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Basically, Picasso cared nothing about civilization or its discontents. He admired, and tried to embody, the child and the savage, both prodigies of appetite. To feel, to seize, to penetrate, to abandon: these were the verbs of his art, as they were of his cruelly narcissistic relationships with the "goddesses or doormats," as he categorized the women in his life. Hence, the energy of The Embrace, 1925, its lovers grappling on a sofa in their orifice-laden knot of apoplectic randiness. Hence, too, the fear (amounting sometimes to holy terror, but more often to a witch-killing misogyny) that emanates from creatures like the bony mantis woman of Seated Bather, 1930. Such images are cathartic: they project fears that no French artist (and outside France, only Edvard Munch) would even admit to. One needs colossal self-confidence to expose such insecurities.
On the other side of these chthonic appetites lay some of the most haunting images of metamorphosis and erotic fulfillment in the history of Western art. They were provided by his affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a young woman whom Picasso picked up outside a Paris department store in 1927. He was 45, feeling trapped in a sour marriage to the Russian dancer Olga Koklova; Marie-Thérèse was 17.
"Pictures are made the way the prince gets children," Picasso remarked a little later, "with the shepherdess." In Marie-Thérèse, he found a shepherdess—a placid, ill-educated and wholly compliant blond, who had never heard of him or his work, and offered nothing that even Picasso's egotism could interpret as competition. She became an oasis of sexual comfort. His images of Marie-Thérèse reading, sleeping, contemplating her face in a mirror or posing (in the Vollard suite of etchings) for the Mediterranean artist-god, Picasso himself, have an extraordinarily inward quality, vegetative and abandoned. In one sense, the body of Marie-Thérèse, curled up in Nude Asleep in a Landscape, 1934, is seen as a graffitist might see it—a lilac-toned pink blob, twisted and curled to show its openings, nipples and navel, the body recomposed in terms of its sexual signs. It is a hieroglyph for arousal, tumescence in paint. Yet it is something more. For in these images of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso demonstrated his power to materialize his sensations. The body is not merely a sign, but a direct translation of desire into plastic terms, and that is what graffitists cannot do.