On art, autonomy, and our appetite for judging other people’s lives

I have been thinking about Picasso lately, although not so much about his paintings, but about the extraordinary enthusiasm with which people seem to discuss his private life, preferably with a verdict already prepared before the conversation has even begun. Mention his name and it doesn’t take long before somebody produces the familiar collection of labels, ranging from narcissist and monster to abuser and all sorts of other descriptions that seem to have become indispensable whenever an unconventional historical figure is discussed. I sometimes wonder whether the people distributing these labels so generously have ever taken the trouble to explore the complexities of his actual life, or whether they prefer the conveniently simplified versions that allow them to arrive at a moral verdict without having to examine the man behind the headlines.

Picasso was undoubtedly a complicated man and I have no desire to turn him into a saint, which would be a ridiculous occupation anyway, especially considering how frequently saints are appointed by people who never knew them. What interests me is our habit of reducing an entire human existence, particularly one that was exceptional, unconventional and full of contradictions, to a handful of moral conclusions, as though the purpose of examining another person’s life were to arrive at a verdict rather than to understand something about the extraordinary complexity of being human.

And I wonder why we are so terribly eager to decide, often a hundred years later, how somebody else should have lived.

The Women Who Had Lives of Their Own

Take the women in Picasso’s life, for instance, whose stories are frequently presented through the prism of his behaviour, his jealousy, his infidelities and his rather spectacular capacity for making relationships difficult, until the women themselves gradually disappear behind the enormous shadow of the man they once loved. What I find particularly curious is that, in our enthusiasm to recognise the suffering these women experienced, we sometimes seem to forget that they were complete human beings in their own right, with intelligence, desires, ambitions, contradictions and an ability to make choices that did not begin or end with Picasso.

Fernande Olivier, for example, had escaped an abusive marriage before entering the extraordinary world of bohemian Paris, where poverty, artistic ambition, passion, jealousy and the excitement of an entirely unconventional existence frequently occupied the same small room. Picasso’s possessiveness could be appalling and locking someone inside a studio is hardly an admirable expression of affection, regardless of the century in which it happened, but I am nevertheless interested in Fernande’s own account of those years, including the moments of happiness and intimacy she described, because human relationships can contain profoundly contradictory experiences without one necessarily cancelling out the other.

I would like to discover what Fernande thought, what fascinated her, what she hoped for and how she understood the decisions she made, instead of reading yet another simplified portrait in which her entire existence is explained through the behaviour of the man beside her. Surely there is something peculiar about claiming to restore a woman’s dignity while simultaneously reducing her to the things that happened to her as if she didn’t have a voice of her own.

And then there is Françoise Gilot, a woman whose independence, intelligence and artistic life I find infinitely more interesting than the familiar narrative of a young woman escaping the clutches of an ageing genius. She was twenty-one when she met the sixty-one-year-old Picasso, and although their relationship was undoubtedly complicated, she was also an artist with her own intellectual world, her own ambitions and a remarkable capacity to observe the man with whom she had chosen to share part of her life. Eventually she decided to leave and instead of allowing that relationship to define the remainder of her existence, she continued painting, thinking, travelling, creating and building a life that belonged to her.

I find it extraordinary that a woman who lived for more than a century, developed her own artistic language and demonstrated such independence should still so often be introduced primarily through the man she once loved, as though leaving Picasso were the most interesting thing she ever accomplished.

I believe that every adult is fundamentally responsible for their own life, their decisions and the direction they choose to take, even when those choices are difficult, uncomfortable or come at a considerable price. Autonomy does not mean that life will be free from suffering, disappointment or complicated relationships, but it does mean recognising our own capacity to act, to reconsider and to choose another direction.

What interests me is the ease with which we turn complex relationships into stories populated by clearly identifiable villains and victims, as though the people involved had no will, intelligence or responsibility of their own. By assigning everyone a convenient role, we overlook something essential about human existence: that we are not the products of what happens to us, but the authors of the choices we make as adults in response.

