The HATE PROJECT-
When tracking through my real world experience with Art, in search for a piece I’d have to consider worthy of the “Hate Project” the answer came quite easily, not because I really have any great disdain for any single work of art, or for that matter any particular artist, but because recently my girlfriend returned from a trip to Aaron brothers, with an arm full of prints that she had bought off the sale rack. All were line drawings of one sort or another, mostly gestures, some still-life…decent for décor, and wonderful to fulfill her intention of dressing the breakfast nook of our tiny rented craftsmen cottage, nestled snugly in the single remaining OC hipster city of Old Town Orange. The black and white art would provide a lovely visual contrast to the boldly aqua blue and pinstripe bench walls I had just finished applying the last coat of paint to. But thumbing through the prints I caught a name so famous, that even my bartending gym teacher younger brother would have recognized it and likely hung the picture on his wall (solely BECAUSE of the artist's signature), between his
The print (depending on who you ask) is titled, either, “War and Peace” (though it appears this title is attributed to multiple Picasso line drawings) or “Sleeping Woman” 
I encountered this print(War and Peace), and no sooner could I return it to the pile for framing and hanging then could I have sincerely hung one of Thomas Kinkade’s pastoral forestscapes on my bathroom wall (*I should mention that I believe ironically hanging a “Kinkade”, is both appropriate, and should be enthusiastically encouraged, say… in the bathroom of a WeHo S&M club, or upon the wall of CBGB’s in Greenwich Village NYC, etc… as irony makes bad art fit for consumption…yummmmm!)
My distaste for the print was far from hidden by the look on my face, and my girlfriend quickly chimed in with a defensive “What’s wrong with THAT one?!!?!!?”…
“It’s f**king Picasso, look at this sh*t” I said “ the proportions are off, the lady’s hand looks like a swollen radiation burn, and it’s just…I just… I just f**king hate it!”
“ Well I like it, and it was only $5…” she replied, very adeptly navigating around my unreasonably childish reaction, which coincidentally only furthers my suspicion that she’ll make a very effective parent one day.
What she could not have known, however, was that behind the flailing armed expletives attached to the explanation of my objection, was a very sincere jealousy. You see, Pablo Picasso is…an Artist, one to whom I have had little exposure to outside of the popular criticism of his most famous periods/movements. I knew what little one could know of him from walking past his work in whichever NYC area museum I could find entry to as a pre-adolescent, and adolescent kid in NY, usually the Met, or MoMA, there may have been a print or two at the Brooklyn museum or at the Whitney which were sometimes haunts of mine, but I remember him most, for whatever reason, most vividly, at the Met. I knew his name, and I knew the impact he had on people long before I knew his story, long before I knew the context of his work… and FURTHER, I resented the sh*t out of him, because HE was an artist, a successful, world renowned artist, seemingly to me for doing things I had seen children doing with crayons all my life with no regard for technique or replicating the visual elements of the world around him, or even aspiring toward an aesthetic beauty. By contrast, I was a child who for as long as I could remember only understood the world with a pencil in my hand. I admired and romanticized "REAL" artists, the Impressionists most of all, who lined the tallest rooms and the greatest walls of the Met in good company next to Rembrandts, Renoirs, and the flattened fat headed religious Flemish triptychs … I aspired to be an “Artist” like the ones I knew and loved, and these (Picasso) images, these renowned paintings, etchings and drawings flew in the face of my adolescent idea of what being an artist was. To me, he seemed not an “Artist” but a con artist, a sham, a despicable lazy fraud who had discovered a means to shock the world into believing him brilliant. And G*DDAMMIT, I hated him for it… nearly as much, as I admired him.
So “War and Peace” would find it’s home on a shelf in the living room, sandwiched between a large picture book of Art Nouveau furniture from the musee D’Orsay gift shop, and a coffee table book of Renoir (a gift from my mother). And there it would stay, until the very first day of this project.
I dusted off the print and carried it into my office to begin my weeks-long marriage to it. First I would research what I could of the time and place of the drawing's creation, & secondly, I would discern any information as it exists pertinent to it’s inspiration, or to the Artist: his intention, his process, and himself.
I am, sad to say, left still greatly speculating about the inspiration for this specific work after having read a few Picasso biographies. It would seem that the woman in the drawing was a lover of Picasso’s, possibly Francoise Gilot who would have filled that position at the time (along with being mother to two of his children) before walking out on him in 1953, she says due to abuse... and (surprise) infidelity. The latter reason suggesting a wider range of potential models. One of those possibilities is Genevieve Laporte, who had an affair with Picasso and in 2005 auctioned off drawings he had done (of her) and presented to her as gifts. My romantic imagination likes this explanation most of all… so in lieu of any confirmed empirical reality, and in the interest of moving along expeditiously, I accept this concept as an “as good as any” origin and will assume this position until proven otherwise by some other armchair intellectual internet blowhard.
