The Signature He Refused to Give
In October 1943, in occupied Paris, a woman arrived at the studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins carrying a package tied with string. She had something to show Monsieur Picasso "in person." She could wait all morning if necessary. When the painter returned two hours later, she unwrapped a small canvas—one of his own, painted in Hyères during the summer of 1922, now making its way back to him like a stray animal. Picasso looked at it tenderly. "Yes, it's a Picasso," he confirmed. "It's authentic." The woman's request was simple: sign it. An unsigned Picasso was, she explained, distressing. Guests who saw it in her home might assume it was a fake. The painter refused. "If I were to sign it now, I'd be committing forgery," he told her. "I'd be putting my 1943 signature on a canvas painted in 1922. No, I cannot sign it, madam, I'm sorry."
The woman wrapped up her Picasso and left. The anecdote, recorded by the photographer Brassaï, who was present that afternoon, is the kind of detail that gets remembered because it catches something essential about its subject—an almost perverse integrity operating alongside towering ego, a man who understood that his name was simultaneously a brand and a promise, and who refused to let the two become confused. Most artists would have signed. Most artists would have seen it as a favor, a kindness, a gesture costing nothing. But Picasso grasped something that most commercial minds spend their entire careers failing to learn: that a signature is not a decoration. It is a temporal document. It fixes an identity to a moment. To blur that line—even in service of confirming authenticity—was to betray the only contract he honored absolutely, the one between himself and the work.
This is a man who, across nearly eighty years of unbroken creative production, generated an estimated fifty thousand works—paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets, costumes—in at least twenty-six identifiable styles so divergent that experts in the twenty-second century, as a 1939 New Yorker profile noted, would have difficulty identifying a Picasso "as easily as they identify, for instance, a Titian today." A man who co-invented Cubism, pioneered collage, reinvented sculpture, produced Guernica, and still found time to carry a revolver, keep a tame white mouse in a table drawer, and observe that military camouflage was plagiarism of his art. A man whose appetites—for women, for work, for domination—were so prodigious that the word "prolific" feels insufficient, a bureaucratic understatement applied to something closer to geological force. And yet the through-line, from the teenager who completed a month-long competitive art examination in a single day in Barcelona to the ninety-year-old drawing self-portraits in Mougins, was not talent alone. It was an unyielding refusal to repeat the terms of his own success—a signature always changing, always in motion, always refusing to be fixed.
By the Numbers
The Picasso Empire
~50,000Total artworks produced across all media
26+Distinct stylistic periods identified by experts
$179MRecord auction price (Women of Algiers, Version O, 2015)
91Years lived (1881–1973)
~80Years of active artistic production
5Simultaneous dwellings maintained in France
4,000+Paintings self-estimated during his lifetime
The Bourgeois from Málaga
He was a Spanish bourgeois. He never stopped being one, no matter how many revolutions he detonated on canvas. Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, in southern Spain—the feast day of Saints Crispín and Crispiniano, the shoemaker saints, whose names were duly added to the chain. His mother's people were silversmiths, originally from Genoa. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a Basque-origin drawing teacher at the local School of Arts and Crafts: a gay-spirited Andalusian wit who had married late and become, by the time his son arrived, an acrimonious, ill-paid art instructor supporting a wife, a mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law, and a growing family. Now and then, Señor Ruiz sold a painting of pigeons or lilacs—his specialties for bourgeois Málaga dining rooms—but as a regular thing the household was pinched for money.
What distinguished young Pablo was not merely precocity—prodigies are common enough in art—but a kind of preternatural completeness. He remembered, more than sixty years later, learning to walk by pushing a big tin box of sweet biscuits in front of him, "because I knew what was inside." He began drawing as soon as his fingers could grasp a pencil. At school he brought a pigeon from his father's cote, placed it on his desk, and drew pictures of it during class—a protest, as he later framed it, against authority and against being taught anything at all. He later swore he had not even learned to read and write at school but had taught himself. His juvenile instinct against authority matured unchanged. His Iberian spirit of anarchy remained one of his few traditional elements.
