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That sense of prodigy never left him. It is central to his imagination, as one of the most interesting books on him, The Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger, points out. "Painting is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants," Picasso has said. His experience of self is predicated on that sensation of bearing, in the literal sense, "a gift," for gifts come from outside, and the artist is their medium. Prodigy is analogous to the divine right of kings—always present, a force beyond argument or development. Hence Picasso s most often quoted remark: "I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in modern painting. In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting; to find is the thing."
When he was not quite 19, before he first left Spain for Paris, Picasso wrote on a self-portrait "Yo el Rey"—the King. This motif runs through his art and life. To think that Picasso has ever been embarrassed by the homages paid him would be naive. Though prone to fits of self-doubt, he is the most naturally egotistic artist since Benvenuto Cellini, a standing refutation of the cozy untruth that geniuses are rather humble at heart. Significantly, he read Nietzsche when he was young, and there is an exhortation in Zarathustra that could well serve as the epigraph to his career: "You must become a chaos if you would give birth to a dancing star."
Inflated Blues. Picasso's immature work has benefited greatly from hindsight and feedback. The slides flick, the familiar images succeed one another—the young painter chewing his way through Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Gauguin, Munch, Steinlen and a host of other influences that crowded upon him in Barcelona and, after 1900, in Paris. There is no consolidated style in Picasso's career until, aged 21, he starts moving into the Blue and Pink periods.
These have long been the public's favorite area of Picasso's work; to some degree they still are, and the desire to treat Picasso as if he had been a master from birth has absurdly inflated them. Thus Alfred Barr once wrote that a Picasso of 1905, Boy Leading a Horse (10), "makes the official guardians of the 'Greek' traditions such as Ingres ... seem vulgar or pallid." Rather, the Blue and Pink periods contain the most accessible images Picasso ever produced—sensitive, mannered and drenched in pathos. Those who have problems decoding the intricate Cubist structure of a 1912 still life have none with the consumptive laundresses, wistful acrobats and delicately shaded cripples who populate Picasso's canvases between 1902 and 1906. On one level, they record his experience of the miserable and dehumanizing poverty that lay around him in Paris and Barcelona; on another, the beggar-as-outcast is equated with the artist-as-outsider.
The figures of the Blue Period, especially, have no identity beyond their tremulous suffering. Some, like Woman Ironing (6),