A Life of Picasso I. [antikvár]

Introduction Opposite top: Picasso, Mateu cie Soto and Caries Casagemas on the roof of 3 Carrer de la Merce, Barcelona, where Picasso and his family lived. Photo, c.1900, inscribed to the author. Opposite bottom: Douglas Cooper, Picasso and John Richardson at the Château de Vauvenargues, 1959. Photo: Jacqueline Picasso. This biography has its origins in a project conceived some thirty years ago. After seeing at first hand how closely Picasso's personal life and art impinged on each other, I decided to try charting his development through his portraits. Since the successive images Picasso devised for his women always permeated his style, I proposed to concentrate on portraits of wives and mistresses. The artist approved of this approach. Anything that might cast light on the mystery of his creative process—a mystery he was always trying and failing to fathom—intrigued him. And so long as he was not badgered with too many searching questions, he was most forthcoming. Apropos the flanges of fur-like hair in a certain portrait, he confessed that this was a 'pun' on the floppy ears of his Afghan dog—a reflection on the animal nature of the woman in question. He would go over a sequence of paintings and show how changes from angst to radiance, angularity to voluptuousness, would announce the onset of a new passion. It must be painful, Picasso would say with more pride than guilt, for a woman to watch herself transformed into a monster, or fade from his work, while a new favourite materializes in all her glory. He showed me how two—sometimes three or even four—women might be present in a single image; how many of the still lifes were in a manner of speaking portraits (a stocky jug would actually look like the artist; a bowl of peaches would conjure up the girl). The same with certain bullfight scenes. Virtually all of Picasso's output, I began to realize, had this anthropomorphic element. Better abandon the portrait project and write a biography that would be broader in scope: one that would set the artist's life and work in relation to each other and in the broader context of cul-mral history. 'My work is like a diary,' Picasso used to tell biographers, as if this facilitated their task. 'It's even dated like a diary.' Picasso was right; however, we have to tread carefully. Much of what the 'diary' chronicles is self-explanatory, but other parts are arcane or in code. And then we should remember that diaries are none the less interesting for fantasizing, embroidering and reordering the truth. This is very much the case with Picasso. He was such a mass of contradictions that, according to his son, he used to repeat again and again, 'Tmth is a lie; tmth is a lie . . .' No wonder so much of what has been said about Picasso turns out to be equally true in reverse. Since quicksilver would be easier to nail down than his precepts, methodologies have proved unequal to the task. I have