The father recognized what he was dealing with. By the time the family moved to A Coruña in 1891, José Ruiz was giving his ten-year-old son highly competent academic art instruction, and finding himself surpassed. The legend—embroidered perhaps, but rooted in observation—holds that upon seeing his son's work, the elder Ruiz handed over his own brushes and palette and never painted seriously again. Whether the story is precisely true matters less than what it captures: a transfer of ambition so complete it amounted to a kind of annihilation. The father's artistic failures became, in John Richardson's reading, an impetus to the son's triumphs—the first of many relationships in which Picasso would absorb another person's creative energy and leave them diminished.
The family moved to Barcelona in the autumn of 1895. Pablo entered the local art academy, La Llotja, where his father had assumed his last post as professor of drawing. At fifteen, he completed in a single day the competitive art examination that older students were given a month to finish. A few months later he was received at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. But finding the teaching there stupid, he increasingly spent his time recording life around him—in the cafés, on the streets, in the brothels, and in the Prado, where he discovered Velázquez and El Greco and Goya. "The Museum of paintings is beautiful," he wrote. "Velázquez first class; from El Greco some magnificent heads, Murillo does not convince me in every one of his pictures." Those artists would capture his imagination at different times during his long career, returning again and again like characters in a novel he kept rewriting.
He fell ill in the spring of 1898 and spent months convalescing in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro. When he returned to Barcelona, he was a changed man: he had put on weight, learned to live on his own, spoke Catalan, and—most important—had made the decision to break with his art-school training and reject his family's plans for his future. He even began to show a decided preference for his mother's surname. By late 1901, he had dropped the "Ruiz" altogether.
"My friends back in Barcelona called me by that name," he later explained to Brassaï. "It was stranger, more resonant, than 'Ruiz.' And those are probably the reasons I adopted it. Do you know what appealed to me about that name? Well, it was undoubtedly the double s, which is fairly unusual in Spain."
The double s. A sonic choice. The name a person bears or adopts has its logic, and Picasso—Italian in origin, maternal in lineage, phonetically distinctive—became the signature on everything. Pablo Ruiz, the drawing teacher's son from Málaga, vanished. Picasso, a sound without precedent, took his place.
Le Bateau-Lavoir and the Heroic Montmartre
He arrived in Paris for the first time in October 1900, in the company of his studio mate Carles Casagemas—a nervous, talented painter from Barcelona who had become despondent about a failed love affair. Having tried unsuccessfully to amuse his friend in Málaga, Picasso took off for Madrid. Casagemas returned to Paris, attempted to shoot the woman he loved, then turned the gun on himself and died. He was twenty. The impact on Picasso was deep: not just that he had lost his loyal friend and perhaps felt a sense of guilt for having abandoned him, but that he had gained the emotional experience and the material that would stimulate the powerful expressiveness of the works to come. Casagemas appeared in death portraits, in funeral scenes, and finally, in 1903, as the artist in the enigmatic painting La Vie—a ghostly figure who continued to haunt the canvas long after he had stopped haunting the cafés.
Picasso settled in Montmartre in 1904, at 13 Rue Ravignan, in a ramshackle edifice resembling a Seine laundry boat and nicknamed Le Bateau-Lavoir. Those were heroic Montmartre days. A handful of imaginative, important artists were, in poverty, hatching their fabulous futures. The building was an absolute slum—hardly more than a stack of shacks piled on top of one another, twelve artists' studios and around thirty rooms. The windows were broken, the walls oozed mildew and damp. There was no running water, no heating, no lighting. The only toilet was a communal hole in the ground.
The cast of characters who orbited this wreckage reads like the credits of the twentieth century. Max Jacob, the minor poet who first discovered and made a cult of Picasso—a cultivated man who was also an impoverished novelty-shop clerk, and who at one point shared Picasso's bed in turns, sleeping at night while Picasso worked, then getting up in the morning so the painter could collapse, the floor carpeted with drawings that Jacob had to walk on, footprints that art experts would later have to clean because every early Picasso fragment eventually became so valuable it could be sold. Guillaume Apollinaire, the major poet who was at the time editing a physical-culture magazine and who would become the first to write seriously about Picasso. Braque, Derain, Matisse, Modigliani, Juan Gris, Van Dongen, Marie Laurencin. Frédé, the art-loving innkeeper of the uproarious Lapin
Agile, who used to bring his pet donkey to parties. Innocent Douanier Rousseau, about to marry for the third time.
