The many faces of Pablo Picasso

Artist Pablo Picasso September 11, 1956 in Cannes, France. Photo / Getty Images

"Picasso," the surrealist poet Paul Eluard said, "paints like God or the devil." Picasso favoured the first option. "I am God," he was once heard telling himself. 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 1950s, 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. "People were happy to be consumed by him," his daughter, Paloma, says. "They thought it was a privilege. If you get too close to the sun, it burns you. But the sun can't help being the sun." "Reality must be torn apart," Picasso told Francoise Gilot, the young painter who met him in 1943 and, obeying his brusque instruction to prove her fertility, bore him two children, Paloma and her brother, Claude.

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, who wrote a 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 new biography, A Life of Picasso, Volume III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, "incinerated in the furnace of Picasso's psyche". His neurotically jangled mistress Dora Maar, the weeping woman in the paintings of the late 1930s, was skewered by his cruelty.

According to Richardson, at lunchtime Picasso might praise a painting by Maar and liken it to Cezanne, giddily elating her; at dinner, he would casually remark that Cezanne was shit and drop her back into self-doubt.

Even after being replaced by Gilot, Maar was expected to remain available, forbidden to accept evening invitations in case Picasso whimsically decided to dine with her. She was not allowed to get over Picasso; his second wife, Jacqueline, a submissive helpmate but also a jealously protective guardian, could not forgive herself for surviving him. After his death in 1973, Jacqueline lapsed into an alcoholic fog, woozily communing with the spirit of the lord and master she addressed as "Monseigneur".

Richardson remembers her in the mid-1980s stubbornly asserting: "Pablo is not dead." A year later, she shot herself. The suffering has persisted into the second and third generations: Picasso's grandson Pablito tried to pay homage to Picasso the day after his death but the monopolistic Jacqueline had him expelled from her villa and decreed that he and the rest of Picasso's motley brood could not attend the funeral. Heartbroken by the rejection, Pablito downed a bottle of bleach and died.

It was Jacqueline who nudged Richardson to begin a biography, counting on him to be "discreet". The undertaking has been a devotional act. Richardson began to worship Picasso when he first saw reproductions of his work in art magazines during his schooldays in the late 1930s. "From the age of 13 to 15, I was obsessed by Picasso - and 10 years later I became his friend."

They met while Richardson was living with collector Douglas Cooper in a chateau they elaborately restored; the two men belonged to what Richardson calls Picasso's "tertulia". "That's the word Spaniards use to describe a group of guys who meet in the cafe to discuss politics, women, sport. We didn't exactly do that. Most often, Douglas and I cooked dinners for Picasso and his entourage on their way home from the bullfights in Arles.

Picasso often repaid our hospitality by bringing us drawings, though later he gave us caviar instead; he joked that now the prices for his art had risen so high, caviar was cheaper." What Picasso demanded from his gang of companions was, as Richardson puts it, "fealty".

It is a revealingly antiquated word, remembering the vassal's obligation of fidelity to his feudal overlord. But can a biographer be so subservient? "I'm sure Picasso would have hated my books about him," says Richardson. "He was secretive, he didn't want everything to be known. His affairs were the source for his work.

Once, when he was showing me some portraits, he said, 'it must be awful for a woman to look at the way I paint her and see that she's about to be replaced'. "He did everything in his power to block the publication of [Francoise] Gilot's book in 1964 and when he failed he banished Paloma and Claude as revenge on their mother.

Sometimes the truth is unpleasant, but I don't hold with the way he's been demonised by feminist academics - denounced as a wife-beater and all the rest." It was only too easy for British production company Merchant and Ivory to cast Anthony Hopkins in Surviving Picasso, a film about his relationship with Gilot; they relied on Hopkins to bring to the character the gloating, carnivorous guile he found in Hannibal Lecter. "Picasso could be ferocious," says Richardson, "but he was also gentle, sweet, child-like. Dora Maar used to talk about his persecution of her, but when she had a breakdown and got religion, she took to calling him the apostle who regenerated art.

After all, she'd been the mistress of Georges Bataille, the most way-out of the surrealists, a real satanist, in love with evil and erotic pain. So life with Picasso must have been a bed of roses after the bed of thistles she shared with Bataille." Richardson has likened Picasso to Frankenstein, who, defying God's creative primacy, soldered corpses together.

