love?

To put the Jacob affair in context and thus to understand the emotional and psychological import of Picasso’s boys, we must first consider Picasso’s emotional history and a peculiar ‘idolization of self’ that permeated his art. At a glance, it would seem Picasso lived life without restraint, almost free of the soon-to-be so-termed ‘ego.’ He had no less than six “major” mistresses in his life and doubtless many ‘minor’ ones besides (Seymour). He was, at intervals, friend and enemy to the likes of Apollinaire and Breton, and was so fabulously arrogant that he is said to have characterized his life thus: “When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso” (qtd. Richardson 67). These words suggest that Picasso conceived his identity as bound up with his art, a notion that seems to spring from his youth. Picasso’s father was an artist and an alcoholic. The elder Picasso trained his son to become a painter and, implicitly, to take over a paternal role in the family (Spies). The young Picasso resented his father’s increasing impotence as an artist, a husband, and a father. He would later recount with disgust how his father “surrendered” to the world by giving his palette to the young Picasso as a gift for his fourteenth birthday (Spies). In his father, Picasso had an early model of how weakness manifests itself in both art and manhood. With such a legacy, he could not let his artistic self be undermined by weaknesses, emotional or otherwise. Even Picasso’s daughter, Maya, like many other women Picasso knew, would later write of an emotional awkwardness with her father when she was child (Spies). This is arguably because Picasso’s emotional life, his virility, and his art were so tied together that he could not let himself be emotionally vulnerable in without becoming also artistically vulnerable. The celebrated sexual conquests of his adult life extend this idea further, enunciating a virile self that corresponded in his mind to his sustained virility as an artist. Yet by deliberately living the life of the rake and womanizer, Picasso necessarily denied a vulnerable part of himself.

Picasso did, however, let himself be emotionally vulnerable once: in 1905 and 1906, Picasso was moving out of Max Jacob’s apartment, ending a relationship that would prove uniquely intimate in what we know of his life. Though Picasso would never live with a woman for more than a decade in the course of his life, he had lived with Jacob on-and-off for three years and would correspond with him until the poet’s death in 1944. Their letters, collected by Hélène Seckel in Max Jacob et Picasso, were intimate and frequent, suggesting that Picasso let himself be emotionally and psychologically vulnerable towards Jacob in a way that he would not allow himself to be vulnerable towards others. Indeed, though they lived together, Richardson writes, Picasso would have despised being thought gay. So to cover, he and Jacob created a fiction of very separate lives, in which Max worked days at the Paris-France department store while Picasso slept during the day and painted at night (Richardson 260). This was, Richardson confessed in an interview, a weak attempt at concealment: “Oh, Picasso was absolutely having sex with Max Jacob. And everyone knew!” (Richardson) Indeed even Picasso’s mistress, Fernande Olivier, noted upon first meeting Jacob that the two men were “toujours ensemble” (Seckel 32). Yet Picasso could not let himself remain with Max Jacob, who represented desires which Picasso saw as effeminate and “artistically sterilizing” (qtd. Seymour). Rather, the adolescent paintings of this period tell the story of a struggle to isolate and externalize these desires.