Word: picasso
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...Picasso: Creator and Destroyer...
...Picasso is dead," trumpets Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington in her new biography of the 20th century's most visible artist, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. The book--and the concept behind it--is at one with the purpose of the other giant-killers, as it seeks to dismantle our comfortable and timehonored portrait of the artist...
...problem is that in destroying the myth of the man we receive no insights into the man as creator. We are told that our artistic hero--Picasso--was a human myth, as well. We learn that he had insecurities and parents and love affairs and friends and children. We learn that he often betrayed his parents, his lovers, his friends and his children...
...aside from facile parallels that Huffington draws between Picasso's treatment of his current lover and that woman's appearance in his work, there is no effort made to probe the source of Picasso's artistic wellspring. The biographer has taken Andy Warhol's dictum that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes too seriously, and, angered by Picasso's constant fame, she has tried to steal a few precious moments in the spotlight for herself at the artist's expense...
What is meant to be the true story of Picasso turns out to be nothing more than an expression of Huffington's personal agenda. In the preface, she compares Picasso to Don Juan and the god Krishna and says that writing his biography was like having an intimate relationship with the artist. Until she broke up with him, that...