In 1907 Picasso showed his friends a new painting. Matisse walked out in silence, red with anger. Braque said it was like "juggling with fire." Gertrude Stein, who later bought it, could not look at it for a long time. The painting was called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Today it stands among the most important works in the history of painting. Then it was a scandal.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga. His father was a drawing teacher; it is said that on seeing his teenage son's work he handed over his brushes and swore never to paint again. Academic painting came to Picasso so easily that it soon bored him.
He arrived in Paris in 1900, at twenty. The Blue Period, the Rose Period — that is the early Picasso, still legible and sad: beggars, circus acrobats, exhausted women. Then came the African museum, the masks of the Congo, Paul Cezanne — and everything came apart.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the demolition of European perspective. Picasso took the body apart into planes and reassembled it as the mind sees, not the eye: full face and profile at once, from the front and from behind. This is Cubism. Over the next five years Cubism changed everything — painting, sculpture, architecture, design.
Picasso lived to ninety-one and worked to the end. Guernica (1937) is a cry against war, painted in a month after the bombing of the Basque town. He gave it to Spain on one condition: "when democracy is restored in the country." The painting returned to Spain in 1981, six years after Franco's death.
He was an uncomfortable man. A Communist, a misogynist, a genius, a tyrant. Those who loved him suffered. Those who hated him could not stop looking at his paintings.