Showing posts with label child prodigy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label child prodigy. Show all posts

14/03/2014

My Kid Could Paint That


In the last week of July 2008, Carol, Steve and I watched My Kid Could Paint That another great art documentary featured on BBC4. The documentary tracked the media sensation of Maria Olmstead a four-year-old ‘child-prodigy’ of abstract paintings - whose reputation and that of her parents - was then undermined by questions about the father’s involvement in the making of the little girls paintings.                                                                                                                            
When I was a child my mother did everything in her power to belittle my artistic ambitions, my drawings and my study – so to see these parents bill-and-coo over every childish scrawl made by Maria made me pause for thought. 

At first, her father showed her paintings in a bar. Later in a gallery run by a disgruntled photo-realist painter - who wanted to get back at an art world that valued his paintings which he had worked on for months – lower than a canvas by an abstract painter who had slapped his together over a long night. She became an overnight media star on American television and started selling her canvases for up to £20,000. Then a Sixty-Minutes special on her – questioned whether she had painted her large canvases by herself. The family had agreed to let the producers film her painting. However the painting she painted on film - lacked the polish, finish and focused intensity of the canvases she had previously exhibited and sold.                                                                                                 

The documentary recorded the sudden fall from grace of this little girl’s parents and her innocence amidst some very unsavoury adult characters.             
                                           
The parents then made their own film of Maria painting – and that canvas too, lacked the power of her exhibited paintings. However, it did look like the last painting she had made on film. I was convinced that her shifty father had been responsible for most of the final work on her paintings. Not that it mattered a dam – her abstract paintings – regardless of who made them – were pointless and crude pastiches of Abstract-Expressionist painters like Pollock, Hoffman, Still and Kline – over sixty years after the fact.      
                                                                                             
For a six year old, to paint abstract scrawls on canvases - with paints bought and put in place by her father – and under his advice was outrageously crass. That she became so successful only proved again to me how senseless art had become. She was nothing but a pawn in an adult game of promotion, hype, greed and deception. You could have taken any half-way talented six year old – supplied them with large professional canvases and paints and achieved the same results. Picasso was a real child prodigy – he made things even very talented adults couldn’t make. ‘Prodigies’ like Maria simply made paintings anyone could make.        
                                                                                
The Abstract-Expressionists were not children – they were mature men who had paid their dues and pursued their vision through many hard times. The originality, ambition and vision of their art, was based on complex avant-garde ideas - not traditional hard won techniques. Pollock, Rothko, Kline and de Kooning spent decades learning their trade, developing their vision and evolving their signature styles. To parody them was easy. But, to come up with something as original and groundbreaking was far harder – just ask any young art student.

13/03/2014

In The Shadow of Pablo Picasso

“I am God, I am God, I am God…” 
Picasso overheard by the Catalan sculptor Apelles Fenosa in the 1930s, John Richardson, Picasso a Life: Volume One 1881-1907. New York: Random House, 1991, P.463.
 

“I know of no better purpose in life than to be destroyed by that which is great and impossible!”
 Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-6.


“Besides aspiring to be a great modern painter – another Picasso no less – the deluded Bemberg aspired to be a great composer… Since Bemberg’s paintings were said to resemble his, I asked Picasso whether they had been copies. “Worse,” the artist said “Bemberg was mad, thought he was me, and wanted to paint his own Picassos.” The mere thought of identity theft so terrified Picasso that he refused to discuss the matter…The almost-ninety-year-old Picasso had been terrified by the mere sight of the drawings. “Don’t touch them, don’t touch them, he cried. “They are not by me, they are a madman’s drawings.”
John Richardson, Picasso A Life: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, Vol.3, P142, 143 & P201, 2007.


Raw ambition in a teenager is just that – raw. Young men seek to conquer the world, yet their ambition is innocent and ignorant of all the obstacles the real world provides. This was the case with me when in 1988 - I turned to face the challenge of Picasso. For over a year, Egon Schiele had been the principal artist with whom I had done battle - and I had begun to stupidly feel that I could eventually surpass the Austrian’s early achievements (in fact I could never acquire his genius for line no matter how hard I tried.) However, as I was to find out, taking on the mantle of Picasso was quite another matter. Picasso’s success and subsequent fame is impossible to underestimate. He was counted alongside Einstein in science and Joyce in writing as amongst the twentieth century’s greatest geniuses. In art there was Picasso and then the also-rans. 
              

Even by the time, I started the race, I had already lost. I tried by means of deception to make it appear that I was more precocious, but even at that I failed! I can laugh about it now, but as Morrissey might have said, “...at the time it was terrible.” My second girlfriend Carol, was shocked and observed, “I can’t believe you let a dead man ruin your life!” Despite the wreckage that my unhealthy competition with Picasso created – I do not regret a minute of it. I did not believe in God, but I believed in Picasso, and to this day I still do. His example made me work harder than I otherwise would have, and he enriched my life as an art lover immeasurably. In fact, my life would lose a lot of its meaning if the influence of Picasso was erased. Along with figures such as Egon Schiele, Vincent van Gogh, Morrissey, Fredrick Nietzsche, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Richardson, Robert Hughes and Brian Sewell, Picasso has shaped my views on art, creativity and stubborn individualism.

I remember when in Sandford Park Prep school in Dublin I brought my new paintings in for my art teacher to look at – I was about eleven. My wonderfully supportive teacher Mrs Glackin looked at my work with undisguised delight and then said: “I see you are in your Green Period at the moment!” “Em, yes Miss!” I replied somewhat bemused. “Do you know Picasso? He had his Blue and Rose Period. You are doing your Green Period!” She exclaimed. That sent me off to look at some of his work. I probably had heard his name – in the way I had heard names like Elvis, Marilyn Monroe or John Lennon – and it rang with the same mythic quality. Looking at his work (mostly his later work) I found it bemusing – so much of it seemed childish and wrong. At the time my heroes where Impressionists like Degas – so I found it hard to appreciate Picasso’s distortions of form.

Virtually every critic I have ever read, writing about Picasso’s early work ask the question “if Picasso died at nineteen or twenty-five would he ever have been remembered by art history”. The answer to which is, he would not have been remembered by art history before Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. But for me as a young artist - such a question missed the point entirely. For me the more important question was “if Picasso had not been such a prodigy and workaholic as a youth, would he ever have achieved what he did with Cubism so early in life, or would that achievement have had as much credibility”. As a young artist trying to become a great artist, I thought the most important question was “how did Picasso train himself to become such a fluent genius in later life”. Many historians, to my mind, criminally started their studies on Picasso with his work after 1900 and completely ignored his academic training. But for me it was like talking about a tree - without any study of its roots. 
             

