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Poor as a sparrow, he shared a small room and single bed with Poet Max Jacob, sleeping by day while Jacob was at work. At night he painted furiously at his first strange subjects: the attenuated figures of half-starved beachcombers, laundresses and musing alcoholics. He painted them all with subtle variations of a single color which he rapidly made his own: blue. Before long, Picasso had found a mistress, a host of Montmartre friends, and even a few buyers. He lost his blues and began painting "pink" pictures, such as his famous Boy Leading a Horse (see color pages'), which represented no real advance over Picasso's bluer ones. It had the same impeccable draftsmanship and the same arty, somewhat sentimental air. By 1907 he was bored stiff with classical grace. Casting around for new ideas, he became fascinated by the distortions of primitive sculpture. He put them into his huge, 92-by-96-inch Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—a strong, muddy draft of Congo water (see color pages). It was unlovely but energetic, and it attracted attention—as Picasso had meant it should.
Next Tack, Cubes. With the Demoiselles, young Pablo became an art-for-art's-sake painter. He was through with doing tinted reflections of what most people mean by "beauty." Thenceforth his pictures would have more to do with what he felt than what he saw—not because he loved nature less, but because he cared more for Pablo Picasso and Picasso's art. Unlike many of his followers, Picasso never abandoned nature altogether. "There is no abstract art," he said. "You must always start with something." But he and fellow painters like Braque could and did smash nature into little pieces and fit the remains back together to suit their fancy. Tables, people, pipes and wine bottles were all reduced to barely decipherable fragments, each seen from a different angle and painted in various shades of birdlime and mud. Scoffers, and later the artists themselves, called the new technique "cubism." "The life of the cubists," Gertrude Stein wrote later, "became very gay . . . Everyone was gay, there were more & more cubists."
But Picasso, who never enjoyed traveling in a crowd, was already searching for new adventures. In 1916 he moved to suburban Montrouge (where a burglar insulted him by stealing his linen and not his paintings). Jack-of-Arts Jean Cocteau rescued him from the suburbs and persuaded him to do the scenery and costumes for a Diaghilev ballet. The invitation led him to one of his strangest adventures of all.
In the troupe was a Russian beauty named Olga Koklova, who not only convinced Picasso that he needed a wife, but also taught him to air the dogs at 9 every morning. They rented a swank apartment, bought a château for weekends and a Hispano-Suiza to take them there. In keeping with his new respectability, Picasso painted neoclassical nudes and started wearing striped trousers. Once he hopped over to London to order 30 suits. "I'll come back," he said, "when all of them are worn out."