscan, Iberian, Catalan Romanesque, Mesopotamian, Polynesian, black … Aside from that, the ephebes (a Dionysian, another Apollonian), from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. C., also of the Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum of Córdoba Homoerotic photos by Wilhelm van GloedeN.

In an interview with ABC last May on the occasion of a course on the artist at the Reina Sofía entitled “Picasso after Picasso,” Eugenio Carmona said this “It is possible to reread Picasso from a ‘queer’ perspective.”». He then said that “from the perspective of the ‘queer’ theory, Picasso could be the prototype of a man who interacts with men in a closed manner, but who, due to his homosociality, has a special appeal for gender performativity.” This theory would not deny machismo and refute the homophobia that the most radical feminism accuses? “The first dealer to place Picasso in the art world is Wilhelm Uhde, who is gay.” And his last great friend was Cocteau. They’ve already talked about all of this Linda Nochlin, Robert Lubar…My way of examining this matter is very psychoanalytic. As an art historian, I tried not to show my belonging to psychoanalytic theory, but I have been there for a long time and there are certain assumptions about it Freud in sexual theory and in other parameters that I have to resort to in order to know what is happening with Picasso. I think it is possible to re-read Picasso from a “queer” perspective. And that doesn’t even question his predominant heterosexualitynor the fact that his relationships with women could have a heteronormative key misogynistic undertones. I don’t think Picasso was homophobic.. He fully belongs to the patriarchal society. “He who is free from guilt should cast the first stone.”

Carmona speaks of fluid gender in Picasso’s work, already on his blue stage, where he portrays homosexual figures from Montmartre: “Picasso transforms male figures into female figures and female figures into male figures.” Criticism, she says, has raised gender questions ‘The Teenagers’ -Work in the exhibition-, has described it as androgynous. “This critic did not know that with this comment he was contributing to the recognition of Picasso’s fluid gender.”

Through Picasso, Carmona “emphasizes the importance of homosexual creators and intellectuals in the emergence of the first full artistic modernity. The heteropatriarchal view It tends to hide this differentiator or make it subordinate. The point now is to assume that otherness played an essential role in the founding of modernity. Without exceeding the date 1906, Picasso said: Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein [judíos y homosexuales] They were fundamental. Without them, Picasso wouldn’t have been Picasso. But the heteronormative vision that has always surrounded Picasso and all avant-garde art does not allow data to contradict what is right.” Considered a paradigm of heteronormative“Without the influence of his open relationship with homosexuality, Picasso’s first definition of modern art would not have been what it was.” And that didn’t happen in the same way with either Matisse or Derain.

Writers, collectors and patrons, Gertrude Stein She was a woman of small stature (1.55 meters), androgynousShe was sturdy and strong like an oak tree lesbian. His partner was Alice B. Toklas. Her stunning personality and looks fascinated Picasso. They both looked unforgiving. A strong energy emerged between them. He crossed the boundaries of friendship, but not sexual ones. Picasso felt a kind of deep reverence for Gertrude. His famous portrait, on loan from the Metropolitan in New York, is one of the jewels of the exhibition. Another gem in the exhibition is a painting by Picasso that he never parted with: “Naked with folded hands”, on loan from MoMA. Gertrude Stein and Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s first great love, with whom she traveled to Gósol in 1906, are the two protagonists of the exhibition. Fernande has her own room.

As Carmona herself explains, It is not my own or new theory. There was already talk of this in the 90s. This is what it says in the 1992 catalog of the exhibition “Picasso 1905–1906” Hans Christoph von Tavel “surprised me with a text in which he took up the first points of criticism Apollinaire about Picasso. Von Tavel highlighted a comment by the poet about the blue Picasso: “These pre-pubescent adolescents have concerns about innocence, animals teach them the secret of religion.” The Harlequins They accompany the fame of women, they look like them; They are neither men nor women‘. And von Tavel added from his own thoughts: “If we take into account all the sources and analyze the works of this period, we will come to the conclusion that in Picasso’s circle of friends, sometimes even the figures themselves enjoyed, practiced and suffered.” “Homosexuals and heterosexuals Love in a troubling network of relationships.”

The curator recalls in the exhibition catalog that it was 1997 “ Robert Lubar the first to associate the term and academic concept of “queer” with the work of Picasso. He did this in his interesting analysis of “Portrait of Gertrude Stein,” while describing the artist’s 1906 compositions depicting young people as homoerotic. The same year, Robert RosenblauM « linked Picasso’s youth in Gósol in the same year with the well-known homoerotic photography by Wilhelm von Glœden Margaret Worth began to talk about something similar to gender performativity in the relationship between body and nude in the 1906 Picasso. The theme was reformulated in 2006 at the international seminar “Gósol: the prologue of the avant-garde” at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

“Some of Picasso’s paintings from 1905 – continues Carmona – may indeed seem to us today Gay sensibility. Some of him Teen nudes from 1906 may actually seem like that to us today homoerotic. The – essential – difference is that the former emphasize decadent melancholy as a value and the latter emphasize its value Gender performativity as an increase in vitality and rebirth. Still, this connotation is risky. The gaze only recognizes what it already knows, and the homoeroticism that we perceive in some of Picasso’s figures, especially the male ones, may be deposited by the artist himself, but could also be implemented through the gaze of the current viewer.

Carmona warns that “the relationship of Apollinaire, and therefore of Picasso and Max Jacob, to the occult, the Rosicrucians and Sar Péladan could be in the background of the androgynous beauty proposed by Picasso.” But they are androgynous young people, harlequins and crooks from 1905, in the middle of the rose era, those who were to become “Arcadian” youth from 1906, with the male-female fluid remaining in its erotic representation. The first drawings and watercolors in which Picasso shows us his joyful intimacy with Fernande date from the summer of 1904. But the delicate and suggestive works on paper in which the artist poses also come from this time lesbian relationships.

On the other hand, Eugenio Carmona’s provocative stance regarding “The Ladies of Avignon” whose relevance was hardly questioned. Considered his most revolutionary work, the most innovative in art history since Giotto and the first masterpiece of the 20th century, the curator warns the press about it in a politically incorrect way “His role in modernity has been exaggerated”. In his opinion, this meant work “A return to order”. The controversy is served.