Spanish artist who lived most of his life in France, Picasso is world-renowned as one of the inventors of the Cubist movement. Considered to be the most original, influential and dominant presence in the visual arts of the early 20th century, his works are on display in the most prestigious museums and galleries of the world. His enormous output, including 14,000 canvases and thousands of prints, engravings, book illustrations, ceramics and sculptures, made him a billionaire at his death. His various studios and houses contained not only his own work, but also other works and collections that he had amassed over the years.
The eldest of three children, Pablo is said to have been born dead. The story has it that a visitor blew cigar smoke into his face and the newborn began crying. His father, Jose Ruiz Blasco, was an art teacher and sometime painter who stopped painting when he realized the depth of his son’s talent. As a child, Pablo was surrounded by females. In addition to his mother and his maiden aunts, he had two younger sisters, Lola, born in December 1884, and Concepcion, born in 1887 (she died January 10, 1895). He is said to have learned macho behavior and control of women early, becoming a first-class manipulator. At three years old he experienced an earthquake which later colored his war-inspired masterpiece, “Guernica.” His earliest surviving picture is “Picador” painted in 1889. Of his childhood work, he later said, “I never drew like a child. When I was 12, I drew like Raphael.”
In October 1896 his father sent him to Madrid for serious study at the Academy of San Fernando. Pablo always believed art could not be taught and didn’t take school seriously. He discovered the bohemian life in his late teens, and it is suggested that at age 17 he had a homosexual relationship with a gypsy boy. He remained in Madrid until a bout of scarlet fever in the spring of 1898 forced him to return to Barcelona to recuperate.
He painted vigorously wherever he went. At age 20, Picasso set up a studio in Paris in 1901 and began signing his work with his mother’s maiden name. Living in total poverty there, he began producing museum quality paintings. Habitually a late riser, he would work far into the night. After a friend’s death he entered his “blue period” from 1902-04 in which he portrayed the poor and the suffering. His “pink period” followed, from 1904-06, featuring harlequins, acrobats and circus life. A brown period with work in sculpture preceded the transition to analytical Cubism, a movement which he developed with Braque, 1909-14.
Picasso’s father died in 1913. From January 23, 1918 to February 15, 1918 the artist had an exhibit of his work in Paris with Matisse. In August 1921 he was detained by the Paris police for receiving a sculpture that was stolen from the Louvre. Picasso had sold it to a friend for 50 francs and, although he didn’t serve jail time, his life-long fear of the French police began with the experience. Picasso lived in France for most of his adult life though he had become a Spanish Loyalist in 1936. His major creation “Guernica,” a mural, was unveiled at the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Universal Exposition in Paris. The painting depicts the devastation of war as shown specifically in the events of April 26, 1937 when the Basque village of Guernica, a Loyalist stronghold, was bombed and laid flat by German air forces. The following year, on January 13, 1938, his mother died.
In 1939, Picasso gave his mural “Guernica” to the New York Museum of Modern Art; it wasn’t returned to Spain until Spain became a democracy well after Franco’s death in 1975.
It was disclosed on October 5, 1944 that Picasso was a member of the Communist Party; he remained committed to party principles until his death though he denounced the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Picasso won the Stalin Peace Prize in November 1950; the name of the prize was later changed to the Lenin Peace Prize.
With his full height at 5’4″, a bull-like short neck, large skull, warrior’s mentality and mesmerizing black eyes, his sexual appetite led him into many relationships and two marriages. Beauty and relative youth were the only consistent qualities he desired in women. Picasso used all of his women as models, both before and after relationships, except for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva.
His first partner in Paris was Fernande Olivier. A jealous man, he would lock her in their apartment when he went out. Marcelle Humbert paralleled his Cubist period and died in 1915 of tuberculosis. Picasso met his first wife, Olga Koklova, daughter of a Russian colonel of good family and upper class tastes, while he was designing for the Ballet Russe during their tour in Italy in 1917. He took her to Spain to introduce her to friends and relatives, painted her in a mantilla and married her in a Russian Orthodox service on July 12, 1918 and a civil ceremony on July 18, 1918. They had one child, Paulo, born February 4, 1921, who died in 1975 of cirrhosis of the liver brought on by alcohol and drug abuse. Olga was out of the picture by September 1933, but they remained married due to their faith.
His next mistress was Marie-Therese Walter whom he met on July 13, 1927. They had a daughter, Maya, born September 5, 1935. Marie-Therese committed suicide by hanging herself in 1977. His next mistress was Dora Maar, born November 22, 1907 in Tours, France. They met in 1936 and she became increasingly deranged as their relationship progressed. Matching his ferocious temperament and depressions with her own, she ultimately had electro-shock treatments. All Picasso’s paintings of crying women were of Dora.
In his 60s his sexual gluttony was becoming obsessive. In March 1946, he met Françoise Gilot, 40 years his junior. They had a son, Claude on May 15, 1947 and a daughter, Paloma in March 1949. After seven years Gilot took the children and left. Shortly afterwards, Jacqueline Roque moved in. His wife Olga died of natural causes in 1955 clearing the way for another marriage. In January 1961 the children he had had with Françoise Gilot officially received Picasso’s name. While telling Françoise he would marry her, he instead married Jacqueline Roque on March 2, 1961 in secrecy.
Picasso had an ulcer operation, suffered growing deafness and failing eyesight. He had to give up chain smoking in 1965 and had to use an elevator which was installed in his home in 1971. He died in his hillside villa in Mougins, France, 11:45 AM, 8 April 1973.
His painting “Acrobat and Young Harlequin,” painted in 1905 and confiscated by the Nazis from his Montmartre studio in Paris, was auctioned in Lucerne, Switzerland 1939 and was purchased for $38.5 million by a Japanese firm on November 8, 1988. His works continue to command awe as well as astounding prices. On May 5, 2004, his “Boy with a Pipe” was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York for a record-setting $93 million that amounted to $104.1 million with the auctioneer’s commission.
On June 27, 2005, another of his lovers auctioned off some of his seldom-seen paintings, some of them nudes of her that he called his “letters of love.” All together, the works of art were valued at $2.4 million. Genevieve Laporte, now 79, says that she met the famous artist in 1944 when she was 18 years old and interviewed him for her school newspaper. Their relationship developed but, according to her, he waited until he was 24 before he seduced her, and he was not the egotist he is often described as being. She said, “I want to pass on the message that he was a loving man.”
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