पिकासोंच्या चित्रातील सेक्सचा 'वास'!...Nosing Sex in a Picasso!

John Berger (1926-2017), ‘The Success and Failure of Picasso‘, 1965:

“...Today, among the five hundred or more of his own past paintings which Picasso owns, over fifty are of Marie-Thérèse. No other person dominates his collection a quarter as much. When he paints her, her subject is always able to withstand the pressure of his way of painting. This is because he is single-minded about her, and can see her as the most direct manifestation of his own feelings. He paints her like a Venus, but a Venus such as nobody else has ever painted.

What makes these paintings different is the degree of their direct sexuality. They refer without any ambiguity at all to the experience of making love to this woman. They describe sensations and, above all, the sensation of sexual comfort. Even when she is dressed or with her daughter (the daughter of Marie-Thérèse and Picasso was born in 1935) she is seen in the same way: soft as a cloud, easy, full of precise pleasures, and inexhaustible because alive and sentient. In literature the thrall which a particular woman’s body can have over a man has been described often. But words are abstract and can hide as much as they state. A visual image can reveal far more naturally the sweet mechanism of sex. One need only think of a drawing of a breast and then compare it to all the stray associations of the word, to see how this is so. At its most fundamental there aren’t any words for sex – only noises: yet there are shapes...”

 
The Guardian reported on January 30 2017: “Tate Modern to host 'once in a lifetime' Picasso (1881-1973) exhibition. Landmark show will focus on ‘year of wonders’ 1932, at height of painter’s affair with young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977).”

In a delightful comedy "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion", 2001, Woody Allen plays an insurance investigator and cracks the case of a missing Picasso.

He explains succinctly how difficult the operation was: 
"...I'm supposed to be looking for a picture of a woman with a guitar, but it's all little cubes. It took me two hours to find the nose."

courtesy: DreamWorks Pictures

Therefore,  imagine the  degree of difficulty in finding sex in the following picture!

Le Rêve / The Dream (1932), painting by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

courtesy: Wikipedia

John Richardson comes to the rescue writing in his 'A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932', 2007:

“...Emptied of rage, Picasso is at his most loving in the second of these three allegories, Sleep (Le Sommeil) which depicts Marie-Thérèse naked and asleep in a friendly armchair. A self-congratulatory inscription on the stretcher—“executed between three and six o’clock on January 23, 1932”—suggests the time frame of one of Marie-Thérèse’s naps. Picasso has wickedly used the circular swoop of the arms and the positioning of his hysterical wife’s head and breasts in Repos to evoke the true repose in this portrayal of his mistress. The next day, Picasso executed the third painting, the celebrated Dream.  The wallpaper pattern, which staggered off the wall in Repose, keeps its place in the Dream, and its darker, denser colors evoke the workings of the subconscious every bit as effectively and much more economically than Dalí. Picasso’s transformation of the dreamer’s thumbs and forefingers into a vaginal image, and her forehead into a penile one, confirms that sex is on her mind as well as between her legs...”

Now,  but for the critic, I would have never known every place the sex was....but I thought there was some amount of objectification of female body in all this and therefore was elated to see the following cartoon that is now almost 70-year-old...

Artist: Whitney Darrow, Jr. (1909-1999), The New Yorker,  May 3 1947