Picasso in the Classroom

 Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with the "Africanized' sex worker in the top right

In a darkened classroom, 12 teens stare at images projected onto a screen before them depicting both partially clothed and completely naked women. The bodies of the women appear distorted and in some of the pictures, scarred and mutilated, their faces distraught and streaming tears, while in others they lay prostrate before fully dressed males.  Over these images a male narrator explains that these women are prostitutes, mistresses, Africanized “whores”.  However, what the narrator and the teacher believe is most important for the students to pay attention to when looking at these works of art are the brilliance of the composition, the radical abstraction of three-dimensional space and that the man who created them was a genius. The rest? Silence.

While the above scenario is a dramatized composite of both real and imagined teaching experiences, it does capture the uncomfortable, inappropriate nature of showing segments from Simon Schama's The Power of Art:  Picasso to one of my high school classes. During the presentation to the class, I experienced a mild panic attack, and instead of the seamless narrative that is typical of teaching art in a traditional modernist approach, the presentation turned into a choppy, fragmented postmodernist lesson, requiring that I pause the playback and interject my meta-commentary on top of Schama's own whenever I disagreed with the facts or the glibness of his interpretations. I found myself feeling mortified by the raw misogyny of Picasso's images and felt that it would have been disrespectful - specifically to the young women in the class, had I failed  to address it more directly and in-depth than Schama does in the documentary.

Of course, Schama is being intentionally provocative in his attempt to make Picasso dangerous again, and therefore relevant to a new generation of artists and art lovers.  This approach is largely successful and makes his film an exciting introduction to Picasso for students as long as the teacher is willing to modify the presentation of the film for a classroom setting. However, while I had planned much of the contextualization, I was not prepared for how the act of watching the students watch the film further heightened my awareness of Picasso's creepiness. I   found myself stuttering through my presentation, feeling embarrassed that I would find this man worthy of my class time. What would happen if I really could bring Picasso into the classroom?  Given his penchant for late-adolescent females when he was well into his old age, would I have to worry about him molesting the students?

 
My renewed uneasiness about Picasso and other mostly white, male artists is not to discount theA poster by the Guerrilla Girls importance of their work and the value of looking at edgy art in a secondary school setting.  Instead, it should provide a way to explore the depiction of race, sexuality, and violence in art and how our interpretations are influenced by our socio-historical context. We should also think about how the artists were influenced by their context as well, while reminding our students that even within our social historical contexts, we still have choices - agency; Picasso’s relationship with women cannot be entirely explained by his 19th century Basque upbringing.

The humorous, in-your-face activism of the Guerilla Girls, whose work in the 70s and 80s brought attention to the sexist nature of the Western art canon, reminds us that sexism is sexism, whether its practiced by a few or an entire nation in either this century or the last.  Yet, in 2011, if we are asked to bring a more balanced perspective than second wave feminists did a generation ago, can we contextualize and provide balance points of views so much that, in effect, we are avoiding the real harshness of history? We don't need historical data to guess that in the past most women and subjects of colonization were not happy with their plight, and that there was real suffering that needs to be made part of the story we tell when looking at artwork that depict human subjects as mere objects. And if we don't, are we being apologists for artists and artworks that we used to love before we were smart enough to be highly critical of them?  I would like to ask my fellow art educators this: How do you deal with balancing art appreciation with relevant social criticism in the classroom?