Nearly two months after the debut of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette on Netflix, I’m thrilled, but unsurprised,
to report that the universal acknowledgment of its brilliance, importance, and
power continues unabated.
In my first post about Nanette,
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-great-gadsby-overnight-queer.html, I concluded with some speculations
about Gadsby’s enigmatic title:
‘It
occurred to me…that there was one more clue hidden in plain sight by Gadsby,
begging an answer to the question – ‘Who was Nanette, really?’ I ask that, because there is something quite fishy about
Gadsby beginning Nanette as follows: ‘My show is called Nanette, and the reason my show is called Nanette is because I named it before I wrote it. I named it at
around the time I’d met a woman called Nanette who I thought was very
interesting, So interesting, that I reckon I can squeeze a good hour of laughs
out of you, Nanette. But, it turns out...nah….I met her in a small town café…’
Gadsby
then segued to the topic of growing up in a small town, and she never mentioned
Nanette again.
I’ve
read enough Austen to be suspicious of a writer with such a compelling message
as Gadsby’s, who gives the prominence of her opening words –in an article, it
would be called the all important ”opening lead”-- to a subject, the origin of
the title Nanette, which she promptly
abandoned without any real answer, and never returned to it. To borrow from Chekhov’s famous comment, if
Gadsby hung the name ‘Nanette’ on the wall in her ‘first act’, then where is
the part when her choice of the name is explained? I could not open Google fast
enough to Google “Picasso Nanette” – and look at what blew my mind when I read
it: “Picasso’s
World of Children (1996), p. 65, a reminiscence by Picasso’s granddaughter,
Maya: “The adorable Paloma, even though
more interested in the tadpoles than in posing for the greatest painter in the
world, is already completely absorbed in her work. With me it’s exactly the
same; he’s shown me hugging my doll. I was delighted to see that it was the one
I liked the best (I still remember her-she was called Nanette—you see, I’m
telling you everything!), but even more surprised to see myself….” “
So, can
it possibly be a random coincidence that Gadsby (an art history major so wonky
that she knew Van Gogh took digitalis for epilepsy, thereby making him
experience the color yellow more intensely; and also knew that Picasso had
justified having sex with a 17 year old while he was married and a quarter
century older than her) just happened to title her breakout performance, the
culmination of a decade of her life’s work, with the name of the favorite doll
of the girl child born of that sexual relationship between Picasso and his
too-young mistress? Before you answer, consider also the tragic additional fact
that Marie-Therese committed suicide in 1977 at age 69, three years after
Picasso died. Her suicide seems like strong evidence that, in Gadsby’s terms,
Picasso, from the grave, “burned and destroyed” Marie-Therese, when viewed with
“hindsight” provided by Gadsby. Marie-Therese seemed to be fulfilling Picasso’s
mandate that she die, because she could have no life of her own beyond his, and
so Marie-Therese never had a “prime”.
And
armed with that anecdote, I went back to Google, and was astounded once again:
“Paris,
Feb. 28 [2007]—Two important paintings by Picasso estimated by the police to be
worth a total of about $66 million have been stolen from the Left Bank home of
his granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso…Paris police officials said the two
oils, Maya with Doll from 1938 and Portrait of Jacqueline from 1961, were
taken sometime overnight…Ms. Widmaier-Picasso and her mother, Maya, the
daughter of Picasso’s longtime mistress Marie-Therese Walter, were asleep in
the house when the theft occurred ….Maya
with Doll is a colorful Cubist portrait of Picasso’s daughter as a child
clutching a doll…Maya Widmaier-Picasso is often called on to verify
questionable works attributed to Picasso, while her daughter, an art historian,
recently published an illustrated book of Picasso’s erotic works called ‘Art
Can Only Be Erotic.’ “
What I
take away from that, is that Gadsby surely knew that factoid as well, and
thought it fitting that, in her Robin-Hood-like “stealing” Picasso’s true story
for recycling in Nanette, she named
her show for the favorite doll of the little girl “created” by the tragically
abusive relationship of Picasso and his victim Marie-Therese. So, I believe
Gadsby is giving Nanette. as a kind
of healing “doll”, to all the women of the world -- especially the “non-normal”
ones -- to inspire each of them on the journey to her “prime”. So I’d say that
Gadsby’s “art history degree” came in very
handy, indeed! “
END
QUOTE FROM MY FIRST POST
I revisit this topic today, to expand on the shadowy presence of
“Maya with Doll” I perceive in the subtext of Nanette. At first glance, Picasso’s painting appears to be a cubist
rendering of his young daughter Maya holding her favorite doll Nanette, and no
more. However, when I take my cues (and clues) from Gadsby, and look at “Maya
with Doll” through the lens of Gadsby’s fiercely feminist critique of Picasso’s
personal misogyny reflected in his art, I see an alternative, disturbing
reality concealed behind that neutral surface:
When I shed the blinders of “cubist
aesthetics”, and simply see the images on the canvas, I note the poignant paradox
of a ‘lifeless’ doll who appears uncannily alive and human, cradled by a ‘living’