So, over the years I tried to expand my knowledge of Picasso’s apprenticeship and as I did - my fear of Picasso and his achievements grew. But I fooled myself into thinking I had time to reach his level!  Until one cold, blustery, rain-soaked day early in April 1988 (while truant from Sandymount High School), I retreated from St. Stephen’s Green for the warmth of Hodgis Figgis bookshop on Dawson street – which at the time had the largest and most select art book section in Dublin. I found and instantly bought a small book on Picasso written by Josep Palau I Fabres. What made this book on Picasso so different to the others that I had previously seen was the importance it gave to Picasso’s early childhood and teenage works – of which there were about 37 in a book of over 150 plates, covering his art from 1890-1973. One small painting in the book jumped out at me: Salon del Prado - Madrid 1897- a tiny oil painting (6”x 4”) on a wooden panel, depicting a rain swept park which was painted when Picasso was sixteen and playing truant from Art College in Madrid! Had these early Picasso paintings been by a mature artist, I would not have paid them much attention, but the fact that they were made when he was so young made them infinitely more interesting and since I found in the early works of all artists the seeds of their later achievements, they told me about the skills he later suppressed in order to create original modern statements.

Picasso’s early work refutes the claim that my child could do that. Since even most talented adults could not draw and paint like the teenage Picasso. These youthful works painted by Picasso from the age of nine to twenty shocked me to the core. Lost in my own fantasy world I had built up a very high opinion of my talents over the years – thinking myself a potential genius.  When I saw what the young Picasso had done at my age and younger, I nearly collapsed in a heap. Before Picasso had turned twenty, he had already made over a thousand artworks. And compared with the youthful Spaniards work, my drawings and paintings were crude, adolescent, and deranged. I was a clumsy, naïve and mannered draughtsman, a ham-fisted painter and an emotional cripple - I discovered that Picasso was at least ten years ahead of me technically. Yet, compared to my more expressive, sexually explicit and psychologically wayward works, the Spaniard’s was more conventional and obedient. I wanted to be the next Picasso, but in fact I was little better than his mentally unstable and impotent friend Casagemas who killed himself after the girl he loved flaunted her flirtations with other men in front of him. 
            

In the course of one day, I realized how great an effort of will would be required of me if I were to compete with his legacy. Every week I would browse Waterstones and Hodges-Figgis bookstores - poring over every book on the Spaniard I could find. There seemed no end to the new work by him that I discovered in book after book. For the next three years I could feel his oppressive presence breathing down my neck - ridiculing my finest efforts. After destroying all of my early works (1980-1986, totalling about 200 works) in March 1987, my total oeuvre age seventeen in 1988 amounted to only about 60 watercolours, drawings and alkyd paintings. By my age, Picasso had already spectacularly entered and left three art academies, achieved excellent marks in drawing and painting, exhibited nationally and won medals at exhibitions. In Picasso: The Early Years 1881-1907 by Josep Palau I Fabre which has only a selection of Picasso’s early work there were 131 oil paintings, 13 watercolours and pastels and 136 drawings made by Picasso from 1890-1898. In Je Suis Le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso Ed. Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher, Picasso’s drawings in sketchbooks (a selection of which were also shown in Picasso: The Early Years 1881-1907 by Josep Palau I Fabre) listed around 820 drawings in sixteen sketchbooks made by Picasso between 1894-1888. So, even before I started to try to compete with Picasso at the age of seventeen – I was hopelessly out of the race especially as an oil painter and draughtsman. Struggling to compete with Picasso I knew Jackson Pollock's rage when he had ranted over forty years earlier: “That fucking Picasso! He’s fucking done everything!” Feeling cruelly treated by fate, I saw myself as the accursed shadow of Picasso. I knew I possessed Picasso's Napoleonic egotism and plans for world domination - but I also knew that I lacked his natural gift for art, his impeccable training, his sheer technical skill, his charisma, his virility and his mental health. All this obsession did was to turn me into a production machine – incapable of discrimination. It also gave my ambitions a second-hand quality. Looking back on my own upbringing, I resented Picasso's happy and supportive family and early paternal instruction in art. However, through a form of magic-thinking, I sought to compensate for my lack of technical finesse with expressive intensity, painterly aggression and sexual provocation.
   


Picasso was 60 years old when he started a relationship with the 21-year-old Francois Gilot. Years, later in 2001, I remember watching Picasso: Magic, Sex & Death and being shocked to hear his lover François Gilot who was forty years his junior when they met say: “I started to paint very young and I was forty years younger than him. So, I was at the beginning of my career, he was well established, well it would have been perhaps more difficult if we had been the same age. I thought my work was in front of me and a number of his works were behind him. And I did not compare myself to him that would have been stupid. I had a certain amount of confidence in myself and certainly if I didn’t have confidence in myself I certainly would not have dared to be with him.” (François Gilot interviewed in Picasso: Magic, Sex & Death, Episode 3, Channel Four, 2001.) Frankly, although I knew my obsession with Picasso was irrational and abnormal and I knew I was mentally deranged, naïve and socially autistic – I still found the presumptuousness of the likes of Gilot staggering. For me this interview highlighted the stupendous self-confidence of a talentless, attractive nubile woman who actually thought she was the equal of an aging genius because nature and frankly media culture considered them equals. Never in my whole life, did I ever have the self-confidence to think in any way that I was the equal of my heroes like Picasso, Basquiat or Schnabel. But then as far as nature and Post-Modern culture was concerned the lives of individual young white men were entirely disposable. Moreover, I was born into a culture and art world that despised white men and did everything to undermine masculinity and promote meretricious feminity for the sake of historical retribution. François Gilot vengefully laid bare Picasso’s life in a way he had never done to her or any other women. In fact, Picasso was known for his discretion. But in the art world of the mid-1960s her book was lapped up. Since no one on the planet had Picasso’s creative ability or accomplishments - members of the art world relished his slandering. Moreover, since Feminists were still waiting for any female artist with even a tenth of Picasso’s ability to justify their claims to equality - they made up for their lack - by emasculating Picasso through black propaganda. Yet, in a way Gilot was right when she claimed that to “compare myself to him that would have been stupid”. Because I had foolishly thought that to be the greatest artist - you had to compete with them and hopefully match them. But in the debased art world at the end of the Twentieth century, success had nothing to do with matching the past. Since all conventional artistic standards had been evacuated and art world success was just about conforming to liberal clichés and politically correct slogans. Nobody wanted another male genius like Picasso - and if he had existed, he would have been ridiculed into poverty and an unmarked grave. So, by the new millennium, the art world did not want the best artists they wanted the most virtuous and well-behaved artists preferably of ethnic origins, female and with a history of victimhood.         
          

