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That's a Guitar. For so varied a talent, there is a refreshing no-nonsense quality about Picasso as Duncan portrays him. When photographing one of the earliest paintings at "La Californie"—a realistic portrayal of the Holy Family that Picasso did at the age of 14—Duncan asked whether the "curious image floating" above the family might have been meant to symbolize the Holy Spirit. "Holy Spirit!" snorted Picasso. "Those are dates. That's a palm tree—with dates. They had to eat somethingl"
By 1907. Picasso had come a long way from those dates. That year he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, now regarded as the first cubist painting. But he also did a demoiselle the world has never seen—a redheaded girl that Duncan found sandwiched between several still lifes of a later period. "Painted on a panel so thin that it is nearly transparent (the lid of an ancient paint box), it seems as though the colors merely screen the person behind." wrote Duncan. In 1907, too, Picasso discovered African masks, and over the next few months his heads took on the look of sculpture, while his nudes became arrangements of ovals with limbs that twined about each other like thick brownish taffy. In 1918 he did a cubist study that Duncan thought was meant to be a dog. "Dooncon," explained the Maestro slowly, "this is a table, with a table cloth. There is a guitar at the left. And a pitcher at the right. You must see that!"
A Lost Period. Every so often, nature snaps back into shape in Picasso's Picassos: a 1923 neoclassic nude is followed by a wispy portrait of little Paulo, Picasso's son by his first wife, Olga Koklova. But the works of the 1920s are few: almost half of those in Duncan's book were done in the '30s. One of the book's chief surprises, in fact, is the chapter devoted to 1936. It was a period during which most authorities believed Picasso painted nothing.
The Maestro was separated from Olga, and his new love was Marie-Thėrėse Walter. Picasso subjected her to startling transfigurations. In one canvas, she is almost normal, her features boldly outlined in strong, simple lines. In the next canvas, she becomes three circular shapes, as if Picasso had reduced her to a kind of amoeba. Other paintings of this period are tragic ones. In a shattering series of portraits, Picasso painted a woman sinking into madness. In the last of these, she is seen staring blankly at a blackened mirror while near by sits a ghostly figure —the visitor of whom the disintegrated mind was only partially aware. Who is this woman? Missouri-born Dave Duncan, who has made himself Picasso's photographic Boswell after an adventuresome career of action photography (the Korean war for LIFE) that turned gradually toward culture-capture (The Kremlin), does not know, or loyally refuses to say.