Everybody was, or acted, young. Everybody borrowed money from everybody else and owed money for paint and rent. Everybody quarrelled, made love, drank, ate risotto because it was cheap, and worked like a steam engine. Picasso carried a revolver. He kept a tame white mouse in a table drawer. He couldn't afford even the luxury of painting on his walls—as he had when a student in Spain—pictures of the furniture he lacked. When he didn't have white paint for his pictures, he painted with blue. When he ran out of new canvas, over the portrait of a crippled flower-seller he painted the big red harlequin that later figured in the Rouart collection. When he lacked linseed oil, he painted with lamp oil. He always kept a supply of lamp oil because he worked at night so people couldn't bother him.
Into this sovereign disorder walked Fernande Olivier—born Amélie Lang, a tall, provocative redhead raised in a middle-class household by an uncaring aunt, married off young to a man who alternately doted on her and beat her, who had fled that marriage and adopted a pseudonym to hide from her husband. She met Picasso one rainy day in 1904 when he was holding a tiny kitten out to her and blocking her path. She thought him a gentle, caring lover—the first she had encountered—but was put off by the squalid conditions and his lack of personal hygiene. "His eyes implore me," she wrote. "He watches, religiously, whatever I do…. When I awake, I find him at the head of the bed, his eyes full of anguish, fixed on me." Their seven-year relationship spanned one of Picasso's most creative periods—the Blue Period's melancholy giving way to the Rose Period's circus folk, the sad thin skulls of the poor topped by gay clowns' hats, the spangled acrobat and his wife and male child posed like a new Holy Family in lovely disguise.
When we made Cubism we didn't mean to make Cubism but to express what was in us.
The Art Merchants' Racket
The first picture Picasso ever sold was bought the day after he arrived in Paris in 1900 by a Mademoiselle Berthe Weill, who ran a bric-a-brac shop and bought anybody's first picture at any time. The next year, Vollard—the great eccentric art merchant—gave Picasso an obscure little exhibition and bought some pictures which, as was his habit, he hid in his cellar, where they brought Picasso no renown. Soulié, a mattress dealer on the Rue des Martyrs, also bought Picassos, apparently for a horse dealer with leanings toward art speculation. The art merchant Sagot, who kept his pictures in an old pharmacy and gave artists handouts of stale medicines, purchased Picassos at cruelly low prices.
Once, when Picasso refused 700 francs—then $140—for three big paintings, Sagot offered 500 francs and, to Picasso's helpless, hungry fury, got them the day after for 300. The story captures something fundamental. In the early twentieth-century Parisian art market, the poor unknown artist was expected to hope for a merchant the way a chorus girl traditionally hopes for a butter-and-egg man: ceding a long-term contract for his future at a low price. Even when a beginner, Picasso refused to do this. He also refused to manifest group solidarity and show his pictures at the Salon des Indépendants. He was, in his spirited resistance, already operating by a principle that would govern his entire commercial life: never surrender control of your output.
The first collector to buy Picasso was Shchukin, the rich Russian industrialist whose Picassos now hang in Moscow. The expatriate German collector-merchant Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was another early buyer. In purchasing Picasso as a discovery, Russian, German, and American collectors were ahead of the French, who had also been slow in taking to Impressionism.
And then there was Gertrude Stein—rich in enthusiasm but modest in means, and then about as unknown as a writer as Picasso was as a painter. She and her brother Leo paid Sagot 150 francs for their first Picasso, and all three quarrelled about the picture's merits. It was the early, exquisite, conventional nude, "A Little Girl with Basket of Flowers." Stein, already ripe to prefer stranger sights in art, thought the girl looked classically flat-footed; Sagot suggested they guillotine the girl and keep only the head. After Stein became friends with Picasso she bought directly from him; from 1906 to 1909, she said, the Stein family controlled the Picasso output, since no one else wanted it. By 1919 she could no longer offer to buy at 100 francs pictures that were worth thousands, so Picasso gave them to her.
In 1906, she posed eighty times for his portrait of her, after which he wiped the face off, saying he couldn't "see" her anymore, and then finished the likeness in Spain, where he couldn't see her at all. When friends complained that the portrait didn't look like her, he said that someday she'd look like the portrait. This has never happened. It became less likely than ever to happen when she cut her hair, which upset Picasso more than any of her other friends because his portrait showed her with her hair long.
The 1906 Stein portrait was a boundary mark. The gay, romantic period was definitely at an end. The intellectual, serious search for Cubism was on.