Most artists struggle to become artists often in defiance of their family. But Picasso was raised from childhood to be an artist. His father trained him like an Olympic athlete in all the disciplines of art, as well as encouraging and cultivating him. Picasso was a beloved, supported, and worshiped child prodigy and he was supported in every possible way as a young artist by his father and family. However, I was an ignored, loathed, pitied, and misunderstood prodigy. Picasso was an easy-going boy with many friends and an easy way with women notable for the humanity of his earliest artworks and his love for other people. Whereas I was a spoilt brat - turned truculent teenager - through childhood abuse. Picasso was always very mature for his age, whereas I was notoriously immature. Unlike Picasso, I loathed other people, despised my teachers and fellow pupils, and could not bring myself to talk to girls. My art was a sinister, anti-social act of defiance against my whole society which I loathed. Picasso spent his life proving himself to art teachers, fellow artist, critics, intellectuals, and women. I on the other hand, spent my life alienating people, and turning them against me in my writings. While even Picasso’s earliest work not only displayed an extraordinary technical ability – it also displayed a precocious understanding of other people. My art never had the quiet, subtle, and detailed technical quality of Picasso’s early work. Because I was unteachably self-deluded, and crudely and insanely self-taught. Just as my grandiose and florid prose was full of extremely basic spelling and grammatical mistakes, so too was my drawing and painting. I wanted the same kind of adulation, fame, and success as Picasso – but I hated my audience and wanted them to love my art - even though I had nothing but contempt for them. But most importantly, while virtually all Picasso’s early work recorded the people he knew or agreed to pose for him, the places he visited and the whores in brothels he frequented – virtually all my youthful artworks were copies from other artists paintings or copies of photographs, video screengrabs or pornographic magazine pages. Picasso’s early paintings recorded his debauched life – mine was only a psychologically warped form of pornographic fan art. While the young Picasso lived life intensely, recording everything around him – I lived the life of bedroom artist merely reflecting what I found in mediated imagery. Picasso’s young art was all about life – whereas my art was all about my reinterpretation of media. While Picasso’s early work was remarkable for its maturity, judgement, humanity and love and concern for others – my early work was remarkable for its immaturity, cynicism, nihilism, and misanthropy.

The twentieth century was a period of unprecedented stylistic innovations, artistic gimmicks and more individual artists than in all the previous centuries of Western art combined. It was a tribute to Modern art historians that any of this story had any shape or meaning to it at all. Movements, artists and oeuvres were whittled down and down, to a few telling styles – moving in a certain direction (from alla-prima Impressionist paintings with their sketchy brushstrokes, to Cubist deconstruction of form, then on to abstraction of many kinds, and finally, at the end of the century, to conceptualism.)  There were a few key artists of originality, skill and intelligence who had created or defined the master movements – Matisse’s Fauvism, Picasso and Braque’s Cubism, Kirchner’s Expressionism, Duchamp’s Dada, Dalí’s Surrealism, Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism, Warhol’s Pop Art and so on. Of course, such a reduction was grossly simplistic, although it was necessary to give order to a tale of such complexity. As such, Picasso came to define Modern art – it’s greatest and most protean creator – but also one who’s work had anticipated, founded or pastiched so many of its different stylistic tributaries. 
            

There was Picasso the Classicist yet there was also Picasso the pseudo-Expressionist and pseudo-Primitive and pseudo-child and in everything he made there was an element of pastiche. Yet, while Picasso was never a true Expressionist artist, he still influenced many of them. But Picasso was never a spiritual or emotional artist like Rembrandt or van Gogh. In fact, he was an actor of styles - some he borrowed - others he created. He was the virtuoso master of style of the twentieth century. So, while I marvelled at Picasso’s manipulation of form - I never really felt the kind of emotional or ecstatic response to his work that I did with others like van Gogh, Munch, Gerst, Schiele, Soutine or Pollock. 


My favourite Picasso periods were from 1891-1901 and from 1961-1973, or his work as a stunning prodigy and his work as an impotent man raging against death. In other words, his most immature, personal and emotive periods. Picasso was an artist that would have achieved greatness in any era of art. Duchamp, Manzoni, Kosuth, Beuys and Emin and all those others artist from Dada to Conceptualism on the other hand could never have achieved success in any era but Modernism - when farce was embraced as revolutionary and publicity stunts were a sure-fire way to attract interest and sales. To suggest otherwise is to akin to suggesting that clowns don’t need the circus.

By today’s standards he was politically incorrect; macho, self-centred, misogynistic, superstitious, a self-made multi-millionaire, a maker of handmade art works (in an age mechanical production and later just concepts), a lover of bull fighting, a chain smoker and the last great standard bearer for the white male genius. Picasso had a Janus-faced attitude to social life, fame and the public. He cherished the solitude of his studio, yet he also enjoyed the interest of the public - but only on his terms.   

In many ways Picasso was the last embodiment of an academic training system that had formed Western art for three hundred years and he was the last great Classical artist. If one compares Picasso to another talented young artist like Max Beckman who was born just three years after Picasso but fell short of Picasso’s youthful genius - one can see how few credible artists of the Twentieth century possessed Picasso’s preternatural abilities, sense of classical form and restraint and his ability to sublimate. If one compares the academic figure compositions Beckman made in his early to mid-twenties with those made by Picasso when he was just fourteen and fifteen one can see that Beckman’s psychological turmoil prevented him from making convincing academic art like the young Picasso. When Beckman tried to use an academic approach with contemporary subjects like the sinking of the Titanic – the results were wholly unconvincing. Beckman’s work lacked the measured and idealised qualities of academic art and it buckled with a quaking proto-Expressionist desire for direct expression that totally undermined the objectivity of academicism. Yet, with a good grounding in academic approaches, Beckman went on to produce some of the most powerful Expressionist art of the Twentieth century. Whereas it could be argued that Picasso never became anything more than a dazzling manipulator of form unable to ever confess his real feelings in art. One could suggest that an artist like Balthus approached the grandeur of academic art, but his work was undermined by a sordid perversity that today would have had him up in front of an ethics committee in an Art College and then expelled!
 


Born as the ancestral tradition of art in Europe was about to give out its death rattle, Picasso was one of the last to profit from a rigours academic training, even if he was to come to revolt against everything it stood for and do more than anyone apart from Marcel Duchamp to destroy it. As Picasso said, his art was a “series of destructions”. Picasso came to believe his academic training and father’s tutorship had robbed him of a truly creative childhood and said that he had “never painted like a child”. Indeed, there was nothing natural about 19th century realism it was as unnatural as one could get – a series of insights into composition, perspective, proportion, shading and colour that went against natural inclination. So, Picasso’s whole career could in fact be seen as a development in reverse – from mastery to childish spontaneity. Many would imitate the worst extremes of his later gestural fecklessness - but they could never win the right to it the way he had.
            

When MoMA staged the largest ever retrospective of Picasso in 1980 the effect on the overhyped and deluded New York art world was devastating. The retrospective exposed the claims of genius of most American artists to be nothing but a sham, and artists and writers alike, whinged about the big bully Picasso, like little children robbed of all their self-delusions. While many of the attributes that determine the reputation of an artist include nebulous qualities such as depth of style, maturity and vision, other crasser barometers of genius like precocity, technical virtuosity, originality, innovation, scandal, influence, productivity and fame are far more easily quantified. Picasso achieved levels of excellence in all of these media beloved barometers as well as all the more ambiguous elitist qualities - making him not only revered amongst artists but also among the general public.  Picasso was a showman, who loved to astonish and entertain his audience, a quality I eschewed. He drew in pencil, charcoal, and pastel.  He etched, lino-cutted and lithographed.  He collaged, potted, sculpted and constructed.  Furthermore, he painted in oils, watercolour, and gouache - achieving high degrees of mastery in all these mediums. In Cubism, he invented the single most influential modernist movement, as well as working in Naturalist, Realist, Symbolist, Neo-Impressionist, Neo-Classical, Surrealist and Expressionist styles. Moreover, in 1937 he painted Guernica, the greatest political painting of the century. His career as a painter spanned eight decades.  By the time he died, he was the richest, most famous, and most prolific serious artist in human history.
             

