The Trajectories of Genius

Work echoing the man: many conceits--and edges

He was thought to be dead at birth in Malaga on Oct. 25, 1881. Then his uncle Salvador Ruiz, a celebrated Spanish physician who had delivered the boy, calmly puffed cigar smoke up the baby's nose, provoking howls of protest. Thus did Picasso embark on 91 years of rugged life.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (he adopted Picasso,* his mother's maiden name, a not uncommon practice in Hispanic societies) was not only the youngest nicotine inhaler in Spain. He was to prove extraordinarily precocious in every other respect. By the age of 14, the pug-nosed, stocky, black-haired Pablo was a familiar figure in the Barrio Chino, the red-light district of fin de siecle Barcelona, the city to which the family had moved when he was five. Some of his earliest work was inspired by the putas and dancers of that wicked cosmopolitan seaport. Though he later won admission to Madrid's esteemed Academy of San Fernando, an art school, he did not take his studies seriously, preferring to spend his time in the Prado and other museums --and in the demimonde with other young artists and poets.

Then, in late 1900, Picasso decided to go to Paris. His departure was, for the world of art, the equivalent of Paul's journey to Damascus. He spent his working life in France, but he remained a Spaniard to his elegant fingertips. His piercing, unblinking deep-chestnut eyes spoke of the Spanish soul's passion. Even after he began to prosper, he was content to dress and live like a Spanish peasant, eating beans and drinking coarse red wine, in loud cafes and private rooms of indescribable clutter. And though it was in France that he found fame and fortune, he remained curiously indifferent to that nation's life struggles in two world wars and a depression. To the outside world, it seemed that the only external event that seared Picasso's imagination and conscience was the Spanish Civil War, the fratricidal bloodletting that inspired Guernica. A fervent supporter of the Republic against Franco, he contributed many paintings to raise funds for the war's victims.

For much of his life, he kept his liquid capital in a locked suitcase. (His real capital, of course, lay in Picasso's Picassos and a huge store of works by other artists that he accumulated over the years.) He did not lightly dispense those bank notes. He preferred to give a delivery boy an instant drawing rather than a five franc tip. Fernande Olivier, with whom Picasso had his first lasting love affair, a liaison that lasted seven years, died of pneumonia in 1958, 46 years after their breakup. She received no financial help from her old lover. Picasso died worth at least $400 million. In the more realistic values of today's marketplace, his legacies are worth much more.

He bestowed little love on his children after they passed the age of cherubic portraiture. Born over a span of 28 years, they were: Paulo, his only legitimate child, by Dancer Olga Koklova (he died in 1975); Maya, by Marie-Therese Walter; and Claude and Paloma, by Franchise Gilot. One of the few paramours or wives with any pretension to intellectuality, Gilot (now married to famed U.S. Scientist Dr. Jonas Salk) was co-author of a bitter book, Life with Picasso, in which she calls him a manipulator of human beings: "He loved only one thing--his painting. Not his women, not his children." Gilot broke with Picasso in 1953. Jacqueline Roque, the aspiring poet he married in 1961, was described by one acquaintance as "the only woman who ever was able to lead him around by the nose."

That nose was, for a while, ringed by the French Communist Party. He joined in 1944 and painted for it the famed Dove of Peace, which the Soviets happily substituted for the hammer and sickle as their symbol of peace on earth. No political sophisticate and certainly no ideologue, Picasso eventually distanced himself from the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. As Salvador Dali quipped: "Picasso is a Spaniard --so am I. Picasso is a genius--so am I. Picasso is a Communist--nor am I."

After World War II, despite sporadic explosions of artistic energy, usually fired by some new love, the once gregarious Picasso gradually became more than ever a recluse. He sustained many old feuds and started new ones with fellow artists, critics and dealers, but welcomed the obsequities of a faithful coterie. In 1958 he purchased a medieval chateau near Aix-en-Provence called Vauvenargues. "I've bought Cezanne's view!" he said. He spent most of his final years, however, at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a hilltop villa at Mougins on the Riviera, named after a chapel that once stood on the site. He worked until dawn on the last day of his life, April 8, 1973.

To the end, as suggested in the following portfolio of intimate photos by David Douglas Duncan, Picasso remained Picasso: an indefatigable worker, a lover of mischief and pranks, quirky, increasingly aloof, mercurial, yet often remarkably generous and warm. In Viva Picasso, a book to be published by Viking next fall, Duncan describes how, in the course of preparing some Picasso canvases for photography, he took a swipe with a feather duster at a 1938 self-portrait--and smudged a part of the canvas. Writes Duncan: "I spent the whole morning dabbing with spit-moistened Kleenex trying to reduce the damage, to clean away the smudges." By lunchtime, the hour at which Picasso usually got out of bed, Duncan, his face gray-green, had to confess his crime. "What's happened?" asked the artist, thinking Duncan had crashed his beloved 300 SL Mercedes. After hearing that the photographer had in fact crashed a priceless work of art, Picasso turned and shouted to Jacqueline: "You have two starving men on your hands! What time do we eat?" He never spoke of the picture.

*He also may have chosen the name because of a 17th century Genoese painter named Matteo Picasso, though he always denied this.

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