His portrait of American writer Gertrude Stein, for instance, grafts on to her mask-like head the face of a nonagenarian smuggler Picasso met during a Spanish holiday. "He had a Dracula side as well," Richardson says. "He fed on those around him, like a vampire sucking life out of his victims. He once said something very telling about the fans, stalkers, autograph-seekers, dealers, collectors and paparazzi: 'These people cut me up like a chicken on the dinner table. I nourish them, but who nourishes me?'

"We all donated our energy, if not our blood. If there were six or eight people for lunch, he'd get every single one - he'd seize control of you, turn you inside out. The pretty girls he'd flatter and flirt with. If there were kids present, he'd make toys for them or do drawings. Even animals weren't immune - he'd entice them to come to him. Everyone had to be seduced. You ended the day completely drained. But he'd imbibe all that stolen energy and stride off into the studio and work all night. I can't imagine the hell of being married to him."

Richardson's friend, Douglas Cooper fell from grace after he presumed to plead the cause of the excommunicated Paloma and her brother. "That was absurd," says Richardson, who re-enacts the scene with a satirical glee. "Nothing could have infuriated Picasso more than trying to get him to recognise his illegitimate children as heirs - not for financial reasons, but because any mention of a will reminded him of death, which his art was so determined to deny. Douglas was thrown out, but wouldn't give up.

There was a steep flight of stairs leading down from Picasso's villa to the front gate and poor Douglas paused on every step, kneeling and weeping and grovelling and begging to be forgiven. It did him no good at all." Richardson felt Picasso's muffled annoyance only indirectly. "It was because of something I wrote for the Observer newspaper, which he read in the French equivalent of the Reader's Digest. It was about his friendship with Braque and I mentioned that Picasso had offered him studio space at his place in Cannes, which Braque refused.

Trivial enough, but it made him cross because he didn't want it known that anyone could say no to him. He never referred to it; Jacqueline ticked me off on his behalf. I did once see him being mean, when he turned up with Cocteau and all the hangers-on for dinner after a bullfight. Jacqueline looked ill, collapsed and I carried her upstairs. Picasso just shrugged and said, 'I seem to have a corpse on my hands'. She told me that she needed an operation - a hysterectomy, I suppose, though she was too ashamed to use the word - but couldn't have it because, 'Pablo doesn't want to live with a eunuch'."

The remark poignantly acknowledged Jacqueline's sense of her duty (and of her failure to fulfil it, since she did not add to Picasso's eclectic crop of children). He was a creator; his women had a lowlier responsibility, serving as reproductive vehicles. "Of course," Richardson adds, "it was just the idea of having offspring that appealed to him.

In practice, he expected the current woman in his life to be at his beck and call, so he begrudged time spent on maternal chores. He could be a doting father. He loved devising games, teaching them to draw, romping on the beach. But his work had priority and then he didn't want to be bothered." The purpose of women was clearly defined. What, I wonder, was the role of male admirers like Richardson? Did the master expect his companions to be slaves or, at least, feudal vassals?

I ask about Picasso's assertion that "to like my paintings, people really have to be masochists". "He probably said that for effect," Richardson says. "A day later he'd have been saying the opposite."

Richardson has so far survived Picasso, but the race is not yet over. He has spent almost 40 years on the biography, though the three volumes published so far have only reached the middle of Picasso's life. "I'm 85 and I don't have all that much time.

The biography grew at its own pace, which is why it has taken so long. There has to be a fourth volume, maybe a fifth - who knows? I suffer from wet macular degeneration and I need an injection in my eyeball once a month. I'm fine in front of paintings, but I have a problem with print, so research is hard." He is currently preparing a New York exhibition of Picasso's last works - paintings of a muddled rabble of musketeers, whores, thieves and beggars, with faces scavenged from Rembrandt, Velazquez and Goya. "By the end of his life, he knew he couldn't compete with the avant-garde.

Americans had taken over, bringing back the abstraction that he always despised. But he turned the studio in his last house into a microcosm, projected slides sent from the Louvre on the walls, and shut himself away to cannibalise the entire history of art. It was a triumphant end to his career, not a falling-off."

Paloma Picasso recalls being present, as a quiet and unobtrusive child, during sessions of almost frenetic creativity in her father's studio. "He was 67 when I was born, but I never thought of him as old. He was so vital, so playful. Perhaps he thought of me as a contemporary, even though I was only four when my mother took my brother and me away to live in Paris in 1953. He was proud to draw like a child, not someone with an academic training.

