Rosalía, one of the world’s most popular singers, apologized after wading into an age-old debate surrounding Pablo Picasso, whose work she initially praised before admitting she didn’t know enough about his biography.
The controversy kicked off after the Spanish singer appeared on a Spotify podcast with the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez, who is best known for her novel Our Share of Night. “I really like Picasso and I’ve never bothered to differentiate the artist from the work,” Rosalía said on an episode posted on March 3. “Maybe I wouldn’t have liked him as much for the things I’ve been told, but who knows, maybe I would have. I don’t know and I don’t care, I enjoy his work.”
This weekend, however, Rosalía sounded a different note about the artist. In a TikTok, she was “not at peace with what I said about Picasso.” Moreover, she said, “It is important not to talk about certain topics when you do not have all the knowledge.”
Rosalía was presumably referring to Picasso’s well-documented history of having physically and emotionally abused women he courted as lovers. In a famed memoir, Françoise Gilot, an artist in her own right, recounted that Picasso treated women like “goddesses and doormats,” and claimed that, at one point in their decade-long romantic relationship, he even threatened to throw her off a bridge. She also said that Picasso frequently pitted her against other women and that he cheated on her.
Meanwhile, Dora Maar, a photographer affiliated with the Surrealist movement whom Picasso memorialized in his “Weeping Woman” paintings, also said that the artist abused her. And Picasso began seeing another one of his paramours, Marie-Thérèse Walter, when she was just 17 years old. All of these women’s stories figure in Sue Roe’s recent book Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso’s Life, among other tomes on the subject.
Gilot, Walter, and Maar have historically been considered among Picasso’s “muses,” a terminology that many now argue is misogynist because it deprives these women of their agency. Moreover, some argue that the term implies that their victimhood was necessary to Picasso’s creative spirit.
Indeed, the difficult act of squaring Picasso, the pioneering modernist who helped inaugurate Cubism and other tendencies, and Picasso, the punishing and frequently manipulative male “genius,” has frequently been taken up by historians, biographers, and institutions. In 2023, for example, the Brooklyn Museum brought on comedian Hannah Gadsby to stage a show about the subject called “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.”
In her TikTok, Rosalía said, “I, personally, thought that Picasso, well, that he was a great man, as you have said typically, you know, that you have heard about him, but I was not aware that there were real cases of mistreatment.”
She added, “I want to apologize if there was a lack of sensitivity on my part during this conversation with Mariana, and this lack of absolute empathy with these women and these testimonies.” The TikTok has been seen more than 8 million times.
Some in the comments thanked Rosalía for shedding light on this side of Picasso’s life. “I didn’t know anything about what Picasso did until Rosalía spoke!” reads one comment that has gained more than 1,700 likes.
