Picasso's sexual personae: in a large exhibition of Picasso's erotic works , the artist emerges as a man of multiple sexual selves, each seeking its own artistic avatar - and a small one devoted to his studio-themed paintings and drawings - Critical Essay

Asked once to comment on the relationship between art and sex in his work, Pablo Picasso declared in his typical conversation-stopping style, "They're the same thing." (1) "Picasso Erotique," an expansive exhibition mostly of works on paper, boldly proposes that we take Picasso at his word, that we see sex as not just a semiprivate sideshow in his career, but as the main event. Including some 350 works--40 paintings, 30 sculptures and hundreds of prints and drawings--the show spills before us a chronologically arranged cornucopia of sexually charged images, embodied in so many different forms that it's tempting to think that eros was indeed the essential fuel that drove Picasso's enterprise.

The problem is that representing Picasso as a prisoner of sex, to borrow Norman Mailer's phrase, makes him a narrower artist than he was; it's like calling Walt Whitman a gay poet, or Henry Miller a dirty-book writer. Contemplating the amazing variety of forms and styles in which Picasso incarnates sexual ideas, you could make a case that Picasso was less interested in sex per se than in how he could exploit it for the sake of art. In that sense, it's the how of these works, not the what, that fascinates--from the nostalgic romance of the Blue Period to the ham-fisted primitivism of his last paintings.

Then again, Picasso's representation of sexual subjects inevitably brings into play a psychological dimension that is naturally less prominent in, say, his still lifes or portraits. If you track the erotic in Picasso, the diversity of his approach begins to seem the necessary realization of an inner multiplicity of self, a wildly complex and contradictory psychic pluralism. What impresses is not one super-libidinous man's insatiable obsession but his openness to an inner multitude of sexual personae, each of which he sought to provide with its own uniquely apt vehicle of expression. Picasso was as much theater director as painter or sculptor, and among his cast of archetypal characters are the lover, the hedonist, the clown, the visionary, the scientist, the nostalgic old man and the angry young man, the earth mother, love goddess, succubus, vamp and whore--all of whom he deploys with consummate skill.

Picasso's erotic work is marked by its range of mood and style right from the start. For example, the wan poetry of the Blue and the Rose periods--the latter represented in "Picasso Erotique" by The Harem (1906) and some related works--coexists with a randy comic idiom reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec. Beginning with a little sketch of copulating donkeys made about 1894, when the artist was barely a teenager, the exhibition includes, from the next decade or so, many journalistic drawings based on visits to brothels, lots of sketches of young women naked but for thigh-high stockings; an image of a beautiful blonde administering fellatio to the artist's friend Isidro Nonell; and, most strikingly, a sweet drawing in a wobbly blue ink line of a young man (apparently the artist himself) performing cunnilingus on a spread-eagled woman who covers her eyes in a gesture of unbearable delight.

In a more fantastical vein, there is a goofy, exactingly etched scene from the story of Salome (1905), with a cast of funny grotesques including an old woman dancing nude, a corpulent Herod and a naked man using a small boy as a violin. Overall, it looks like something that might have inspired Jim Nutt. And postcard-size, emblematic images--a naked woman with a fish hooked to her vagina (1902-03), an anthropomorphized phallus with a little naked woman nested in the scrotum (1903)--could be the icons of some sexual mystery cult.

For all its bawdy variety, however, Picasso's sexual imagination remains remarkably conventional. Compared to erotic specialists like Beardsley, Bellmer or Balthus, he's pretty normal. Exclusively heterosexual, his imagery shows no sign of fetishism or sadomasochism, no unseemly interest in children. If Picasso is polymorphously perverse, he sublimates it into a promiscuous play with form and style.

With Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, the relationship among the erotic, the formal and the theatrical comes to the fore with a vengeance. The painting itself is not included in the show, unfortunately, but some small preparatory studies are, and the catalogue includes a lucid and informative essay about it called "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Picasso's Erotic Theatre" by Robert Rosenblum. Rosenblum offers a brief disquisition on the history of erotic display in painting, touching on artists like Delacroix, Ingres and the early Cezanne, and fleshing out the traditional background against which Picasso knowingly plays. What Rosenblum does not directly address, however, is the assaultive impact of the picture. While his predecessors used deductive painting to draw the viewer into words of orgiastic promise, Picasso gives us a frieze of blocky, zombie-eyed gorgons enveloped in flamelike swathes of sharply creased drapery, a hellish spectacle more likely to cause detumescence than its opposite in the average male viewer. This is a theater more of cruelty than of eros.