The Sum of Destructions
Why Cubism had to be invented still puzzles a large public. At the time, Apollinaire described it as "a search for a new composition with formal elements borrowed not from the reality of vision but from the reality of conception"—words which bewildered Parisians no less than the paintings themselves. More bluntly: Cubism was an effort to give painting not two but three dimensions by depicting the subject—whether an apple or a man—as if it consisted of visible geometric facets. In practice, a Cubist portrait of a handsome man looked like a still life of beautiful building blocks. It marked the point in modern art where the artist and public no longer saw eye to eye no matter what both were looking at—when the artist began deliberately painting what he did not see and what no one else could check up on.
The first authentic example, modern museum men say, was done in 1907: Picasso's big painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Five women from a Barcelona brothel, their bodies fractured into angular shapes, their faces part Iberian sculpture, part African mask. When the collector Shchukin first saw it, he wailed that its ugliness marked the end of modern French art. Many people still think the historic young ladies from Avignon are a frightening lot. That was precisely the point.
The dispute over who invented Cubism—from what source, at what date, with what picture—remains delicate. Stein says Picasso's 1908 paintings of cubelike cottages in Spain were "the real beginning." She also says African Negro masks were perhaps shown by the sculptor Maillol to Matisse, who then showed them to Picasso, though there was also the tradition that Picasso first saw the masks through Derain. Cocteau says Cubism was a name invented by Matisse to deride a Braque painting. Apollinaire says the Negro sculpture "which was destined to influence new French art" was discovered by Vlaminck. Picasso himself simply and plurally says, "When we made Cubism we didn't mean to make Cubism but to express what was in us."
What is not disputed is the collaboration. Picasso and Braque worked together from 1909 to 1912—the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in this way—their canvases becoming so similar that their paintings are almost indistinguishable. They reduced their palette to monochromatic ochres, browns, and grays so as not to distract from the structure of form itself. They fragmented objects into overlapping opaque and transparent planes. They included lettering—a song title, "Ma Jolie," could point to events outside the painting or to compositional elements within it; it could refer narratively to Picasso's new mistress, Eva, or to the function of flat pictorial elements playing off curvilinear motifs. Then, by 1912, they were gluing real paper and other materials onto their canvases—collage—taking a stage further the conception of a work as a self-contained constructed object.
One night, at the beginning of the World War, Picasso and Stein were taking a walk when they saw a camouflaged truck for the first time. He was amazed by its resemblance to Cubist art and, in the tone of a man who has just been plagiarized, said, "Why, it is we who invented that!" Later, when a new field uniform for the French army was being discussed, he told Cocteau, "If they want to make an army invisible at a distance, all they have to do is dress the men as harlequins."
Picasso said something, abstrusely, that cuts to the core of it: before he came along, painting had been the sum of additions, but his painting was the sum of destructions. The phrase sounds like provocation. It was description. Each new Picasso destroyed the Picasso that preceded it, and in so doing destroyed whatever assumptions the audience had built around the last version. He was not evolving. He was detonating.
The Twenty-Six Men
From 1896 through 1939, according to experts who could agree, Picasso's pictures fell into about twenty-six styles, most of them such typical Picassos that they looked as if they had been painted by twenty-six different men. No other painter of his stature has ever offered so many completely differentiated versions of himself. For forty years he was in a constant fit of metamorphosis. Starting in his youth as the most gifted graphic artist of his time—the one most able to delineate likenesses in the grand manner—he spent his years detailing unlikenesses in an increasingly varied and cerebral manner.
The classicist enemies maintained he had debauched the aesthetic tradition of Europe by the power of his painting personality and had made ugliness the style. When a painter fails to settle into one matured mood, critics figure he hasn't found himself. Picasso was deemed to have found himself two dozen times over and, among his special public, had made much of his reputation precisely on his restless, drastic mutations—which he silently invented in his own seasons and which only his devotees garrulously explained throughout the years.
The mutations were not random. The faces and eyes of three women date and differentiate some of his works. The almond-eyed Fernande Olivier is visible through the romantic Rose Period. The straight-eyed face of the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova—whom Picasso married in the Paris Russian Church in 1917, and through whom the Spaniard was temporarily influenced by the new popularity of anything Slavic—marks the early 1920s period of gigantic female nudes. The profile of Dora Maar—a Yugoslav photographer of good family who shortened her name from Markovitch, usually painted with two handsome sloe eyes and both handsome nostrils visible—marks the deliberately deformed and decorative curvilinear portrait work of the late 1930s.
