Pablo Picasso - Do You Know My Name?

[cypher]

"I am God! I am God!"
Picasso over heard by the Catalan sculptor Fenosa in the 1940's, John
Richardson, Picasso, A Life. Volume One.

"I know of no better purpose in life than to be destroyed by that
which is great and impossible!"
Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-6.

My Website - www.thepanicartist.com

My Blog on Art - ttp://thepanicartist.livejournal.com/

Raw ambition in a teenager is just that - raw. Young men seek to
conquer the world, yet their ambition is innocent and ignorant of all
the obstacles the real world can mount. This was the case with me when
in 1988 - I turned to face the challenge of Picasso. For over a year,
Egon Schiele had been the principal artist with whom I had done battle
- and I had begun to stupidly feel that I could eventually surpass the
Austrians early achievements (in fact I could not no matter how hard I
tried ever acquire his genius for line - though as a painter I think I
equaled him). However, as I was to find out, taking on the mantel of
Picasso was quite another matter.

Even by the time I started the race - I had already lost. I tried by
means of deception to make it appear that I was more precocious - but
even that failed! I can laugh about it now - but as Morrissey might
have said 'at the time it was terrible'. Despite the wreckage that my
competition with Picasso created - I don't regret a minute of it. His
example made me work harder than I would otherwise have done, and he
enriched my life as an art lover immeasurably. In fact my life would
lose a lot of its meaning if the influence of Picasso was erased. With
figures like Egon Schiele, Vincent Van Gogh, Morrissey, Fredrick
Nietzsche, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Richardson,
Robert Hughes and Brian Sewell, he has shaped my views on art,
creativity and stubborn individualism.

I remember when in Sandford Park Prep school in Dublin I brought my
new paintings in for my art teacher to look at - I was about eleven.
My wonderfully supportive teacher Mrs Glackin looked at my work with
undisguised delight and then said: "I see you are in your Green Period
at the moment!" "Em, Yes Miss!" I replied somewhat bemused. "Do you
know Picasso? He had his Blue and Rose Period. You are doing your
Green Period!" She exclaimed. That sent me off to look at some of his
work. I probably had heard his name - in the way I had heard names
like Elvis, Marylin Monroe or John Lennon - and it rang with the same
mythic quality. Looking at his work (mostly his later work) I found it
bemusing - so much of it seemed childish and wrong. At the time my
heroes where Impressionists like Degas - so I found it hard to
appreciate Picasso's distortions of form.

Over the years my knowledge of the Spaniard slowly increased as did my
fear of him and his achievements. But I fooled myself into thinking I
had time to reach his level. Until one cold, blustery, rain soaked day
early in April 1988 (while truant from Sandymount Highschool), I
retreated from St. Stephens Green for the warmth of Waterstones
bookshop on Dawson street - which at the time had the largest and most
select art book section in Dublin. I found and instantly bought a
small book on Picasso written by Josep Palau I Fabres. What made this
book on Picasso so different to the others that I had previously seen
was the importance it gave over to Picasso's early childhood and
teenage works - of which there were about 24 in a book of over 150
plates covering his art from 1890-1973. One small painting in the book
jumped out at me; Salon del Prado - Madrid 1897- a tiny oil painting
(6"x 4") on a wooden panel, depicting a rain swept park which was
painted when Picasso was sixteen and playing truant from art college
in Madrid! These youthful works painted by Picasso from the age of
nine to twenty shocked me to the core. Lost in my own fantasy world I
had built up a very high opinion of my talents over the years -
thinking myself a potential genius - when I saw what the young Picasso
had done at my age and younger I nearly collapsed in a heap. Compared
with the youthful Spaniards work, my drawings and paintings were
crude, adolescent, and deranged. I was a clumsy naive and mannered
draughtsman, a ham-fisted painter and an emotional cripple - I
discovered that Picasso was at least ten years ahead of me
technically.

