Three Feelings

Love, Loss and Intimacy.

Three paintings caught my interest, each depicting one of the feelings represented in the Exhibition.
Observing Picasso's Venus and Cupid I was struck by the way the artist depicted his loss of love for Francoise/Venus.
The painting was done in 1949, soon after the birth of Paloma (second child after Claude) when Picasso started distancing himself from Francoise.
Little Claude/Love/Cupid/Picasso is brandishing an arrow and shaking it up at his mother/wife. Claude/Picasso looks up at her admiringly but his gesture is aggressive. His left arm is stretched up showing her the arrow of Love while the right arm is outstretched in front of her in a gesture of delimiting her space. He seems to want to keeps her firmly on the other side, away from himself.
Francoise's head is not anymore recognizable as that of Francoise. Picasso sees her as an Egyptian princess/deity/female pharaoh, as depicted on ancient wall paintings. Her hippopotamus-like back; the lotus like shape covering the sacred space of her genitalia, carry messages of sexual power and fecundity. Picasso is afraid of her easily impregnated belly, her Nile-like fertility.
A spider-like web of lines - from temple to ear - covers one side of her face: beautiful, intricate, strong but still a trap to catch food, live creatures; to catch Picasso's life and eat it up.

Proud Maise. Frederick Sands depicts his common-law wife Mary Emma Jones, who was an actor, not in the usual sentimental, sweet, lovesick depiction of the times. He knows her well, is intimate with her thoughts and feelings. She has character, personality and individuality. She is herself, not contaminated, and not touched by the age view of womanhood. Is she proud? She is pulling a strand of her long, luxuriant, thick, curly, Italianate hair in her teeth, mouth slightly open, chin forward, looking sideways, almost behind herself, beyond herself: she is introspective. Is she trying to get a perspective, an intimate understanding of her situation, her position in life, her emotional state and feelings? She had 10 children. Was she thinking about her past career?

Munch's The Kiss. This is a scary portrait of Love. Love all absorbing, all consuming. Possessive Love. Demanding Love. The lovers - united by the kiss and the embrace - are graphically lost in each other: their bodies melted into one. They have no longer a separate life, thoughts and feelings. They share all. However, this total communion, this abject surrounding is dark, forbidding. The whole world has disappeared from them. They are devouring each other. They totally depend on one another. Theirs is a cannibalistic love. The position of his body - leaning over hers, almost encircling her - shows desperation, a desperate grabbing, of this love. She clutches at him as if wanting to suck all love and life out of him. So dark, so desperate. This is a terrible kind of love.

Poor, poor Munch.

Vanna Walsh