He muttered the mantra three times, boasting of his power to animate and enliven the visible world. Any line drawn by his hand pulsed with vitality; when he looked at it, a bicycle seat and its handlebar could suddenly turn into the horned head of a bull. But he also took a diabolical pleasure in warping appearances, deforming faces and twisting bodies, subjecting reality to a tormenting inquisition.
Picasso's behaviour was equally dualistic. In my recent conversations with people who knew him, I heard him compared to a saint, and was startled when a former model took him at his word and equated him with God.
His biographer John Richardson, who lived near him in Provence during the s, told me about the warmth and rollicking conviviality of the man: the genius was also genial. Others described a predator who gobbled up visual stimuli and wolfed down friends, employees and lovers. The Swiss dealer and collector Angela Rosengart, whose own Picassos are on display at her museum in Lucerne, remembered presenting him with some handmade drawing paper.
He licked his lips as he appraised its possibilities: "I'm a paper-eater, you know! If you get too close to the Sun, it burns you. But the Sun can't help being the Sun. After 10 years with him, Gilot wondered whether she, too, had been torn apart. As a painter and a sculptor, Picasso magically metamorphosed the things he saw; Gilot, in her book about their vexed partnership, felt that he had forced "a metamorphosis in my nature".
He remade her to suit himself, then looked elsewhere when she had served her purpose, which was to fuel his creativity and cosset his ego. Unlike the rest of the many women in Picasso's life, Gilot took the initiative by leaving him. She survived; others, less lucky, were, as Richardson says in his biography, "incinerated in the furnace of Picasso's psyche".
