The Magic of Pussy Hats

On inauguration day—rainy and dank and “full of mourning,” as one friend wrote on a Facebook post—we gathered in my friend Christine’s kitchen in Hastings-on-Hudson and made signs, first trolling the Internet for catchy slogans. Christine, who had already knitted several pink pussy hats, liked “Keep Your Tiny Hands Off My Rights,” while I was partial to “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention,” though I worried it could be too much work to block and color all those letters. We settled on WOMEN’S RIGHTS: NOW AND FOREVER and LOVE TRUMPS HATE, though Pat, a college English teacher, pointed out that grammar was key for this slogan because if you used the possessive LOVE TRUMP’S HATE, you could be mistaken for a supporter of the new president.  

         But with our pink pussy hats, pink scarves, and pink backpacks filled with clementines and hard-boiled eggs, we were instantly identified as women’s marchers. Riding the train into Grand Central the next morning, gathering on 42^nd street to walk up Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower, with thousands of other grandmothers, mothers, and daughters memed out in pink, we didn’t spot one he-who-must-not-be-named supporter. (The only figure remotely threatening was a hulking guy in an oversized black jacket with letters on his back screaming JESUS SAVES FROM THE WRATH OF GOD, the last four words going up in flames.) Having read about outbreaks of violence in D.C. on inauguration day—a limo set on fire, a Starbuck’s window smashed—we had worried that we could be beaten up, pepper sprayed, or even arrested.

         But the mood was benign, almost festive. About an hour before our group, which included Christine’s daughter, son-in-law, and three children, was scheduled to march, I had hurried across 42^nd street to use a café bathroom (the lines for the Ladies in Grand Central were epic). Returning, I spotted a platoon of some fifty New York City police decked out in biking gear, mounted on ten speeds and pedaling East. Along the crowded sidewalks, protesters and passersby stopped to watch, cheer, and clap. Wow! This was light years away from the sixties where the cops were pigs. It was as if all of New York were turning out to say no to this native New Yorker who threatened to take away everything—from the Affordable Care Act to Planned Parenthood to the fine points of the First Amendment—that New Yorkers held dear.  

         I took 173 photos that day, asking my friends to hold our signs so that I could record everything: the faces, the outfits, the signs, which outdid one another in manic creativity: CUT YOUR HAIR NOT OBAMACARE read one held by Christine’s ten-year-old granddaughter. A slight, sixtyish balding man standing alone in the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Hall held up a sign that he’d obviously spent some time creating: REPEAL AND REPLACE TRUMP: PROFESSIONALLY UNPREPARED, INTELLECTUALLY ILL-INFORMED, MORALLY COMPROMISED, and TEMPERMENTALLY UNFIT. He beamed when I asked to take his picture. Another guy brandished a MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN sign. But my favorite was the one crayoned in childish red scrawl on a raggedy piece of cardboard and held up by a girl in pig tails clinging to her pink-scarfed mother two blocks from Trump Tower: MY DOG WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT.   

         The plan had been to walk to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and then north up Second Avenue before turning west toward Fifth Avenue. But the crowds were so thick that we only got as far as Lexington before heading uptown. At times, there was human gridlock. We came to a standstill.  If you suffered from claustrophobia, being in such close quarters with others could be scary. But the faces—black, brown, white, young, old, male, female—of the marchers reassured you, and, as you got closer to Trump Tower, there were volunteers in orange vests on the sidewalks, some holding loudspeakers. On Fifth Avenue, you could hear bells from St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church playing “This Land is Your Land,” and somehow you knew that everything was going to be okay, that the spirit of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and Ghandi were with you.

         Later that afternoon, gathering for a glass of wine in the kitchen in Hastings-on-Hudson, we watched MSNBC, which had been covering the march in D.C. all day, the sister marches in Boston and San Francisco and Seattle, in London and Paris and Antarctica, we felt what I can only describe as a kind of elation. We had lived to tell our tale; we were part of something magical, something larger and bigger than anything we had ever witnessed in our lifetimes, and even though it was disturbing to watch Sean Spicer shouting at reporters in the White House press room that the media had falsified the numbers at the inauguration, that there were more people at Trump’s inauguration than at Obama’s two previous inaugurations, more people, in fact, than at any inauguration in history, assertions that would later be proven false, what Kellyanne Conway would call “Alternative Facts,” even though all this was crazy-making and even more crazy-making the evil executive orders President Trump would sign that very first week—cutting funds for abortion at home and abroad, building a wall against Mexico, limiting immigration to the U.S. from Muslim countries—still, what could not be taken away, not by Sean Spicer, not by Kellyanne Conway, not by Steve Bannon, was that we had shown up and resisted and permitted ourselves to be counted--all over the city, all over the country, all over world, and that we would not shut up until this mad dog of an illegitimate president was reined in by Congress or the courts. Yes, he was the leader of the free world, but he was accountable to us, the people, and we would not let him forget it.     

