Volume 34, Number 7 · April 23, 1987
Picasso's Apocalyptic Whorehouse
By John Richardson
For too long Picasso has been seen as a French artist. Haven't we been told, time and again, how a succession of French painters—Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, Gauguin, Douanier Rousseau, Ingres, Cézanne—rescued Picasso from the questionable clutches of Modernisme (the Catalan art movement), and lured him from his native land to become a founder of the school of Paris. This view is finally fading. It is now possible to see that Picasso's roots in Spanish art and literature, mysticism and religion, go far deeper than anyone thought: far deeper than Lorca's romantic concept of duende—Spanish darkness and gypsy doom which John Berger promoted. For all that he came under the sway of French poets and painters, Picasso was as Spanish at the end of his career as he was at the beginning. By failing to make allowances for his Hispagnolisme, historians have failed to plumb the Mindanoan depths of the artist's psyche. Even the Demoiselles d'Avignon—cornerstone of modern art—turns out to have a few more answers to give once we realize that the painting owes at least as much to El Greco as Cézanne.
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