ART : COMMENTARY : Cry Me a River : We know that Pablo Picasso was a womanizer and not a very nice guy. But those aren’t the only reasons these women are weeping. There was also the quake and his mother and, of course, the Spanish Civil War

“Guernica,” Picasso’s great and terrible monument to the Spanish Civil War, was in part inspired by the memory of an earthquake the artist experienced in 1884, at the age of 3, in Malaga, his native city in southern Spain.

Picasso never forgot the sight of his pregnant mother wearing a peasant kerchief and the feeling of being swaddled in his father’s cape as the family fled from its house.

Fifty-three years later, in 1937, these sensations found their way into the famous grisaille mural as images of torment--of a woman holding her dead baby, of another dragging her own wounded body across the floor, of yet another, head upturned, screeching as she falls from a window.

The mural was the centerpiece of the 1937 Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris. During the same year, however, Picasso also created an extraordinary series of drawings and paintings on the theme of weeping women.

While directly inspired by the artist’s complex romantic life at that time, they clearly relate to “Guernica’s” images of agonized peasant women. These smaller works, including a number of widely acknowledged Picasso masterpieces, are now themselves the subject of an exhibition, “Picasso and the Weeping Women: The Years of Marie-Therese Walter & Dora Maar,” that opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

From the title of the exhibition, we might infer that the artist had been responsible for making the subjects weep in real life, but this would be only partially true. The Spanish master (1881-1973) may have been one of the century’s greatest geniuses, but he was also one of its most famous male chauvinists. However, the “Weeping Women” represent something more complex, a unique fusion of sexist manipulation, empathetic feeling, photojournalistic reportage and psychic crisis. The paintings are impositions on, as well as interpretations of, real women. Furthermore, they are also generalized symbols of the suffering of the Spaniards and physiognomic maps of one man’s midlife crisis.

While only two women are named in the show’s title, the show’s curator, Judi Freeman, formerly of LACMA and currently of the Portland, Me., Museum of Art, contends that three real women are reflected in the works in question. Olga Koklova--the unnamed woman--was a Russian ballerina from a minor aristocratic family whom Picasso married in 1918 and from whom he was estranged.

Marie-Therese Walter was a blond teen-ager he picked up outside the Parisian department store Les Galeries Lafayette in 1928 and with whom he secretly had a child, Maya, in 1936.

Dora Maar was a dark-haired, politically impassioned intellectual, a painter as well as a photographer, with whom Picasso embarked on an affair in 1936. Maar’s political activism played an important role in the gestation of “Guernica.”

Picasso developed a different visual code for each of these women. The show at LACMA has been planned to adhere to this organization, with a first room devoted to images of Koklova, a second room to Walter, a third gallery to the “Weeping Women” and a fourth to Maar.

Koklova is not on the marquee at LACMA, because by 1937, she was pretty much out of the picture in Picasso’s life, and her presence in his art was oblique. She is depicted in this period as a monstrous, devouring figure. By the late ‘20s, Picasso had begun to show intense hostility toward his wife in paintings of an abstracted human head with a vagina dentate in place of a mouth.

The images of women with bared teeth and pointed tongues in “Guernica” may likewise be inspired by Koklova’s habit of smiling and sticking out her tongue at her husband. Picasso’s painting “Head of a Woman” (1927), one of the crueler works inspired by Koklova in the showat LACMA, depicts a desiccated hieroglyph of a yawning mouth in profile with four sharp prongs for teeth.

The Walter portraits are the absolute embodiment of non-threatening womanhood and sensual bliss. They are among the most sexually explicit works in his oeuvre . “The Studio” (1934) shows a pinkish female nude in an uninhibited swoon (Walter was famous for her naps), while the figure of a male artist paints a small canvas of flowers.

This bucolic mood began to sour when Picasso moved Marie-Therese and Maya to a villa outside Paris that was lent to him by his old dealer Ambroise Vollard. By this time, Picasso was also beginning to get bored with his blond nymphet, and her portraits from 1936-37 start to look static. Her code of colors (green, violet, yellow) and metaphors, vegetal and sappy, don’t really evolve in this period, which is one clear indication of Picasso’s waning interest.

The persona of Dora Maar undergoes the most radical transformation in Picasso’s portraits of this period. During the late 1930s, the real erotic and intellectual joust was between Maar and Picasso, and it is no coincidence that in 1940 he depicted her in a big painting, “Woman Dressing Her Hair” (not in the LACMA version of the show), with a sword for an arm. When he first met Maar at Cafe des Deux Magots in 1936, she is said to have been throwing a sharp penknife down between her fingers into a wooden table. In Picasso’s portraits, she starts out as a good-looking girl with short black bangs and carefully manicured dark-red nails. Gradually, she becomes a barely legible character enmeshed in spidery lines. Later she is depicted as entirely encased in tight basketwork coils.

For all the inaccuracies in the biography “Picasso: Creator and Destroyer,” published in 1988, author Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington had a point when she wrote: “Dora, beautiful and brilliant, was transformed by Picasso into the Weeping Woman, her face distorted in torment. The goddess was turned into a doormat.”

One of the last portraits Picasso made of Maar in 1942 during World War II shows a relatively straightforward likeness of an emotionally devastated person. Maar, born Henrietta Theodora Markovich in Tours, France, in 1907, was half-Jewish on her father’s side, yet Picasso somehow arranged for her to remain in Paris during the Occupation.