"One day, I got a pair of white espadrilles. I was so happy, they looked so cute, I'd wanted them so much. And the moment my father saw them he covered the canvas with red and blue designs. They looked fabulous, they'd become an art object, but it was a little sad too; I realised I'd never ever be able to have white espadrilles like the other girls."

Even when taking a rest or pausing to entertain his daughter, Picasso could not help littering the world with more art. "All day long while he worked, he smoked. The cigarettes came in little cardboard cartons and whenever he finished a packet, which was three or four times a day, he'd cut it up to make me a doll or a finger puppet or scribble a pencil drawing on it. He couldn't stop himself."

The black eyes inherited by Paloma are less baleful than her father's and they shine with delight as she remembers a world in which daily reality consisted of dreams and games. "We had a menagerie in the house. My father was like St Francis of Assisi - animals couldn't resist his aura. A goat called Esmeralda had the run of the villa, it lived upstairs with us. My mother gave away an earlier Esmeralda to some gypsies because she hated its smell and the mess it made; my father was outraged and said he loved the goat like a child. He even sculpted it, with cardboard ears, a basket for its belly, udders made of terracotta milk jugs and a metal pipe sticking out for its anus.

This one was the second Esmeralda and it was lonely. It cried at night and I'd go and goat-sit to comfort it. Often, I fell asleep beside it. "One summer, a frog hopped out of the pond and came and sat with us on the steps in the evening when it was cool. My father constructed a little ladder so it could climb up and get into the house. We gave it a bowl to live in, but it couldn't feed itself in there. My father collected flies for it; he had a way of gently sweeping the air with his open hand and then closing it on the insects. Even the flies weren't afraid of him."

During the 1950s, Paloma and Claude travelled from Paris to the south of France to spend their holidays with Picasso. "He played the role of father when he met the train and asked us about school. But he really didn't care and admitted that he'd been a bad student himself." The idyll ended with the publication of Gilot's Life With Picasso in 1964.

Swiss art dealer and collector Angela Rosengart remembers Picasso's reaction when he read the French translation. "He gripped my shoulder and said, 'how could a woman do such a thing?' That shows, you see, what respect he had for women." When Picasso first met Gilot, he'd proposed keeping her captive in an attic, swaddled like a Muslim woman, until he was ready to unwrap her for delectation; early in his friendship with Rosengart, he said that he fancied detaining her on the premises as a perpetually available model.

"The book was not harmful," Paloma insists. "The art world deified my father and my mother wrote about him as a human being - about his little quirks and superstitions, but also about his attempts to control her. Anyway, [his second wife] Jacqueline used the book as the excuse for a breach with us.

From now on, we officially didn't exist, we couldn't be mentioned, we were bad. But how evil can you be when you're only 14? Maybe Jacqueline resented us because she gave him no children. "Once, during the time we were banned, I saw my father in Cannes. I rushed up to him, we embraced as if nothing had ever happened. Should I have told him that I'd been to the house every day that week, but was not allowed in? I didn't want to ruin the moment with accusations. Then Jacqueline bustled up and bundled him into the car. She must have been very insecure, which is maybe why she couldn't survive him."

Picasso dieid [in April, 1973] intestate, forcing Paloma and Claude to apply to the French courts for recognition as his descendants and heirs. Eventually, a legal ruling allowed them to adopt the surname Ruiz-Picasso.

The hyphen ironically disinterred the conflicts of previous generations. Ruiz was their father's patronymic, which he spurned as a means of separation from his own father, also a painter; he called himself Picasso after his mother's family. But the famous name that Paloma coveted carried its own burden. "Both my parents were artists, so what else could I be? When the estate was settled, each of us - me, my brother and the step-siblings from other relationships - was allowed to choose a group of his works, within certain financial limits. And then we were involved in setting up the Musee Picasso in [Paris], which took care of the death duties.

After you've been looking at Picassos all day, you don't want to come home and pick up a pen or a brush. Although I started to design jewellery before he passed away, for a long while I felt inhibited. How could I measure up?" She soon found an independent way to merchandise the family brand, and, following the example of the ceramics her father turned out in multiple editions in the 1950s, supplied the market with her own relatively affordable Picassos: jewellery, cosmetics, leather goods, sunglasses, china, tiles, furniture covers and wallpaper.

