Morbidity

"Carcass of Beef"by Chaim Soutine (1925)

Picasso was a serial killer. He turned his lovers, Olga Khokova, Dora Maar, Marie-Therese Walter into his subjects, painting, then leaving them, stags shot then mounted.  Too Far Too Go was John Updike's often heartbreaking rendering of the dissolution of a marriage which happened to be his, but as you read, you can't help thinking, why? When there is so much genuine love between two people, why need they part? Or is there a perversion involved, a psychiatric condition not listed in the DSM, where an artist needs to turn his subject into dead meat--a la Soutine. Do some writers inflict pain on themselves and others, in order to write about it?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn