ART / Allan Jalon : Biography Paints a Picture of ‘Pablo, Dearest’

Want to spark some lively conversation in a museum or gallery? Bring up the just-published, revisionary biography “Picasso, Creator and Destroyer,” by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington.

It’s a sort of “Pablo, Dearest” that portrays the century’s most famous artist as a sort of Rambo of romance. Its luridly dramatic prose details what might be called a lifelong Cubism of the heart, complete with hard edges and illusive surfaces: Picasso played women off against each other, physically abused them (tamping out a cigarette in a mistress’s cheek) and drove them to suicide, Huffington writes. Not a pretty picture.

The author seems to want to feel her corrosive impact on the artist’s image. She has claimed that some collectors have sold their Picassos after hearing her side of the story, a claim two of the collectors have denied. Of 12 people interviewed recently in several Orange County art galleries and shops, most of whom had at least read an article about Huffington’s book, none said they would discount Picasso’s artistic worth in accord with her claims.

“Whoever said Picasso was Santa Claus?” asked Barbara Bowie, a visitor at the Lady Di Fine Art Poster Gallery in Laguna Beach. “My mom is an artist and she was talking to me about this book on the phone. She asked, ‘Do you think it’s all true?’ I said, ‘Sure, it’s true.’ But I think that a lot of women who know anything at all about art and looked at his paintings had a gut feeling about what kind of man this was. Come on, he pulled women apart in his pictures. He dissected women. If you were using your eyes, this is not news.”

It must be news to some people, however. In artistically inclined Laguna Beach, the book is hot, say employees at Upchurch-Brown Booksellers, where 18 copies have sold in three weeks at $22.95 each. It is the store’s No. 2 best-seller after Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s new novel, “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Salesman Brian Waley read the Picasso book, and concluded that “there is a correlation between what (Huffington) says and the art, especially in the later years. She paints a picture of a man who is utterly disillusioned, and you can see it.

“But it doesn’t change my ideas about his art,” he quickly added. “In fact, I’m even more impressed by it now than ever. You can see how effectively he was able to put himself into his art.”

Gloria Grant, who studied art and now volunteers at the Laguna Art Museum’s reception desk, said: “Yes, there clearly is a lot of anger in his work. But there is such variance in his art. There are a lot of happy and funny elements. . . . I saw this woman (Huffington) on TV. She says in her book that Picasso would have been a better artist if he had developed the more harmonious, more benevolent side of his personality. I don’t see that.”

Cameron Armstrong, a museum security guard and soon-to-be UCLA freshman, listening to Grant, agreed. “It sounds like a very American way to look at a European artist,” he said. “ We have that Calvinistic mentality . . . we always think we’re so good. We’re the good guys and we have to punish people who are bad. Look at Italy: Over there, they elected a porno star to political office and here we tore down a presidential candidate because he supposedly slept with a woman who wasn’t his wife.”

The notion that Huffington’s Picasso is an American tabloid rendering of a Mediterranean temperament, a judging of a personality locked into one culture by the standards of another, came up often.

“I’ve lived with a Spaniard for eight years,” said Bowie. “And there is that Mediterranean thing. Greeks. Italians. They’re brooders. My boyfriend is a brooder. After dinner, I ask him, ‘What’s wrong?’ He says, ‘Nothing’s wrong. I’m Spanish!’

“You know what the problem is?” she joked. “They never got over the Spanish Armada. They were on top of the world, militarily, and then. . . . “ Bowie made a sliding motion with her hand. She and Jane Coco, a friend of Bowie’s who works at the Lady Di Poster Gallery, pulled out an art book filled with photographs of Picasso paintings, children, harlequins, beggars and an old, cross-legged guitarist framed by a deep, melancholy blue. “See how gentle he could be,” Coco said, looking at a tenderly rendered picture of a small girl. “There’s softness and humor there.

“People are always judging artists in this way,” said Coco. “What about Robert Frost? He wasn’t always Mr. Cheerful and he was poet laureate.”

At the Newport Harbor Art Museum, receptionist Ursula Cyga said she had not read the book. But she had read about it and agreed with Bowie and others that, while it might contain some interesting details, the idea that Picasso’s talent flowered amid thorns is no stunner. “It doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “We know he had a hot temper.” “Anyway,” she added, in a knowing tone. “He was a Scorpio. That is a very strong sign. They’re very dynamic people. There’s always a little danger there.”