Picasso: No. 1 with palette

We all know who8217;s the most celebrated artist of the century. But, why him?

By the mid-1920s, Pablo Picasso was one of the most celebrated men in Paris, and he liked people to know it. He rode around town in a chauffeur-driven Panhard. He relished greeting important visitors while wearing white silk pajamas. His wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova, did the cooking, but the meals were served by a butler in white gloves. When an art collector named Christian Zervos visited him one day in his Paris studio, Picasso asked if he8217;d like to see another couple of rooms. To Zervos8217;s surprise, the rooms contained not art but a Scrooge-McDuck-like pile of large-denomination French bank notes bundled in newspaper. 8220;Everything Picasso did,8221; writes John Richardson in A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, the new, penultimate volume of his four-part biography, 8220;would be news.8221;

Which prompts the question: Why? Why has Picasso8212;with his endless variations on disjointed and unpretty cubism8212;become the quintessential modern artist? Why isn8217;t it Henri Matisse, with his brightly coloured fauvist pictures? Why not Marcel Duchamp, the chess champ who set the standard in modern-art ballsiness by submitting a urinal to an important sculpture exhibition? Why not Salvador Dali, with his astonishingly real-looking, groovily weird surrealist paintings, and a talent for publicity that makes Paris Hilton seem like a hermit?

Picasso8217;s pre-eminence is the result of a lot of things, including paying some dues, being in the right place at the right time, making avant-garde art sexy, finessing politics8212;and, of course, being a genius.

In 1900, at age 19, Picasso did what revolutionary artists were supposed to do for career openers: he went to Paris and almost starved. It took him seven years before he8217;d painted Les Demoiselles d8217;Avignon, the world8217;s most influential painting, and invented cubism. Being a Spaniard in Paris8212;an outsider8212;helped Picasso immensely. He was able to see through surface appearances.

Take Painter and Model 1928: the face of the model sports a vertical row of three eyes8212;or two eyes and a mouth, depending. The artist, on the right, is a busy stick figure with one hilariously long arm holding his brush and a shorter arm8212;sticking out suggestively just below belt level8212;holding a genital-shaped palette. Sex sells, and it didn8217;t hurt Picasso8217;s career either.

He certainly had plenty of8212;shall we say material8212;to draw on. In 1927, the 45-year-old, still-married artist spots 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter outside a Paris department store. She is, Richardson says, 8220;the femme-enfant of his dreams. Picasso tells her, 8216;You have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you.8217; Less than a week later, they8217;re doing that you-know thing together. He seemed like a real stud, which made him much more of an influence on younger artists than his competitors. Picasso also managed to negotiate the politics of Europe. The huge monochrome Guernica 1937 is an antifascist masterpiece, turning the horror of a bombing raid on a civilian town into a brutally beautiful fugue of cubist forms. Picasso managed to get himself treated with kid gloves by the Nazis in occupied Paris during World War II. After the war, Picasso showily declared himself a communist8212;to which Dali supposedly quipped, 8220;Picasso is a communist; neither am I.8221;

Picasso created fine art8217;s equivalent of rock 8216;n8217; roll and put in seven decades producing some of modernism8217;s greatest hits. By the time we leave Picasso at the end of The Triumphant Years, he8217;s been creating one 8220;monumental8221; painting every single day for six weeks. And he8217;s still got 40 years to go. If that isn8217;t No. 1 with a bullet, we don8217;t know what is. LAT-WP

-Peter Plagens