I've Come To Bury Picasso

Did someone say have you gone crazy? How dare you? Why don't you
leave our great artist alone?

Let me answer you this way. Should we accept bad behaviour from an artist just because he is considered to be world class? Is world fame a license to cause physical agony to those around him? Let me give my opinion. One that may not be popular but is well substantiated.
If God gives an artist a great talent, should he not use it in His service? May the artist use his great gift as an armor to protect him from public attack even while he flaunts his evil attitude and hurts the people around him?

I feel strongly that I should write about Picasso's dark side and not gloss over it merely because he was a master of colors and forms. In fact, I feel so strongly about this matter, that if someone would come to me and eagerly say "hey, there's a Picasso art exhibition in town, let's go and see it", I would say "no, not me".
For that very negative response, I give the following reasons:

Picasso (an adopted name, by the way), began painting in Spain doing many bullfight scenes, at first. After his fascinating "Blue Period" period, he went to Montmartre in Paris and was soon joined by many well-known artists and a poet or two, working in his Bateau Lavoir studio. They formed the so-called Bande Picasso. It included artists such as Modigliani, Max Ernst, Chagall, Diego Rivera, Chaim Soutine, Derain as well as the poet Max Jacob.

Picasso went through many stages of development and, at 24, was already famous for pioneering his admirable cubistic art style. He and George Braque, had become famous in this art form. During this period, he lived with Eva, the girl friend of a friend of his, as well as with another girl friend, Fernande. He then married Olga, a dancer at the Diaghelev Ballet, who bore him a son, Paul. This was the only time that he married one of his women but the two soon divorced.

Later he had affairs with Dora Maar and Marie Theresa Walter. Although Marie gave him a daughter Maria in 1935, he did not marry her.
Then he lived with a very good artist named Franscoise, who gave birth to Claude (1947) and Paloma (1949). She left him, filled with disgust at his behaviour and wrote a very unflattering book about him. In it she was the first to reveal publicly his cruel streaks.
This was about the time when he began distorting the objects in his paintings even more than he had done before. He also began to fracturing them and placing the parts in unnatural positions.

It is doubtful if he ever loved any his women, except perhaps for Eva and Marie. He may have loved but did so in his own way. In spite of this "love", he never signed any of the paintings that he gave to Marie and as a result of that, she lived in poverty. She did so in spite of having a stack of potentially invaluable Picasso originals, kept in a store. He had deliberately kept back from signing them in order to keep them unmarketable. This was just another one of his many cruel and spiteful actions.

By now, Picasso had begun to paint men and women in the most disgusting positions. Satanic looking Minotaur's began to fascinate him.
Painter, yes. Great graphical artist, yes. Master of composition, yes. But as far as his nature was concerned, he was egotistical to the extreme and had a very cruel streak. He, for example, left no will behind and in so doing left most of his family and dependents destitute. Furthermore, he did not let any of his children bear his name and would not even let them into his house.

Here are some of the disasters and tragedies that he left behind:

Marie and Jacqueline both committed suicide. Dora ended her life in a mental asylum. His grandson, Pablito, drank poison when he learned that he had been disowned. Picasso did this although his son was truly of his bloodline heritage.

In the painting above, done in a pseudo Picasso-like style, the international post-impressionistic artist Margaret, highlights the following cruel aspects of Picasso:

Dora Maar is crouching in the background, obviously quite insane.
Francoise, in the role of a picador, is wounding Picasso in the cheek. This is a reference to Picasso burning her cheek with a cigarette, while in Paris.

The horns of Picasso, the bull, have pierced the body of Marie.
His hoof is pushing agonizingly into the stomach of Fernande.

In the foreground, he's using Jacqueline as a floor mop.
In the painting on the back wall, Eva is shown in death.

I've written this because I feel that the true nature of Picasso should be made known and understood. Perhaps then it will become clear, why at the end, he painted women figures in the most grotesque and crude positions. For that reason, people began to call him that "dirty old man", behind his back.