Picasso

Patrick O’Brian “Picasso: A Biography   G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976, 492 pp.

If you read this book, keep your computer close by.  Apparently it was the decision of the author, or the publisher, not to include illustrations in the book. So, I used my computer search engine and readily brought selected paintings & sculptors to my screen which made the discussions much more understandable.  Reading this book when published in 1976, without such an assist, would have been frustrating--I believe I would have just given up.  Anyway, my motivation for reading about Picasso was my puzzlement of why anyone would be attracted to cubism.  Every once in a great while I kind of like an abstract work, but mostly not.  When I was much younger, I thought certain artists, maybe the ones who couldn’t draw, were playing a joke on the gullible.  Of course, Gertrude Stein could not be considered gullible and she had a lot to do with launching Picasso’s career, they first met in 1905.   Anyway, the book establishes that Picasso probably had the greatest work ethic of any artist of the 20^th century.  He lived 91 years, dying in 1973 without a will (he was superstitious about even mentioning death) and an estate probably worth a billion dollars in 2013 money.

Picasso's output was very much related to the changing women in his life.  His treatment and opinion of women is best illustrated by the comment he made to his mistress, Francoise Gilot, that women were either “goddesses or doormats.”

My Notes:

Pg. 140:  Picasso was genuinely fascinated by Gertrude Stein’s appearance: his eye detected qualities in her massive person that were concealed from the world in general, for by ordinary standards her looks cannot have recommended her at any time.  She sat for him eighty or ninety times.  His meeting with Stein led to his meeting and life-long friendship with Matisse.

Pg. 151:  Picasso’s 1909 painting “Demoiselles d’Avingnon” is one of the most important paintings of the twentieth century.  In 1937 he painted Guernica (something even I like).