Take Down the Picasso by Hon. Michael Panter (Ret.)
As published in The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.
The real world is messy. Maybe even more of late. Politics, gender, race, religion—everything is vastly more complex and nuanced than when many of us grew up.
Particularly, I’m thinking about judgment-making in the real world. In mediation, we’re continually trying to help lay people understand this fictional legal world we occupy. Our world has a different language, different rules, time runs differently. We have to help clients understand their positions and their legal choices, a job that can seem overwhelming at times.
Try explaining to an impassioned client that it’s not truth but proof that matters in law world. Or that much of what they know has no value because of our evidentiary rules. In law, their personal judgments just don’t matter.
Lady Justice wears a blindfold to exclude race, gender, religion, politics or other real world considerations from her judgments. In law, we don’t have to look at the big picture. We only have to look at a very narrow set of facts and squeeze them into a very limited and specific set of laws and standards. Of course, even that is amorphous and uncertain but the scope of the task in law is not comparable with making judgments in the real world.
Law is addictive because it so organizes and simplifies the world. Lines are drawn. Actions are OK or not OK. A pleading was filed timely or it was not. Products are judged by standards that existed when they were manufactured. Physicians are not judged by later developed knowledge or technology. Ex post facto laws do not apply. No one’s conduct is judged by rules created decades later. We care less about getting the judgment right than about making the judgment definitive. Reconsideration has strict limits. We believe in precedent. We believe our prior judgments carry substantial weight. Laws change constantly but “evolve” slowly. Judgments are mostly permanent.
This is a terrible problem in our world today. We are endlessly reconsidering past judgments of so many whose genius enthralled us, brought us to laughter and tears and moved the world. No one knows what standards apply. Each of us tries to decide exactly what is relevant to these individual and terribly hard judgments. There are no rules of evidence. There is no jury instruction on the burden of proof or comparative fault. Each of us judges by our own inconsistent and completely subjective standards.
Chris Jones wrote a terrific piece in the April 28 Tribune about the immensity of the conflict in staging a Michael Jackson revival. He described the producers’ torment in presenting the artist’s genius in light of his personal behavior. He wrote how he has been “wrestling mightily” with these issues. Can we judge Jackson’s work under today’s standards? Jones wrote, “Look at the recent scandals surrounding racially insensitive statues or murals in schools, depicting very different Americas from the past. Debate ensues about whether they should be removed. Imagine, though, that someone had suggested painting a new one in the old way.”
By most artistic standards, Picasso is considered the greatest artist of the twentieth century. Our sculpture in front of the Daley Center is the unofficial symbol of Chicago. I’ve worked under its shadow for forty-one years and I’ve viewed it a million times. It doesn’t even have a title. It’s just, “The Picasso”. Whatever the heck it is, it just somehow fits. It is our city. So I was terribly surprised one night at dinner to hear a dear friend say she will have nothing to do with Picasso.
“Picasso’s grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso’s son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself. ‘Women are machines for suffering,’ Picasso told Fran?oise Gilot, his mistress after Maar. After they embarked on their affair when he was sixty-one and she was twenty-one, he warned Gilot of his feelings once more: ‘For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.” Marina saw her grandfather’s treatment of women as an even darker phenomenon, a vital part of his creative process: ‘He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them’… Picasso was a womanizer who left most of his lovers in emotional shambles. He was not, by most stretches of the imagination, a moral or ‘good’ person.” Cody Delistraty, The Paris Review, November 9, 2017.
My friend will not wear a blindfold to the entirety of the artist’s life. And not life as he lived it. But his life judged under current standards and mores. Maybe it’s fitting that this beacon of our courthouse, the gateway to the largest centralized court system in the country, should represent the clash between real world and law.
Can anyone disagree that these overwhelming reconsiderations show major shifts in our real world judgments and our very method of judging? Or that much of the reconsideration does seem worthwhile and for the good? On the other hand, is there anyone not concerned that what we do today will later be judged unacceptable?
In Daley Plaza, no law governs how we should feel about The Picasso. Each of us judges for ourselves. Maybe that’s the very point. When we walk past it and enter the courthouse, we surrender our personal judgments and accept the constancy, the narrow focus and also the imperfection of what happens inside.