Art: Anatomy of a Minotaur

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tips in the art of gracefully demolishing a bull. Now it is pottery time, and 83 ceramic owls later, Picasso summons his chauffeur and picks up three virgins on the beach. They are deflowered during the siesta, and retire, twittering gratefully, to write their memoirs. Refreshed, the Maestro fills in the yawning hours before dinner with a dozen portraits. The omelette palpitates under his fork, unable to believe its luck. It, too, will be converted into a Picasso. A green, nocturnal silence reigns in the garden, broken only by the muffled clamor of Greek shipping millionaires stuffing $1,000 bills through the letter box in the hope that Picasso will draw on one of them. But the day is over . . .

Lost Passion. Life is not like this, and neither is Picasso's. The elaborate fiesta that the mayor and citizens of Vallauris have prepared for his birthday will go largely unrecognized by Picasso, predicted his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 87, who has known the artist since 1907. "I'm sure that he will disappear for his birthday this year as usual. Perhaps he won't even leave his house. But he will cut the telephone; he will start saying that he is traveling somewhere. He always does." Picasso still dresses with a dandyism beyond the wildest dreams of King's Road: trousers with one blue and one red leg, dragon shirts, Oriental headgear. "He is a little model," says his tailor, Michel Sapone. "I have made him velvet robes, kilts, jackets embroidered in the Yugoslav manner. I assure you, he wears them with majesty." But all desire to be public, to act in front of the camera, is gone. The group of friends and colleagues has dwindled, for Picasso has outlived them. Matisse, Braque, Gris, Léger, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Gide, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Eluard, Breton, Sabartès, Gertrude Stein—almost all the friends and legendary figures who made the "heroic" years of the French avant-garde and constituted the tribunal against which Picasso could measure himself—are dead. "When I see you," he recently told one friend, Photographer Georges Brassai, "my first reaction is to reach in my pocket for a package of cigarettes to offer you one, like the old days. I know very well that we don't smoke any more. Age has obliged us to renounce them, but the desire remains! Same thing for making love. One doesn't do it any more. But the desire remains."

Narrow Circle. The cercle Picasso is narrow now, and it has not changed in years—the painter Edouard Pignon, his wife Hélène Parmelin, Sir Roland Penrose (who wrote a biography of him), the British collector and art historian Douglas Cooper and Kahnweiler himself. Casual visitors, even ones who have known Picasso for years, are generally turned back by the intercom at the electronically controlled gates of his villa at Mougins, Notre-Dame-de-Vie.

Picasso still owns the Château de Boisgeloup near Gisors, which he bought in 1931; a sumptuous Belie Epoque villa at Cannes, La Californie (which he quit in pique when a real estate developer put apartment blocks on the land below the garden, ruining the view); and the enormous castle of Vauvenargues on the north flank of the hill that Cézanne often painted, Mont St.-Victoire. But Mougins has become his cloister. "He doesn't travel any more. He hardly even goes into Cannes