by Arianna Huffington

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer

The year 1895, when Pablo Picasso was thirteen, brought his initiation into two mysteries—the mystery of power and the mystery of death. On January 10 his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diptheria. Picasso watched her deteriorate from the smiling little girl with the blonde curls whom he had so tenderly drawn to the ghost of herself that he drew just before death snatched her away. He watched the desperate comings and goings of Dr. Ramon Perez Costales, a friend of his father's. He watched his parents' struggle to save his sister; and he watched bewildered as they celebrated Christmas and Epiphany and gave presents to the children, trying to shield Conchita from any knowledge of approaching death. In his anguish Picasso made a terrible pact with God. He offered to sacrifice his gift to Him and never pick up a brush again if He would save Conchita. And then he was torn between wanting her saved and wanting her dead so that his gift would be saved. When she died, he decided that God was evil and destiny an enemy. At the same time, he was convinced that it was his ambivalence that had made it possible for God to kill Conchita. His guilt was enormous—the other side of his belief in his powers to affect the world around him. And it was compounded by his almost magical conviction that his little sister's death had released him to be a painter and follow the call of the powers he had been given, whatever the consequences.

AFTER CONCHITA'S death the family moved from Corunna, in the northwest corner of Spain, to Barcelona. During his early days there Picasso did a revealing drawing, Christ Blessing the Devil, which was evidence of the deep conflict raging within him. Christ, with a shining aura around his head, is blessing with his left hand an overwhelmed Devil. At the same time he painted The Holy Family in Egypt and Altar to the Blessed Virgin. In 1896 came an abundance of religious pictures: Christ appearing to a nun, Christ being adorned by the angels, the Annunciation, the Last Supper, the Resurrection.

A year after he drew Christ Blessing the Devil, he gave tender expression to some of the most powerful symbols of religious worship, but he also did a picture of Christ with no face—impersonal, unreal, and with no answers. Catholicism, with its emphasis on ethical rules and the rewards of heaven, held no answers for Picasso, with his growing passion for freedom and this world. He would reject the Church, but he could not stop himself from returning throughout his life to the figure of Christ, as a symbol of his own suffering, in the same way that he would bury his transcendent longings but could not extinguish them.

TALK of nihilism, catalanism, anarchism, and modernism filled the smoky air of Els Quatre Gats, Picasso's main haunt in Barcelona. Els Quatre Gats was from the beginning a huge success, "a Gothic tavern for those in love with the North," where Uerillo staged puppet shows, where Rusinol, Casas, and Nonell, among other painters, showed their work, and where anyone with an apocalyptic gleam in his eye would gravitate to discuss the new ideas. Enthusiasm contended with a sense of futility, and the urge to create with the compulsion to destroy. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was one of the imported heroes of Els Quatre Gats: "Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge."

Such was the intellectual milk that nourished Picasso in Barcelona at the turn of the century. Uneducated but quick to learn, he devoured ideas and philosophies through his friends who had read and absorbed them. Nietzsche's Will to Power struck an especially powerful chord in Picasso's heart. Power was the only value set up by Nietzsche to take the place of the transcendent values that had lost their meaning for modern man. And Picasso, for whom transcendent values were associated with Spain's repressive Church, found that Nietzsche's philosophy admirably suited his own needs and dreams of power.

PICASSO arrived in Paris just a few days before his nineteenth birthday, speaking no French and having no place to stay. At the beginning it did not seem to matter where he lived. Most of his time was spent on the streets, at cafés, in the Louvre, at the Universal Exhibition, at the Grand and Petit Palais, in the odd whorehouse.

IN the Summer of 1901 Ambrose Vollard, the dealer of Cezanne and Gauguin, put on a Picasso exhibition. There were prostitutes and society ladies, portraits and landscapes, interiors and street scenes. The exhibition was a success, but even more significant for Picasso's life, it led to his meeting the man who for the next few years would fulfill two of his three most constant and urgent needs. Max Jacob would become his caretaker and his worshipper. As for Picasso's third need, for constantly and effortlessly available sex, he would no doubt have been eager to meet that too, if only Picasso had been willing. Max Jacob went to see the Vollard show and soon after, struck by Picasso's "fire" and "real brilliance," arrived at the boulevard de Clichy, where Picasso was living, to pay his respects to the young master.

Jacob was twenty-five years old when he met Picasso. He had come to Paris from Brittany three years earlier, determined to become an "artist"—a poet and a painter. "Stick to poetry" was Picasso's advice, and to a very large extent Jacob took it. He called Picasso "my little boy" but listened carefully to what the little boy had to say. This short, prematurely balding intellectual, who wore a monocle with the sensuality of a woman wearing a garter belt, had already gained considerable influence in the demimonde of poets and painters which he had made his home. He would launch some and help the careers of others already launched, but none would he love as deeply and as unconditionally as he loved Picasso.

THE summer of 1901 was a demonically creative one for Picasso. The art critic Francois Charles cautioned him "for his own good no longer to do a painting a day," but Paris had unleashed a surge of experimentation in him. It was a summer of reveling in the city, of celebrating his freedom from Spanish conventional morality, of flower still-lifes, cancan dancers, the races, pretty children, and fashionable ladies. Yet a noticeable change was beginning to take place in both his mood and his work. "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green," Van Gogh wrote in 1888, and in 1901 Picasso, spurred by his inner turmoil, switched his focus to the solitude and pain of humanity and tried to express them by means of blue. So began the procession of beggars, lonely harlequins, tormented mothers, the sick, the hungry, and the lame. And in their midst was Picasso himself, his own suffering on display in a blue self-portrait.

