What You Don’t Know About Picasso

John Richardson is more familiar with the artist than anyone else. In the third volume of his massive biography (Knopf) he recounts these details:

1. PICASSO WAS VERY SUPERSTITIOUS

In later years he refused to let his wife hand down his old clothes to his gardener, lest some of his genius rub off.

2. HE HATED DRIVING

He worried that it could damage his hands. His luxurious Hispano-Suiza limousine, the last word in automotive bling at the time, was always chauffeur-driven.

3. HE HAD AN AFFAIR WITH COCO CHANEL

And she would have liked it to have gone on. Years later she called him “the only one in that milieu who really turned me on.” But Richardson surmises that Picasso was wary of her. “She was too much of a celebrity,” he writes, “and not submissive enough.”

4. SPEAKING OF WHICH

In many of his female nudes of the 1920s, Picasso departed from tradition by clearly indicating the anus.

5. HE WAS EVEN MORE EGOTISTICAL THAN YOU THOUGHT

“God is really another artist … like me,” he told a friend. “I am God. I am God. I am God.”