23
" This sense of the beauty and significance of an object in itself is said to be quite general among the very young; and there can be few who do not remember being entranced by wet pebbles on the strand, sea-worn glass, or oil on puddles. In most people the vision dwindles or even perishes as the process of growing up, receiving accepted social, moral, and aesthetic notions grinds them down to size; but it certainly never did so in Picasso, who from his nature and from his status as an outsider was not to be ground down. In him it grew steadily more intense, and often he was able to persuade those who were still open to persuasion that other values, often very ancient, were still available to them. There is his magnificent, disreputable goat, for example, that defies all established, academic canons of beauty, and that has given innumerable beholders the joy of seeing the quintessence of the creature. "
― Patrick O'Brian , Picasso: A Biography
24
" But there were also men of far greater value who were drawn to Cubism, men whose language was paint or sculpture: among them Léger, Picabia, Delaunay, La Fresnaye, Le Fauconnier, Dufy for a while and Friesz, Lhote, Kisling, Herbin of the Bateau-Lavoir, Survage, Marcoussis, Diego Rivera, Mondrian, Archipenko, Brancusi, Lipchitz, and perhaps the most important of them all, the three brothers Jacques Villon, Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp. "
― Patrick O'Brian , Picasso: A Biography
26
" Others he never could persuade; his attempts to do so angered them, producing a flood of vituperation and acrimonious mockery. A witty Italian summed it up in a burlesque interview with Picasso, who is here supposed to be speaking: “In art, the mass of people no longer seek consolation and exaltation … but whatever is new, odd, original, extravagant, or scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and even before, have satisfied these masters and critics with whatever bizarre extravagances passed through my head, and the less they understood the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, rebuses, and arabesques I became famous, famous very quickly. And for a painter fame means selling, making money, making a fortune, growing wealthy. So today, as you know, I am famous and I am rich. But when I am quite alone I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the ancient, splendid sense of the word. Giotto and Titian, Rembrandt and Goya, were true painters; I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and to the utmost of his powers has exploited the silliness, the vanity, and the stupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may seem; but it has the merit of being sincere. "
― Patrick O'Brian , Picasso: A Biography
27
" Picasso and Cézanne had this in common: when they were working on a picture it was the most important thing in life—it was life itself. Then with the last stroke it would die. Sometimes Cézanne would abandon his pictures under olive-trees: and moved by the same impulse or rather creed Picasso said, “A finished work is a dead work, killed,” and he was very unwilling to give the last mortal stroke. Yet in this as in everything else Picasso was full of apparent inconsistencies: the man who maintained that the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” was never finished and who spent months and months on Vollard’s portrait would also dash off three pictures in a day; he did not leave a few dozen laboriously perfected paintings behind him but several thousand; and although he said that his work was of no interest to him once it was done he would fly into a pale rage if he saw one of his pictures, or Cézanne’s, varnished, cleaned, or interfered with in any way. What is more, although the whole of his work was carried out in contemptuous defiance of the critics, he was exceedingly sensitive to approval: even in his eighties he would still show people his work, piling the canvases up in a tottering pyramid and watching intently for the reaction. "
― Patrick O'Brian , Picasso: A Biography
32
" Miles away Matisse had had much the same reaction: he was at the frontier with his passport in his pocket and the boat was waiting at Genoa to take him to Rio de Janeiro; but, as he wrote to his son, “When I saw the endless line of people leaving I had not the least desire to go … I should have felt like a deserter. If everything of any worth runs away, what will remain of France?” France meant different things to Matisse and Picasso: but although Picasso remained a Spaniard through and through, France and above all Paris nevertheless for him meant light, freedom, and the living arts, and that intemporal country, beyond all national or geographic boundaries, was where his patriotism lay. "
― Patrick O'Brian , Picasso: A Biography
38
" It is many years since I saw the film and I cannot speak of it with any accuracy; but, mixed with the pleasure of seeing him at work, I do remember an uneasy impression that he was being put through his paces, that the fruit of immense thought and experience was presented as something like a most accomplished trick, almost a music-hall turn, carried out in minutes, as though celerity were of real significance; and this impression was strengthened by the music, the drum-roll for the vital stroke that gave apparently random lines their meaning, and indeed by the nature of some of the things that Picasso drew when he was amusing himself. The incredible virtuosity was there, but so it was when Picasso was amusing himself in a restaurant after dinner, when he drew on the napkins or made creatures out of crumbs; and Picasso is so very much more than that. "
― Patrick O'Brian , Picasso: A Biography
40
" Yet at some point in all the happy turmoil Picasso changed, or was changed, from a capital painter, known as such a painter should be known, into a monstre sacré, a holy cow surrounded with an enormous, self-perpetuating, inescapable, and generally irrelevant notoriety. And whereas a capital painter may be a man among other men, of finer essence no doubt but still capable of bleeding when pricked, a sacred monster may not; and when he is pricked he must ooze gold rather than blood, or at least a kind of contagious fame. To the natural inequality between him and most men is added a factitious and often somewhat tawdry rank: he is never allowed to forget his status and he must live almost as lonely as the phoenix, surrounded by courtiers rather than friends—a hard fate for one who loved company as much as Picasso. The change did not come about at once, and its accompaniment of vast wealth, with all the possibility of corrupting power, authority, and freedom from restraint that wealth implies, was still some few years away, together with his full realization that fame was “the castigation by God of the artist,” and of the fact that a certain kind of fame means solitude. "
― Patrick O'Brian , Picasso: A Biography
