Although secure in his niche in the Pantheon of art history, as a person, Pablo Picasso was a jerk. That’s the conclusion of Surviving Picasso (1996), but don’t take the film’s word for it. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplay was drawn from Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s highly critical biography and supported by the memoir of his onetime lover, Francoise Gilot, whose book Picasso sought to suppress.
Surviving Picasso is told from the perspective of Gilot (Natascha McElhone), an ingenue artist who sought Picasso as her mentor. His expectation of sex as part of her education came as no surprise to her. She enters the relationship with eyes wide open.
However, she soon discovers that it’s not always easy living in the great man’s shadow. In one scene, her attempt to flee the situation while still at the center of his erotic compulsion is thwarted by force. To complicate the scenario, many happy years (and two children) follow that incident. Only after Picasso’s next lover was in place did she decide to move on as he loosened his grip. His parting words: “Without me you’re nothing—you’ll have no existence without me.” Afterward, Picasso tried to impede her career as an artist.
It’s tempting more than 20 years after the film’s release to read the story through a #metoo lens. However, the content is better served by recognizing Huffington’s book and the film it inspired as a deconstruction of the Great Artist theory that was a touchstone of Modernism. The leading figures of modern art were deemed (and many saw themselves) as prophets, priests, kings (never queens) of all they surveyed. Their every utterance was oracular. They could do no wrong and when they did, all was forgiven. It’s Art!
Anthony Hopkins plays Surviving Picasso’s title role with bare-chested gusto as he carelessly tramples the dignity of all his associates, male or female. He is playful, charming, but always manipulative.
As an artist as well as a person, he never allowed himself to be confined by past achievements. At his best, he contained multitudes—he knew how to draw and shape pottery, to challenge the boundaries and to color within the lines. His ambitions were unlimited and unchecked by ethics. Echoing the bargain-basement Nietzsche of the Nazis who despised his art, Picasso said: “What is human is to be strong an survive. The rest is rubbish.” He gladly accepted an award from Stalin. In a telling scene from Surviving Picasso, he encourages two ex-lovers to go at it with fists in his studio while he paints his immoral denunciation of violence, Guernica.
