Rosalia, one of the world’s most popular singers, has apologized after becoming embroiled in a long-running controversy surrounding Pablo Picasso, whose work she initially praised before later admitting she didn’t know enough about his biography.
The Spanish singer sparked the controversy after appearing on a Spotify podcast with Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez, best known for her novels the night we shared. “I really liked Picasso and I never bothered to differentiate between the artist and the work,” Rosalía said in the episode released on March 3. “Maybe I won’t like him that much because of what I’ve been told, but who knows, maybe I will. I don’t know and I don’t care, I like his work.”
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This weekend, however, Rosalía expressed a different opinion about the artist. In the TikTok, she was “upset by what I said about Picasso.” Additionally, she says, “It’s important not to talk about certain topics when you don’t know everything there is to know.”
Rosalía is presumably referring to Picasso’s well-documented history of physically and emotionally abusing the female lovers he pursued. In a famous memoir, Françoise Gilot, an artist in her own right, recalled that Picasso treated women like “goddesses and doormats” and claimed that at one point during their decade-long romance, he even threatened to throw her off a bridge. She also said Picasso often pitted her against other women and that he cheated on her.
Meanwhile, Surrealist photographer Dora Maar, whom Picasso memorialized in his “Weeping Woman” painting, also said Picasso abused her. Picasso began a relationship with another of his lovers, Marie-Thérèse Walter, when she was just 17 years old. All of these women’s stories appear in Sue Roy’s recent book Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso’s Lifeand other books on the subject.
Gilot, Walter, and Maar have historically been considered Picasso’s “muses,” a term that many now consider misogynistic because it took away agency from these women. Furthermore, some believe that the term implies that their victimhood was necessary to Picasso’s creative ethos.
Indeed, historians, biographers and institutions often place Picasso, a pioneer of modernism who helped usher in Cubism and other genres, alongside Picasso, a punitive and often manipulative male “genius.” In 2023, for example, the Brooklyn Museum hosted comedian Hannah Gadsby for an exhibition on the subject called “It’s Pablo-esque: Picasso through the Eyes of Hannah Gadsby.”
“I personally think Picasso was a great man, as you usually say, you know, you heard about him, but I didn’t know that there were actual cases of abuse,” Rosalia said in her TikTok.
She added, “I want to apologize if I lacked sensitivity in my conversation with Mariana and lacked absolute empathy for these women and these testimonies.” The TikTok has been viewed more than 8 million times.
Several people in the comments thanked Rosalia for revealing this side of Picasso’s life. “I had no idea what Picasso did until Rosalia spoke up!” read one comment that has received more than 1,700 likes.
