Picasso Summer

It’s not quite Pablo Picasso at the Hermitage State Museum, but this masterpiece caught my eye this weekend as I stood in a toilet cubicle at the Wits theatre.

I was attending the annual production of the Johannesburg Youth Ballet (my best friend’s sister being one of the organizers) and could not resist taking a photo of our president dancing his heart out next to a roll of toilet paper, which was flapping around like a national flag. It made me think of several things: isn’t it wonderful that we live in a country where students take the time to draw political satire on walls where the norm is naked women, disproportionate penises and badly spelt invitations to sexual acts you pray your children will never find out about. I also thought about how ridiculous it is to have a president whose trademark is a shower head (relating to his rape trial) and an outdated revolutionary dance calling for a machine gun. And I thought about Zapiro – the creator of the shower head – and the effect one man can have on a nation. Remembering just how much contempt I have for politicians, I strolled off to the ballet to get lost in the uncontaminated smile of one of the young dancers.

Speaking of Picasso, I read a magnificent story this weekend by Ray Bradbury. On one of my shopping sprees to the Exclusive Books in Hyde Park, my favorite place in which to disappear for a few hours, I picked up a collection of Bradbury’s short stories. The author has been in my family for as long as I can remember and my parents read his stories (translated into Russian) while we still lived in Moscow. Picasso Summer is a story about a man on holiday with his family at the same resort as Pablo Picasso. When the man looks at the sky, the sea and the beach, he sees Picasso’s paintings and their brilliant reds, blues, yellows… He is obsessed with Picasso but can’t afford to buy his paintings. And then, one evening, he comes across Picasso drawing in the sand with an old ice cream stick. He freezes as he watches the artist create a string of breathtaking works in the sand. He panics, wondering if he has time to run to the hotel to fetch his camera, or hire a builder to excavate the sand or fill it with concrete to capture the images. As Picasso strolls off, the man realizes he cannot own the images and walks up and down looking at them until the sun sets. At dinner that night, he asks his wife: “Can you hear that?” “Hear what?” she replies.
“The tide coming in.”