Art: Anatomy of a Minotaur

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Man. Impressive as Picasso's Cubism now seems, it won no immediate public recognition for its creator. That came only in 1917, when Impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned Picasso to design a new ballet, Parade, with music by Erik Satie. Picasso went to Italy with the ophidian prodigy of the salons, Poet Jean Cocteau, to work on the sets and costumes. The motifs he encountered there inspired a series of stout, monumentalized "neoclassical" compositions (33-35). From then on, Picasso had a repertory for his Arcadia: the vine-wreathed gods and nymphs, the Minotaurs and classic busts, the disjecta membra of antiquity that he was to superbly transmute in the Vollard etchings of 1932 and return to, at intervals, for the rest of his life.

Parade created a scandal and launched Picasso as a public personality. Cocteau's milieu absorbed him, and he became a social lion, resplendent in dinner jacket and red sash, surrounded by titled groupies. During this "bourgeois" phase of Picasso's life, he made a disastrous marriage to one of Diaghilev's dancers, a Russian girl named Olga Koklova. Picasso, as several of "his" women have made clear, was never an easy man to live with. As he put it bluntly to his later mistress Françoise Gilot, women are for him "either goddesses or doormats." (Picasso, not Mailer, is the century's monument of narcissism and male chauvinism.)

But in Olga he picked exactly the wrong wife. She was pretty, inflexibly respectable and snobbish; she tried hard to reform Picasso's bohemian habits. His portraits of Olga when they were in love (32) are among the few completely insipid Picassos that exist. As the marriage disintegrated, the great figure paintings and still lifes (31, 36, 37) began alternating with a sequence of brutally distorted female heads. Woman's Head and Self-Portrait, 1929 (38) is nothing less than a pictorial act of revenge: the savage, angular profile of Olga, with its chisel teeth and spike tongue about to devour the undistorted silhouette of Picasso's own profile. Its delirium is prolonged, in a different way, in the Surrealist beach scenes at Dinard, like Bather Playing with a Ball, 1932 (39), populated by elephantine, grotesque she-bathers who balloon on the sand or fiddle intrusively at the keyholes of locked beach huts.

Erotic Images. These are among Picasso's more evident gifts to Surrealism. But they also exemplify his astounding power to make images of sensation. In fact, his painting from 1920 onward seems increasingly to draw its power from emotion fed back into the object—sexual or not—that had provoked it. Wrote Critic John Berger: "He has been able to see and imagine more suffering in a single horse's head than many artists have found in a whole Crucifixion." His paintings approach autobiography, a vivid graph of his reactions to public issues and private relationships.

Thus they indicate, among other things, how he felt about his successive loves. In the early '30s, for instance, Picasso fell in love with a blonde Swiss girl named Marie-Thérèse Walter, 33 years younger than he. Marie-Thérèse—unlike the social-climbing Olga, who preceded her, and the sharply intelligent, gifted and nervous Dora Maar, who was her successor—presented no threat to him at all. She was a passive,