Photographer David Douglas Duncan had often passed the locked door during his visits to the Riviera villa of Pablo Picasso, but in the three years he had known "the Maestro." he never guessed what was stored on the other side. One day in 1959, Picasso took him by the arm, unlocked the door, and motioned him inside. There, and in other rooms in the villa, were 532 finished paintings by Picasso that the world had never seen—"the greatest unrecorded treasure in modern art." Duncan says.
This week, as Picasso celebrates his 80th birthday, the treasure goes on record in a new book illustrated and written by Duncan and printed under his supervision in Switzerland (and published in the U.S. by Harper*). Picasso's Picassos is more than a historymaking catalogue of the unknown paintings at the villa "La Californie"; it is also a touchingly sentimental journey into Picasso's life. Duncan spent six months photographing the paintings while Picasso watched and commented, and the book's 102 color plates thus take on an added dimension. As the reader examines them, he can almost imagine Picasso looking over his shoulder, offering comment and explanation as Picasso did for Duncan.
The Personal Note. There has never been a collection of Picassos more personal than this, and that, along with his canny desire not to flood the market, is the reason for its being kept so long from view. The four paintings that TIME reproduces (see color) catch a variety of styles and colors—plus this personal note. Picasso has seldom been more tender than in his first portrait of Marie-Thėrėse Walter, and rarely has he endowed a figure with such regality as in the second portrait of her. The Minotaur is all passion, sad and fierce at once, almost like the master himself, and in the portrait of the woman with the dramatic hat, all conventions of beauty and ugliness are swept aside, as if the artist were intent only in crashing through the skin to get a look inside. In all four paintings the palette glows and roars: the image is not just there—it explodes.
Today, married to 35-year-old Jacqueline, the sixth of the important women in his life, Picasso is as exuberant as ever. But in a sense, this most inventive of living artists has come to be one of the least controversial: his stature is so enormous, his gifts and influence so overwhelming, that even the most conservative critics are apt to forgive his occasional tendency to showmanship and shock. His very restlessness sometimes seems a form of dilettantism, but every art movement from cubism to collage to abstraction, has felt his presence. In the entire history of art, no one man has offered so many ideas or seemed to find so many ways of looking at the world. To a great extent, Pablo Picasso is a history of modern art in himself.