I act with paintings the way I act with things. I make a window the way I look through a window. If the open window isn't any good in my picture, I paint a curtain and close the window the way I would in a room.
Olga brought him into Diaghilev's Russian Ballet orbit—he made sets for Parade, Tricorne, Pulcinella, the cruel truncated décors for Cuadro Flamenco—and the fashionable postwar beau monde, where personalities were the rage. She also brought him into domesticity, a bourgeois apartment, a legitimate child named Paulo. A tender 1923 line-edged classic portrait of his wife eventually won the Carnegie Institute art prize in 1930. By then the marriage was already corroding. In 1927 he painted a final Cubist portrait of his son dressed as a harlequin—the clown figure who had haunted his work since the Médrano Circus days, now appearing one last time before Cubism's long experiment formally closed.
The marriage ended by divorce in 1937. Afterwards came Marie-Thérèse Walter, who bore him a daughter, Maya, in 1935. Then Dora Maar—the Surrealist photographer whose photographs of Picasso creating Guernica became important visual documents, whose own radical art was overshadowed during her lifetime by the details of the affair, who later said of his portraits of her: "All his portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar." Then Françoise Gilot, the painter who was twenty-one when she met the sixty-one-year-old Picasso in 1943, who bore him Claude and Paloma, and who in 1953 became the only woman to walk out on him—an act so unprecedented it altered the legend. Then Jacqueline Roque, forty-five years his junior, who became his second wife in 1961 and his steadfast companion and muse until the end.
Each woman entered the work. Each woman was, in some sense, consumed by it. "There are only two types of women," Picasso once said, "goddesses and doormats." The remark is coarse even for its era. But it reveals less about his view of women than about his method: everything—lover, child, friend, rival—was raw material. The work took what it needed and moved on. The person remained behind, often diminished.
The Bombing and the Bull
The Spanish Civil War profoundly affected Picasso, theretofore politically indifferent. His patriotism, previously visible principally in the nostalgic Spanish shadows of his Blue Period, became passionately republican. He refused to shake Italians by the hand because they were bombing his land. His broadsheet, Songes et Mensonges de Franco, he sold in postcard format for charity. He gave big sums to the Spanish government to buy planes. He gave money to Spanish refugees in the French border camps.
On April 26, 1937, German and Italian warplanes bombed the Basque town of Guernica in an act of coordinated terror. Within weeks, Picasso had begun a vast mural—more than twenty-five feet wide—commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition. Guernica depicted death and anguish in the aftermath: a screaming horse, a dismembered soldier, a mother holding her dead child, a bull watching impassively. Dora Maar photographed the painting's progress, documenting how the composition shifted through successive states—an invaluable record of creation as process. The work was met with mixed criticism at first. It grew in power as it toured the world in subsequent decades, eventually becoming the most famous anti-war painting ever made.
The Spanish war furnished a terrible, trite human tableau which distracted Picasso for the first time from a preoccupation with his own visions. It was the only cause large enough to pull him from the studio into the world. Since the Spanish war ended, the only show of Picasso's paintings in Paris displayed nearly nothing but peaceful, pretty flowers.
During the Nazi occupation, Picasso chose to remain in Paris. He was not unharassed—the Gestapo paid visits, inquiring about his activities—but he was also not cowed. The famous story, possibly apocryphal, has a German officer pointing at a photograph of Guernica and asking, "Did you do that?" Picasso's reply: "No, you did." Whether it happened or not, it captures the way his legend had begun to operate independently of his person—a force field that made even fascists hesitate.
Hands That Know Before the Mind
Georges Ramié, the master potter of Vallauris, remembered the moment clearly. Picasso came in 1946 as a visitor, asked to fashion a few pottery pieces, and left them for baking. Then silence for a year. In 1947 he came back, looked at the pieces he had left, and seemed to see in them discoveries his hands had arrived at almost by accident—guided accident, if unconscious. He sat down right then and commenced. He became a Vallauris potter at once, made thousands of pieces now in the museums of the whole world, worked harder than any laborer—a real artisan.
"You got the impression his hands had printed what to do," Ramié said, "and he had to wait a year to see."