In his art, Picasso wanted to please and impress his public - but he also wanted to confound and confront them. Hence his split-personality desires to prove both his classical virtuosity and his modern barbarity. Likewise, in his portraits of women he could both idealize them like a Renaissance master and denigrate them like a misogynistic sociopath.
             

Much was made of Picasso the supposed anarchist and iconoclast, but there was also Picasso the commercial whore who often painted works guaranteed buyers and public approval – mothers and children, tame nudes and society portraits and if you liked any one version of these subjects, he could also offer you twenty other slightly different versions too. Picasso famously painted over 10,000 canvases. Or to put that another way, the collectors of Europe and America financed Picasso so that he could spend over €300,000 (at today’s prices) painting 10,000 canvases and funded their storage in Picasso’s many mansions. And that was quite apart from these collectors lobbying as members of museum boards for the Picasso paintings they had bought to be enshrined in museums all around the world.
 

Though, Picasso saw himself as a law onto himself, his career as visual shaman was supported by his tribe at the expense of many others. He may have broken the laws of perspective but apart from being found in possession of stolen artefacts and having sex with a seventeen-year-old Marie-Thèrése Walter when he was fifty, Picasso broke virtually no social rules - quite unlike the murderer Caravaggio or Egon Schiele who by today’s standards would be convicted of production of child sexual abuse imagery. He may have had Napoleonic self-belief and supernatural ability – but his character was more comprehensible to the public than that of oddballs like van Gogh or Dalí and his art rarely possessed the anguish typical of Expressionists or the perversion of Surrealist artists. 
             

Picasso scholars have identified over 40 different periods or styles in the Spanish master’s oeuvre, probably making him the most varied serious artist in art history. According to the ongoing Online Picasso Project, the most detailed and up to date catalogue of Picasso’s work, between 1891-1973 Picasso produced; 4,530 oil paintings, 864 gouaches, 1,039 watercolours, 363 pastels, 333 collages, 12,916 drawings, 1,660 uncategorised works, 3,194 engravings, 992 lithographs, 843 sculptures, 1,685 ceramics as well as 324 photographs. So, in an eighty-two-year period, Picasso made a total of 28,743 surviving catalogued works. Moreover, he made all this with his own hands, unlike Warhol, Koons or Hirst. And the surviving oeuvre of Picasso – though enormous, will never be truly complete.  Countless numbers of his early works have been lost, painted over by the artist or destroyed by his or others’ hands – as recorded so well by John Richardson in his Life of Picasso Vol.1. Indeed, Picasso summed up his attitude to art when he said: “I believe in nothing but work. You cannot have an art without hard work: manual as well as cerebral dexterity.” (Picasso quoted in Picasso a Life: Volume One 1881-1907, John Richardson, New York: Random House, 1991, P.48.)
 

Yet, Picasso’s manic productivity was a challenge to conventional connoisseurship - the most important evaluation of any artists real worth. So, let us be clear of one thing - Picasso’s productivity was a slap-dash kind of productivity. Few of his paintings were as technically demanding as say a Van Eyck, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Delacroix or even Lucian Freud. As they say, the devil is in the details, and throughout his career Picasso avoided the complication of details and minute finish. Seen overall, his work was always striking and powerful, yet up close, his application of paint could be crude and slap-dash and his rendering of details like eyes and feet was generalized and often very clumsy. 
             

Apart from his virtuosity, bohemian poverty, his numerous women and mindboggling wealth and success, Picasso’s private life was uninteresting and given over almost totally to the creation of art. Picasso was an egotistical, cruel and selfish man, utterly obsessed with his own creativity – his only drugs were unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes and art. He drank little, though he did experiment with opium and hashish. The ethereal and edgy look of his Blue Period and the languid heat of the Rose period may in part have been influenced by the supine quality of the opium high and its melancholy come down. However, he quit opium after seeing the effect it had on other artists in Montmartre, such as Modigliani. His comments on art were wise and enigmatic but he lacked the literary gifts of Delacroix or van Gogh. Picasso had a knack of putting down the gifts of other artists he plainly did not possess. He put down the Renaissance masters as theatrical, Bonnard’s art as a “potpourri of indecision” (Gilot and Lake 1964, P.271-72.) Even Braque his partner in the creation of Cubism was domesticated in his mind as his wife. 
            

Though, Picasso came to view his art as a visual autobiography, Picasso’s art was mostly extrovert and thus lacked the inner dialogue and self-awareness that makes truly autobiographical art so engaging. Picasso’s virtuosity and joyous creativity - lacked the humanity and tragic depth of other greats like Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, van Gogh or Pollock. 
         

Picasso was masterfully in control of his art and every style, as well as every woman he encountered. He did not drop his guard, expose himself, or make confessionals. He was always masterful, dominant and in control. He played art like a game, not a confessional - and fucked women as a dominant, not a submissive! I on the other hand had little control over either my art or relationships with women. 
 

Picasso married twice and had five other serious sexual relationships, fucked hundreds of groupies had countless encounters with prostitutes. As his fame grew so too did his sexual confidence and as he got older his partners got younger. Ironically, as a cold-blooded sexual predator, he exploited Women’s Liberation after World War II, to fuck countless free-spirited girls. Like a vampire, Picasso fed off the macho energy he acquired through endless conquests of female lovers and a series of serious relationships with women who acted as muses and each brought a new perspective on life that could inspire his art towards fresh directions. Writers like Arianna Huffington liked to later portray Picasso as a sadistic, misogynistic control freak, and this was true – but most of the women in his life knew what they were letting themselves in for. As the English Comedian Mrs Merton might have asked the likes of Ms Gilot, “What was it that attracted you to the world-famous, multi-millionaire genius Pablo Picasso?” It is pious naivety to think these women did not know what they were doing and that he merely abused them. He may have been short, pudgy, bald and old – but he was also Picasso! Personally speaking, I attended many night classes in art schools, and I never saw any of the pretty twenty-year old girls flirting with the short, fat, bald sixty-year-old bus drivers in the room! In fact, many of those that knew the women in Picasso’s life like; Fernande Oilver, Olga Koklova, Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Marr, Francois Giolt and Jacqueline Roque – observed that they competed for his attention and against each other. However, time and time again, these women were to discover that Picasso had only one true love – his art. He sacrificed everything for it and expected those close to him to do the same – that was the price of friendship with Picasso. Living in to his nineties, Picasso outlived his critics and enemies, became a figure of myth to the young and acquired the uncritical adoration only accorded legends. But he never escaped his terror of death and compulsive need to produce. 
            

