Is Picasso being cancelled?
Pablo Picasso’s track-record with women certainly would not make him a feminist pin-up today.
There were two wives, at least six mistresses and countless lovers — with a tendency to abandon women when they became ill, a voracious appetite for prostitutes, and some eye-popping age differences (his second wife was 27 when he married her at 79).
Some of the quotes attributed to him would probably cause Twitter’s servers to combust if he said them now (“For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats”).
None of this is new — it has been recycled through books and articles from (sometimes traumatised) family members since soon after his death in 1973.
But in a post-MeToo world, it poses a challenge for those who manage his legacy.