Perils Of Pablo PICASSO: CREATOR AND DESTROYER

By ROBERT HUGHES

In 1981 Arianna Stassinopoulos (as she then was) brought out a biography of the diva Maria Callas, heavily borrowed from several earlier works, including Callas by John Ardoin and Gerald Fitzgerald. It was a best seller. Now it is the turn of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), the quintessential modern artist. Picasso is on the front cover, looking haggard. On the back is Huffington, looking glamorous. Her fixed smile displays a row of pearly teeth: no stains or chips. Which is remarkable, given that they have bitten off so much more than they can chew.

There is no sign in the 558 pages of Picasso: Creator and Destroyer that Huffington has given a day's close thought to Picasso's art -- or anyone else's. To her, Picasso is mainly interesting as a celebrity with an odious character: a user, all but incapable of real affection, destructive to his friends, brutal to his women, cruelly indifferent to his children. Some of this is, of course, true, and it has not been a secret for years. The Big P.'s personal life was no oil painting, and Huffington documents it with zeal, leaving one in no doubt that he was to ordinary male chauvinist pigs what Moby Dick was to whales.

Yet while inverting some earlier writing about Picasso -- hagiography of the goat god, by members of his claque -- Huffington produces something just as hokey. She comes on like a cross between Marabel Morgan and Mme. Defarge. She is out to avenge all of the women in his life -- "goddesses and doormats," in Picasso's nasty phrase -- except his late widow Jacqueline Roque, whom she denounces. Her biography becomes an interminable pecking session, to the point where she even finds fault with Picasso for becoming rich. "It took a lot of money to keep Picasso in bohemia," sneers the author, who in 1986 capped her own social ascent in Reaganland by wearing an $18,000 gown at her heavily publicized wedding to Texas Oil Heir Michael Huffington.

She does find something for her candied prose to cloy on. "He stirred in me all the emotions present in an intimate relationship," pants Huffington, who never met Picasso. "I was seduced by his magnetism, his intensity, that mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth from the transfixing stare of his black-marble eyes as much as from his work . . . Picasso was for the women and for many of the men in his life both the irresistibly sensual and seductive Don Juan and the divine Krishna." Add Dallas to Callas, and presto: Phallus!

Huffington even comes up with a gay period for Picasso. In 1898, she claims, during a visit to the mountains near Horta, he fell in love with an unnamed gypsy boy. The high-sierra idyll is padded with imagined dialogue and trills of swoony prose, but not one scrap of solid evidence is given for it.

Unfortunately, Huffington's grasp of Picasso's work, of the cultural milieus through which he moved for three-quarters of a century and of the general history of 20th century art into which his achievements are woven is so sketchy as to border on the sophomoric -- on the few occasions when it rises above freshman level. Few paintings are discussed, and none with originality, in a text that is riddled with errors large and small. She thinks, for instance, that the Catalan sculptor Julio Gonzalez "guided Picasso's first serious steps into sculpture" in 1928. In that year Gonzalez did teach Picasso how to weld; but Picasso had changed the very history of sculpture long before with his cubist constructions, starting with the sheet-metal Guitar of 1912.

Huffington evades treating his art as art with the common claim of kitsch biography: "His art was so thoroughly autobiographical that what he did was what he was." Through the pink fog of her pop psychology, one hears Muzak about "genius," "passion" and "torment" attached to a simple rehash of the dubious argument put forward some 20 years ago by John Berger in his book The Success and Failure of Picasso. Picasso's work, Berger claimed, declined into absurdity as his own fame insulated him from the "real" concerns of society. In Huffington's romance, Bluebeard gets his due: the sexual tyrant is condemned to creative sterility in old age. These ardent simplicities are largely contradicted by his work.

No truly definitive life of Picasso can be written until his archives are opened to scholars. But one could wish Huffington had done better with what was available. Far too much of her book merely repeats other biographies, such as Pierre Cabanne's Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times (1977). Thus Cabanne, page 294: "In a drawing dated March 1937 and entitled Dora Maar Asleep, the new inamorata appeared in all her glory; she had even taken from her predecessor . . . one of her most delicious attractions, her sleep." Huffington, page 229: "On March 2, Dora was even portrayed asleep. Having usurped Marie-Therese's primary place in Picasso's life, she had now also usurped her abandoned rest."

Things perk up a bit by the appearance of Francoise Gilot, who lived with Picasso from 1946 to 1953, bore him two children and had the gumption to produce an unflattering book about him, Life with Picasso (1964), co-written with Carlton Lake. She was one of the few people close to the artist whom Huffington could get to. But Gilot has little of significance to add to her old book beyond some domestic horror stories (Picasso supposedly stubbed out a cigarette on her cheek). Huffington's treatment of her as the Mystic Virgin confronting the Horny Beast is so implausible that, once again, one's interest flags.

No doubt, given Huffington's way with talk shows and gossip columnists -- her real constituency -- this book will do well in the market. But as an addition to our understanding of a great, conflicted artist and his times, it is mere fluff.