The Curious Pleasure of Passing Judgment

There is something almost comical about the confidence with which we examine the lives of people who inhabited entirely different centuries, surrounded as we are by our contemporary convictions, our comfortable assumptions and the reassuring belief that we would naturally have behaved better under the same circumstances. We sit in judgment over people whose worlds we have never experienced, applying our present-day vocabulary to relationships, social structures and personal choices that developed within conditions we can only partially reconstruct, and then congratulate ourselves on having reached the correct moral conclusion.

There is another aspect of this fascination with Picasso that interests me, however, and it has to do with the discomfort that exceptional people can provoke by being difficult to classify. I have observed something similar in the world of exceptional intelligence, where independence, intensity, unconventional thinking and an unwillingness to adapt to established expectations are frequently interpreted as difficulties to be managed rather than qualities to be understood.

Societies are fond of predictability and understandably so, because rules, conventions and shared expectations make it possible for large numbers of people to live together without constantly reinventing the arrangements of everyday life. Yet those same conventions can become remarkably restrictive when they are treated not as practical agreements but as universal standards against which every human being must be measured.

Someone who thinks differently, creates differently or refuses to organise an entire existence around the expectations of others can become an uncomfortable presence, particularly when that person achieves something extraordinary without following the prescribed route. It is tempting, then, to discover a flaw that brings the exceptional individual back within familiar proportions, because once we have established that a great artist was also an unpleasant dinner companion, we can reassure ourselves that extraordinary talent does not necessarily imply extraordinary character. Which, of course, it doesn’t, although I have never understood why anybody expected it to.

The interesting question is why we seem to need these comparisons in the first place, as though the existence of exceptional artistic ability were somehow an accusation against the rest of humanity, requiring us to restore the balance by demonstrating moral superiority.

I would much rather remain curious about what somebody has created, what that person has experienced, how their mind worked and what made an entirely unfamiliar way of seeing the world possible, without feeling obliged to turn the encounter into a competition over who deserves the highest position on the moral ladder. When I look at Picasso’s life, I see a man who lived through extraordinary historical upheavals, who encountered immense challenges and who, with an almost unimaginable force of will, shaped his entire existence around his art, continuously reinventing himself and his work without surrendering his creative independence. Very few people could even begin to imagine what it takes to live and create with that degree of intensity, let alone accomplish anything comparable and I find that infinitely more fascinating than the endless discussion about whether he lived according to somebody else’s moral expectations.

Art Has Never Asked for Permission

What I admire about Picasso’s artistic life is his extraordinary freedom to move between different forms of expression, abandoning visual languages that had already brought him recognition and pursuing unfamiliar possibilities without appearing particularly concerned about whether the public would approve. There is something wonderfully liberating about an artist who refuses to become the caretaker of his own previous achievements, because I can hardly imagine anything more exhausting than spending the rest of one’s life reproducing yesterday’s successful painting only because people have decided that this is what they expect from you.

I have never understood why an artist should feel obliged to create what the world already recognises, or why the development of a personal style should eventually become a contract requiring endless repetition, as though the paintings themselves were products in a catalogue and the artist only the person responsible for maintaining consistency.

For me, painting begins somewhere entirely different, in a moment when something presents itself without asking for permission, whether it is a memory, a sensation, a particular colour, an unexpected association or an energy that has no recognisable form until I begin working with it. I follow whatever appears because I am curious about where it will take me and the idea of consulting public opinion, current fashion or commercial expectations before allowing that process to unfold seems so absurd that I would probably spend more time laughing than painting. There is no committee sitting inside my head discussing whether a painting is sufficiently fashionable, whether it resembles my previous work or whether somebody might find it difficult to understand and I sincerely hope no such committee ever applies for a position.

The freedom of artistic creation is, to me, inseparable from the willingness to encounter something that has never existed before, without attempting to control it through expectations inherited from yesterday. Once an artist begins manufacturing the familiar in order to satisfy an audience, the entire relationship with creation changes, because instead of discovering what wants to emerge, the artist is occupied with producing what has already been decided. From Creation to production…

And yet, while I see no reason why the freedom of imagination should be negotiated with society, I make a distinction between the canvas and the people who share our lives, because other human beings possess their own sovereignty, their own desires and their own freedom to choose a direction that may have absolutely nothing to do with ours.

