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Web-Only |<br>Criticism |<br>April 24, 2026
The Mind of a Minotaur
Displaying Picasso’s dark side
by<br>Zachary Ginsberg
Françoise Gilot—the only one of Pablo Picasso’s lovers who left him before he left her—wrote in her memoir that he once said all women are either “goddesses” or “doormats.” He fought (and lost) in court to prevent the publication of that book, I guess because he thought it would make him look bad. It does. But Gilot’s account only fills in the details of a general arc of misogyny that one can easily glean from his biography and oeuvre. He was a tyrannical romantic partner: two of his lovers committed suicide, one suffered a debilitating psychological breakdown, and others had any number of problems that fell short of those extreme fates. (A less than promising track record, even if we can’t cleanly blame him for all of it.) But perhaps the worst thing he ever did to women was paint them.
In his Cubist period, he reassembled their bodies into geometrical contortions, and even his more flattering portraits collapsed women into one of his signature styles. He ironed out the imperfections that inflect a lover’s face with individuality to align with his ideal—for example, by smoothing the features of Olga Khokhlova as if her skin were made of shiny rubber. Other times, he mutated women’s faces beyond recognition, as he did to Dora Maar in his fractured “weeping woman” series. He stole their beauty as if it belonged to him and held it captive so they could never have it back. Gilot knew this and refused to recognize herself in the paintings he made of her. “What I did see in it,” she wrote, “was him, not me.”
If Picasso were alive today, I have to imagine he would have been canceled by now. Some tried to do it post-hoc, on the heels of 2018’s #MeToo reckoning, and failed. The Brooklyn Museum’s 2023 exhibition It’s Pablo-matic, curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby, notoriously attempted a grand reappraisal of the man in light of his mistreatment of women, urging other museums to reconsider how they present him.
When celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death arrived that year, the question was whether criticisms like Gadsby’s would result in any lasting damage to his reputation or the critical reception of his work. Far from it, most institutions adopted a starkly amoral or even laudatory attitude, with the French and Spanish national governments sponsoring an official commission to support events around the world in honor of their shared national hero. An exhibition I attended at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2025 titled Picasso and Paper hardly acknowledged any of his transgressions—though it prominently featured Cubist drawings where women’s faces are folded inward like vulvas and prints that show nymphs ransacked and raped by burly men. The wall texts and catalog treated Picasso’s vulturine sketches in a matter-of-fact manner, mostly commenting on his biography and the larger projects they were in service of.
Yet there were also signs that the critiques had penetrated below the surface. Many curators and writers felt the need to, at minimum, allude to Picasso’s sexism. A typically ambivalent essay, published in the New York Times by the art critic Deborah Solomon, was subdivided into two sections: “I Love Him" / “I Hate Him,” entertaining both sides in equal measure. Another common, more forceful strategy was to center women in his place. Picasso: Drawing from Life at the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, focused on the muses and support network that made his art possible. The art historian Sue Roe did the same in her book Hidden Portraits, a group biography of sorts about the six most significant women in Picasso’s life. The artist Sophie Calle took this approach to the extreme at the Musée Picasso in Paris, removing almost all his work from the building and replacing it with her own.
But none of these attempts to challenge or complicate Picasso’s genius and stature did, or really ever could, change how we view his art as art. Part of the reason for this is that to lob accusations of moral shortcomings at his art does not chip away at its greatness. His work absorbs it too well. He knew he was a total dog with no inhibitions, and he relished it.
In Cleveland, the choice to foreground his works on paper (his most...