Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington has thrown the art world into a bit of a huff.
Filled with scene after scene of cruelty, brutality, misogyny and sexual passion turned sadism, her new biography, ”Picasso: Creator and Destroyer,” dares call into question his role as the 20th Century`s foremost artist in a dark portrait of the master as sociopathic monster. Beyond this, her assessment that ”Picasso was not a timeless genius” has pursed lips and arched backs in a world where such words are tantamount to heresy.
Pablo Picasso`s art cannot be separated from the man, a man who let darkness prevail over light and the destroyer overpower the creator in him, asserts Huffington, who amply illustrates the destroyer at work on his favorite targets: the women in his life.
She shows Picasso seducing 18-year-old Marie-Therese Walter into a sadistic sexual relationship, calmly painting ”Guernica” as she and Dora Maar, a competing mistress, literally pummel each other in the background over the right to be his lover. She shows him callously betraying friends and torturing lovers, even holding a lighted cigarette to the cheek of Francoise Gilot, the woman who lived with him for 10 years and bore his children, Paloma and Claude, before fleeing from him in 1955. Gilot, now the wife of Dr. Jonas Salk and a major source for the book, is the only one of Picasso`s wives and lovers still living. Three died by suicide, including Picasso`s last wife, Jacqueline, who shot herself in 1986, and Huffington clearly implies that Picasso`s treatment of them leaves him hardly blameless for their demise. In Huffington`s book, the list of his crimes against women is endless.
The book was barely in the stores when the critics and reviewers pulled out their knives, slicing and dicing their way through her thick tome with the zeal of Samurai warriors on a sacred mission.
”Mrs. Huffington writes about Picasso`s life as though she were breathlessly narrating a trashy novel,” sniffed the New York Times. ”She comes on like a cross between Marabel Morgan and Madame Defarge,” sniped Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, who already had pronounced her work ”a dog of a book” in a New York magazine cover story earlier this month. ”What Mrs. Huffington has given us in this new `Picasso` is a vividly written life of the artist as a dirty dog,” barked the Wall Street Journal.
”Huffington is no art scholar, and her reading of Picasso`s work is narrow and fuddy-duddy,” huffed Newsweek in a full-page review. ”What a shame,” lamented the reviewer, ”that instead of a definitive biography, Picasso`s life has been turned into a candidate for the raciest beach book of `88.”
”We`re using that in an ad for the book,” said Huffington with a sweet smile, sipping coffee in her suite at the Pierre Hotel on a recent afternoon. A striking, russet-haired woman of 37, the Athens-born author declares herself not only serenely above the fray but delighted by it.
”Well, I have to tell you that it is my dream come true because I`m challenging a major cult figure. If people had not responded with these rantings and ravings-because really a lot of response is almost inarticulate; it`s like some of them were so angry they couldn`t even form a sentence-I think, God, the book has worked. It must be powerful enough to have made an impact, because these are the rantings of worried men.
”My hope has always been to start the debate. I know enough about history, and what it is like to challenge the conventional wisdom, to know that if your challenge works, it starts a controversy. And that`s the only way to change the cultural climate.”
It certainly has raised the temperature in the art community, where denizens seem hottest under the collar less over Huffington`s ”challenge”
than over her right to issue one. The woman simply has no credentials, her critics harp over and over.
Huffington is the first to admit that she is no art scholar; her own degree, from England`s Cambridge University, is in economics. Further, she dismisses the notion that one requires an art degree to tell the story of Picasso`s life and even sees it as an advantage to be an outsider who never knew him.
”Being an outsider makes it much easier to be the little boy who says the emperor has no clothes. It`s easier if you`re not part of the court,” she says.
”Of course, it`s important to have credentials,” said a clearly exasperated John Richardson, an art scholar who knew Picasso for 15 years. The first book of his own four-volume biography of Picasso is expected to be published next spring.
”Anyone who met Picasso, who had any feeling about art at all, did realize that he was, without any question, a great genius. It does seem pretentious of this woman, who has no credentials as an art anything, who has no credentials, period, in this field, to come up and give the world a false view of a very great man.”
As for Huffington`s attempt to cast Picasso out of the pantheon of the timeless geniuses, Richardson said, ”I don`t find it shocking, I find it silly. You know, one would take this seriously from a serious person, but from her, this is sort of Shirley Temple making a muscle.”
The underlying, unspoken cry of outrage among all Huffington`s detractors seems to be: Just who is this woman?
Arianna Stassinopoulous Huffington has led a life straight out of a Judith Krantz blockbuster. The author of three other books since her graduation from Cambridge, Huffington is best known for the equally controversial biography,”Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend,” in 1981, for which she was accused of plagiarism, charges later dropped in a settlement. That same year, she came to New York from England, where she took the town by storm.
In one of the nimblest climbs up the social ladder ever witnessed, she crowned her achievement with a 1986 marriage to Michael Huffington, a Houston oil tycoon. The dazzling wedding, in this case literally given by Ann Getty, assembled a Who`s Who cast of 400 to witness a joining that, as guest Henry Kissinger noted, ”had everything except an Aztec sacrificial fire dance.”
The couple currently live in homes in Houston and Santa Barbara, Calif.
Some of this glitz may fuel the fires of Huffington`s detractors. She herself finds their attacks more subjective than factual, noting that she spent more than her $550,000 advance on research. ”There is all that innuendo,” she said. ”I want to know, what are they actually objecting to?” Well, for starters, just about everything, in the view of art scholar Richardson.
”Have you got a week, a month?” said Richardson in a telephone interview at his home in Connecticut. ”I`m here with my research assistant and we`ve just been going over a bit of it, and on every single page there`s either a major error of fact or emphasis.”
Quick to express reluctance to comment and stressing that there is ”no war involved” between himself and Huffington, he is no less quick to let her have it.
”I knew the artist extremely well and I knew his widow, Jacqueline, extremely well and I know all the family extremely well. Therefore I`m in a better position than most people to be able to judge whether her book is a likeness. And her book bears absolutely no resemblance to Picasso
whatsoever.”
Richardson is not, for example, convinced that Picasso`s childhood difficulties in school may be attributed, as Huffington suggests, to dyslexia, an impairment of the ability to read. Huffington counters with her information from Francoise Gilot that both of Gilot`s children with Picasso suffer slightly from dyslexia, often an inherited condition.
Richardson also is skeptical of Huffington`s suggestion that the teenaged Picasso may have had a homosexual affair with a young Gypsy in a Spanish mountain cave, rejects the notion of a later love affair with Pere Manyac, his dealer and onetime-roommate in Paris, but concedes the notion that the painter may have slept with Max Jacob, his long-time friend.
Huffington`s patience wears thin at this sort of skepticism, the only time in the interview that she seems even close to losing a shred of her impeccable cool. ”Now, do you think that Richardson, who only knew Picasso in the last, declining years of his life, who had lunch with him only now and then, knows more about what happened to him in Spain than Francoise Gilot, who lived with him for 10 years, who had endless hours to discuss his past with him in the intimacy that Richardson never had?”
Consider the source, Richardson thrusts back. It is no secret that Picasso`s most ardent fans view Gilot as a traitor, her treachery documented in her less-than-flattering 1964 memoir ”Life with Picasso,” a book that Picasso himself fought bitterly and unsuccessfully to suppress. ”Let me make it clear,” Richardson said. ”Francoise Gilot is a major witness who has provided art historians with a lot of marvelous material, but she has it in for the artist and one has to be very wary when she starts telling this story.”
In any event, Huffington maintains, ”It`s not the facts alone that have the power, it`s the context, too, in which they are put.”
The suggestion, floated by Huffington`s publicists, that the market for late-period Picasso artworks may suffer due to the book`s ugly portrait of the artist`s life in that era, has so far been greeted with skepticism, if not outright ridicule, in art circles.
Although Huffington stops short of predicting a decline in Picasso prices, she embraces the concept with relish. ”It`s not because Picasso was a cruel or sadistic man, it`s because suddenly you see in the work that sadism, that rage, that cruelty. It`s a very direct, gut reaction to the work. It`s not an intellectual reaction that says, `He was like that, therefore I don`t like this,` ” she said.
”I sincerely doubt it,” said Charles Stuckey, curator of 20th Century art at the Art Institute of Chicago. ”I mean, Paul Gauguin left his wife and kids, abandoned every friend he had and left for Tahiti and it certainly hasn`t affected the price of his work. Everyone realizes that Vincent Van Gogh was an absolutely impossible human being and you would love to have his pictures.”
The big auction houses have been understandably silent on their views of Picasso prices and Huffington`s book. Christie`s in New York declined to comment and Sotheby`s would say only that it had done well with Picasso works at auction last month.
The earliest chance to see if there has been any cooling of ardor for late Picassos at auction will come June 28, when Sotheby`s will put some of these works on the block in London.
Meanwhile, the book already has hit the beaches and, as even its most vicious critics had predicted, looks to be shaping up as a hot number, even making it onto one best-seller list in its first week off the presses. The rights having been sold even before the book was published, ”Picasso: The Movie” can`t be far behind.
