Magic Worlds of Fantasy [antikvár]

nearly twenty years I was given the password to a wizard's castle and photographed fantasy—close up—in constant volcanic eruption. Glaring owls materialized from fistfuls of random nuts and bolts. Demon gods stood guard along the walls and in the gardens: gaunt, unblinking and gargantuan even among the same palm trees from which drooping fronds had been torn then lashed together to form their spines when they were reborn in bronze. Bouquets of crenelated flowers were once-upon-a-time kitchen-stove burner grids. A grandmother baboon, clutching an infant to her breast, could trace her ancestors to a grape picker's wicker basket (her bulbous body) and a child's toy auto—headlights and all (her hostile eyes and menacing jaws . . . the ears were made from half-broken handles of cracked coffee mugs). Dangling on a nail was the most renowned creation of the ancient magicians's alchemy: a bull's skull conjured from the handlebars and saddle of a junked bicycle. Surrounding it hung ikons of the princess of the castle in which the classic face and serene gaze progressively disappeared until all that remained was the patrician profile, and a single luminous eye. I had entered the already legendary realm of Pablo Picasso, which according to contemporary myths was almost as inaccessible as the cloud-temple palace of the Dalai Lama. In reality, the artist's gate on the French Riviera always swung open in response to the original, simple password . . . friendship. Picasso was a paradoxically gregarious recluse who often lamented his self-imposed isolation, yet knew that any weakening of resistence to the seductive world beyond his walls would be reflected immediately in his relationship with the only all-consuming, demanding and insatiable love of his hfe—work. But then just when his life appeared to be a predictable routine of never-ending work, interrupted only by meals in the kitchen with his wife, Jacqueline, he abandoned easels and sketchbooks, pottery kilns and sheet-metal welding to submerge himself in news of the outside world brought by bullfighters, poets, concert pianists, silversmiths, novelists, political philosophers, movie gunfighters, marine zoologists and assorted others from the towering inverted pyramid of friends he had accumulated during a long lifetime when friendships mattered—who possessed the same password. During those rare days when the gates unpredictably opened—when gypsy guitarists lunched elbow-to-elbow with governors of the great banks of the world, first-year art students next to art tycoons, museum curators, steel heiresses, oil-tanker barons or stone-broke old-time circus stars who had never been forgotten by the artist since they shared the riches of Parisian poverty in their youth—it became obvious that besides lavishing pure Spanish hospitality upon his guests, Picasso was also an intensely observant host sensitive to the real-world needs of some of his visitors. He sent the empty-pursed director of a Portuguese museum home with a magnificent still life under one arm and a letter to various customs