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No one has ever tended the flames more assiduously or mistreated nature with more zestful enthusiasm than the little barrel of a man with the wonderful name: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano de la Santisíma Trinidad Ruiz Picasso. Seizing nature by the hair, he joyously twists, tears, chops, stretches and mauls her to create new faces never before shown to mortal men. "What is a human face?" asks Picasso. "Who sees it correctly—the photographer, the mirror or the painter? Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?"
Like the Eiffel Tower. Today Picasso's own face is leathery, seamed and wrinkled, illuminated by big dark eyes which sometimes sparkle but more often stare off into the distance. He is old and fat, but still powerful: his chest and belly, bristling with white, goatlike hairs, are mahogany-tanned. At 68, he still dominates the whole canvas of modern art.
In his adopted France, Spanish-born Pablo Picasso is as much of an institution as the Eiffel Tower or the Grand-Guignol. His ideas, his loves and his wisecracks are as faithfully reported as the goings-on of any movie star. In the rest of the world he is almost as well known. His pictures hang in the world's most famed museums, and fetch prices as high as $50,000. Almost anywhere the mere mention of his name is enough to start a boiling controversy.
Though he can draw like Raphael when he likes, he much prefers to voyage off to worlds that never were, and to return from them with his own devil-may-care impressions. To his admirers he is a restless, inventive, original genius. To his critics, including some of the other topnotchers in the school of Paris, he is a talented mountebank and irrepressible showman who has lured his followers and the world up a blind artistic and intellectual alley.
But the fact remains that no young artist today can wholly escape Picasso's shadow. Picasso has done as much as anyone to develop the two distinguishing and disputed techniques of modern art: abstraction and distortion.
Whenever the student tries a new experiment these days, he is apt to find that Picasso, like Kilroy, has been there ahead of him.
If he falls back on traditional art forms, he is simply returning to Picasso's own beginnings. A painter. who easily masters every tool of his trade, is easily bored with everything new he tries, Picasso often seems not just one individual but half a dozen. Since work, for Picasso, means self-expression above all else, his art changes as fast as the artist. And his life, like his art, has always been a ragged succession of brief, blind voyages to unknown ports of call.
First Tack: Blues. Before he was 15, Picasso was already well launched on his first tack. His father was a drawing teacher in Spain, and Pablo inherited the old man's academic skill along with his brushes. He was still a boy when he had his first one-man show, in the doorway of an umbrella-maker's shop in La Coruña. At 18 he took off for Paris, the artists' Mecca, which has been his base of operations ever since.