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on 25th October 1881 in Malaga, Spain. It was in his late teens that Picasso changed from signing his canvases Pablo Ruiz Picasso, to simply Picasso, his mother’s maiden name. It was just one of his many Oedipal gestures - made to erase his father’s influence on his early art. He was a Scorpio – creative, passionate, headstrong, sexual, jealous and vengeful. Pablo was his parents’ first born and only son – he was followed a few years later by his sisters Lola and then Conchita (who would die at the age of four.) His father José Ruiz Blasco was a painter and teacher in the local School of Fine Arts and Crafts, and he was most famous for his pictures of pigeons. It was his father who first taught Picasso the basics of drawing and painting.

As I have mentioned, early writers on Picasso ignored his early work – the art he made before he became the Modernist superstar Pablo Picasso. It was only in the early 1970s that the extent of his early work began to be appreciated. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona alone has 213 oil paintings on canvas and board, 681 drawings pastels and watercolours on paper and seventeen sketchbooks and albums with 826 pages of drawings. Moreover, fourteen of the paintings and 504 of the drawings have other works on the back of them. So, in total, The Museu Picasso in Barcelona has 2,200 works made by the young Picasso between the age of nine in 1890 and twenty-three in 1904. The works vary in size from less than 4” x 4” (10 x 10cm) up to 78.8” x 99.7” (197 x 249.4cm). Yet most are surprisingly small even tiny. These works included works from life, his imagination and memory, works from plaster casts and life models in academies, sketches of people in the streets, landscapes, seascapes, portraits, animal figures, self-portraits and caricatures. The young Picasso’s works varied from quick sketches and oil studies to fully finished drawings and paintings.
 

The importance of Picasso the prodigy - is that the exalted and wilful attitude of one who could create like others daydream, shaped Picasso the virtuoso of all styles. As Robert Hughes observed: “Prodigy is analogous to the divine right of kings – always present, a force beyond argument or development.” (Robert Hughes, Anatomy of a Minotaur, Time, 1st November 1971.) From early on Picasso knew how to take a shape or colour from one artist, mix it with the style and line of another and add to them both a mercurial interpretation of his own to create works that were alternatively verged on pastiche or went beyond pastiche into something truly original. For Picasso art history was not something to be ignored, derided or forgotten – it was a goldmine of inspiration to build upon or destroy at whim.
 

Yet, proving that the egotism of some artists is never satisfied, Picasso when visiting an exhibition of children’s art was quoted by Ronald Penrose saying: “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.” (Pablo Picasso quoted by Ronald Penrose in Picasso: His Life and Work. London: Victor Gollancz LTD, 1958, P. 275.) But while Picasso was an astonishing prodigy he never drew like or as well as Raphael when young - or when old either for that matter. Moreover, Picasso’s bizarre later ambition to abandon all ancestral skills - to try to make art like a child was symptomatic of the bankruptcy of European Art and society. Though I think that coming as it did after World War Two, it was a reaction against all the evils brought upon the world by adults.
 

The earliest surviving work by Picasso is his drawing of Hercules (1890) which he executed at the age of nine. In the same year he painted Picador, his first oil painting – both are childish and naïve – the sense of anatomy and perspective is limited and frankly you could see works of similar quality in a national children's art competition. Slowly though, over the following two years, his work gained in childish awareness of shadow, anatomy and perspective. But it was at the age of eleven that his work really hit its stride. I have seen many drawings of plaster casts – and most are notable for their crudeness and mechanical manner. Picasso’s drawings of plaster casts are quite another story – he managed to infect these mundane academic exercises with pathos, profundity and soul. Even when at the age of thirteen Picasso copied from Charles Bargue’s famous charcoal drawing guide (which the likes of van Gogh had used to train) drawing Study from a Torso, he managed to turn a schematic exercise into a display of incredible subtly and chiaroscuro magic – which fooled many into believing for decades that it had been drawn from a real plaster cast and not just an engraving in a book. In 1895 he began to paint wonderfully bravura painterly portraits of beggars and old men under his father’s tutorship.

Many art critics have poured scorn on the idea that Picasso was a prodigy. These creative neuters who have never brushed oil paint onto the coarse weave of primed canvas or stroked a stick of charcoal onto a sheet of laid paper, like to play down Picasso’s preternatural skills. Discussion of such things seem puerile - the stuff of the sensationalist media. To these art critics who know nothing of the difficulty of being a young artist and who spend all their time looking at the masterpieces of the Old and Modern Masters (and think they are their intellectual equals because they have read a few books on art history and theory), think Picasso’s early work is irrelevant. The conceited critical doggerel written by most art critics about Picasso’s early work only makes one realise that they would be truly appalling art teachers. Because they really know nothing about drawing or painting, and they assume that if you cannot draw and paint like the mature Velázquez or Rembrandt in their very best masterpieces in the great museums - you are useless! They are like people who only ever stand at the finishing line of marathons and have no conception of the years of training and twenty-six miles of agony involved in finishing. These smug critics have absolutely no conception of how long and painful a journey it is from making ones first marks on paper, to achieving mature mastery, or finding something original and profound to say! Or how a modern artist who acquires these skills might later try to deskill themselves to achieve other more modern effects. Yet, no matter how wild and crazy their later work may seem, it will always be built upon an extraordinarily strong foundation and understanding of both the rules and how to break them. That is why, the huge archive of Picasso’s childhood artwork is such a treasure trove for anyone interested in artistic development - quite apart from the fact that they were made by the most famous artist of the twentieth century. Because his family were sure of his genius and historical importance, they kept almost every scrap of paper he worked on and thus preserved the most extensive archive of youthful artworks by any major artist before or since.

I often wondered who the greatest child prodigy in art history was – technically some might have considered Van Dyke more skilled, Dürer more precocious, or Bernini more promising. But one very great advantage Picasso had was that he produced so much, and that so much of it was preserved by his family, who were convinced of his genius. I personally find that only Picasso’s early work compels me to look and look again. Even today I tremble when I see the young Pablo do masterful things with the brush, pen, or charcoal that I try but fail constantly to achieve. His early work is more than a mere display of skill – it is the first step on an epic road of a deeply autobiographical art (perhaps the most extensive visual diary ever.) But while the autobiographical nature of Picasso’s work has often been noted especially by the likes of John Richardson (and Picasso himself said as much), what is rarely mentioned is that few artists in art history could have made such a lengthy visual diary. As a prodigy, Picasso was able to document his family and young life like no other artist in history. And from the start Picasso had a gift most technically accomplished artists do not possess – he had the capacity to load his drawings and paintings with real feeling for humanity.