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Picasso's Blue Period

“I began to paint in blue,” Pablo Picasso wrote, explaining the origins of his Blue Period, “when I learned that Casagemas had died.” Carlos Casagemas was a painter whom Picasso had met in 1899 at Els Quartre Gats (The Four Cats), a café in Barcelona. The two Spaniards traveled to Paris in 1900 and opened a studio together in Montmartre, eking out a living as artists and visiting brothels where Picasso would paint murals on the establishment’s walls in exchange for services. But Casagemas lacked Picasso’s swaggering sense of self; when Carlos was rejected by a woman he loved, he shot himself with a pistol at The Hippodrome Café on February 17, 1901.

Picasso was in Barcelona at the time, but when he returned to Paris, he channeled his grief into his work, choosing the color favored by turn-of-the-century, avant-garde artists as well as that most closely associated with melancholy. Picasso’s subjects were outcasts: prostitutes, prisoners, beggars, drunks, laundresses, one-eyed old women, emaciated street musicians. But bourgeois Parisians didn’t want to be reminded of these ghoulish figures from the lower depths—despite the revolution of Impressionism, the art world still prized a prettified classicism—and so the melancholy, monochromatic pictures went unsold. Picasso became so poor he couldn’t afford to buy paints, and even had to burn his canvases in order to stay warm in his garret on the Rue Voltaire. But the young artist was not to be deflected from his quest. He continued to paint in blue, sometimes working the features of Casagemus into portraits of his friends, but rarely, for the next three years, adding other colors.

More than a hundred years later, JPEGS of Blue Period paintings can be downloaded from dozens of Internet sites, posters of The Old Guitarist turn up in coffee shops and college dorms. (My friend, Sarah, remembers putting up The Tragedy, which depicts a poor, desolate family on a seashore, in her dorm room at Mary Washington College in Virginia in the 1970s, and recently my friend, Christine, noticed The Tragedy on the walls of a jewelry store owned by an Indian couple in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.) The pictures haven’t stopped speaking to us. It seems astonishing that a young man barely out of boyhood—he was only 20 in 1901—possessed the empathic intelligence as well as the technical artistry to portray such feeling.

Of course, a young man’s melancholy is a different animal than an old man’s disaffection. And while scholars believe that Picasso probably suffered from a mood disorder for most of his life—which he battled by adopting a killing work ethic as well as a dizzying parade of serial mistresses, who got progressively younger as the decades passed—he never again painted exclusively in blue. In 1904, when he fell in love with Fernande Olivier, a dark-haired model and artist who would bear him his first child, he began to add red to his canvasses, initiating the Rose Period, which, in turn, gave way to the African Period, to Cubism, Classicism, Surrealism, and Neo-Expressionism.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 92, having produced over 50,000 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints, tapestries and rugs. He remained lucid until the end—his last words at a dinner party that he and his third wife, Jacqueline Roque, hosted at their château in the south of France were, “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.”

His astonishing productivity was stunningly evident in “The Last Years, 1963-1973” at the Guggenheim Museum in the winter of 1984. My first husband, Len, and I were among the crowds jostling for spaces to view the exhibit of paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculpture, which filled most of the museum. In my memory the date feels several years earlier, 1978 or 1979, but perhaps this is because Len and I were both so lighthearted afterward, shedding our cares like winter coats as we bopped down Fifth Avenue to catch the bus to our studio apartment in Greenwich Village, where we stayed in town during the week. (If anyone had said, “In two months, Len will be diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and by the end of December, he’ll be dead, I would have thought they were joking.)

As we dodged patches of snow and ice on that darkening February afternoon, Len and I talked animatedly about what we had seen: the cartoonish line drawings of huge figures with massive breasts and swollen penises engaged in all manner of transgressive activity: peeing, shitting, and copulating. In another era, they would have been branded pornographic, the demented effluvia of a dirty old man, and yet the work had a childlike playfulness that compelled us, energized us. We were amazed that a man in his eighties and nineties still possessed this kind of creative urgency. But maybe not so surprising, Len observed, when you consider what Picasso said after observing a group of schoolchildren in 1956: “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

As I meditate upon that winter afternoon twenty-five years ago, I keep thinking of Bob Dylan’s lines, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Could it be that just as youth is wasted on the young, so depression is mostly a younger person’s affliction, a monochromatic, cyan-colored cloak that the very old, facing the prospect of losing everything including the memory of loss, cannot afford to wear?