Mother-in-Law. by Pablo Picasso. c. 1919.
The concept of Pablo Picasso was born in Madrid in 1885. His real accouchement is unknown. As a child prodigy he began sketching while still at the breast. His father recognized the infant genius and sold the family olive oil crock to send young Pablo to an Etch-a-Sketch factory to learn his trade from the bottom up.
At sixteen Pablo left Madrid for Paris, where he heard the girls liked to play squidgelum. Always the loner, Picasso refused to attend art classes, instead giving himself up to the riotous nightlife of Beal Street and the Barbary Coast. He surrounded himself with the most avant garde painters of the era -- such luminaries as Eli Wallach, Walton Goggins, Strother Martin, and Vincent Schiavelli.
His mania for painting was such that he would lock himself in his studio for days at a time, living off of onion sandwiches and canned sardines, while he painted wild and extravagant canvases in a style that eventually came to be called Cubism, but which originally went by the title of Mishmosh. During the 1923 presidential election he came in second behind Calvin Coolidge.
As Picasso aged his rage at the confines of the physical world grew immense. His paintings and sculptures take on an almost hysterical writhing in shape, form, and color -- as if he knew that what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.
He married twice, and had six children -- none of them survived the paparazzi.
As the greatest painter of the Twentieth Century, Picasso transformed what had been a gentleman's hobby into a demonic maelstrom of protest, surrealism, and humus against the indignities and horrors of the modern world. His most famous painting is his canvas entitled "Gherkin" -- which shows a solitary pickle in a bleak blue landscape, peeling a banana. It recently was auctioned at Christie's for a number with so many zeros in it that no bank could cash the check and remain solvent.
Pablo Picasso lived a very long time, and then jumped into an art textbook to look at the nymphs. He's still in there somewhere.
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