I believe that absolute freedom in artistic creation is only possible when the artist is no longer governed by emotional dependencies, unresolved fears or the need for recognition and is able to remain in an open connection with the Creator, the source, or what I sometimes call the Field. Until then, whatever occupies the artist’s consciousness will inevitably find its way onto the canvas, whether consciously or unconsciously, because a painting is never separate from the person who creates it. And I see nothing wrong with that, since we are all travelling our own paths, discovering, experiencing and becoming aware in our own time. In that sense, every painting is also an expression of the artist’s state of consciousness at the very moment of creation, revealing something about where that person stands in their own development, regardless of how accomplished, beautiful or technically extraordinary the work may be.

This is also why I find the relationship between artistic genius and personal autonomy so fascinating, because an artist may possess an extraordinary ability to create while still being entangled in emotional patterns that influence both their life and their work. Picasso’s paintings can be revolutionary without requiring us to regard every aspect of his personal life as equally liberated, just as Françoise Gilot’s independence deserves to be recognised as an expression of her own consciousness not as a reaction to his. For me, true sovereignty begins when freedom no longer depends on controlling another person, because the moment our own autonomy requires somebody else’s submission, we are still acting from dependency rather than freedom.

The Freedom to Remain Unclassifiable

Throughout my life I have been fascinated by the ways in which people organise themselves into groups, establish conventions, reward agreement and occasionally congratulate one another for having reached precisely the same conclusions, preferably after consulting the appropriate authorities to make certain that everybody is thinking correctly. There is nothing inherently wrong with belonging somewhere, of course, and I have no objection to people enjoying the company of others who share their interests, but I have never been particularly tempted to exchange my independence for membership of a club whose principal activity consists of confirming its own opinions.

I prefer to wander about, read something unexpected, follow an interesting thought into unfamiliar territory, change my mind when I encounter something that genuinely surprises me, paint when a painting arrives and write when an observation develops into something worth exploring, without feeling obliged to explain how any of these activities fit into a recognisable category.

Sometimes this means spending an entire afternoon absorbed in a book, sometimes standing in front of a painting for considerably longer than anybody else seems to find reasonable and sometimes doing absolutely nothing except looking at the world, which is an activity I consider seriously underrated.

It also means that I have little interest in deciding whether Picasso was ultimately a good man or a bad man, because I cannot imagine how either description could possibly contain the entirety of a human existence that included such extraordinary artistic invention alongside relationships that could be deeply troubled and painful. I can admire his paintings without admiring everything he did, recognise his independence without celebrating his possessiveness and find Françoise Gilot fascinating without reducing her to either a victim or a heroine. None of these observations requires me to reach a final verdict, because understanding a human being is not the same activity as passing judgment on one.

What troubles me about our contemporary appetite for moral classification is the possibility that false certainty may gradually replace curiosity, until we become so accustomed to deciding what people are that we lose the ability to observe what they actually do, how they think and what their lives might reveal about the astonishing variety of human experience.

Once we have decided that somebody belongs in a particular category, there is very little left to discover and I find that quite a disappointing way to encounter the world.

Picasso remains Picasso, with all his contradictions, his magnificent paintings, his difficult relationships, his astonishing inventiveness and the many aspects of his existence that I will never fully understand and I am perfectly content to leave some of those mysteries unresolved.

After all, when I visit a museum, I do not go there to establish whether the painter would have made a suitable dinner guest, whether I would have approved of his marriage or whether his neighbours considered him a respectable member of society, because none of those questions tells me very much about the extraordinary experience of standing before a painting and suddenly discovering something I have never seen before. Although, come to think of it, I would absolutely love to have dinner with Picasso, preferably an entire evening with good food, excellent wine and a conversation that might continue well into the early hours of the morning. I can hardly imagine anything more fascinating.

And I suspect that after such an evening I would return home with far more questions than answers, a head full of unexpected ideas and enough inspiration to last a lifetime, which is precisely why I would rather spend an evening being curious about Picasso than spend my days being certain of my judgment about him.