Accepting Fragility: The Key To Living A Happy Life

How a torn portrait of Picasso’s lover reminds us to appreciate the tangible in this digital age.

You may not recall, but right before we stepped into this new decade, the last one concluded with a man called Shakeel Massey being charged with criminal damage. He’d thoughtlessly attacked and ripped a £20 million Picasso oil painting at London’s Tate Modern art gallery.

The surrealist piece, entitled Bust of a Woman, was painted in Paris, 1944, towards the end of the Nazi occupation, and depicts Picasso’s muse and lover Dora Maar.

Picasso first met Maar in 1935 at Les Deux Magots, renowned Parisian hangout of the young intelligentsia of the era — think Hemingway and de Beauvoir and Sartre. His liaison with the photographer, painter and poet lasted for 9 years, during which time he painted many portraits of her. In most, she was portrayed as a nebulous and fragile soul, the broken outcome of pain and suffering.

When I read about Massey’s strange and inexplicable attack, and subsequently looked into the painting and its subject, it got me musing on the frailty of existence, of the corporeal, of poor, forlorn creatures like Maar. This led me down a gloomy path, much the same as when a person thinks for too long about the…