Here, at long last, are the show notes (with timestamps) to episode 11 of season 1 of Texting! Link to the original podcast audio on Substack or YouTube as you take a deeper dive into Picasso’s 1937 painting Weeping Woman!
00:00 - warning
00:39 - intro
3:21 - “All art is a form of literature.”—Fernando Pessoa
4:45 - “What do we see?”
5:55 - “the anxiety and the torment, particularly in the eyes and the mouth”
8:01 - tears or fingernails?
9:05 - “the G-word” = grotesque
15:53 - the eyes
18:35 - the hair
20:30 - “an illustration of optimism”?
22:10 - color
23:12 - the handkerchief and the hands
26:04 - “Where do you think the pain is most directly located?”
27:05 - “The line between sorrow and rage is often not clear.”
28:55 - 61 cm x 50 cm (23 inches x 19 inches) = “about the size of a regular human face [or] a bit bigger”: quite a bit bigger, actually
29:30 - “at the Tate Modern in London”
30:05 - excursus on Guernica (1937):
34:07 - excursus on Massacre in Korea (1951):
34:29 - “based on a Goya painting”: namely, The Third of May 1808 (1814):
36:35 - 1937 = the annus mirabilis in which both Guernica and Weeping Woman were painted
37:00 - Dora Maar as the Weeping Woman and the Mater Dolorosa
38:00 - 36(!) versions of Weeping Woman
38:42 - Picasso = “the Shakespeare of painting”
38:52 - “the biography . . . by Arianna Huffington”:
40:08 - “Women are suffering machines.”
41:44 - “hypermasculinity, macho bullshit”
42:44 - “Burroughs’ description of the human as ‘the soft machine’”
44:40 - Dora Maar: “All of his portraits of me are lies. They are Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”
46:00 - “It’s not either/or, it’s both/and”: one of the guiding principles of Texting
46:59 - Dalí “pro-fascist”: the Surrealist painter is pictured below with Generalissimo Francisco Franco:
47:15 - “like Orwell said . . .”: In his essay “Benefits of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali,” the author of 1984 writes: “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.”
47:43 - “Philip Roth’s statement that art . . . is not a moral beauty pageant”
48:34 - Picasso likened by Arianna Huffington to Krishna with his gopis
50:34 - “another analogue would be Dionysus and his bacchae”
53:57 - The Pissing Woman (1965):
55:16 - The Dream (1932):
55:53 - Cubism and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907):
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