Despite his prodigious abilities, he made simple mistakes throughout his career – lopsided eyes and elephantine proportions – unconscious traits early on that he turned into self-conscious mannerism later. He loved starting a drawing or painting, but he all too often quit before the more difficult task of bring it to completion. This slap-dash haste and love of the unfinished became another hallmark of his efforts.

Unlike most child prodigies, Picasso had the ambition, determination and work ethic to move beyond the easy victories accorded exceptional children to challenge the status quo that had nourished him and win the true victories of maturity. No matter how many masterpieces he made, he only thought of the next artwork and the victories not yet in grasp. It is that desperate need to constantly prove himself to the end that gave the best of his late proto-Neo-Expressionist canvases their tragic intensity.

Picasso famously wrote on one of his sketchbooks, “Je suis le cahier” (sketchbook No.40, 1906-7), or “I am the sketchbook,” in English. He could also have said – ‘I am the camera’ - for in his earlier sketchbooks he recorded everything and anything around him:  his family, himself, his pets, his classmates, his bedroom, his living room, the streets of every city he lived in, horses, bullfights, beggars, prostitutes and so on. If he later went on to make some of the cruellest and most misogynistic images of women ever committed to canvas – he did so only after a lifetime of recording them in all their other facets – as mothers, as siblings, as friends, as lovers, as idols and as Madonna’s. While I hid away in my bedroom painting pictures based not on real-life experience and human contact, but on photographs cut from magazines and books or scene-gabbed from video tape – Picasso was interacting with the world - travelling, having sex, making friendships and establishing a career for himself.
 

Throughout his young life, Picasso drew his friends and family – strengthening his bonds with them, and in return, their awe of him. Picasso grew up drawing and painting in public – in front of his father, his academic tutors, his friends, and his family – he made art in a fearless manner unfamiliar with performance anxiety. It is this self-confidence, lack of restraint and complete freedom that makes his art so compelling. That is why Picasso could be filmed in 1955 for The Mystery of Picasso – and work with such brevity and ease – whereas Pollock (a much more conflicted and anxious artist of no natural apparent facility) went back on the bottle after filming with Hans Namuth ended in 1950.

Picasso’s childhood life and art are full of myths - some made by Picasso himself, some made by others close to him on his behalf – like Jaume Sabartés his early friend and later his secretary and biographer and Ronald Penrose his first major English biographer.  It was cunning liars like Picasso that I later sought to distance myself from by trying to be ruthlessly honest about both my life and art. No other writer has done more to dismantle these myths than his friend John Richardson. One key myth to the Picasso story is that one day his father left him to finish off the feet on one of his pigeon paintings and after seeing what his son had achieved – he handed the boy his pallet and brush and vowed to never paint again - it’s pure fiction – his father continued to paint and exhibit locally well into the twentieth century. But the myth is notable for what it said about Picasso – who felt he had won the Oedipal battle with his father at the age of thirteen. Later Picasso famously said: “In art one must kill one’s father.”


Dull-witted critics like to constantly point out Picasso’s mistreatment of women. But in fact, that is a smoke screen - which hides one of his most important betrayals – that of his father. If you ever had a child, gave him a loving, stable and creative home life, structured his training, tutored him in Conté crayons, charcoal, watercolour and oils, bought him canvas and paint, and still more canvas and paint, helped him to get into Art College, sat for him constantly, encouraged everything he did and at the end of it all he turned his back on you and belittled your help – how would you feel?

Directors of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona like Juan-Eduardo Cirlot and M. Tersea Ocaña and the great German historian Carsten-Peter Warnche were one of the few writers to make clear how Picasso’s father tutored him to greatness and how successive Spanish academies drilled Picasso (whether he liked it or not) in the ancestral skills of Western art. But had Picasso not so dramatically broken with his father’s influence later and reinvented himself he would have remained nothing more than a father’s boy living out his father’s conservative dreams. By recasting himself as a primitive and concealing his tutored virtuosity he made art that spoke to his generation and the ones that would come later - rather than merely satisfying the mind set of his father’s dying and bankrupt academic generation.

Picasso the iconoclast, the innovator, the Modernist is an uncomfortable hero to today’s youth – they like his originality and crave his success – but they loath his elitist traditional skills.  One of the gross myths of modernism – expounded by both its advocates and critics alike, is the notion of the Modern artist as a self-taught, inspired, lunatic - breaking every single rule of traditional craft and ancestral art. It is a myth Picasso fully embraced. His story as he told it was that he was a born genius who learned with ease all the traditional rules of drawing, perspective, shading, brushwork and colour without even trying very hard.  It was only once he proved his point that he went on to break every rule he had learned. But any close and attentive study of the oeuvres of Modernists like Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Kupka, Dix, Beckman, Dalí, even Dubuffet, illustrates another truth – that nearly all the really first-rate innovators of modernism first acquired a solid (sometimes exceptional) grounding in realist skills before moving beyond their limitations.

The young Pablo began exhibiting regularly at the age of fourteen – in local and later national art exhibitions. Apart from privately teaching drawing to children for a while at the turn of the century (when he was in abject poverty because his Blue paintings could find no dealers or collectors), Picasso never had a regular job – his whole life from nine onwards had only one purpose – to create art.

In 1896, at the age of fourteen, Picasso painted and exhibited First Communion. Technically, I consider it a brilliant display of traditional Spanish naturalist painting – if I were told it was the work of a Conservative academic in his late thirties I would have believed it. In 1897, at the age of fifteen, he painted and exhibited Science and Charity, an even larger and more ambitious canvas – though one I find more awkward looking than his previous masterpiece. However, when it was shown in the national art exhibition in Madrid that year, it won a gold medal. What these paintings and other countless drawings prove is that the young Picasso was more than capable of making complex group figure compositions of great naturalistic skill and realism. From the age of fifteen onwards Picasso was also able to conjure up figure compositions based on nothing but his memory or imagination. He often continued to paint from life – but he interpreted and condensed reality through his own artistic vision – in a manner only a handful of other Modern masters like Matisse and Beckman were able to match (needless to say, I never achieved their feats of skill.)

According to Richardson, Picasso is said at the age of fourteen or fifteen to have lost his virginity to a prostitute in the Barri Xino district of Barcelona. It is thought that his older classmate Pallares treated Picasso, since Picasso’s pocket money would not have sufficed. Picasso would continue to frequent brothels throughout his late teenage years – this was not unusual at the time - no respectable woman would have sex before marriage. I too would later lose my virginity to a prostitute – but it would be at the age of twenty-one and in Amsterdam - because my fear, shame and guilt had prevented me going to one earlier in Dublin. While Picasso drew women to him and used them up as he sought fit – I would struggle all my life to court girls.