girl who seems broken, unreal, dead. But might we also interpret the doll as that
broken girl reborn and rebuilt? I believe Gadsby intentionally hinted at that
outside-the-frame notion, via what are among her most powerful, climactic words
in Nanette:
“Picasso’s mistake was his
arrogance. He assumed he could represent all of the perspectives. And our
mistake was to invalidate the perspective of a 17-year-old girl, because we
believed her potential… was never going to equal his. Hindsight is a gift. Can
you stop. wasting my time? A 17-year-old girl is just never, ever, ever in her
prime! Ever! I am in my prime! Would you test your strength out on me? [audience
applauds] There is no way anyone would dare… test their strength out on me,
because you all know… there is nothing
stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
Put another way, I believe Gadsby, in Nanette, has ‘sampled’ Picasso’s art the way a rap artist samples other
music genres, appropriating it in order to convert Picasso’s misogyny into truthful,
healing story telling. And in this worthy, magical artistic ‘hostile takeover’,
there’s sharp irony, as the following scholarly article excerpts (which I half-suspect
Gadsby had already read!) reflect Picasso himself as an artistic magpie:
(1991) “Picasso and Appropriation”
in The Art Bulletin 73:3, 479-494
…For
Picasso, appropriation was not merely an artistic exercise in which he
critiqued the Modernist reverence for originality and explored his relationship
to great art and artists. Indeed, the
artist perceived appropriation as a magical transference of power that could be
applied to both historical and contemporary art and to objects and people…Picasso
borrowed the vivid colors and broad brushstrokes of The Dead Casagemas from the
paintings of Vincent van Gogh. His appropriation of Van Gogh's work, and
its inevitable associations with the Dutch artist's life and death, enabled him
to glorify Casagemas's own brief and tragic life. … Picasso's belief that possessing an object meant possessing the
properties of the former owner. Gilot also noted Picasso's superstition
"that one person can assume control over another through the possession of
his fingernails or hair trimmings," and added: ... There are other
fetishistic addictions which Pablo has followed in the most systematic manner…It
was a metaphorical way of appropriating someone else's substance, and in that
way, I believe, he hoped to prolong his own life. Picasso gave form to these beliefs in Maya in a Sailor Suit of 1938, in
which he depicted his daughter Maya wearing a sailor suit with
"Picasso" inscribed on the hat band. In an interview of 1945,
Jerome Seckler, believing the portrait to be of Picasso himself, asked why the
artist had depicted himself as a sailor. " 'Because,' he answered, 'I
always wear a sailor shirt. See?' He opened up his shirt and pulled at his
underwear-it was white with blue stripes!" No doubt Picasso did not contradict Seckler on his identification of
the portrait because it depicted both Maya and Picasso, who thus appropriated
his daughter's identity in order to project himself in an eternally youthful
state.
…Picasso's
belief that one artist could acquire a second artist's power by appropriating
his models or work was manifested in several exchanges with Henri Matisse. In
1946, when Picasso took Francoise Gilot to meet Matisse for the first time, the
older artist observed that if he were to paint Gilot's portrait, he would
depict her with green hair. Picasso was troubled by this potential artistic
violation of his model by an outsider…when Matisse wrote in 1947 that his
initial sketches for the Virgin and Child for the Chapel of the Rosary at Venice
resembled Francoise and her son Claude, Picasso exclaimed, "I feel
negated-that's it, negated, obliterated from A to Z, not only as an artist but
even as a father." Picasso seems to have believed that Matisse's depiction
of his mistress and muse would give the older artist power over one of the
sources of Picasso's creative drive and art. Picasso nearly carried this
proprietary belief to its ultimate extreme when he told Gilot: "You should wear a black dress with a
kerchief over your head so that no one will see your face. In that way you'll
belong even less to the others. They won't even have you with their eyes." END QUOTE FROM
BURGARD ARTICLE
I can’t help but wonder if Gadsby, in weaving Picasso into Nanette, has striven to magically
acquire, while at the same time pulling the plug on, Picasso’s power! And so, via
her enigmatic title, she first invites an e-scavenger hunt to locate “Maya with
Doll”; and then proceeds to teach us, in code, how to reinterpret Picasso’s art
subversively. Instead of just taking “Maya with Doll” at face value, Gadsby ‘reframes’
Picasso’s painting as an unwitting confession of his misogynist crimes – confessing
that, in service of his “art”, he heartlessly shattered the ‘face’ (i.e., the
soul) of his mistress -- a vulnerable 17 year old girl ill-equipped to defend
herself –and shattered her so permanently that, a half century later, she took
her own life as soon as he died, as if she were a “doll” programmed to self-discard
when no longer needed by her ‘owner’.
And I only
just realized that Gadsby slid another sly bit of wordplay into her explanation
of her title:
“I named
it at around the time I’d met a woman called Nanette who I thought was very
interesting, So interesting, that I reckon I
can squeeze a good hour of laughs out
of you, Nanette. But, it turns out, nah”.
