Pablo 'n' Me

So I'm at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see "Picasso and the Weeping Women," a retrospective of Picasso's work and how it echoed his personal life.

Now, being an engineer-type, I'm not the biggest fan of interpretive art. I tend to favor the realists: Dutch masters, Renaissance artists, Norman Rockwell, that sort of thing. But I can appreciate the emotional content of a painting just as well as anybody, even if I think the painting itself is ugly. And this exhibit has emotional content in spades.

About half-way through the hall, though, I sit down and try to decide what's bothering me about these pictures. A lot of them are ugly, yeah, with contorted faces and angry colors, but there is something else -- something disjoint -- about almost every one of them. Something wrong. Somehow, almost every "Weeping Woman" canvas I come across is deeply, deeply wrong.

The teeth. Most of the paintings have these teeth. Not quiet, sad teeth -- the teeth of someone weeping -- but angry, gnashing, clutching, stabbing teeth. If you cover the mouth, the entire painting is perfect -- eyes spilling tears, a handkerchief held to the cheek, the face open and soft and sad. And if you take your hand away: the teeth. It makes these women look like they're in pain, in physical agony.

They bother me, these teeth.

So on the way home I stop and get a fritter at Randy's, that place on La Cieniga with a giant donut on the roof. That made me feel better.

 



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