Mum and Picasso

Picasso's installation of miniatures was in shambles. So was my dream about it, when I woke with a start. Normally I would have let the images go, let them slowly become fainter and the gaps between them become stranger, as I do with most dreams. But I wanted to recover the context of my mum saying, in an emphatic but quavering voice, "I think we won." At least I'd be able to re-visit that moment a few times, and it might even help me explain my extraordinary parents to my bewildered children.

For over a decade Picasso's installation of miniatures at the Ukrainian Labour Temple at 300 Bathurst Street had been closed to the public, due to the Labour Temple's dilapidated state. A total of 3,189 post-card-sized ink drawings had been personally mounted on copper shingles, and then each corner of each shingle had been screwed into lead anchors in the masonry wall above the stage of 300 Bathurst, by Picasso himself, coinciding with an Ontario Art Gallery exhibition of his work in the 1964. He had insisted on attaching each anchor and screw while lying on his back on a scaffold, so that the detail of each miniature would not distract him from the effect of the emerging ensemble. From the floor fifteen feet below the installation (or the balcony forty feet opposite), it was impossible to see the details of any individual miniature, but the combined effect was stunning.

Good binoculars, or a ladder (neither were allowed near the installation while Picasso was alive) would have revealed that the subjects were fairly ordinary, adult women. Picasso had worked from photographs, interviews, and correspondence, with thousands of mothers around the world. These mothers had collected their children's baby teeth as they fell out, and mailed them to researchers in the U.S. Tooth Fairy Project. The teeth were then tested for levels strontium-90 spewed out by the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. My mum was one of these mothers, and her miniature in the installation, as well as our baby teeth, stood ready to condemn the weapons corporations.

Although the teeth and and miniatures stood ready to condemn, the world wasn't uniformly ready to hear the condemnation. In the intervening years my parents marched and petitioned to ban the bomb, which remained un-banned, but (with two horrible exceptions) un-dropped. They brought their children and friends to march against the American war on Vietnam, and we shared our home with American war resisters who refused to help drop napalm and cluster bombs on kids halfway around the world. The Vietnamese finally pushed out the American military, but not before a million Vietnamese were killed, with the country pockmarked with bomb craters and poisoned with dioxin. More wars came, a few went. My parents worked to end each war as though this was the most natural use of their spare time. The installation of miniatures helped prove that, although unusual, they weren't isolated.

The miniatures had fallen on hard times. Verdigris forming on the copper shingles, rather than adding a greenish distinction to each miniature, was threatening to stain many of them. The combined weight of over twelve-thousand lead anchors threatened to bring down parts of the wall, and the installation had to be closed for the safety of the public. The estimated cost of reinforcing the wall and replacing the shingles was staggering, impossible.

Miraculously, a start was made. Great-grandchildren of the blue-collar workers whose weekly donations had built the Labour Temple in the thirties, were now donating some of their service-worker pay cheques to the restoration. They did this because surviving volunteers of the 1960s installation told them what it had been like working with the brilliant-but-temperamental artist, and that the faces being restored to the wall were women just like their mother or grandmother. Volunteers were learning, with difficulty, to handle sheet metal shears to trim new copper shingles to the right size for each miniature --- something that had been easier in the 1960s, when there were many sheet metal workers among the volunteers helping with the installation. But it seemed extremely unlikely that the installation would ever be successfully restored and opened to the public.

In the middle of this, my mum turned to me and said: "I think we won." This would have been a ludicrous boast if it had been uttered by anybody else. But my mum's gaze fixed me on the hook of an open-ended responsibility that I share with my siblings, wife, and perhaps with our kids.