The 20th-century Silicon Valley

Picasso, doormats and billions of dollars

Dear Friend,

I hope you had a good week. If you’ve signed up since my last letter, thank you! I’m happy that you’re here.

Last week I wrote about my completion of the Paris 20k. I’ve had a more modest week, physical-exertion-wise, involving lots of naps, but I did go out for a run yesterday to the nearby suburb, Saint-Ouen. On the way home, as I was crossing under the ring-road that separates northern Paris from the suburbs when I found myself immersed in a rich cacophony of car horns. It was a true wall of sound: long, low honks, pert little beeps—a call-and-response of blaring horns, all overlapping each other like an angry urban symphony. The honking cars were waiting for gas at a large petrol station on the edge of the city. 

The workers at some of France’s biggest energy companies are on strike, demanding a share of windfall profits in the shape of higher wages to combat the rising cost of living. There’s currently a national shortage of petrol, with many stations running out completely. Still, things seem to be less chaotic than they are back in the UK, from the prime minister’s dizzying U-turns, to the home secretary’s ‘dream’ to see asylum seekers flown to Rwanda for Christmas. 

But, let’s not dwell on that. It’s Sunday and hopefully you are having a reasonably cosy time!

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Picasso: the O.G. Silicon Valley CEO

Earlier today I visited the Picasso Museum in the Marais in central Paris. It was a mild day with a few gentle rays of sun illuminating the old stone balustrade and ornamental sphinxes.

A sketch from the roof of the Musée Picasso, Hannah Meltzer

It’s lovely there, but I have to confess that I was on a kind of anti-pilgrimage, almost a kind of real-life hate-scroll.

Earlier this week I listened for the first time to an episode of Vénus s'épilait-elle la chatte? (to translate it politely, given that my mum reads this: ‘Did Venus shave her bikini line?’). It’s the podcast of art historian Julie Beauzac, with the stated aim of' ‘deconstructing the history of Western art, offering a feminist and inclusive point of view.’ (In that way it is quite similar to The Great Women Artists, another illuminating podcast by British art historian Katy Hessel.)

The episode was called: ‘Picasso: Séparer l’homme et l’artiste’ (‘Picasso: separating the man and the artist’). In the episode, Beuzac draws on her own research, as well as interviews with other experts, to basically assemble a litany of all the ways Pablo Picasso was disdainful, cruel and damaging in his treatment of women (and other men perceived as less virile than him), and how this dovetailed with his artistic work, his wealth and his career.

Essentially she argues that we can’t really separate the man from the art, first because a certain violence towards women can be seen throughout his work—spliced-up Cubist interpretations of women, paintings of his lovers weeping and many, many reoccurring depictions of sexual violence, either embodied in human characters or through his minotaur motif. And second because he didn’t separate himself from his art. He was a pioneer of personal branding, encouraging and basking in his own cult of charisma. As his star rose, he knew the value of his own signature and bestowed it and refused it at will as a way to wield power.

Throughout the episode, we come back to a particular citation from the artist.

There are only two sorts of women:

FR: Déesses et paillassons

EN: Goddesses and doormats

Only two types: Picasso counts, Hannah Meltzer...

I have come to the Musée Picasso to see the exhibition ‘Maya Ruiz-Picasso, daughter of Pablo’, which features unseen works and a whole floor dedicated to the artist’s relationship with his own daughter, from whom he was estranged for the last decade of his life.

With the artist’s disregard for the humanity of women fresh in mind, I was hoping to see his extreme machoism in every work. But it’s not that easy. I have always loved Picasso’s work. It is full of energy and love and intention and truth. The paintings of his daughter were not cruel in tone, but tender and loving.

But then again—it’s easier to produce such work when you can work all day and leave your various women to look after your various children. What if the women he’d been with had been granted the same physical/financial/psychological scope?

A couple of years ago, the Tate Modern in London held an exhibition of Dora Maar’s photography. I was enthralled. I loved the playful, witty way she framed her images and the surrealist collages she created that feel modern even now.

Dora Maar on my kitchen wall

Earlier this year, I wrote some scripts for a travel/history/culture podcast called Cerca. Across two episodes, I recommended something art-related to do in each of Paris’s 20 arrondissements. The recommendation for the third arrondissement was the very site of my anti-pilgrimage today: the Picasso Museum.

While researching the episode, I was pretty surprised to learn how rich Picasso was. I knew he was rich and successful in his own time, but I didn’t realise just how rich. When Picasso's assets were valued after his death in the 1970s, his net worth was put somewhere between 100 and 250 million dollars, something equivalent to between 530 million to 1.3 billion dollars today. He had: properties, cash, stacks of gold and thousands upon thousands of his own works.

He didn’t leave a will, instead leaving his women and children to continue fighting about him after he was gone. In fact, that’s how the Musée Picasso came about: his descendants donated a bunch of his work to settle a disputed tax bill. The collection I saw today was a top-up payment from his daughter, Maya.

Like I always did, you might have a very romantic association with the name of Picasso: immediately I would think of the quiet pain of the Blue Period, his gentle line drawing of a dove. But Picasso was also a shrewd businessman, the it-boy at a time when Paris was the height of modernity, the centre of the world.

At the turn of the century, Paris was a shiny, new state-of-the-art city. Haussmann’s remodel of the city (the signature avenues, boulevards and sandstone houses we know today) was just a few decades old. The Eiffel Tower was a new, controversial structure, right on the cutting-edge of industrial chic. Impressionism had been born here, Cubism was flourishing. Paris’s World’s Fairs and cabarets were the envy of the globe.

Paris was the seat of empire, industry, money and influence. In short, Paris was kind of the Silicon Valley of the early 20th-century and Picasso was the Elon Musk of his age. That’s my theory.

I was chuckling to myself thinking about how Pablo might behave today, if he was a Silicon-Valley CEO instead of a Belle-Epoque painter. He would definitely wear an Apple Watch and a Rolex, a trend I learned from a Financial Times article is called “double-wristing.” He would probably trade NFTs. His Instagram would be unbearable.

Of course, today, the worlds of art and money are tightly linked. The FT also reported this week how, amid the cost-of-living/climate crisis, fine art is outperforming fine wine, US Treasury bonds and gold, in that order.

“The bluechips — Picassos, Monets, Basquiats — are assumed to be the safest bet. Buying them may be a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” - FT

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Thirty-second book club

This week I am continuing to work my way through Au Bonheur des Dames by Emile Zola. After I wrote about it in my last letter, a few people wrote to me to say that they love Zola/ have always been meaning to read his work / or only just read it this year. It’s well worth a go, I think.

The period described in this ode to Paris’s department stores is really the start of Paris’s Belle Epoque and, in many ways, it’s the culture of this time that we still associate with the city.

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Thank you for reading this letter. If you are enjoying these dispatches, please consider asking a friend to subscribe too. I’d love that! 

You can always write back to me: hannah@hannahmeltzer.com. It’s very nice to receive post.

I’ll write again on Sunday. I hope you have a good week! 

Yours, 

Hannah 

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