This was the paradox that animated the work across every medium and period: Picasso was an empiricist, not a theorist. He created while the theorists argued the sex of angels. "I don't have a clue," he told Brassaï when asked whether his ideas came by chance or by design. "Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen. To know what you're going to draw, you have to begin drawing…. When I find myself facing a blank page, that's always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas."
The process was anti-intellectual in the deepest sense—not hostile to thought but dismissive of the notion that thought must precede action. He contrasted his own method with Matisse's: "Matisse does a drawing, then he recopies it. He recopies it five times, ten times, each time with cleaner lines. He is persuaded that the last one, the most spare, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and yet, usually it's the first. When it comes to drawing, nothing is better than the first sketch."
He once started painting a portrait of the poet Jean Cocteau and it turned into a picture of some girls rolling hoops. He was not surprised. A painting had an integral life of its own when being worked on. "When an intrepid American lady asked him what his painting was supposed to mean, he answered, 'Madame, on ne parle pas au pilote.'" Do not speak to the pilot. The plane goes where it goes.
The Maginot Line and the Doorbell
Being an iconoclast, Picasso believed painters should paint in comfort and that French studios were either too hot in summer or too cold in winter. He painted at his ease in a pair of bourgeois Paris apartments at 23 Rue La Boëtie—he and some selected paintings living in the downstairs flat, his palettes and other canvases living upstairs. Though he no longer painted exclusively at night, he was a restless man, always working at or fiddling with something, and his output was tremendous. There were thousands of canvases in collections, private hands, or commercial circulation. He also owned stacks of his work which he had never offered to sell; when war broke out in September 1939, he stored some of his most valuable canvases in steel safe-deposit closets in a bank.
Because he hated sweeping or having things moved, the dust in his atelier was epic, as was the confusion caused by drawings on chairs, sculpture in the corners, paint tubes on the floor, and an assortment of the pretty rubbish painters—like little girls—pick up: lengths of frayed colored velvet, odd old boxes, stray pieces of once-fine furniture from earlier periods.
Because he could never make up his mind what to do with his belongings, he gradually accumulated five different dwelling places—not as a well-organized man expanding into new forms of life but as somebody irresolute who had hired havens. A small weekend house at Le Tremblay. A country property, Boisgeloup, near the medieval Norman town of Gisors. For summer painting, his friend Man Ray's modern penthouse at Antibes. His newest Paris dwelling—if he could ever decide to move in—was on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, two floors in the magnificent seventeenth-century mansion formerly belonging to the Ducs de Savoie. The place was a noble architectural curiosity, with broken floor levels, nests of small rooms, and sudden great salons. In anticipation of eventual residence, the painter installed modern necessities and what he called his Maginot Line—a grille cutting across the staircase leading to his front door, preventing visitors from reaching his doorbell.
Friends said he hated hearing his doorbell ring but hated it more when it didn't ring at all.
A picture lives by its legend, not by anything else.
His domestic entourage consisted principally of a chauffeur named Marcel and a factotum named Sabartés, a friend of long standing and a compatriot. Picasso clung to his well-worn Spanish connections and painted portraits of Sabartés, who in turn wrote articles about the painter. Among those close to Picasso, his despotism, indecisions, hermetically sealed character, and energetic talents aroused a curious loyalty. The chauffeur could, in a pinch, give the dates of his master's canvases.
The Legacy of Odalisques
In 1954, Henri Matisse died. Picasso found himself struggling to cope with the sudden absence of his great rival—the only other painter of the century whose ambitions matched his own. "Yes, he is dead," Picasso said. "And I, I am continuing his paintings."
Six weeks later, on December 13, 1954, he began a series of fifteen paintings, two lithographs, and a vast number of drawings inspired by Eugène Delacroix's 1834 Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur Appartement. Françoise Gilot had written that Picasso took her to the Louvre on an average of once a month to study the Delacroix. She asked how he felt about the earlier painter. "His eyes narrowed and he said, 'That bastard. He's really good.'"
"When Matisse died, he left his odalisques to me as a legacy," Picasso stated. The series—labeled alphabetically from A through O—was completed on February 14, 1955. Over three months, Picasso varied the arrangement of Delacroix's figures to the point of anatomical distortion. Some of the depictions were full of vibrant colors and soft curves; others were reminiscent of his Cubist phase, sharp-edged in tones of gray. Version O—the acknowledged masterpiece, joining Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica on the undoubted peaks of Picasso's oeuvre—sold at Christie's in 2015 for $179 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction at that time.
