Half a century after his death, Picasso tried as a sexist monster

According to the French scholar Isabelle Barbéris “art must be anti-sexist, anti-speciesist, anti-colonial and, of course, anti-capitalist…”. Should we really cancel the Spanish artist?

He won’t end up like Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie just because if it’s easy to tamper with and modify an old novel – one word away, two we change, three we amputate – it’s far more difficult to insert a brushstroke into a picture. But maybe Pablo Picasso it could end up like “Ila and the Nymphs” by John Williams Waterhouse, which the curators of the Manchester Art Gallery, one of the largest in the United Kingdom, have hidden from the public for a while because it smells of “sexism”. In times of artistic correctness, as the French scholar Isabelle Barbéris defines it in L’art du politiquement correct (Presses Universitaires de France), “art must be anti-sexist, anti-speciesist, anti-colonial and, of course, anti-capitalist… Because the whirlwind of these fragmented morals, as harmless as they are repetitive, responds to the implementation of an unshakable conformism”. “On the fiftieth anniversary of his death: Pablo Picasso at the time of #MeToo,” headlines the Welt. “The MeToo for Picasso”, the Telegraph. And on the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, the English newspaper Guardian publishes a long article in which the Spanish is accused of his known misogyny. “We should cancel Picasso”, the title.