An artist. Twenty artists. Two hundred artists. The artist with a thousand faces. A great and indomitable genius. Paul the bohemian. The tireless worker. the whorehouse The declassed. The suspicious migrant in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. Short. Well-built. From hair to chest Devouring eyes. radical creator. Subversive. Generous with his friends. Cruel to his lovers. Misogynist (he classified women between goddesses and doormats, first putting them on the pedestal and then knocking them down). possessive lover. Seductive. Lost. Jealous. Braggart. Priapic. Ruthless sadist (the painter Françoise Gilot, mother of her children Claude and Paloma, and the only one who dared to abandon him, explained that during an argument she crushed a lit cigarette into her cheek).
Controller. Bookish narcissist (his granddaughter Marina wrote that he "subjected [women] to their animal sexuality, tames them, bewitches them, ingests them, and crushes them on his canvas. Having spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled, he would get rid of them.”) Burning and at times just a sad looker. Savage, until tragedy struck the ferocious minotaur who in his engravings raped virgins. “He was getting older, he was prouder than ever, he loved women as much as he ever had, and he was facing the absurdity of his own relative helplessness. One of the oldest jokes in the world became his pain and his obsession.” observed John Berger.
Picasso the god of modern art (“I am God”). a colossus. The fucking master. Revolutionary. Effervescent. Imaginative. Extraordinarily productive. Deeply honest in his determination to unlock the mysteries of perception and being. Co-creator of cubism. Superb painter, draftsman and sculptor. The man who with the vision of him freed our gaze. Vampire (he gobbled up the work of other artists: Brancusi, who was Romanian and knew how Dracula spent his time, loathed as much as he feared his ability to suck ideas and energy). Obsessive (“When I finish painting, I paint again to relax”).
Surly. Joker. Financial astute. Self advertiser. Multimillionaire. Idolized as a rock star. Sentimental communist. Antiwar who left behind a trail of devastated lives. Pacifist. Solidarity (he gave large sums of money for the republican cause and helped the exiles who arrived from Paris fleeing Francoism). Forever jovial. Human, at last: already in his nonagenarian age, he got off the pedestal and from the afterlife portrayed himself as a skull, unshaven, his face ape-like, bruised, his eyes widening in a spiral of sadness or fear and his lips sealed, as if he had already everything was said or had nothing more to say. Dead but still alive.
John Richardson, friend and author of a monumental biography, masterfully summed it up in a single sentence: “The man was a paradox. Say what you say about him, the opposite is also true."
