Prodigy, Pauper, Painter of Blue
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881, son of a provincial drawing teacher who, family legend insists, handed over his own brushes when the boy surpassed him in childhood. Academic honors came absurdly early; boredom followed at once. In the Barcelona of anarchists and cabarets he found his generation, and after the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas in 1901, his palette froze into the Blue Period's beggars, prisoners, and gaunt mothers, painted while Picasso himself burned furniture for heat in Paris and shared beds in flophouse hotels.
The rose-toned circus players followed, then the encounter that detonated everything: Iberian carvings and African masks, seen with predatory attention at the ethnographic museum, and Cezanne's geometry. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, five fractured prostitutes staring the viewer down, horrified even his allies; Braque said it felt like drinking kerosene. That African debt, acquired in a colonial marketplace of looted objects and long unacknowledged by the artist himself, sits permanently in the ledger of modernism, and of him.
Cubism Was a Duet
What followed was not a solo. For seven years Picasso and Georges Braque climbed, as Braque put it, roped together like mountaineers, inventing Cubism in a dialogue so close that they sometimes left canvases unsigned; papier colle and collage, the century's most consequential studio trick, was Braque's move first. The war broke the partnership, and Picasso spent the following decades shape-shifting through neoclassicism, surrealism's orbit, sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking, roughly fifty thousand works in all, while dealers built the first modern art market largely on his name.
In 1937, for the Spanish Republic's pavilion, he answered the German bombing of a Basque market town with Guernica: a black, white, and gray mural of screaming horse, gored woman, and broken soldier that became the century's indictment of aerial war. He refused to let it reside in Spain while Franco ruled; it reached Madrid only in 1981. A Communist Party member from 1944, he painted doves for peace congresses while declining to criticize Soviet tanks, a political record as convenient as it was sincere.
The Minotaur at Home
The private ledger is dark, and it is not a footnote. Picasso ran wives, mistresses, and muses in overlapping shifts, Fernande, Olga, the teenaged Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, painting each radiant and then dismembered as desire moved. He told Gilot women were machines for suffering, goddesses or doormats; she alone walked out, and her clear-eyed memoir, which he sued unsuccessfully to suppress, remains the essential witness. After his death in 1973, Marie-Therese hanged herself; Jacqueline later shot herself; a grandson drank bleach after being barred from the funeral.
None of this cancels the work, and the work does not launder the man; museums and biographers now generally present both, which is the honest settlement. He died at ninety-one, the wealthiest artist who had ever lived, leaving no will and a decade of estate litigation that itself built a museum, the Musee Picasso in Paris, from taxes paid in art. The twentieth century keeps his shape: its liberation of form, its cult of genius, and its bill, presented afterward, for what the cult permitted.