In January of 1902 he returned for a time to Barcelona, where the sometimes despairing, sometimes bitterly tender expressionism of the Blue Period became still more intense. The destitute women of Paris appeared in their Barcelona incarnation utterly crushed by life and a hostile world. In Two Sisters, his painting of a whore and a nun, Picasso expressed for all time his starkly divided vision of women as madonnas or whores. And in his life, having idealized his mother to the point where he could not even bear to talk to the real, imperfect Dona Maria, he spent his time watching, sleeping with, and painting women who in his mind occupied the space reserved for whores. Two of the smaller nude drawings he would keep for his Private collection. On one of them he had written, "Cuando tengas ganas de joder, jode"—"When you are in the mood to screw, screw." In his struggle to define himself as a man, lust seemed the most appropriate emotion toward women.

IN October Picasso returned to Paris. All his hopes were now pinned on a new show organized by Berthe Weill. The other artists in the show were Lauriay, Pichot, and Girieud, and the catalogue praised Picasso's "indefatigable ardor to see and show everything" and the "wild light" that permeated his work. But nothing was sold, and Picasso's mood became even more nihilistic.

His despair was there for all to see in his work. Charles Morice focused on it in an essay he wrote for the Mercure de France while the Weill show was still on.

It is extraordinary, this sterile sadness which weighs down the entire work of this very young man. His works are already numberless.... He seems a young god trying to remake the world. But a dark god. Most of the faces he paints grimace; not a smile. His world is no more habitable than lepers' houses. And his painting itself is sick. Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?

It was an extraordinarily powerful piece, and it shook Picasso. He wanted to meet Morice, as if the man who had so accurately diagnosed his state of mind might also be able to provide a cure. Morice, a good friend of Paul Gauguin's, introduced him to Noa Noa, Gauguin's autobiographical poem. Picasso's deep-rooted pessimism was pitted against Gauguin's primitive, questing optimism. "Where are we coming from? Who are we? Where are we going?" Gauguin asked, and although Picasso never formulated those questions in words, they were all there in his work and in the restlessness of his life.

BLUE was still dominant on his canvases, but a rose glow began to creep in, anticipating a major change in his life. In the afternoon of August 4, 1904, in the middle of an unexpected thunderstorm, he was on his way to his studio, carrying a little kitten he had rescued from the storm, when a beautiful, statuesque woman rushed into the Bateau-Lavoir, drenched to the skin. He blocked her path and thrust the kitten into her arms—an offering and an introduction. He laughed and she laughed with him, and he took her to see his studio. Her name was Fernande Olivier. In a nude autobiographical drawing dated August, 1904, they have just made love and he is still stretched on top of her, his feet barely touching hers, her almond eyes closed, her wavy hair dark and rich. He commemorated the occasion as if he knew immediately that this was not just another sexual encounter. It was, in fact, the beginning of his first real relationship, the first time in his life he committed himself to a woman—not "till death do us part" but at least until the attachment stopped being passionate, inspiring, or convenient.

Fernande had been born in Paris on June 6, 1881, four months before Picasso was born in Malaga. At seventeen she had become involved with a shop clerk, Paul-Emile Percheron, and had a son by him. When the child was five months old, Percheron married her, but soon after, both father and son disappeared without a trace, and Fernande married the sculptor Gaston de Labaume. In Fernande's inventive reshaping of her life she had never had a child or a shop-clerk husband. Instead, at seventeen she had had, as she described it, "an extremely unhappy try at marriage," which left her at twenty-two, again in her own words, "already a little disillusioned with life," living alone at the Bateau-Lavoir, as Madame de Labaume.

"For good or for bad," Gertrude Stein would say, "everything was natural in Fernande." She was naturally beautiful, naturally intelligent, naturally creative, and naturally lazy. She painted and drew, but she preferred to expend her creativity in inventing a life, a past, and a new name for herself. The new name was Olivier, and it was as Fernande Olivier that she entered Picasso's world and became his first official mistress and his door to manhood. "There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight," she wrote years later about meeting Picasso, "though his oddly insistent expression compelled one's attention. It would have been practically impossible to place him socially, but his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, gave him a sort of magnetism which I was unable to resist. "

For him, there was a sense of recognition and inevitability. And it was exhilarating to have such a beautiful, worldly woman beside him. He loved the way she looked and the way she dressed and wore her floppy hats with such instinctive grace. But there was also fear and anxiety, prompted by the challenge of adult sexuality and the prospect of a real relationship. In the fall of 1904 Fernande moved in with him. Yet his fears persisted. In Woman Sleeping he painted himself sitting by the bed, lost in anxious thoughts and imaginings, while Fernande lies blissfully asleep. She had surrendered, while he was still troubled by this dramatic change in his life.