In 1943, the Spaniard took up with another young woman, Francoise Gilot, and his imagery changed again. Maar suffered a severe nervous breakdown, was hospitalized and given electroshock treatments and recovered only after extensive analysis with eminent French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan. Picasso himself admitted: “For me, (Dora Maar) is the weeping woman. For years I gave her a tortured appearance, not out of sadism and without any pleasure on my part, but in obedience to a vision that imposed itself on me.”

While mirroring Picasso’s love life, the “Weeping Women” also reflect events on the world stage. They were made at the time of intense bloodshed during the Spanish Civil War and they anticipate the even greater horrors of World War II. There is a mood of universal anguish about these images, as well as a specifically nationalist message in these icons of females often coiffed in elaborate mantillas.

It is noteworthy that other Spanish artists, such as Joan Miro and Julio Gonzalez, depicted weeping peasant women at exactly the same time, and their works were also exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition. Picasso’s “Weeping Women” should thus be understood as part of a larger apocalyptic groundswell in the late 1930s. Reduced to an almost animal state, rending their handkerchiefs with their teeth, these women are Picasso’s unforgettable vision of world panic.

And, of course, in a very real sense, the “Weeping Women” are also about the artist’s own midlife crisis. For several months in late 1935 and early 1936, after Koklova had seals put on all of his property, Picasso almost stopped working altogether, except for some stream-of-consciousness writing. He was 55 years old, a new father and starting to juggle a couple of new affairs with the wives of friends before he got involved with Dora Maar.

The Spanish Civil War erupted in July, 1936, and although Picasso made no attempts to visit his native country, the situation filled him with sorrow. When Maar came on the scene in late 1936, she galvanized a very famous man who was in a bad slump. Through her old boyfriend, writer Georges Bataille, Maar found Picasso a new studio in which to paint “Guernica.”

She energized him with her left-wing political opinions. She photographed the mural as it developed and she even painted bits of it herself. She got Picasso out of his midlife crisis, and “Guernica” should be seen as their conceptual collaboration.

Dora Maar is still living in Paris. (Koklova died of natural causes in 1955, and Walter committed suicide in 1977.) When curator Freeman interviewed the 85-year-old recluse at her apartment, she agreed to talk but only off the record. Her contribution thus remains undocumented in the catalogue, and Maar is not a lender to the show, although she still owns a key “Weeping Woman” painting.

Recently she has been the subject of a consuming memoir by James Lord, “Picasso and Dora, a Personal Memoir” (1993), and a selection of her photographs were included last year in the Getty exhibition “Women on the Edge: Twenty Photographers in Europe, 1919-1939.” What little I’ve seen of her work suggests that the time is ripe for a reappraisal.

Perhaps the greatest work on view at LACMA is a small, brightly colored oil on canvas dated Oct. 26, 1937, on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. In this famous painting, a woman bites her handkerchief, which in turn becomes a veil enshrouding one of her hands. British Surrealist Roland Penrose bought this work out of Picasso’s studio when it was barely dry.

About this painting, Penrose later wrote: “It was as though this girl, seen in profile but with both the dark passionate eyes of Dora Maar, dressed as for a fete, had found herself suddenly faced with a heart-rending disaster.” Recently, David Hockney, whose homages to Picasso are legion, acknowledged being smitten by this very painting when it was shown in London in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the LACMA catalogue he recounts: “The first image I ever saw of Picasso’s work was the ‘Weeping Woman.’ I can never forget it.”

With this icon to a sobbing woman, Picasso created a new mythic creature as archaic in its way as the Minotaur, which the artist also used as a mythic self-image in paintings and drawings of the 1930s. He invented a whole genre, precariously balanced between tragedy and comedy, that might be called the Sardonic Sublime. In these images, the women have eyes like bathtub boats that pour out rivers of tears. Picasso’s Maenads, who rip their handkerchiefs, inspire pity, terror and catharsis, but in another mood, they might also provoke laughter.

Although Freeman doesn’t trace the afterlife of the “Weeping Women” in the catalogue, Picasso’s Sardonic Sublime casts a long shadow on 20th-Century art, influencing Willem de Kooning’s grinning women and Francis Bacon’s grimacing baboons, Andy Warhol’s vampiric icons of Marilyn Monroe and even contemporary artist Rona Pondick’s false-teethed sculptures. (In retrospect, Dora Maar may even be one of the original “Bad Girls,” a label used to describe the current transgressive feminist art featured in the bicoastal exhibition “Bad Girls” and “Bad Girls West” at the New Museum in New York and the Wight Art Gallery at UCLA, respectively.)

“Picasso and the Weeping Women” is a great subject, and, in fact, Freeman even managed to scoop the grand old man of Picasso shows, William Rubin at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who is planning his own exhibition of Picasso portraits for MOMA in 1996. With its weird, lachrymose title, Freeman’s small show of about 60 works represents a new beginning for appreciating Picasso in the 21st Century. Rubin’s larger exhibition will probably be the swan song of the old patriarchal, art-historical approach.

It is both to Freeman’s credit, and a slight weakness in her argument, that she doesn’t come down harder on Picasso’s sexism in her catalogue. But her partially feminist approach makes convincing sense, interwoven as it is with close formalist and psychological readings of the day-by-day progression of one motif, the crying head, during 1937, an anxious year for the world and a crucial one for Picasso’s art.

* “Picasso and the Weeping Women: The Years of Marie-Therese Walter & Dora Maar,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on view today through May 1. Also at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 12-Sept. 4, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Oct. 8-Jan. 8.