LYDIA CSATO GASMAN (1925–2010)
Lydia Csato Gasman, an art historian known for her groundbreaking scholarship on the work of Picasso, died on January 15 in Charlottesville, Virginia, reports Roberta Smith for the New York Times. Gasman’s death was confirmed by Larry Goedde, chairman of the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she taught for two decades.
Fluent in several languages and equipped with a formidable memory, Gasman redefined Picasso studies. Most scholars had either analyzed Picasso’s art purely in terms of formal innovations and aesthetic progress or offered one-dimensional readings of his work in relation to his life story. Gasman found a middle way. One of her more sensational achievements was to track down Marie-Thérèse Walter, the great love of Picasso’s life, in the south of France in 1972 and, over a period of several days, to conduct the frankest, most detailed interview about their life together.
But Gasman’s most far-reaching accomplishment was to tie the imagery of Picasso’s paintings to the life of his mind: his reading (especially the poetry of the Surrealists), his own writings and notebook jottings, his psychic state and his interests in all forms of mysticism, magic, and ritual.
She introduced her findings in the sprawling four-volume dissertation for her Ph.D., which she earned from Columbia University in 1981. Mystery, Magic, and Love in Picasso, 1925–1938: Picasso and the Surrealist Poets delved into arcana like Picasso’s interest in the Masons and their use of ritual objects; the sexual significance of the beach cabana, a frequent motif in his paintings of the 1930s; and his belief in the magic nature of the art and artifacts of so-called primitive cultures, especially African. It devoted seventy-five pages alone to the images of severed rams’ heads in Picasso’s painting and the underlying theme of sacrifice.
Although never published, Gasman’s dissertation, photocopies of which were available for purchase, was required reading in some art-history departments and was regularly mined by other scholars and writers on Picasso, who all too frequently failed to credit her discoveries. John Richardson, Picasso’s principal biographer, has said that Gasman did “more to unlock the secrets of the artist’s imagination than anyone else.” Luanne McKinnon, a former graduate student of Gasman’s at the University of Virginia and now director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum, said, “Lydia’s in-depth reading of Picasso is in the air and water of the field, so to speak.”