I first took “War and Peace” to my local Starbucks, where after a few “it’s nice”s and a few more “no-thank-yous” from presumptuous folks who imagined I was trying to sell it to them (I'm clearly not alone in my resistance to Picasso), I found a couple of happy chatty Baristas more than willing to discuss it's merits… I will call them “Glasses”, and “Girl in green apron who is obviously smarter and more intuitive than Glasses” (note: I did go so far as to share with them my assumed theoretical history of the piece… so keep that in mind)
Glasses – “I think it’s probably like something he drew for the girl, and he was like, ‘YO I’m Picasso, I’ll draw you’ and she was all ‘OKAY!’ and so he banged that thing out and she was just like ALL over him… *laughter/sexual insinuation* etc..”
Girl in green apron who is obviously smarter and more intuitive than Glasses – “She seems relaxed, It’s very calm…Peaceful… yeah just calm. Maybe the war is …him, you know the artist, Picasso, with his pencil like a weapon, or whatever?”
I carried it with me to more and more places, in my brown bag, to more coffees, and to a taco place, to my bank even. To the School’s First Federal Credit Union, the woman teller looked at it…and me, and smiled. Embarrassed at my question, flirtingly answering back with her own
Teller -“Why do you wanna know what I think?”
Me –
“Well... because it’s important" ... I stammered... "because… I don’t know you, but I think...maybe... through YOU I’ll find something out about THIS that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise?”
Teller- “Well alright, I think the girl is happy, because she’s smiling. I like it… it needs more color though”
More and more reactions were either direct like the ones I got from a friend, Brooke, who has a very neat and simple contemporary aesthetic,
Brooke, - “I like it, it’s pretty”
or from her boyfriend Selin who operates with a bit of a machismo about all things artistic
Selin - “I don’t like that kind of ‘art’. It looks like something my niece could draw” .
*On a sidenote: I stopped counting how many people made reference to their younger siblings, nephews, nieces, or neighbors that could produce the same work… because, I was beginning… to understand that THAT was the point.
My BOLDEST move, or so I had hoped was when I brought it into my therapist’s office, a licensed psychotherapist and confirmed Freudian. I was READY! Pen in hand I reached for the print, pulled it out of my bag, placed it on my knees held perpendicularly to the floor so she might get a good long solid look at it… thinking she would examine the line, and the meaning behind the oversized hand…the single contour stroke defining the hair of this woman coming across as a figurative gesture of anger toward his mother… blah blah blah… I was certain she would tear this thing to shreds and in minutes I would have my very own professional psychological profile of Pablo Picasso circa 1952. So I… sat, and held it, and she looked and she furrowed her brow a bit, hemmed and hawed a few times, I could HEAR her mind at work, the thoughts connecting and leaping between the synapses of the brain, I waited… a minute… she motioned, directed her hand toward the drawing, leaned forward in preparation to dispense her astute observations… she opened her mouth and said in no uncertain tone(and I shit you not)
“I’d like it better if it was a kitty”
My friend, a contract attorney and long diagnosed workaholic said simply
“I’m jealous, she’s sleeping, it’s relaxing, I would definitely hang it on my wall even if I DIDN’T know who was responsible for it”
Then my best friend, a much more talented than I, Photorealistic Painter and fellow skeptic on abstract art got hold of it
Painter- “It just seems lazy, I wonder how much of this is him believing he’s creating art and how much of it is him, scribbling on a piece of paper and saying, ‘fuck you it’s art BECAUSE I’m Picasso’”
He began to espouse some of the same criticisms I had initiated, and harbored for decades… and AS he was making those same arguments, MY arguments, I found something in me begin to shift, I found myself defending Pablo Picasso, and THIS drawing… I started relating what I’d just learned about the achievements he had reached by age 13… and the ambition that led he and Georges Braque to Cubism. I began dissecting the difficulty for a mind of such a technician abandoning technique and the concern for perfection, or even proportion, to achieve another possibly GREATER end, an emotional end, an abstraction of reality. I argued that the result was not simply a capturing of the image of the woman in front of him, but the speed of his hand, the simplicity of line, the abandonment of technique was a reflection, no, a direct expression of the artist as he sat in a room watching a woman sleep. I argued that for the drawing to be photorealistic would, on the contrary, be the most UNNATURAL way to have captured that moment in time… That was when I realized I had found the missing and most important element for appreciating Picasso, Context.
It was in discovering the context of his work, the struggles that brought him to and through each of his “periods” and the ambition that inspired him to abandon convention in pursuit of a truer truth in art, and in turn in humanity, that I say I no longer 'hate' this piece. Knowing what I know OF it and how it came to be has expanded my appreciation for it in ways I just wouldn’t have understood... before.
The most important opinion I'd sought is the one I’ve saved for last, because it comes from the person responsible for this 'hate' worthy art having ever been called to my attention, my girlfriend, Courtney. Courtney from the beginning has thoughtfully regarded this print as “sensual…and romantic, and deserving of a place in our home” and well, upon achieving this enlightened perspective... I have to say...in no uncertain terms... that... I agree with her. (that's as close to "You were R%^&T" as you're gonna get from me LB)
Jason's exercise really has taught me the sort of Kumbaya lesson that in an adolescent past I'd have otherwise rolled my eyes at. That lesson being that if I can discover what other people are SEEING in something, that I don’t see when we’re both looking at the same thing, then I might learn how to see those things too, and through so doing, understand a little better… the rest of the world, in context…
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