Work echoing the man: many conceits—and edges
He was thought to be dead at birth in Málaga on Oct. 25, 1881. Then his uncle Salvador Ruiz, a celebrated Spanish physician who had delivered the boy, calmly puffed cigar smoke up the baby's nose, provoking howls of protest. Thus did Picasso embark on 91 years of rugged life.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (he adopted Picasso,* his mother's maiden name, a not uncommon practice in Hispanic societies) was not only the youngest nicotine inhaler in Spain. He was to prove extraordinarily precocious in every other respect. By the age of 14, the pug-nosed, stocky, black-haired Pablo was a familiar figure in the Barrio Chino, the red-light district of fin de siècle Barcelona, the city to which the family had moved when he was five. Some of his earliest work was inspired by the putas and dancers of that wicked cosmopolitan seaport. Though he later won admission to Madrid's esteemed Academy of San Fernando, an art school, he did not take his studies seriously, preferring to spend his time in the Prado and other museums —and in the demimonde with other young artists and poets.
Then, in late 1900, Picasso decided to go to Paris. His departure was, for the world of art, the equivalent of Paul's journey to Damascus. He spent his working life in France, but he remained a Spaniard to his elegant fingertips. His piercing, unblinking deep-chestnut eyes spoke of the Spanish soul's passion. Even after he began to prosper, he was content to dress and live like a Spanish peasant, eating beans and drinking coarse red wine, in loud cafes and private rooms of indescribable clutter. And though it was in France that he found fame and fortune, he remained curiously indifferent to that nation's life struggles in two world wars and a depression. To the outside world, it seemed that the only external event that seared Picasso's imagination and conscience was the Spanish Civil War, the fratricidal bloodletting that inspired Guernica. A fervent supporter of the Republic against Franco, he contributed many paintings to raise funds for the war's victims.
For much of his life, he kept his liquid capital in a locked suitcase. (His real capital, of course, lay in Picasso's Picassos and a huge store of works by other artists that he accumulated over the years.) He did not lightly dispense those bank notes. He preferred to give a delivery boy an instant drawing rather than a five franc tip. Fernande Olivier, with whom Picasso had his first lasting love affair, a liaison that lasted seven years, died of pneumonia in 1958, 46 years after their breakup. She received no financial help from her old lover. Picasso died worth at least $400 million. In the more realistic values of today's marketplace, his legacies are worth much more.