VISUAL ARTS / LEAH OLLMAN : Author’s Admitted Goal Was to Poke Some Holes in the Picasso Myth

Romantic legends of child prodigies, loners and bohemians fill the annals of art history. Now, enter the destructive tyrant, sadistic, seductive and sexually confused, a man who manipulated people in life and drove them to suicide even after his death.

His name? A familiar one: Pablo Picasso.

Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s new book, “Picasso: Creator and Destroyer,” pokes gaping holes in the bubble of awe and reverence that surrounds the artist, replacing it with a persistent cloud of shame. Upsetting the myth of Picasso was one of the author’s main goals, she said recently by telephone from her home in Santa Barbara, but it bore its own upsetting consequences.

“If you challenge the orthodoxy, you are challenged back,” she said. “People will fight very hard to protect the conventional wisdom.” Art historians and critics, whom Huffington calls “the guardians of the Picasso cult,” attacked her book mercilessly and nearly unanimously when it was released in June. One called it a “resentful sexual history,” another simply a “deeply terrible book.” Huffington will discuss Picasso, the man and the book at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the San Diego Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium.

Indeed, the book does have as many fatal flaws as the author attempts to pin on her subject. It summarily dismisses major bodies of Picasso’s work, while dwelling with unforgiving scrutiny on the details of his personal relationships. It comes as no surprise that both television and movie rights to the book have already been sold; the biography feeds the current hunger for gritty details of public figures’ private lives.

If the book doesn’t meet the requisites of art history--which, Huffington stressed, she wasn’t interested in writing--it certainly satisfies those of the romance novel, with its concentration on power, sex, jealousy and intrigue. As if to compensate for the glut of books about Picasso the creator, Huffington focuses almost exclusively on the artist as destroyer, highlighting his every flaw, hypocrisy and sin of pride.

Whatever other faults in approach or tone have been ascribed to the book, however, not one of its critics has challenged its accuracy, Huffington said. Knowing what kind of opposition she would face, the author, who has also written a biography of Maria Callas and several other books, conducted her research with scholarly precision, and her sources, including hundreds of interviews with those who knew Picasso, are all carefully noted in the book.

Both the tangible facts presented within the book and the equally tangible controversy surrounding it raise an issue fundamental to the study and appreciation of art: Can art be separated from its maker to the extent that one can admire the art and despise the artist?

Yes, Huffington says, it is possible, “and there are many examples, starting with Wagner. You can despise a lot of his views, like his anti-Semitism, and love his music. The case with Picasso is different. I’m not saying his work is less admirable because of his character. I’m saying that we need to separate the legend from the true value of the work.”

During the five years spent working on the book, that legend “seemed like the fantasy hero of a collective act of make-believe compared with the Picasso I came to know,” she writes.

But, for Huffington, acceptance of an artist or his work is based on more than just an assessment of character. One must consider the philosophical basis of both the artist’s life and his work. Picasso, she said, “felt that God is evil and that man is his adversary. That for me is a metaphysical lie, and no art based on a metaphysical lie can be ultimately great. Timeless art must transcend this, it must give a glimpse of transcendence.”

If you look at Picasso’s art, especially from the 1920s on, she said, “you cannot avoid the evidence of misogyny and brutality.” Blind acceptance of that is very troubling, she feels, for, “If everything is accepted, what has true value? It’s ultimately the kind of judgment that does affect our private lives and the way we react.

“When Picasso refused to lift a finger to help his friend Max Jacob when he was picked up by the Nazis, it was easier because he believed in evil as a reality.” But the issue, she continued, is not just Picasso, it’s our own culture. “Picasso is dead, but our culture is still here, and people are suffering. The way we respond to art is the way we respond in our lives.”

Contemporary reactions to art mirror our age, Huffington suggests, just as Picasso’s art mirrored his. He was “a seismograph for the conflicts, turmoil and anguish of his age,” she writes. “He brought to fullest expression the shattered vision of a century.” Since he painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the cornerstone of Cubism, he was “out of love with the world,” and regarded his role as an artist to combat against nature, human nature and God.

In truly great art, Huffington writes, there is a sense that “beyond the darkness and the nightmares that it portrays, beyond humanity’s anguished cries that it gives voice to, there is harmony, order, peace.” Not so in Picasso’s art, she believes. What predominates there is nothing but rage and rebellion. As influential as these attitudes have been in determining the course of 20th-Century art, they are not the products of a “timeless genius,” Huffington said.

Besides, “We need to move beyond rage,” she said. “Rage is an adolescent stage.” The few positive reviews of her book affirm this, she feels, whereas those writers who criticized it “are threatened because they know that the culture they represent is dying. They know that we are at a turning point. People are looking both in their own lives and beyond for something that doesn’t just shock and disturb. There’s an incredible openness to what I’m saying, because people are aware of this quest in their own lives. Today, people are longing for a glimpse of transcendence.”