Having overcome his anxiety about her living with him, he was now equally anxious that she be with him all the time. He asked nothing from Fernande but to exist as part of his life. He didn't care if she cooked, he didn't expect her to keep their place clean or even to sweep the floor, and he positively forbade her to do the shopping, his jealousy creating nightmarish visions of her being propositioned on the streets of Montmartre and succumbing to other men's advances. His needs perfectly matched her disposition. "Out of a sort of morbid jealousy," she wrote, "[Picasso] forced me to live like a recluse. But with some tea, books, a couch, not much housework to do, I was very, very happy.... I was, I admit, extremely lazy." Her youthful indolence and her unbridled sensuality were the cornerstones of their relationship. She offered Picasso passionate and abandoned sex, at any time that suited the unpredictable rhythm of his work and his equally unpredictable moods. By regularizing his sex life she brought stability to his whole existence. In fact, she brought more than that. Her equanimity balanced his anxiety, and her healthy optimism was an antidote to his depressions—not a potent enough antidote, however, as she herself observed. "This rather sad, sarcastic man, who was sometimes a bit of a hypochondriac, found no consolation but only forgetfulness in his work and in the love of his work, for he always seemed to bear a great grief within him."

With Fernande, Picasso was becoming a man, no longer the adolescent who searched for women in whorehouses and thought only of himself. Fernande's value to him was there for all to see in the metamorphosis that his work underwent. Rose became the dominant color, and circus performers and saltimbanques replaced the derelicts of the blue worlds He still portrayed outsiders, but there was more tenderness and more empathy in this world of the circus. Charles Morice wrote another piece in March of 1905, in which he saluted Picasso's new maturity and his deepened sensibility relative to his earlier work, when "he seemed to take delight in sadness without sympathizing with it."

A FIGURE who began to appear, though in considerable disguise, in Picasso's work in the spring of 1905 was the young poet Guillaume Apollinaire. His first portrayal was in the Family of Saltimbanques, as a big buffoon who presides over the group and combines the qualities of two major archetypes, the jester and the wise old man. He also soon appeared as a youthful giant, hardly an accurate reflection of the plump Apollinaire's physical prowess, but more a subjective portrayal of the poet's intellectual powers and understanding of the ways of the world—qualities that Picasso admired and on which he would often lean as he negotiated his way through the minefield of his life in Paris.

Within days of meeting Picasso this illegitimate son of the daughter of a Polish papal chamberlain, this former tutor and writer-of-all-work, was writing his first promotional piece on him. It also happened to be his first piece of art criticism. He had never before taken any interest in the visual arts and had an even scantier knowledge of them than he had of Prague, where he had set a short story that left readers convinced he had spent his life there.

What he did for Prague he did for the Blue Period. When its existence was revealed to him in Picasso's studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, two days after they met, it was alien to anything he had ever seen or thought about. But when he wrote about it, it was as if he had been its creator.

These children, who have no one to caress them, understand everything. These women whom no one loves now, are remembering. They shrink back into the shadows as if into some ancient church. They disappear at daybreak, having attained consolation through silence. Old men stand about, wrapped in icy fog. These old men have the right to beg without humility.

In Apollinaire, Picasso had also found an advocate who was big enough to contain his contradictions. "It has been said that Picasso's work shows a precocious disillusionment," Apollinaire wrote in the first issue of a small review he was editing.

In my opinion the contrary is true. Everything he sees enchants him and it seems to me that he uses his incontestable talent in the service of an imagination that mingles delight and horror, abjection and delicacy. His naturalism, with its loving precision, has a counterpart in the mysticism which, in Spain, is to be found deeply rooted in even the least religious mind.

These two brilliantly gifted outsiders had first met, toward the end of 1904, at an English bar near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Apollinaire was there, waiting for the train to Le Vesinet, the suburb where he lived with his mother and his brother. The money he made from editing and writing was far too meager to allow him the freedom to live in Paris, away from his increasingly eccentric mother and close to his artist friends.

THE harbingers of freedom from want were Gertrude and Leo Stein. Gertrude Stein, whom Picasso later described as his only woman friend, was in fact more masculine than many of his men friends. "Masculine, in her voice, in all her walk" was the way Fernande described her. "Fat, short, massive, beautiful head, strong, with noble features, accentuated regular, intelligent eyes." She also had a large independent income, superlatively managed by her elder brother, Michael, back in the States, which made her rebellions as well as her independent views and bohemian life-style much easier to sustain. She was twenty-nine when she left Baltimore, having completed her medical studies, which had included a course in surgery. Her brother Leo, bald and bearded and wearing goldrimmed glasses, had in the meantime been living in Florence, painting and immersing himself in art. Fernande remembered, "Too intelligent to care about ridicule, too sure of themselves to bother about what other people thought, they were rich and he wanted to paint." They soon provided the informal focal point of contemporary art. They inspired, they catalyzed, and, even more important at this precarious surge of Picasso's existence, they bought.

Picasso met the Steins at the establishment of Clovis Sagot, a former clown who had turned a pharmacy into an informal art gallery. "Who is the lady?" Picasso asked Sagot. "Ask her if she will pose for me." Leo Stein recalled later that "at the very moment when Picasso was demurely awaiting her word of acceptance, Gertrude was vocally expressing total dislike of the painting they had come to see." The painting was Young Girl With a Basket of Flowers, and Gertrude so hated the girl's feet that she even suggested cutting them out and keeping only the head. Finally Leo prevailed, and the first Picasso, "with feet like a monkey's," entered the Steins' apartment, at 27 rue de Fleurus, intact.

It was at the rue de Fleurus that Picasso met Henri Matisse. They were Gertrude Stein's two great loves, and she wrote a short story, "Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein," to celebrate that love.

