Jerrod Carpenter
Mrs. Evans
American History
8 Nov 2007
The book starts off with Pablo’s mythic near tragic birth “Don Salvador, however, leaned over the stillbirth and exhaled cigar smoke into its nostrils. Picasso stirred. Picasso screamed.” (3). It then tells the story of Picasso’s endowment of a feeling of nobility by the many women in his life, his mother, aunts, and grandmothers. It then goes about saying how he was a visual thinker and felt isolated at school. He paints a few paintings, his dad wants to ride his coat tail and sends him to a painting school in Barcelona. He then moves to Madrid, becomes well acquainted with the ladies of the night and makes a few friends in the process.
He and his buddy escape to the countryside during the Spanish-American War in order to dodge the draft. He lives in a cave naked with his friend and a stranger, they concentrate on painting and possibly experimenting with homosexual feelings that were aroused at the time. He then goes back to Madrid, and decides Paris is where it at, He then begs his uncle Don Salvador, who had been his prime supporter up to this point, for train fair. When he gets to Paris, one of his good friends meets a girl, proposes to her, is denied, attempts to kill her and a friend, and then kills himself all in the course of a few months. Picasso then successfully sleeps the woman his friend killed himself over.
He then falls into the blue period, this was marked with poverty and depression obviously. Art goers of the time just weren’t digging the whole blue palette thing. He then meets his first wife, Fernande. She moves in with him, during the summer it was so hot Picasso would often paint while completely nude, and wouldn’t shy from greeting people at the door either. He first experiments with Opium around this time and starts to draw out of the blue period.
The book its self was very easy to read, but threw enough interesting words out there to keep you interested. I liked how the book went in to what Picasso was thinking about or associating things with such as “Of course, other psychic equations would follow. Since his sister Lola was so soon to follow, the three-year-old boy may have assumed that birth was the aftermath effect of a cataclysm. Were women with large bellies omens of earthquake and birth?” (6-7).
This could and did get out of hand though. I especially liked the attention given to the important women in his life. Such as Fernande who got a whole chapter to her self! One thing I didn’t like include redundancy, the book sometimes had the habit of repeating a concept over and over again. But overall it was a great book, sometimes I forgot I was even reading a non-fiction book.