His close relationships with his mother and his sister Lola, and his early initiation into the mysteries of sex, might explain the natural and healthy nature of Picasso’s sexuality, even if it is often characterized as misogynistic. Picasso’s eroticism could be frenzied, sarcastic, whimsical, voluptuous, classical, or conceptual, yet on the whole his sex rarely achieved the intense heat of a Rodin sketch or the perversity of a Hans Bellmer. Moreover, in Picasso’s erotic work there was none of the twisted perversion of Salvador Dalí his fellow countryman - or the anguished and morbid sexuality of the young Austrian Egon Schiele. Few of his erotic works expressed genuine intimacy or love (the drawing he made in 1904 of himself and Fernande Olivier making love for the first time being one of the exceptions). Sex for Picasso especially in his later works was about dominance and damnation. On the other hand, his female nudes were always earthier than the decorative Matisse or the aesthete Modigliani. He could place women on a plinth and worship their beauty, sexiness and fecundity, but he could also tear them down to the level of a base animal showing them menstruating or urinating. Frankly, if Picasso was a ‘manly’ misogynist in the eyes of women - I was a perverted sicko in comparison. Personally, I think the word ‘misogynist’ is too political, too simplistic and too dishonest to explain the complexities of any man’s sexuality.

In 1897 Picasso won admittance to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid.  It was his first time in the Spanish capital and his first time away from his father’s control. Picasso’s move to Madrid at sixteen, to live in a strange capital, in poverty and without friends or family demonstrated his ambition and willingness to make sacrifices that would lead to several internal developments of maturation. When he was nineteen, he yet again proved his inner strength, ambition and will power by moving to Paris. As a housebound hermit, I was never to make such courageous moves. Still, Picasso rarely attended the Royal Academy of San Fernando – preferring instead to spend his time in the Prado Museum or drawing people in the parks and in the streets. After eight dissolute months, he left the academy. The following two years were a period of immense growth from a boy into a man (a growth that would take me into my mid-twenties to achieve.) Through friends, he became aware of philosophers like Nietzsche and the concepts of Anarchism. The confusion of ideas in his life was reflected in the lack of focus in his art at the time. He dabbled with style after style – never settling long on any particular one. However, by 1900, he had begun to find his feet as a modern painter, influenced by both the Post-Impressionists and the Symbolists.

At the age of nineteen, Picasso travelled to Paris to make his name and even he found it difficult to make a decisive breakthrough early on! Over the next few years, he would shuttle back and forth between France and Spain. His early Parisian paintings were wonderfully energetic Post-Impressionist inspired studies of nightclubs, theatres, prostitutes, street life and the sexual loquaciousness of the French. Stylistically they were unoriginal – instead they were a clever mix of the tricks and mannerisms of the likes of van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. Everyone knows that Picasso’s impotent and neurotic friend Casagemas killed himself over a woman called Germaine. Everyone has seen the paintings Picasso made of Casagemas in his coffin with a bullet hole in his head. What few people know is that Picasso had a sexual dalliance with Germaine Gargallo after his death – it’s a rather distasteful betrayal in my opinion – but just one of the many by Picasso.


However, it was the guilt, shame and sorrow provoked by Casagemas’s death that provoked Picasso into producing his first truly great art – the work of his Blue Period. The Blue Period was an expression of his feelings for the downtrodden, the poor and the marginalized – the same experiences he was suffering as a poor artist in Paris. While there are a great many gems in the Blue Period – the overall effect I find very monotonous. Early cynics suggested that Picasso painted in blue during his Blue Period because it was the cheapest colour. This is nonsense, cerulean blue which Picasso often used during his Blue Period is in fact one of the most expensive colours. However, monochrome painting is far cheaper than full colour painting.

This dark era in his life ended with his relationship with the lusciously beautiful Fernande Oliver – his first serious girlfriend. His pallet became warmer, his paint creamier and gentler.  It was then that he painted some of the most tender and beautiful images of young women and adolescent boys in the history of art. From here he could easily have stopped developing and instead simply churned out such sellable canvases – but he had a crisis of faith. He recognized that modernism was about innovation and he was jealous of the fame and notoriety artists like Matisse were achieving. With Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso made his bid for immortality and the rest is history. Les Demoiselle d’Avignon was both the summation and repudiation of all the assumptions of Western Art before the twentieth century. It marked both the explosive end of the Western figurative tradition and the start of a completely new understanding of reality and what art could be. Instead of presenting answers – it asked endless questions. It was the two-dimensional record of aesthetic thought - radically changing through the passage of time and psychological awareness. What started out, as yet another conventional anecdotal academic picture titled The Wages of Sin – quickly became a vast laboratory used by Picasso to deconstruct Western figuration and confront the geometry of his own sexual fears. Yet, Les Demoiselle d’Avignon was not a hot and heavy confession – it was more like a cold and dispassionate philosophical dissertation. The form and fracture of Les Demoiselles d’Avigion may have been Modern but its character and anxiety was ancient. It continued a long tradition of the Femme Fatal that had reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century with the work of the Symbolists whom the young Picasso had been heavily influenced by. Les Demoiselles d’Avigion was also painted at the height of the syphilis epidemic and the start of demands for the vote for women and female emancipation. It may have started as a macho painting of phallic power - but Picasso literally could not keep it up - and it became a horrific image of voyeuristic trauma, post-coital tristesse, fear of castration and abject terror of the feminine.

In his poverty-stricken youth Picasso had been easy prey for critics and dealers, but once he had achieved success he surrounded himself with sycophants many of whom would write about him with uncritical hyperbole. Exploited by dealers in his povertystriken youth, Picassso became a master manipular of them, playing them off against each other and hoarding some of his very best works for his own private collection.

By 1909 Picasso days of poverty were over. By the dawn of World War One, he was being hailed as a genius by artists, dealers, collectors and art lovers alike. By the 1920s Picasso was already the most famous artist in the world, a multi-millionaire with a townhouse in Paris and a chateau in the countryside. He was constantly interviewed by the press and photographed by the greatest photographers of the day. He was a regular name in society columns and a figure of awe, fear, worship and resentment to every artist in the world. As the decades passed his fame, notoriety and mystique only grew bigger. Dalí had to act as a lunatic in public to even come close to Picasso’s column inches and Warhol would later have to employ assistants and silkscreen mass-production to beat Picasso’s personal output of handmade canvases. Throughout his life, Picasso made stunning academic realist drawings, astonishing works with the power of the Old Masters, or works as oddly intense as anything produced by an Outsider artist.
 

Throughout his youth, Picasso attempted and passed every test of skill required of a naturalistic painter. He moved from drawings of plaster casts, to drawings of life models, to oil paintings of life models, to compositions with multiple figures, to street scenes, landscapes, still life’s, nightclub scenes, allegorical paintings and finally, in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906-7) - to a uniquely original recasting of form, as revolutionary in Western painting as Giotto’s frescoes of Padua was in 1303-6. Later, Picasso’s and Braque’s invention of Cubism (a profound extension of the paintings of Cézanne with their shifting viewpoints as well as lessons in iconic simplicity from Iberian carvings and expressive Africa tribal masks) was no mere stylistic novelty - it was a radical reordering of reality on canvas.

