The Crying Women

Picasso invented half a dozen styles of painting, making a new one every ten years. As a child he painted like Raphael de Sanzio and as an old man he painted only like Picasso. He was not just fluent in color or just drawing. No one has said more with a single line than what Picasso said. With what he did in any of his separate times, it would have been enough to consider him the best painter of the 20th century. With what he did throughout his life the best in history. But he was an Abuser who left in his wake a trail of ruined lives. If we attribute to his genius that he was a billionaire communist, we already have the circumstances that allow us to turn a blind eye to an abuser. And not only psychological, that also.

Zoe Valdes is a Cuban writer, a true feminist. (Communist feminists are not. They are only comunists). She is exiled in France fleeing the Cuban dictatorship. Her novel "The Crying Woman" pays homage to Dora Maar. She is possibly the best photograph in the history of history and certainly the best of the surrealist school. Picasso tried to turn it into a mediocre painting and she ended up sunk and her camera in her closet.

Zoe Valdes' book tells of a trip to Venice where the nature of her relationship with Picasso is uncovered and how an evil man and a patriarchal society destroyed the roads of a great woman. She tells it with pain, because her admiration for the genius as I have done cannot be forgiven. For me, Picasso must be in all museums, but his name cannot be in any square or in any street. One thing is one thing and another is another thing

"The Crying Woman" is a novel that worships the most extreme and interesting human feelings, but that also tries to put certain things in their place . When Zoé Valdés was asked if Picasso “mistreated” Dora Maar, she stared at this word, “mistreat”, as if she had never seen it. Whoever signs this intuited that he thought: how little and how clumsy it is to "mistreat" to describe what Picasso did to his women, or to his friends like Max Jacob, whom he allowed to send to Auschwitz without lifting a finger . As if Picasso were a simple gender delinquent.

"Dora Maar was mistreated in the first place by the time, the historical moment," Valdés ended up deciding to say, "but we are always accomplices in some way when we want to make suffering an art." And she did exactly that, giving a titanic pulse to that Picasso who seemed to advance through life leaving a trail of suicides in his wake. Dora resisted the spell, the siren song of killing herself, and chose instead to withdraw from sex and the world in the most graceful… and violent way. The details, in the novel.