Matisse was "very much master of himself," Fernande remembered. "Unlike Picasso, who was usually rather sullen and inhibited at occasions like the Steins' Saturdays, Matisse shone and impressed people.... With his regular features and his thick, golden beard, he really looked like a grand old man of art. He seemed to be hiding though, behind his thick spectacles, and his expression was opaque, gave nothing away, though he always talked for ages as soon as the conversation moved on to painting.

"He would argue, assert and endeavor to persuade. He had an astonishing lucidity of mind: precise, concise and intelligent."

Matisse thought that Picasso and he were "as different as the North Pole is from the South Pole." While Matisse pursued serenity in his life no less than in his art, Picasso was a mirror for the conflicts and anxieties of his age. Matisse's objective was to give expression to what he described as "the religious feeling I have for life.... What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, free of disturbing or disquieting subjects . . . an appeasing influence." Picasso had no clear intellectual objective, only a vague but all-consuming urge to challenge, to shock, to destroy and remake the world. The fascination they extended over each other was the foundation of the relationship that began in Gertrude Stein's living room and that, despite all its up and downs, lasted until Matisse's death, in 1954. It was the fascination of opposites.

"ON the rue de Rennes," Matisse wrote, "I often passed the shop of Père Sauvage. There were Negro statuettes in his window. I was struck by their character, their purity of line. It was as fine as Egyptian art. So I bought one and showed it to Gertrude Stein. And then Picasso arrived. He took to it immediately." Max Jacob's recollection was much more dramatic. "Picasso held it in his hands all evening. The next morning, when I came to his studio, the floor was strewn with sheets of drawing paper. Each sheet had virtually the same drawing on it, a big woman's face with a single eye, a nose too long that merged into the mouth, a lock of hair on the shoulder. Cubism was born."

Cubism was not yet born, but in the fall and winter of 1906 Picasso was definitely pregnant with it. And preparations were under way for the momentous event. He had a canvas mounted on specially strong material as reinforcement and ordered a stretcher of massive dimensions. Years later he talked to Andre Malraux of the moment of conception.

All alone in that awful museum with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting -- yes absolutely!...When I went to the old Trocadero, it was disgusting. The Flea Market. The smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But I didn't leave. I stayed. I stayed. I understood that it was very important: something was happening to me, right?

The masks weren't just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things. But why weren't the Egyptian pieces or the Chaldean? We hadn't realized it. 'Those were primitive, not magic things. The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators; ever since then I've known the word in French. They were against everything—against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! Everything! Not the details— women, children, babies, tobacco, playing—but the whole of it! I understood what the Negroes used their sculpture for. Why sculpt like that and not some other way? After all, they weren't Cubists! Since Cubism didn't exist. It was clear that some guys had invented the models, and others had imitated them, right? Isn't that what we call tradition? But all the fetishes were used for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. They're tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent. Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren't talking about that very much), emotion -- they're all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter.

Everything, the whole of creation, was an enemy, and he was a painter in order to fashion not works of art—he despised that term—but weapons: defensive weapons against the spell of the spirit that fills creation, and offensive weapons against everything outside man, against every emotion of belonging in creation, against nature, human nature, and the God who created it all. "Obviously," he said, "nature has to exist so that we may rape it!"

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon may have come to Picasso in the Trocadero, but there were Iberian influences, Egyptian influences, and many unconscious philosophical influences whose principal perpetrator was a man scarcely five feet tall, with long black hair parted on his large head and falling on his narrow shoulders, and with mad, deep, black eyes. It was Alfred Jarry, the creator of Father Ubu, who in his play Ubu Roi summed up his philosophy of destruction: "Hornsocket! We will not have demolished everything if we don't demolish even the ruins!" Jarry abhorred every aspect of contemporary society -- its bourgeois pretensions, sham, and hypocrisy—and his life no less than his art was devoted to its destruction. He carried a pair of pistols and contrived opportunities to use them to underscore his social role.

Destructiveness was Jarry's rallying call, and a deep, barbaric destructiveness was at the center of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. When Jarry gave Picasso his revolver, he knew that he had found the man who would carry out his mission of destruction. It was a ritual act and was seen as such by all those present at the supper at which Jarry passed on the sacred symbol. "The revolver sought its natural owner," Max Jacob wrote. "It was really the harbinger comet of the new century." So was the explosion that was named Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: five horrifying women, prostitutes who repel rather than attract and whose faces are primitive masks that challenge not only society but humanity itself. Even the Picasso bande was horrified. "It was the ugliness of the faces," the young poet André Salmon wrote, "that froze with horror the half-converted." Apollinaire murmured about revolution, Leo Stein burst into embarrassed, uncomprehending laughter, Gertrude Stein lapsed into unaccustomed silence, Matisse swore revenge on this barbaric mockery of modern painting, and Andre Derain expressed his wry concern that "one day Picasso would be found hanging behind his big picture."

Georges Braque, who had just met Picasso when he saw Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon, in the fall of 1907, knew immediately that nothing less than a revolution was intended. "It made me feel," he said, "as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire." He was shocked, but he was also stirred as he had never been before. Seven months younger than Picasso, he was to become his partner not only in the great pioneering adventure of twentieth-century art but also in a shared intimacy that was rare in Picasso's relationships and unique in his relationships with other painters. "The things Picasso and I said to each other during these years," Braque remembered, "will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being two mountaineers roped together."

To the extent that Picasso felt himself part of a movement, it was a movement made of two. "We worked with enthusiasm," he later said, "and that was the main thing, putting much more into our efforts than usual, for we were involved in them body and soul." It was a quest that transcended ego and personal ambition, and to underline that what they sought was "pure truth without pretension, tricks, or malice," they signed their canvases only on the back to preserve anonymity uncontaminated by personal glory. "Picasso and I were engaged in what we felt was a search for the anonymous personality," Braque said. "We were inclined to efface our own personalities in order to find originality. Thus it often happened that amateurs mistook Picasso's painting for mine and mine for Picasso's. This was a matter of indifference to us, because we were primarily interested in our work and in the new problem it presented."

ON AUGUST 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, a theft that led to national outrage over the security arrangements at the nation's great museum. On August 28 Géry Pieret, a young Belgian dilettante straddling the fence between amusing, unscrupulous inventiveness and mild crookedness, went to the offices of the Paris Journal with an Iberian statuette he had stolen from the Louvre, proudly demonstrating how easy it was to rob the place. Apollinaire read the headline in the next day's Paris Journal and was horrified. Pieret had been working as his secretary and the statuette had been at his home ever since Pieret had removed it from the Louvre. Even worse, a few years earlier Pieret had sold Picasso two other Iberian statuettes, which he had similarly acquired by removing them from the museum. Picasso was enchanted by them and, following Pieret's advice, had kept them hidden at the bottom of an old Norman cupboard. He had hardly given them any further thought until "the Louvre burglaries" hit the front pages of the French press.

Apollinaire and Picasso went into a frantic huddle at the boulevard de Clichy. Terrified that they might be implicated, they decided they had to act. Their first thought, born of their growing panic, was to flee the country. Fortunately, Fernande's common sense prevailed and they decided instead to dispose of the incriminating evidence by throwing the statuettes into the Seine.

After midnight they walked up and down the Seine looking for the right moment to get rid of their burden, but all moments seemed equally filled with risk. Finally, they gave up and returned to Picasso's apartment, where they spent the rest of the night plotting their next course of action. Early the following morning Apollinaire went to the offices of the Paris Journal and delivered the stolen treasures and a major scoop, on condition that the source would not be revealed. The condition was accepted and instantly breached. On the evening of September 7 the police arrived at Apollinaire's apartment, searched all his papers, found letters from Géry Pieret, and arrested him.

Two days later, at seven o'clock in the morning, there was a knock at Picasso's door "As the maid had not come down yet," Fernande remembered, "it was I who opened the door to a plainclothes policeman, who flashed his card, introduced himself and summoned Picasso to follow him in order to appear before the examining magistrate at nine o'clock. Trembling, Picasso dressed with haste, and I had to help him, as he was almost out of his mind with fear.... The bus between Pigalle and the Halle-aux-Vins, in which he had to ride, was haunted for many a day by those unfortunate memories. The detective was not allowed to take a taxi at his client's expense."

The rising anxiety of the past few days, the long wait at the police station, and finally the sight of Apollinaire, being led into the magistrate's office "pale, disheveled and unshaven," according to Fernande, "with his collar torn, his shirt unbuttoned . . . a lamentable scarecrow," completely unbalanced Picasso and drove from his mind every thought of friendship, every vestige of loyalty, and all sense of truth. Only an animal instinct for survival was left, and if that meant denying his friend, so be it. And deny him he did, when he claimed that he had only the most superficial acquaintance with the man who stood before him in trouble and in need of help. Apollinaire started to cry, and Picasso, as if to outdo him, began to tremble and cry at the same time The magistrate discharged him with a warning to stay within reach in case further examination was necessary, and Apollinaire was sent back to the Sante prison.

He was held at the prison for a total of five days, during which he was interrogated again and again regarding the theft not only of the statuettes but also of the Mona Lisa. It was the most devastating experience of the poet's life. From the moment he had been photographed for the criminal records, with handcuffs and without his belt, his tie, or his shoelaces, to his betrayal by the man he had loved and championed, and then to his provisional release by the magistrate, at seven o'clock on September 12, he had endured a nightmare that gave form to his deepest fears and insecurities. But in public he acted as if nothing had changed between him and Picasso, hiding both his dismay and his hurt. Even when he wrote about the whole affair to a friend, he referred to Picasso as "X," never by name.

AT the end of November 1911, there appeared a review by the critic John Middleton Murry in The New Age, of London, which struck a chord that was to reverberate through the years in the response to Picasso's work. "I frankly disclaim any pretension to an understanding or even an appreciation of Picasso," Murry wrote. "I am awed by him.... I stand aside, knowing too much to condemn, knowing too little to praise— for praise needs understanding if it is to be more than empty mouthing." This was the first time that the leitmotif of awe mixed with incomprehension was sounded so clearly in relation to Picasso's work. In the future, praise, not just awe, would unblushingly become a constant companion of incomprehension. The reason for this unlikely pairing was stated by Murry in comparing Plato and Picasso: "I feel convinced," he wrote, "that it is but my weakness that prevents my following them to the heights they reach."

In The Republic Plato expelled all artists from his ideal state, because they merely copied nature, which, in turn, was only a copy of the ultimate reality. "In fact," Picasso said, "one never copies nature, neither does one imitate it.... For many years, cubism had only one objective: painting for painting's sake. We rejected every element that was not part of essential reality." As Murry put it,"Plato was seeking for a Picasso." When, in 1912, Picasso painted the first collage of the twentieth century, Still-Life With Chair-Caning, with a printed oilcloth across the bottom of an oval canvas and a newspaper, a glass, a pipe, and a sliced lemon, he was no longer imitating reality but displacing it. "When people believed in immortal beauty and all that crap," he would say, "it was simple. But now? . . . The painter takes whatever it is and destroys it. At the same time he gives it another life. For himself. Later on, for other people. But he must pierce through what others see—to the reality of it. He must destroy. He must demolish the framework itself." It was the beginning of synthetic Cubism, along the path Picasso had embarked on toward an art of essentials rather than an art of imitation.

At the same time, he had set out on another journey. He was falling in love. During numerous evenings Picasso spent at the Ermitage, his new favorite brasserie, with Fernande, the Polish painter Louis Marcoussis, and Marcelle Humbert, with whom Marcoussis had been living for the past three years, his waning attachment to Fernande was replaced by a growing passion for Marcelle.

The two women were a study in contrast. Gertrude Stein always referred to Fernande as "very large," but she was never larger than when next to Marcelle, who was very small. Fernande was older than Picasso—only four months older, but she suddenly seemed very much older. Marcelle was younger than Picasso -- only four years younger, but next to Fernande, she appeared very much younger. Fernando was temperamental, sometimes unfaithful, sometimes angry-- once so angry that she shook Picasso with enough vigor to shake off a button. Marcelle was so gentle and delicate that she was almost ethereal. Fernande had the flair to be extravagant even when she was starving, while Marcelle had the talent to make the tiniest budget stretch to permit delicious meals and a cozy home. Fernande was a seductress who allowed herself to be seduced, but always with her eyes open. Marcelle was ready to be swept off her feet, to surrender, to love without conditions. Fernande lived as if the world owed her a living. Marcelle did not have the strength to take on the world; she needed someone to protect her, and in return, she gave all of herself. Fernando gave herself if she felt like it, and knew she could survive alone—giving French lessons or pawning her earrings or breaking the rules.

When the increasing distance between her and Picasso became too much for her to bear, Fernando let herself surrender to the charms of Ubaldo Oppi, a young Italian painter who had been introduced to them at the Ermitage by the Futurist Gino Severini. "To live on one woman," Picasso would say later, ". . . was not to be thought of." But to leave a woman was for him emotionally no less difficult. So he waited for Fernande to take the first step. "Fernande left yesterday with a Futurist painter," he wrote to Braque. "What will I do about the dog?" Within twenty-four hours of Fernande's running off with Oppi he had lured Marcelle away from Marcoussis.

To demonstrate how precious Marcelle was to him, Picasso renamed her Eva. It was the name she had been given when she was born, at Vincennes, outside Paris, to Marie-Louise and Adrien Gouel. But, following the fashion of the times, she had invented a new name for herself, and no one knew her any longer as Eva Gouel. By renaming her Eva, Picasso was not only giving her back her original name but also sealing her place in his life as the first woman he truly loved. "Yes, we are together and I'm very happy" was all that he was prepared to disclose even to as trusted a friend as Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. "But don't say anything to anyone," he admonished his dealer.

LIKE a spoiled child who cannot bear sharing affection, Picasso whined to Kahnweiler, who loved Juan Gris and his work, "You know very well that Gris never painted any important pictures." He could not talk away Gris's importance, but neither could he learn to coexist with the younger Spaniard, whom Kahnweiler called the "modest genius," no doubt to distinguish him from his compatriot. Despite calling Picasso "cher maîumflex;tre" and exhibiting his portrait under the title Homage to Pablo Picasso, Gris had become very much his own painter and his own man. And the slightest tinge of rivalry brought out in Picasso the pout, the bark, and the bite. Gris was a Spaniard and yet he had become attached to Matisse, which, in the war going on in Picasso's mind, meant that he had crossed the enemy lines and was siding with the Frenchman.

But there was something about Gris that continued to draw Picasso to him despite his irrational antagonism. Kahnweiler later described Gris as a "firm hand serving a pure soul and a clear mind," and it was this purity that attracted Picasso. In his work he was trying to portray the essence of things, and in his life, despite himself, he kept being pulled to people who seemed closer to that essence. "I felt his friendly presence, his affection always about us," Kahnweiler wrote about Gris. "He was gentle, affectionate, unassuming, but he knew his work was important and he was firm in defending his ideas.... That is what makes Juan Gris such an outstanding figure in art: The complete identity of his life and art . . . He was not only a great painter, but a great man." Picasso's antagonism toward Gris was to become even more virulent as he was confronted with growing evidence of Gris's integrity and his goodness. It was as if he had to disparage and destroy what he did not have or could not possess on his own terms.

ONE of Picasso's favorite pastimes during the first winter of the First World War was learning Russian. It was a project born partly of his fascination with Russia and mostly of his fascination with the Baroness Helene d'Oettingen. Part of Picasso's seductiveness was his willingness to be seduced, and he and the baroness spent many long evenings together, absorbed, as far as the world was concerned, in advancing his knowledge of Russian. Eva, left behind, found herself increasingly often at the mercy of coughing fits. She did everything she could to conceal from Picasso the fact that she was suffering not from a passing bout of bronchitis but from tuberculosis. She hid the bloodstained handkerchiefs and applied thicker and thicker layers of rouge to disguise the pallor of her cheeks. She was terrified that if he knew, he would leave her.

At cafés and in the streets men and women stared at Picasso, full of contempt for an able-bodied man who had stayed behind. He took refuge in sarcasm. "Will it not be awful," he said to Gertrude Stein, "when Braque and Derain and all the rest of them put their wooden legs up on a chair and tell about the fighting?" His humor seemed even blacker when news reached Paris that Braque and Apollinaire had received dreadful head wounds and both would have to be trepanned.

By fall Eva had to be hospitalized. Picasso was living alone for the first time in years. He went to the clinic every day, but he needed someone to console him during the long, lonely nights. He found that someone in Gaby Lespinasse a beautiful twenty-seven-year-old Parisian who had been his neighbor at the boulevard Raspail. She had taken the name of the American-born artist Herbert Lespinasse, who was her lover when her affair with Picasso began. "My life is hell," he wrote to Gertrude Stein. But the sensual drawings of Gaby naked and the whimsical watercolors like The Moonlit Bedroom and The Provencal Dining Room belie his protestations with their playfulness and their ardent inscriptions: "Gaby my love my angel I love you my darling and I think only of you I don't want you to be sad To take your mind off things look at the little dining room I will be so happy with you . . . you know how much I love you . . . Till tomorrow my love it is very late at night with all my heart Picasso."

IN DECEMBER, 1915, the composer Edgar Varese brought Jean Cocteau, the young poet of the glittering salons, to meet Picasso. Cocteau, then twenty-six, had been variously described as walking "with the pride of a wild bird that had dropped by chance into a poultry yard," as evoking more strongly than any other young man Wordsworth's "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," and simply as "the frivolous prince"-- the title of a volume of poems he had published at twenty-one. Impeccably elegant, he wore in his buttonhole one of the gardenias that, rumor had it, he received every day from London. Picasso told his two visitors that he was very much in love with a young woman who was about to die. "I have never forgotten Picasso's studio," Cocteau said forty years later,

because the whole height of its prowlike bay window looked out on the Montparnasse cemetery.... Picasso and I eyed each other for quite a while. I admired his intelligence, and clung to everything he said, for he spoke litte; I kept still so as not to miss a word. There were long silences and Varèse could not understand why we stared wordlessly at each other. In talking, Picasso used a visual syntax, and you could immediately see what he was. saying. He liked formulas and summed himself up in his statements as he summed himself and sculpted himself in objects that he immediately made tangible.

The long silences, the wordless staring, the clinging to Picasso's every word: Cocteau was in love and on the scent of something ultimate. "He fell under Picasso's spell and remained there for the rest of his days," wrote Francis Steegmuller, while Cocteau described their meeting as having been "written in the stars." As for Picasso, the frivolous prince was his bridge to a world he had barely glimpsed, of society, balls and banquets, princesses and counts, virtuosity and yet more uncritical idealization.

A FEW days later, on December 14, Eva died. "My poor Eva is dead," he wrote to Gertrude Stein. "It was a great sorrow . . . she was always so good to me." Ever since his little sister had so suddenly died, it seemed that death was always winning.

IT was the saddest Christmas of Picasso's life. Alone at the rue Schoelcher, haunted by memories of Eva, by sickness and death, he was too distraught even to find refuge in work. Discharged from the Marines, his war over while the war still raged, Cocteau decided to bring Picasso into Sergei Diaghilev's circle. Cocteau's vision was for Erik Satie to write the music and for Picasso to design the costumes and stage sets for a new ballet, Parade. Picasso threw himself wholeheartedly into his new project. On February 16, 1917, he took Cocteau to Gertrude Stein's to introduce him and to announce that they were leaving the next day for Rome. "Voila," they exclaimed on arriving at the rue de Fleurus, "we are leaving on our wedding trip."

"I HAVE sixty dancers,"Picasso wrote to Gertrude Stein. "I go to bed late. I know all the Roman women." What he did not write to Gertrude was that among the sixty dancers of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet was a twenty-five-year-old Russian ballerina whose dainty good looks and restrained bearing had immediately intrigued Picasso and had brought to an end the series of nameless casual encounters that had filled the void since Eva's death. Olga Koklova was the daughter of a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and had been born in Niezin, in the Ukraine, on June 17, 1891. She had left home at twenty-one to join the Diaghilev Ballet. Her talent was too small to compensate for the fact that, by ballet standards, she had started so late, but Diaghilev liked to include in his company girls from a higher social class, even if they were not very good at dancing.

Olga Koklova was, above all, average: an average ballerina, of average beauty and average intelligence, with average ambitions to marry and settle down. For Picasso, who had tried prostitutes, bisexual models, flamboyant bohemians, tubercular beauties, and black girls from Martinique, Olga was so conventional as to be positively exotic. And there was a touch of mystery about her too. This time it was not the mystery of another reality, which Eva had radiated, but the mystery of another country. Picasso had always found all things Russian fascinating, even more so since his encounter with the Baroness d'Oettingen. He, who even at the height of the war read only gossip and the comics, could not read enough about developments in Russia, the uprisings, the fate of the czar, the hopes of the people. In the spring of 1917, Russia fascinated him more than ever. The Revolution had just taken place, the czar had abdicated, and a provisional government had taken power. Many ingredients at that particular moment in history and in Picasso's life combined to transform an average Russian ballerina into a spellbinding creature singled out from the corps de ballet as the object of his lavish attentions.

What Picasso was for Olga was much simpler. Women—and men—were transfixed by his black-marble stare, charmed by "his hands so dark and delicate and alert," enchanted by the unruly forelock of his black hair. Some, like Cocteau, felt "a discharge of electricity" when they met him; others, like Fernande were magnetized by "this radiance, this internal fire one felt in him." Others still were mesmerized by the dashing bohemian who knew about opium and women and cabarets and whorehouses, and were spellbound by his vigor, the secrets he seemed to know and hide, his flair and his showmanship. And there were those who were simply overwhelmed at being in the presence of the sacred monster of Montmartre and Montparnasse, the revolutionary inventor of Cubism. But Olga cared nothing about art except as something to decorate an apartment, was revolted by bohemianism, and was too firmly controlled to allow herself to be swept off her feet by animal magnetism. Also, she was a performer, and her narcissism matched his. So she responded to his advances because he was important in her own immediate world, someone substantial enough to have been chosen by the legendary Diaghilev as the designer for Parade. And she responded with caution and calculation.

The signs of future disaster were there for all to see, but Picasso was somnambulating toward their wedding day as though on a course set by fate. Tired of daring, he was hoping to find with Olga a haven of dignified tranquillity and perhaps even an excuse for daring no more. He wanted to escape from the exhausting search for absolute painting and the absolute in painting to a world of luxurious ordinariness.

Years later he would say that he had settled on Olga because she was pretty and belonged, however tangentially, to the Russian nobility. As a boy in Corunna he had been rejected by the family of his first love, a girl named Angeles, because his social background was not sufficiently distinguished. A quarter of a century later he would settle that score. There was also the wish to ally himself with the elite of position and wealth, a world that was still new to him. Whether or not Olga was the right partner for life, she was unquestionably the right partner for society. The great revolutionary of twentieth-century art fell back in his life on the stale hope of marrying into the aristocracy.

It was the beginning of what the Surrealist painter Matta called Picasso's "Harper's Bazaar" period. "He was so flattered by the attention," Matta said, "that from then on a schizophrenia pervaded his life: between his need for privacy and his need for more and more attention." His chief remaining links with the world of his past were Apollinaire and Max Jacob. On July 12, 1918, Apollinaire, Max, and Cocteau, ambassadors from the past and the future, were witnesses at Picasso's wedding to Olga, performed first in a civil ceremony at the mairie, and then in a sumptuous religious ceremony at the Russian Orthodox church in the rue Daru. Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Diaghilev, Leonide Massine, Vollard, Paul Rosenberg—all were there to see Picasso marry Olga with pomp and circumstance, incense, flowers, and candles.

ON FEBRUARY 4, 1921, Olga gave birth to a son they called Paulo. The pride and delight of being a father pushed Picasso's anguish into the background and inspired a series of tender sketches recording Paulo's first months. Sometimes, as if aware of the dramatic changes wrought during a child's first year, he recorded not only the date but the hour at which the drawings were done. Soon, however, the uneasy feeling appeared again, in a succession of pictures of mother and child, isolated and inaccessible in their own world. There are male children but no men in this world, where time stands still—not in blissful timelessness but in a lumpish immobility from which every ounce of life's vital energy has been drained. And when there is activity, it is in slow motion, sluggish and leaden, a kind of absentminded surrender to the force of gravity.

Olga was lethargically but obsessively preoccupied with little Paulo. There were servants to ease her burden—nurse, chambermaid, chauffeur, cook—yet emotionally she was incapable of stretching beyond the nursery or the ossified niceties of fancy balls and opening nights.

ON MAY 22 Cuadro Flamenco, Picasso's fourth Diaghilev ballet, premiered atthe Gaite-Lyrique. It was no more than an echo of what had gone before, and this time Picasso had effectively invited himself to do the sets and costumes—and for the meanest of reasons. Diaghilev had originally commissioned Juan Gris to design the ballet, but when Gris arrived in Monte Carlo, where the company was based in April, he discovered to his amazement that his services were no longer required. "I don't know just what happened," he wrote to Kahnweiler. Picasso knew. Gris, his health already failing, had been late with his designs. And Picasso, a master of intrigue, with whose machinations Gris was unequipped to compete, immediately started spreading the rumor that Gris was too sick to do the job. To drive his point home to Diaghilev more forcefully, he sent his own sketches for the ballet, which were little more than a rehash of sets—a stage within a stage—that he had prepared for an earlier ballet and that Diaghilev had turned down. This time he accepted them, and Picasso won a double, hollow victory: he beat Diaghilev into submission and he beat Gris out of a glamorous job.

PICASSO and Olga saw 1922 in at a New Year's Eve party given by the Count de Beaumont. Midnight approached, and one of the most important guests had not yet arrived. The host announced that Céleste, Marcel Proust's housekeeper, had just telephoned for the tenth time, to find out if the house was drafty and if the herb tea for which she had given the recipe was ready. "Finally at midnight," wrote the painter Jean Hugo in his diary, "there was a sort of stir in the crowd and we knew that Proust had arrived. He had entered together with the new year, the year of his death.... His pale face had become puffy; he had developed a paunch. He spoke only to dukes. 'Look at him,' Picasso said to me, 'he's still on his theme."' Picasso may not have read Proust, but he had absorbed him.

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