Picasso was a great artist

Looking at some of his later work, you might guess Pablo Picasso was a over-rated bum. Drunk. Or mentally ill.

Fact is, he was a childhood prodigy. Brilliant from the start at age-13.

Here’s Science and Charity, oil on canvas, 1897. Picasso was age-15.

His abstract work came much later.

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

He’s best known for co-founding the Cubist movement.

He shocked the artistic world with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó, a street in Barcelona.

The shocking part was the angular and disjointed body shapes. The slightly menacing aspect.

This was new.

His best work, for me, is his anti-war painting exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Guernica (1937).

Picasso opened his morning newspaper on April 27th to find images of the destruction of Guernica. It had been bombed by the Nazis at the request of Francisco Franco.

All that said. Much of Picasso’s hundreds of pieces of sculpture, ceramics, drawings and paintings hold no appeal for me. He worked fast. Had fun. Loved to be contrary. And many of those experiments didn’t work.

I saw many of those failed experiments in the Picasso museum in his hometown Málaga, Spain.

Here’s one that did work. Bull’s Head.

One day, in a pile of objects all jumbled up together, I found an old bicycle seat right next to a rusty set of handlebars. In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the Bull’s Head came to me before I had a chance to think. All I did was weld them together…