Since “Nanette” is the name of the doll which Maya (in her own adult
words) “hugged’, Gadsby seems to have her tongue firmly in cheek when she tells
us, again in code, that she found the story of Marie-Therese, Maya, and Nanette
very interesting, and initially reckoned she could “squeeze” a good hour of
laughs out of their story. She seems to deliberately echo the way Maya squeezed
her beloved doll, in describing how she had for so long milked laughs about
high art during her career; but now she no longer is willing to submerge the third,
painful part of their story, for the sake of a laugh.
That “nah’ (as in Nah-Nette) speaks volumes-it is Gadsby’s
renunciation of the false face of ‘comedy’ in favor of the searing truth of
trauma and shame which she so brilliantly enacts for the world in Nanette. And as a final act of parodic disrespect, Gadsby’s
riff about the color “blue” implicitly points to Picasso’s
“blue period”, an echo which Gadsby subtly amplifies by wearing a blue outfit,
and even having her stage backdrop consist of an array of blue panels which (unlike
the “busy” six-color LGBT pride flag) reminds the eye of Picasso’s key cubist splintering.
Like a mythological fury, Gadsby has exacted karmic justice by taking what was
most precious to Picasso- his reputation!
But it’s not just about Picasso. Gadsby repeatedly draws
attention during Nanette to her own traumatic
childhood, as well as to babies, all with repeated subliminal echoes of “Maya
with Doll”:
“I have been learning the art of tension diffusion since I was a
child…Might’ve peaked
a bit early, but…
…I
love Tasmania. I loved growing up there. I felt right at home, I did. But I had
to leave as soon as I found out I was a little bit lesbian….I took a long time
to come to terms with my sexuality. There’s a few reasons for that. A lot of it
has to do with bad press. Yeah, they didn’t get a good rap when I was growing
up, the homosexuals. We didn’t have social media like we do now, but… “Letters
to the Editor,” let me tell you. Slow Twitter. Brutal”
“You
know what’s weird? Pink headbands on bald babies! That’s weird. I mean,
seriously, would you put a bangle on a potato?...I don’t assume bald babies are
boys. I assume they’re angry feminists, and I treat them with respect. How
about this? How about we stop separating the children into opposing teams from
day dot? How about we give them, I dunno, seven to ten years to consider
themselves… on the same side?”
“I’ve always been judged by what I
am. Always been a fat, ugly dyke. I’m dead inside. I can cope. But you fellas…And
what I had done, with that comedy show about coming out, was I froze an
incredibly formative experience at its trauma point and I sealed it off into
jokes.”
Can you
hear the subtle refrain of being frozen and dead? And then, as
she explains her own traumatic childhood, she also can be heard as narrating
the story of that sad fragmented face of Maya (masking Marie-Therese) hugging
her doll:
“Nobody
is born ahead of their time. It’s impossible! Nobody’s born ahead of their
time! Maybe premmie babies, but they catch up!....By the time I identified as
being gay, it was too late. I was already homophobic, and you do not get to
just flick a switch on that. No, what you do is you internalize that homophobia
and you learn to hate yourself. Hate yourself to the core. I sat soaking in
shame… in the closet, for ten years. Because the closet can only stop you from
being seen. It is not shame-proof. When you soak a child in shame, they cannot
develop the neurological pathways that carry thought… you know, carry thoughts
of self-worth. They can’t do that. Self-hatred is only ever a seed planted from
outside in. But when you do that to a child, it becomes a weed so thick, and it
grows so fast, the child doesn’t know any different. It becomes… as natural as
gravity.”
And so that
is why I am even more convinced of the aptness of the title “Nanette”. Gadsby
has illuminated how her own story paralleled that of Marie-Therese, but whereas
Gadsby survived, Marie-Therese did not; and Gadsby hopes that with Nanette, she will avert future tragedies,
by giving hope and inspiration to others suffering in some similar way: “My story has value. I tell you this
’cause I want you to know, I need you to know, what I know. To be rendered
powerless does not destroy your humanity. Your resilience is your humanity.”
Did you
catch that final pun on “render
another human being powerless’? ‘Render’ ordinarily means ‘cause to be’ in that
sentence, but it also can mean ‘depict’, as in an artistic ‘rendering’ of a
model’s image, as in “Maya with Doll’. Gadsby
has worked very hard to hide in plain sight the poignant fact that Marie-Therese
Walter was rendered powerless by Picasso in life and in that painting of a sad little
girl hugging her beloved “Nanette”.
[Added 08/16/18:
I
believe it is far more likely that Gadsby was intentionally hinting at Nanette
the doll in Picasso's "Maya with Doll" than that (i) she did so
unconsciously, or (ii) it was a random quadruple coincidence. Nanette is a
work in which, I believe it is clear, every single word spoken was carefully
chosen -- there are so many interwoven echoes that unify the entire 70-minute
script, that it is clear, to me, that the choice of her title -- perhaps the
most significant word spoken by her during the show-- was also intentional. And
I just realized while writing this comment that my claim that the name points
to the doll in Picasso's painting is also supported by Gadsby’s discussion of
how a joke has 2 parts, but a story has 3. What I am claiming is that taking
the title as really being about a passing encounter by Gadsby with a woman
named Nanette is like hearing a joke with 2 parts, whereas pointing out that
Nanette was Maya's doll's name is like hearing the full story with 3 parts!]
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter