Picasso Erotica at Leslie Sacks Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA
Jack Jordan
From adolescence through old age, Picasso’s two great passions were women and art, and these came together in his erotic works. The most famous of these is his monumentally important painting of 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (collection MoMA), which is viewed by art historians as the prototypical modern painting. But of all of Picasso’s multitudinous erotic adventures in various media, the etchings are by far his most important body of work. They are not merely numerous, but rather each is highly charged with the unbridled life force that infused all of his best works, erotic and otherwise. The range of emotion and sensation is tremendous, communicated not merely through narrative imagery but more fundamentally in lines, textures and shapes that embrace the lust, delicacy, pathos and humor of uncensored human sexuality.
While Picasso’s personal interest in Eros may have exceeded that of most of his contemporaries, one can’t dismiss the relevance of the subject with respect to then contemporary socio-cultural issues. With regard to psychology, the first-half of the 20th century was dominated by the Freudians, with much emphasis given to the far reaching role of sexuality in shaping emotion and behavior. This occurred in concert with the birth of modern anthropology, which showcased tribal cultures, particularly their naturalism inclusive of nudity and the ritualized adulation of fertility. This stood in stark contrast to the culture of the work ethic that had come to dominate Western industrial civilization, just as the trappings of academic European art had threatened to suppress more vital and relevant modes of artistic expression.
The American art scene is viewed as notoriously puritanical by most art professionals, here and abroad. A major exhibition of Picasso’s erotica was organized for 2001 by the Picasso Museum, Paris. Some 5000 people attended the opening at the Jeu de Paume. The show traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts whose Director, Guy Cogeval, stated, "My American colleagues said they’d love to do a show like this, but they can’t with their boards of trustees" (Forbes magazine, 2/28/01). Leslie Sacks says, "I’m quite pleased that in being a privately-owned gallery without a board of trustees and public funding I don’t have to deal with curatorial politics."
It’s interesting to note how "Picasso Erotica" plays in this time of neo-conservatism, with American culture experiencing a reprise of 1950’s level interest rates and an almost equally low tolerance for progressive social values. Picasso’s erotic etchings, though now some thirty years old, fly in the face of fundamentalist Judeo/Christian morays. Indeed, the etchings in the Picasso show at Leslie Sacks are so flagrantly erotic as to be confrontational even in 2005, thus they remain as contemporary as they were when first published.
