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Nude Today with Dr. William A. Lipsmacker
Saturday, February 16, 2008
This week: Dr. William A. Lipsmacker examines a very dirty tea
towel
It is one thing to spend an afternoon downloading
pictures of young women and their sideways smiles,
it is quite another to encounter them in an art
gallery.
In Barcelona’s Museu Picasso one summer however,
that is just what I found. The terrifying, obsessive
recapitulations of female genitalia by an ageing man
as if he were frightened of forgetting what they
looked like. I had brought my great-aunt to show
her the pigeon paintings, so you can imagine her
discomfiture. We were both rather quiet as we
sipped our tea.
I was wondering how I could slip back to the gift
shop when she wasn’t looking.
Picasso died in his nineties and for much of his last decade he drew splay-legged
women. This embarrassed the art world horribly – which preferred boys and had
probably never seen so much pussy in its life.
Some have suggested that Picasso saw his drawings of a woman’s sexe as a new
form of portraiture, capturing the second, private face of women who knew how to
paint and pluck their public face but hadn’t yet got around to Brazilian waxing. This
sounds altogether too charming for Picasso, who knew more about how to destroy
women, in paint as well as in life, than he did about how to stand back and admire
them.
He often appears as a watching figure in these late works, although not quite an
admiring one. A clown, a grotesque old man, a monkey, he stands and stares at the
indifferent beauty gaping in front of him.
In some African societies it is believed that to gaze on a woman’s private parts will
bring death, a taboo that must limit the options for foreplay, unless blindfolds come
into it somewhere. Picasso, no stranger to African influence, was perhaps here
closest to that school of thought. Except that Picasso, defiant to the last, stares
down the crack of doom even as death comes for him. In one of his final drawings, a
giant vagina towers over a tiny wreck of a man walking toward the blackness of
death with his eyes wide open.
So taken was I by the power of the late Picasso I was delighted to discover, having
slipped away from my great-aunt, that I could purchase one of these images in the
form of a tea towel. It hangs on my oven door even now: I find myself reluctant to
risk it to the wash.
Not the most pornographic of Picasso’s final creations, it nonetheless captures his
mood.The old man scrawls down his lines; the nude towers over him, her face
turned away. Living longer than most artists, and productive right until the end,
Picasso had time to discover the great tragedy of the artist’s life: he gets older and
older and the models stay the same age.
If only he’d lived long enough to try Viagra.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Dr. William A. Lipsmacker's Nude Today appears every Saturday on The Lizard.
Back to the homepage
Saturday, February 16, 2008
This week: Dr. William A. Lipsmacker examines a very dirty tea
towel
It is one thing to spend an afternoon downloading
pictures of young women and their sideways smiles,
it is quite another to encounter them in an art
gallery.
In Barcelona’s Museu Picasso one summer however,
that is just what I found. The terrifying, obsessive
recapitulations of female genitalia by an ageing man
as if he were frightened of forgetting what they
looked like. I had brought my great-aunt to show
her the pigeon paintings, so you can imagine her
discomfiture. We were both rather quiet as we
sipped our tea.
I was wondering how I could slip back to the gift
shop when she wasn’t looking.
Picasso died in his nineties and for much of his last decade he drew splay-legged
women. This embarrassed the art world horribly – which preferred boys and had
probably never seen so much pussy in its life.
Some have suggested that Picasso saw his drawings of a woman’s sexe as a new
form of portraiture, capturing the second, private face of women who knew how to
paint and pluck their public face but hadn’t yet got around to Brazilian waxing. This
sounds altogether too charming for Picasso, who knew more about how to destroy
women, in paint as well as in life, than he did about how to stand back and admire
them.
He often appears as a watching figure in these late works, although not quite an
admiring one. A clown, a grotesque old man, a monkey, he stands and stares at the
indifferent beauty gaping in front of him.
In some African societies it is believed that to gaze on a woman’s private parts will
bring death, a taboo that must limit the options for foreplay, unless blindfolds come
into it somewhere. Picasso, no stranger to African influence, was perhaps here
closest to that school of thought. Except that Picasso, defiant to the last, stares
down the crack of doom even as death comes for him. In one of his final drawings, a
giant vagina towers over a tiny wreck of a man walking toward the blackness of
death with his eyes wide open.
So taken was I by the power of the late Picasso I was delighted to discover, having
slipped away from my great-aunt, that I could purchase one of these images in the
form of a tea towel. It hangs on my oven door even now: I find myself reluctant to
risk it to the wash.
Not the most pornographic of Picasso’s final creations, it nonetheless captures his
mood.The old man scrawls down his lines; the nude towers over him, her face
turned away. Living longer than most artists, and productive right until the end,
Picasso had time to discover the great tragedy of the artist’s life: he gets older and
older and the models stay the same age.
If only he’d lived long enough to try Viagra.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Dr. William A. Lipsmacker's Nude Today appears every Saturday on The Lizard.
Back to the homepage