So in the course of one day, I realized just how great an effort of
will, would be required of me if I was to compete with his legacy.
Every week I would browse Waterstones and Hodges-Figgis bookstores -
poring over every book on the Spaniard I could find. There seemed no
end to the new work by him that I discovered - book by book. For the
next three years, I could feel his oppressive presence breathing down
my neck and ridiculing all my finest efforts. After destroying all of
my early works (1980-1986, totaling about 200 works) in March 1987, my
total oeuvre in 1988, amounted to only about 60 watercolours, drawings
and Alkyd paintings. By my age, Picasso had already spectacularly -
entered and left three art academies, achieved excellent marks in
drawing and painting, exhibited nationally and won medals at
exhibitions. Moreover he had produced approximately; 132 oil
paintings, 8 watercolours, drawn over 142 drawings on individual
sheets of paper, plus a further 866 drawings in seventeen sketchbooks
(all these figures come from Josep Palau I Fabres catalogue resume of
Picasso's early years 1891-1907). Struggling to compete with Picasso I
knew Jackson Pollock's rage when he had ranted over forty years
before: "That fucking Picasso! He's fucking done everything!" Feeling
cruelly treated by fate, I saw myself as the accursed shadow of
Picasso. I knew I possessed Picasso's Napoleonic egotism and plans for
world domination - but I also knew that I lacked his natural gift for
art, his impeccable training, his sheer technical skill, his charisma,
his virility and his mental health. Looking back on my own upbringing
- I resented Picasso's happy and supportive family and early paternal
instruction in art. But, through a form of magic-thinking, I sought to
compensate for my lack of technical finesse with expressive intensity,
painterly aggression and sexual provocation.

The twentieth century was a period of unprecedented stylistic
innovations, artistic gimmicks and more individual artists than in all
the previous centuries of Western art combined. It was a tribute to
Modern art historians that any of this story had any shape or meaning
to it at all. Movements, artists and oeuvres were whittled down and
down, to a few telling styles - moving in a certain direction (from
alla-prima Impressionist paintings with their sketchy brushstrokes,
into Cubist deconstruction of form, into abstraction of many kinds,
and at the end of the century into conceptualism) and a few key
artists of originality, skill and intelligence who had created or
defined the master movements - Matisse's Fauvism, Picasso and Braque's
Cubism, Kirchner's Expressionism, Duchamp's Dada, Dali's Surrealism,
Pollock's Abstract Expressionism, Warhol's Pop Art and so on. Of
course such a reduction - was grossly simplistic but it was necessary
to give order to a tale of such complexity. As such Picasso came to
define Modern art - its greatest and most protean creator - but also
one who's work had anticipated, founded or pastiched so many of its
different stylistic tributaries.

While many of the attributes which determine the reputation of an
artist, include nebulous qualities like; depth of style, maturity and
vision. Other crasser barometers of genius like; prodigiousness,
technical virtuosity, originality, innovation, scandal, influence,
productivity and fame are far more easily quantified. Picasso achieved
levels of excellence in all of these media beloved barometers as well
as all the more ambiguous elitist qualities - making him not only
revered amongst artists but also the general public. He drew in
pencil, charcoal, and pastel, he etched, lino-cutted and lithographed,
he collaged, potted, sculpted and constructed and he painted in oils,
watercolour and gouache - achieving high degrees of mastery in all
these mediums. In Cubism he invented the single most influential
modernist movement, as well as working in Naturalist, Realist,
Symbolist, Neo-Impressionist, Neo-Classical, Surrealist and
Expressionist styles. Moreover in 1937 he painted Guernica the
greatest political painting of the century. His career as a painter
spanned eight decades and when he died he was the richest, most famous
and most prolific artist in human history. Picasso scholars have
identified over 40 different periods or styles in the Spanish masters
oeuvre probably making him the most varied artist in art history. He
left behind over; 13,500 paintings, 660 sculptures, 2,010 prints, 200
ceramics and 20,000 drawings. Indeed Picasso summed up his attitude to
art when he said; "I believe in nothing but work. You cannot have an
art without hard work: manual as well as cerebral dexterity."(Picasso
a Life, John Richardson p48).