That the series coincided almost exactly with the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence—France's eight-year war of decolonization, which began on November 1, 1954—has been noted by scholars. Whether Picasso's choice of subject was influenced by the war remains unresolvable. But the framing is irresistible: Delacroix's first version dated from 1834, the same year France imposed colonial military rule on Algeria. Picasso's variations bracketed the colonial era at its end. In the years since independence, several Algerian women writers staged a reversal by enlisting Picasso's paintings as the voice of their own aspirations—reappropriating his imagery as narratives of resistance to colonialism and Orientalism. They colonized Picasso as he colonized Delacroix. The work outlived the intention. It always did.
Writing Himself Into History
In his late work, Picasso repeatedly turned toward the history of art for his themes. He seemed at times obsessed with the need to create variations on the works of earlier masters—Altdorfer, Manet, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and most famously Velázquez, whose Las Meninas generated a series of fifty-eight discrete pictures. At times he reworked a specific work because he identified personally with it. More often he seemed moved by the challenge to rework in his own way the complex pictorial and narrative problems the older artists had originally posed. In a sense Picasso was writing himself into the history of art by virtue of association with his predecessors—a man who understood that artistic lineage is claimed, not inherited.
There was a renewed sense of play in the later years. He transformed paper cutouts into monumental sculptures. In Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1956 film Le Mystère Picasso, the artist—the sole star—behaved like a conjurer, performing tricks with his brush. And just as he turned to the paintings of earlier masters, redoing their works in many variations, so he turned to his own earlier oeuvre, prompted by the same impulse. The circus and the artist's studio became once again the stage for his characters, among whom he often placed himself portrayed as an old acrobat or king.
His daughter Maya remembered: "I liked telling people that my father was a housepainter, even though everyone knew who Picasso was at the time, but often considered him a fraud, a charlatan." The gap between the myth and the man persisted to the end—and beyond. He died on April 8, 1973, at his villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins. He was ninety-one. At the time of his death he owned some fifty thousand works in various media from every period of his career. A selection passed into possession of the French state. The rest went to his heirs.
The Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which opened in 1963 at the express wish of the artist and his friend Jaume Sabartés, houses around five thousand pieces—the most complete record of his formative period. In 1970, Picasso decided to donate to the city of Barcelona all the works that had been kept by his family at their home on Passeig de Gràcia. This gesture—a public and voluntary donation—demonstrates something beyond generosity. It was a staking of claim. The work belonged to the city where he had become himself, where Pablo Ruiz had chosen his mother's name and set out to reinvent what painting could be.
John Richardson's four-volume
A Life of Picasso—initiated in 1991, still the definitive biography, running more than 1,800 pages—attributes to Picasso's "demonic Andalusian birthright" his jolting oscillations between tenderness and cruelty, his self-dramatization, his harnessing of sexuality to his art. Richardson, who lived near Picasso in France for a decade and was a friend of the artist, kept a diary of their meetings. After Picasso's death, his widow Jacqueline collaborated in the preparation of the work, giving Richardson access to the studio and papers. It is one of the few books truly indispensable to understanding Picasso's artistic and spiritual growth.
But Picasso resists biography the way he resisted signing that 1922 canvas in 1943. To fix him is to falsify him. He is not one artist but twenty-six, not one man but a succession of men who shared a pair of remarkable eyes—"a wild little right eye like a Spanish bull's and a kinder, larger, and more human left eye"—and a conviction that work, above all else, was the only thing that justified existence.
"Work," he said sombrely, "is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock."
In a small restaurant in occupied Paris, a twenty-one-year-old painter named Françoise Gilot saw him for the first time at the next table—his hair graying to white, an absent look, a withdrawn oriental appearance that reminded her of the statue of the Egyptian scribe in the Louvre. He brought a bowl of cherries to her table and offered some to everyone. Whenever he said something particularly amusing, he smiled at her rather than at his dinner companions. She was sitting with friends. He was sitting with Dora Maar, who sat in extraordinary immobility, carried herself like the holy sacrament. Between the bowl of cherries and the immobile woman, the entire future hung—Claude and Paloma not yet conceived, Dora's breakdown not yet suffered, Jacqueline not yet encountered, the late paintings not yet painted, the fifty thousand works not yet counted. Just a man at a table, performing a little for strangers, offering fruit from a bowl.
