When Picasso became Picasso: the story of how an obscure young painter from Barcelona came to
Paris and made himself into the most influential artist of the twentieth century. In 1900 an
eighteen-year-old Spaniard named Pablo Picasso made his first trip to Paris. It was in this
glittering capital of the international art world that after suffering years of poverty and
neglect he emerged as the leader of a bohemian band of painters sculptors and poets. Fueled
by opium and alcohol inspired by raucous late-night conversations at the Lapin Agile cabaret
Picasso and his friends resolved to shake up the world. For most of these years Picasso lived
and worked in a squalid tenement known as the Bateau Lavoir in the heart of picturesque
Montmartre. Here he met his first true love Fernande Olivier a muse whom he would transform
in his art from Symbolist goddess to Cubist monster. These were years of struggle often of
desperation but Picasso later looked back on them as the happiest of his long life.
Recognition came slowly: first in the avant-garde circles in which he traveled and later among
a small group of daring collectors including the Americans Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1906
Picasso began the vast disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Inspired by
the groundbreaking painting of Paul Cézanne and the startling inventiveness of African and
tribal sculpture Picasso created a work that captured and defined the disorienting experience
of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he'd gone
mad. Only his colleague George Braque understood what Picasso was trying to do. Over the next
few years they teamed up to create Cubism the most revolutionary and influential movement in
twentieth-century art. This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift.
It is filled with heartbreak and triumph despair and delirium all of it played out against
the backdrop of the world's most captivating city.
