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The era of greyhound racing in the U. See how people have imagined life on Mars through history. See More. The stone carvings around his handsomely proportioned studio windows are its finest relics today. Since , however, he has lived—in his comfortable, impoverished manner—in his costly mansion in the hills above Cannes. Called the Villa Californie, it is a large, tastelessly built Edwardian house, with big salons, which are perfect for studios. It sits in a neglected garden, now ornamented with gigantic ceramic figures that he has made.
His friends use them as chairs and tables. The scarce real furniture is dilapidated by use, by having frequently been moved from house to house, and by his indifference. He inherited some good Spanish cabinets from his parents, but they have failed to survive. Around his studios, there has always been a mixture of Negro sculpture, bronze statues, pottery, broken-stringed musical instruments, and paintings—like the unsorted overflow of a provincial museum.
Besides his own canvases, he has some valuable paintings by other modern artists. Rousseau with a lamp. As a rule, these pictures—as well as most of his own—are posed carefully in corners, faces to the wall.
The disorder in which Picasso lives is psychologically very in formative—a special, static, organized disorder, mystifying to visitors, touching to his friends. It consists of a confusing, dusty, heteroclite accretion of objects—many of them valueless, or ephemeral and kept beyond their time—behind which he seems to immure himself in order to feel at ease and resident. It is a disarray that he studiously protects—nobody is permitted to tidy up and destroy it—and that both stimulates and comforts him.
He saves everything—half-empty boxes of Spanish matches, half-filled boxes of desiccated Spanish cigars. For years, he kept an old hatbox full of superannuated neckties.
In his Rue des Grands-Augustins flat, the telephone serves as a paperweight, holding down telephone bills, invitations to art exhibitions long since past, calling cards, addresses, and stray papers inscribed with special information—all impounded together so they will be handy if he ever chooses to look at them.
The mantelpiece overflows with postcards, letters, snapshots, calendars, art-sale catalogues, maybe a box of chocolates, new writing paper, and press clippings, ranged in confused, mixed piles. There are more piles of things on the tables and chairs. Because of his theory that anything not in sight is irretrievably lost, things merely go permanently astray.
The pockets of his jackets are frayed by what he picks up in his peregrinations: pebbles of unlikely shapes, shells, bits of promising bone, pieces of deformed wood, sections of metal—discarded fragments that no longer look like whatever they were at first and so are free to look like something new, different, and stimulating to him.
Everything is always privileged to lie where he puts it down or where chance happens to place it, to mature in situ so that his glance can come to rest on the immobility of these surroundings he has brought to pass. It is a collection caused by nothing being thrown away. Change and organization he restricts to his art, in which he has spent his career ceaselessly reinventing, distorting, and altering the nature and appearance of life while immersed in the proved, commonplace reality of his surroundings.
If he walked by night, he usually took the same streets he had taken the night before, and the night before that. Picasso has always delighted in having people about him, like courtiers. He invites them in numbers, and often lets them wait in his untidy salon until they have grown into a small crowd.
Then, instead of talking to several of them at once, he may select one person for a confidence, leading him to one side, or even taking him into an adjoining room, as a mark of favor. Most of his life, he has worked at night, to assure himself of no human interruption at all, and this has led to his habit of rising late in the morning. Picasso is a heavy cigarette smoker who does not inhale.
He eats simply and without fine taste, possesses incomparably preserved good health, has always been a hypochondriac who once had a bit of liver trouble and an attack of sciatica , is still proud of his small hands and feet, hates old age, and has a horror of death. He is always reported as shutting off his past behind him—as having no nostalgias, and living, with almost cruel determination, only in the perpetual present, on which he has seemed to construct his life.
Yet the old friends from his youth who are still alive are, in a literal manner, daily in his thoughts. To an English friend of the younger generation he lately confided that he has the habit of repeating to himself the names of these old friends every morning.
When Maurice Raynal—the noted art critic, who was for some time a member of the Montmartre group during the impoverished euphoric Bateau-Lavoir days—died recently, Picasso felt great remorse, he told his English friend. Raynal had died on the very day Picasso forgot to mention his name in the morning. Picasso is ranked as the wittiest artist and best conversationalist since Whistler, if very different.
He has become famous for his talk and what could be called his carnivorous wit, since it usually eats other people alive.
He does not converse but talks solo—creatively, decisively, and fascinatingly, with wit, ideas, and odd images, his ever-present Spanish accent seasoning his phrases, which emerge in bursts. His earliest surviving print, depicting a Bullfighter Seen from Behind , was made by engraving and heating the base of a wooden salad bowl. During World War Two, resourcefulness became necessary, and Picasso took to cutting, tearing and burning paper into shapes with new abandon.
Materials were hard to come by in Paris during the German occupation, but behind the blackout blinds of his studio, Picasso fashioned from his store of scraps a knife and fork, a goat, a bird, glove, a row of dancers, and most poignantly of all, a series of skulls, which he also painted.
It was no accident that many of these wartime shapes resembled ghosts. The fact that he kept it, however, and went to such care to preserve and date — with day, month, year, sometimes even time — even swift sketches on paper — suggests that he wanted to be remembered for far more than his finished masterpieces. The piles Picasso left behind document his daily existence.
They are the thoughts, the half-thoughts, the distractions out of which so many of his ideas grew. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. The chaotic habit behind Picasso's genius work. Share using Email. It was not the occupation a revolutionary artist wanted to be associated with. So, he took matters into his own hands, and, according to author John Richardson's biography, A Life of Picasso , changed his last name to his mother's maiden name, Picasso. It was Pablo who once said, after all, that "in art one must kill one's father.
While the main and most obvious tragedy of the crash were the human lives lost at sea, there was something else that went down with the plane that was irreplaceable: one version of Picasso's painting, Le Peintre. The painting was in the cargo hold of the plane, being transported from one location to another. After the recovery effort was completed, some some 98 percent of the aircraft was found and brought back to land. The only trace that remained of the artwork, however, was a centimeter scrap of canvas found floating in the wreckage.
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