Although he had more academic talent at fifteen than most mature artists, Picasso was to go on to do more than any artist in art history to destroy the authority of the Western academic system. While the completely overrated Matisse merely turned colour up to eleven, Picasso dismantled the legitimacy of drawing - the central foundation of Western Academic art. Picasso also totally deconstructed Western visual reason.

Picasso only ever had one notable artistic block in the spring of 1935 when he gave up drawing and painting and turned to writing poetry for thirteen months. But mostly throughout his career he was a workaholic producer of an endless stream of artworks. I on the other hand, was crippled every couple of weeks with artistic block and self-loathing despair. However, unlike Picasso who made so much of his work to please and entertain others, most of my work was made for purely personal reasons without concern for the sensitivity, approval, or pleasure of others. 


People who knew him characterized him as demonically charismatic, bursting with vitality, virility and unshakable self-confidence (just a few more gifts I was denied in life.) He had his moments of black self-doubt – no serious artist doesn’t – but his mental health was remarkably good in an era of depressive or manic-depressive artists often set on a path of self-destruction.

In her memoirs, Fernande Olivier, his first girlfriend, recalled how one night, Picasso, after having taken hashish tablets, thought he might as well kill himself - because he had nothing left to learn. He feared that drugs would make things too easy and remove from him the slow process of learning that had evolved in his sketchbooks, leading him to produce gimmicky art and ultimately creative sterility. I was later to spend my adult life intoxicating my brain – in the hope that drugs would unleash apparitions to me and give my work complexity and rawness.  It rarely did.  In fact, it made my work look wonky and aggressive. My life in contrast to Picasso’s proves that there is no chemical that can make you a genius. It is a gift – Picasso had it – and I never did.

Picasso could scribble a masterpiece on a calling card or menu in a few minutes, but he could also work (as he did on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) non-stop for three-quarters of a year on a massive canvas that would change the course of art history – amassing over 809 preparatory drawings in the process. He could make art with the apparent simplicity of a child – yet in the same day draw a naturalistic study that bore comparison with the old masters for brevity, grace and subtlety of tone. Idiots who know nothing of painting or drawing or real creativity – and spend their life with magnifying glasses looking in awe at some tedious and dumb photo-realist canvas – simply do not understand Picasso. His work looks raw, uncouth and unfinished – but, along with the sketchbooks of Da Vinci - his oeuvre is the greatest display of the creative mind in action. What you see is what you get – fierce technical skill and intellectual gravity. Creatively, Picasso’s oeuvre is pure technical command sustained over eighty years – he is like a noble marathon runner in a race with incompetents who use every trick in the book to keep up – steroids, blood transfusions, bikes, mopeds and cars (I tried to cheat with my backdating and use of photographs.)

Picasso was one of those very rare artists who knew just when to stop. A huge amount of his work was, in traditional terms, unfinished – but he always seemed to suggest so much genius in what he did do that one forgave him his sloppiness and often slap-dash approach. Picasso was incapable of drawing a crude or uninteresting line no matter what style he employed. He was never a very painterly painter – but he was infinitely more ‘painterly’ than me a seventh-rate painter - and a host of other fourth-rate painters. He was never a natural colourist – but he had more than enough to hold his own against second-rate Fauvists or Expressionists. As for black – he was a master – and he played with it more inventively than anyone else of the twentieth century. For me, the Spaniard was also the greatest print-maker, ceramist and sculptor of the twentieth century.


That said I still found much of Picasso’s Cubist work boring, dry and indecipherable. In his Cubist paintings, the figure became increasingly abstracted or substituted with still life’s – which is perhaps why I found them so tedious. Frankly, it was only later in my life when tripping on LSD, mescaline or magic mushrooms - that I saw the world in a fragmented cubist manner! I am well aware of what Picasso and Barque were trying to do in surpassing the one-eyed geometric perspective that had ruled art since the Renaissance and their attempt to overlay multiple viewpoints and moments in time. But I find the results cold, irritating, pretentiously puzzling, difficult, obscure, unlovable and admirable only to intellectuals desperate to separate themselves from the common man. Braque and Picasso did not invent collage, it was a common practice amongst Victorian women and the claims for the influence of Cubism on photography, film, advertising and popular art are grossly exaggerated. Personally speaking, Picasso was at his best when dealing with the human figure. This is why I much preferred his later work from Guernica on, when he used the lessons of Cubism to twist and distort the human form - creating savage, almost Surrealist looking nudes and odes to femininity. However, that being said, the collages he and Braque made from 1912 onwards are some of my all-time favourite works of the twentieth century.

Unlike so many Neo-Salon artists of today who think that an artwork has to be huge to be great or important, most of Picasso’s artworks (apart from occasional large scale masterpieces done every few years) were disarmingly medium and small scale - even often tiny. Yet, Picasso had an incredible ability to make even small canvases look like monumentally scaled works in reproduction. Then there was the curious case of Picasso’s cardboard assemblages made in 1912 – these Cubist sculptures made of the humblest materials became, when photographed and published in art magazines of the day, quite simply the most influential force on Modernist sculpture from the Italian Futurists, Russian Constructionists, and Dada, up to artists like David Smith and Antony Caro. So, every time I saw a pompous and monstrous bronze by the likes of Henry Moore, Richard Serra or Damien Hirst – I thought with fondness of these humble assemblages. Moreover, while for a blague, Duchamp could only take a found object and put it in an art gallery, Picasso took found objects and junk and transformed them into real art. 

With Picasso’s kind of international success, the production of perfectly wrought masterpieces was less important than signature style logos that could fill up galleries around the world. Therefore, late in life Picasso turned himself into a one-man factory for turning out ‘Picassos’. He had stacks of linen canvases and fine oil paints trucked to his house for him to daub on. These slap-dash paintings produced in a matter of hours replaced quality works produced over a period of weeks or months. The last thirteen volumes of Christian Zervos’s thirty-three volume catalogue raisonné records just the last twenty years of Picasso’s life! A frenzied covering of blank canvases by the crate load replaced the thoughtful and hard-won evolution of images. In fact, his abandonment of all the finer points of creativity in favour of egotistical emblems did more than anything to erode traditional picture making values in the late twentieth century. Since Picasso, artists as varied as Dubuffet, Warhol, Basquiat, Schnabel and Hirst have mimicked the same ‘genius’ effect repeatedly.


In the final analysis, Picasso did make a few hundred paintings worthy of comparison with the best of the twentieth century, but he also produced thousands of paintings that they had not been signed ‘Picasso’ - would not have found even a sliver of recognition never mind respect. Seen within the loop of Picasso’s biography most of it has some kind of meaning as fragments of genius – but once hung alongside the work of others its self-delusion becomes apparent. Paintings in a museum like the Louvre or Metropolitan are not there because they were of sentimental diary-entry value in an individual painter’s life – they are there because their quality and meaning has universal and timeless value. Everyone is young, middle-aged, old, suffers, loves, loses, grieves and is sometimes triumphant – but none of this alone has any aesthetic value - except to those brainwashed members of the artistic cult of a particular artist-cult-leader.