書的故事， 立傳豈容易：Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995. BY Norman Mailer, "creative non-fiction" or "New Journalism",
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
1994 年，此書書名盛傳為Picasso and Fernande，風波不斷.....https://www.facebook.com/hanching.chung/videos/4336925596318214
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, film-maker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II—more than any other post-war American writer.[1]
His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948 and brought him early and wide renown. His 1968 nonfiction novel Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction as well as the National Book Award. His best-known work is widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, the 1979 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Mailer is considered an innovator of "creative non-fiction" or "New Journalism", along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, a genre which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in fact-based journalism. He was a cultural commentator and critic, expressing his views through his novels, journalism, frequent media appearances, and essays, the most famous and reprinted of which is "The White Negro".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer
***紐約時報書評
Tough Guys Don't Paint
Date:
Byline:
Lead:
PORTRAIT OF PICASSO AS A YOUNG MAN An Interpretive Biography. By Norman Mailer. Illustrated. 400 pp. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press. $35.
Mr. Mailer also becomes fixated on the androgyny of the hulking proto-Cubist figures Picasso painted in 1906, connecting them to Gertrude Stein, whose portrait the artist was then painting. Mr. Mailer's remarks on the subject are worth quoting at length, to give a feel for his prose: "It is safe to assume that Gertrude Stein was the most monumental crossover in gender that he had ever encountered. He had to be knowing about this. With Fernande [ Olivier, Picasso's mistress ] , he had entered the essential ambiguity of deep sex, where one's masculinity or femininity is forever turning into its opposite, so that a phallus, once emplaced within a vagina, can become more aware of the vagina than its own phallitude -- that is to say, one is, at the moment, a vagina as much as a phallus, or for a woman vice versa, a phallus just so much as a vagina: at such moments, no matter one's physical appearance, one has, in the depths of sex, crossed over into androgyny. Picasso was obsessed with the subject."
Leave aside for the moment the paradox of Mr. Mailer's twisted syntax in a book that takes art historians and critics to task for their writing. The basic fact is that Mr. Mailer says Stein influenced Picasso's art. So she did, and Picasso even incorporated an image of a man into her portrait. But scholars have pointed all this out already: Mr. Mailer is appropriating their ideas just to indulge in the sort of grandiose flourishes that are a trademark of his style. In any case, it becomes hard to weigh Stein's significance because other obvious influences on Picasso -- like the large women in the works of Renoir and Maillol -- are glossed over or missed. Mr. Mailer is so enraptured by the affairs of the artist's life that he regularly plays down the connections between Picasso's works and those of other artists. To be sure, he isn't alone in this. Picasso has largely been written about in terms of his biography. The exception is his Cubist period, and Mr. Mailer is right in this case to lament the "near impenetrability" of so much of the critical jargon attending it. "Cubism is not a form of lovemaking with the lights out: Cubism is compelling because it is eerie, resonant and full of the uneasy recognition that time itself is being called into question," he writes. "Some of the paintings, if we dare to entertain the vision, have the appearance of corpses, their flesh in strips and tatters, organs open."
Again, Mr. Mailer isn't the first to speculate about the emotional impact of Cubism's fractured imagery, but this is a provocative and minority viewpoint, and unfortunately he does not take it further. The collaboration of Picasso and Braque on the creation of Cubism is almost unparalleled in art history, and it would seem to have afforded Mr. Mailer a vast psychological field in which to let his imagination play. What is one to think of a man like Picasso, he might have asked, who on the verge of success suddenly chose to make difficult pictures virtually indistinguishable from someone else's? But Mr. Mailer ignores this question to hop on an old hobbyhorse: in life, he writes, "Braque had legitimate machismo," but in art he "cannot often come off like Picasso. Machismo, obviously, has its mansions and no one was going to be more macho than Picasso when it came to painting." So much for their profound and complex association.
Mr. Mailer's principal sources are Fernande Olivier's colorful memoirs, "Picasso and His Friends" (1933) and "Souvenirs Intimes" (written in 1955 and published posthumously in 1988). Olivier lived with Picasso from 1905 until 1912. She has said that she kept diaries at the time and that her memoirs derived from them. Still, these are books written as much as 43 years after the fact, and by a former lover, which brings to mind the French saying about trying to pull the sheets to one's own side of the bed.
***
Biographies
- Marilyn: A Biography. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973.
- Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
- Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery. New York: Random House, 1996.
Fernande Olivier
Fernande Olivier, circa 1900s
Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Born Amélie Lang, Fernande Olivier suffered from a difficult childhood and married an abusive husband to escape her domineering aunt. At 19 she left her husband, changed her name, and fled to Paris, where she met Picasso and became his model and lover around 1904, influencing his Rose Period and early Cubist works.
Pablo Picasso's "Les Démoiselles d'Avignon" (in background)
Photo: Herbert Gehr/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images
Olivier's inspiration is exemplified in Picasso's Les Démoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Head of a Woman (Fernande) (1909), among other works. In fact, Picasso went on to produce over 60 portraits of Olivier before their erratic relationship ended in 1912, with both parties cheating on one another.
By the time they parted ways, Picasso was at the height of his popularity, and Olivier decided to capitalize on their relationship by publishing a serialized memoir in a Belgian newspaper. To prevent her from divulging any more intimate details of their time together, Picasso offered her a pension, which she accepted. The full memoir was released in 1988 after the two were no longer alive.
Olga Khokhlova
Pablo Picasso and Olga Khokhlova, circa 1918
Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
A blue-blooded Russian ballet dancer, Olga Khokhlova met 36-year-old Picasso when he served as a costume and set designer for her dance company. Smitten with the artist, Khokhlova married him on July 12, 1918, and the couple set up residence in France. A few years later, the former dancer gave birth to Picasso's first child, a son named Paulo.
During this period with Khokhlova, Picasso expanded beyond cubism, fusing it with more realistic forms. Khokhlova inspired him to explore nurturing themes like domesticity and motherhood, but still, by the time his son Paulo was born in 1921, Picasso was already fleeing into the arms of multiple women, including Marie-Thérèse Walter, who became pregnant in 1935.
Although Khokhlova demanded a divorce, Picasso refused to divide his assets with her. Feeling she had no choice, she stayed married to him until her death in 1955.
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