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Ego dance

Norman Mailer's self-serving Picasso

by Christopher Millis

NORMAN MAILER ON PICASSO. Airs this Monday, March 3, at 10 p.m. on Bravo's South Bank show.

[Norman I remember it like a mugging, the occasion when, stuck in a classroom, I realized that "bored to tears" was no mere metaphor but a physical response to a genuine assault. It's a slow and subtle death, sensory deprivation, and it's one to watch out for, or depending on your mood, relish, if you tune in to the Norman Mailer interview on Bravo this Monday. Mailer is shilling his 1995 book, which claims to be an interpretive biography of Pablo Picasso, and the stifling dullness, the lack of insight that passes itself off as revelation, is consistent enough to make violence itself seem warm and friendly.

To do the man justice, it's not just the interview but the book, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, that could excite only silverfish. Mailer's fundamental approach to "interpretation" is to connect the dots between events in the artist's life and motifs in his work with a kind of one-to-one correspondence that would shame most six-year-olds. We're treated, for instance, to the information that Picasso's sister "Lola was born three years after Pablo and just three days after an earthquake devastated Malaga." On that basis Mailer makes the connection that "the three-year-old boy may have assumed that birth was the after-effect of a cataclysm." But he doesn't stop there. "Were women with large bellies omens of earthquake and birth? It is interesting to note the huge misshapen females he would paint in the 1920s. For that matter, his maternal grandmother, still living with them, was a very fat lady with a powerful presence."

Worse still, we learn not an iota about the work itself. The illustration accompanying Mailer's text is a 1920 oil-and-charcoal work of three women who don't seem misshapen so much as exaggerated (maybe my grandmothers were fat), and who for all their corpulence look utterly comfortable in their bodies: one dances, another stands watching the dancer with a raised leg resting on a rock, and the third luxuriates in the foreground, extended like a manatee basking in a warm shoal. Movement, contemplation, and rest, the women are a study in the freedom and the potential and the meaning of flesh. From the art critic Mailer, however, we hear not a word.

What we do hear in the Bravo interview are riches of embarrassment. Picasso "could have been one of the great pornographers of all time," Mailer observes early on in response to the coarse eroticism of many drawings, details of which the camera zeroes in on with the avidity of an adolescent behind closed doors. It's like hearing somebody say that Pavarotti could have oared one mean gondola. Fatuous banalities aside, Mailer's perspective is as original as bread pudding yet served up as an expert confection. "Colors have a life for painters," he pauses, searching for just the right words, "that different kinds of whiskeys have for a drunk."

By their own standards both Portrait and the Bravo program are failures. Mailer begins the Bravo conversation by explaining the unique if superficial angle of his take on Picasso: he knows what it's like to earn massive recognition in youth, and he knows what it's like to be physically diminutive. There's promise to such idiosyncrasy, the kind that might have opened our eyes to the conquistador of modern art, yet Mailer says no more about the vision his lenses afford. Instead, he relies on the book-report format, passing off biographical anecdotes as aesthetic reading. When that approach fails, he relies on bellicosity. Les demoiselles d'Avignon is one "damn ugly" painting, for instance, whereas Picasso's Head of the Dead Casagemas is the artist's first great work largely because the candle flame beside the corpse's visage looks like a vagina. (Don't ask.) As for the negative reviews his book has garnered, Mailer's parting words become self-caricature, as if he were playing himself on Saturday Night Live. "Most bad reviews are an exercise of a mean-spirited human being's ego. Really. I can tell. Some of them should be punched out." Maybe so, but Mailer's just not strong enough.

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