Revisit Janet Flanner’s 1957 Profile of Pablo Picasso, who began making art as a prodigy—at the age of about 17—and continued for the rest of his life. NewYorkerArchive
Pablo Ruiz Picasso began being an artist at the age of prodigy—at about seven—and at seventy-five he remains the complete phenomenon he has been throughout the intervening years. The excesses of his artistic endowment, of his will, of his life appetites, and of his character appear to have been idiosyncratic from earliest childhood, so that becoming prodigious and phenomenal has been, for him, the only form of being natural.
Toward the end of 1898, when Pablo had just turned seventeen, he suddenly ceased signing his pictures “P. Ruiz Picasso,” dropped his father’s patronymic, and started using only his mother’s family name. By Spanish custom, a child’s legal surname is dual, being that of both parents combined, with the mother’s maiden name coming last but the father’s family name being what the child is called by.
Physically, Picasso has always been abnormally alert. His eyes are inordinately quick at seizing and noting details, and he likes to pamper his extraordinarily acute sense of smell. In his early, impoverished Montmartre days, whenever he had a hundred francs to invest in pleasure, he would buy a big bottle of eau de cologne for Fernande Olivier, the first and most historic of his many public Paris attachments.
In one way, at least, Picasso fulfills the popular notion of the conventional artist, who is always supposed to work in a studio cluttered by disorder. Once given a chance to accumulate, the clutter in Picasso’s successive studios and apartments has never varied since his days in the Bateau-Lavoir.
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. Even his friends speak, with almost helpless appreciation, of how his “malicious eyes” scintillate as he, like his listeners, enjoys his malefic tongue.
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