Psychologically, Paloma also learnt from her father's example. Paparazzi besieged the hospital in which she was born and dispatched nurses to bribe her mother; her infancy and childhood were remorselessly documented, since Picasso, as Richardson says, was "as famous as a rock star".

Richardson regrets Picasso's antics for the camera. "He played the fool, dressed up, performed little mimes, though often it was his only way of communicating with people. After the war, it was compulsory for Americans visiting Paris to call on him. They spoke no French, he spoke no English, so he had to put on these foolish dumb shows with silly hats or Indian head-dresses, like the one Gary Cooper gave him." Paloma takes a different, wilier view. "My father didn't deny his celebrity. He treated the press the way you would do a dog - if you run away, it will chase you and bite you, but if you play with it, it may lick your hand."

Paloma developed her own sly version of this tactic and, like her friend Andy Warhol, she became socially and commercially ubiquitous while remaining unknowable. "I was so timid," she sighs. "That's why I played the part of that lustful lesbian Hungarian countess in the film Immoral Tales; I thought that would cure my shyness. When I began designing, I diverted attention to my persona, to the extravagant way I dressed or the fire-engine-red lipstick I wore. The look was a mask like those my father collected and I hid behind it." Her current disguise is an immaculate anonymity.

Sitting opposite me on a sofa in a hotel, she could be any prosperous, well-tended Swiss matron, except when the gold hoops rattle on her wrists and her father's eyes scorch me like a pair of black suns.

Another young woman inadvertently immortalised by her brief contact with Picasso was 19-year-old Sylvette David, who posed for him in the summer of 1953. She caught his eye when her boyfriend tried to sell him some shakily assembled cubist chairs; soon she was visiting the studio every day. Sylvette - today called Lydia Corbett after a failed second marriage to an Englishman and a rebaptism following her religious conversion - lives in Britain.

Picasso fancied Sylvette because she had a ponytail. "He was fascinated by that. It was my father's idea; he liked the way ballerinas pulled their hair back. And no one ever had such a high ponytail as mine. Even Brigitte Bardot decided to copy my hair when she saw me on the Croisette in Cannes.

Of course, she wasn't naturally blond, like me." Picasso began with delicately accurate sketches of her, then in the next few months experimentally racked and twisted her body, finally remaking her in folded metal or casting her in bronze as his Woman With a Key, a statue originally pieced together from fire-clay bricks and other implements from a potter's kiln. "I was in the middle of two women - Francoise and Jacqueline - and they didn't like me being there," she says. "Oh la la, it was difficult.

Picasso often painted me in a rocking chair. You see it again in his portraits of Jacqueline, but I sat in it first. After a while, she made sure I wasn't welcome. Finally, she presented me with a book about his art, which he inscribed to me. That was her way of saying, 'It's over, go'.

Later I heard that the statue of me as the woman with the key was called The Brothel-Keeper and I was so offended. Who would say that about me? Maybe Jacqueline. Once he did offer me money to pose, but I refused. I thought, what if he wants me to be nude? He was 73 then, he wore slippers. But he was clean, he had no whiskers and he smelled nice, not of wine and garlic. He went back to his youth through me. He gave me a cuddle sometimes, like a good old dad." Despite Jacqueline's rebuff, Sylvette survived Picasso.

Indeed he subsidised her after-life by presenting her with one of his 40 paintings of her, which she sold to buy an apartment in Paris. She shows me one of her recent watercolours, influenced more by Chagall than by Picasso.

Against a gold background like that of a religious icon, Sylvette floats among a collection of Picasso's props - owls, masks, statuettes - with a cowled monk representing his better self; the painter's round face is lunar and those omniscient eyes keep protective watch on the world. "He's so big he envelops us all," she says.

I wondered, however, why she had given Picasso three arms, which reach out to pinion the airborne Sylvette. His extra, exploratory hand seemed bent on mischief. Was Picasso a deity or a randy old devil? Or perhaps, as poet Paul Eluard suggested, both at once? "The man was a paradox," says John Richardson. "Whatever you say about him, the reverse is also true."

His lovers, friends, models and children know that he metamorphosed them. Whether they were recreated or destroyed, even they can't be sure.

* A Life of Picasso, Volume III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, by John Richardson (Jonathan Cape, $95)

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