Picasso was a selfish man utterly obsessed with his own creativity -
his only drugs were unfiltered Gauloise cigarettes and art. He drank
little though he did experiment with Opium and Hashish. The ethereal
and edgy look of his Blue Period and the languid heat of the Rose
period may in part have been influenced by the supine quality of the
Opium high and its edgy melancholy come down. However he quit after
seeing the effect it had on other artists in Montmartre like
Modigiliani.

Picasso had two marriages and five other serious sexual relationships
- with perhaps a few dozen other encounters with women and prostitutes
- but that was pretty small fry compared with the sex lives of many
men or women of my today. Writers like Arianna Huffington liked to
later portray Picasso as a sadistic control freak and misogynist and
this was true - but most of the women in his life knew what they were
letting themselves in for. As the English Comedian Mrs Merton might
have asked the likes of Ms Gilot: "what was it that attracted you to
the world-famous, multi-millionaire Genius Pablo Picasso." It is pious
naivety to think these women did not know what they were doing and
that he merely abused them. He may have been short, pudgy and old -
but he was also Picasso! Personally I was to attend many night classes
in art schools and I never saw any of the pretty twenty-year old girls
flirting with the short, fat sixty year bus drivers in the class! In
fact many of those that knew the likes of Fernande Oilver, Olga
Koklova, Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Marr, Francois Giolt and
Jacqueline Roque and had competed on the strenght of these women.
However time and time again these women were to discover that Picasso
had only one true love - his art. He sacrificed everything to it and
expected those close to him to do the same - that was the price of
friendship with Picasso.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on 25th October 1881 in Malaga, Spain. It
was in his late teens that Picasso changed from signing his canvases
Pablo Ruiz Picasso to Picasso his mother's maiden name. It was just
one of his many Oedipal gestures - made to erase his fathers influence
on his early art. He was a Scorpio - creative, passionate, headstrong,
sexual, jealous and vengeful. Pablo was his parents first born and
only son - he was followed a few years later by his sisters Lola and
then Conchita (who would die at the age of four). His father Jose Ruiz
Blasco was a painter and teacher in the local School of Fine Arts and
Crafts and he was most famous for his pictures of pigeons. It was his
father who first taught Picasso the basics of drawing and painting.

The earliest surviving work by Picasso is his drawing of
'Hercules' (1890) which he executed at the age of nine. In the same
year he painted 'Picador' his first oil painting - both are childish
and naive - the sense of anatomy and perspective is limited and
frankly you could see works of similar quality in a national
children's art competition. Slowly over the following two years his
work gained in childish awareness of shadow, anatomy and perspective.
But it was at the age of eleven that his work really hit its stride. I
have seen many drawings of plastercasts - and most are notable for
their crudeness and mechanical manner. Picasso's drawings of plaster
casts are quite another story - he managed to infect these mundane
academic exercises with pathos, profundity and soul. In 1895 he began
to paint wonderfully bravura painterly portraits of beggars and old
men under his father's tutorship.

Many critics who have never brushed oil paint onto the coarse weave of
primed canvas, or stroked a stick of charcoal onto a sheet of laid
paper like to play down Picasso's prodigiousness. Discussion of such
things seem puerile - the stuff of the sensationalist media. But as an
artist who began seriously painting at the same age of Picasso - and
tried with all his might to be as good as him - I can testify just how
astounding his feats of skill were.

I often wondered who was the best child prodigy in art - technically
some might have considered Van Dyke more skilled, Durer more
precocious, or Bernini more promising. But one very great advantage
Picasso had was that he produced so much and that so much of it was
preserved. I personally find that only Picasso's early work compels me
to look and look again. Even today I tremble when I see the young
Pablo do masterful things with the brush, pen, or charcoal that I try
but fail constantly to achieve. His early work is more than a mere
display of skill - it is the first steps on an epic road of a deeply
autobiographical art (perhaps the most diaristic oeuvre in art
history). From the start Picasso had a gift most technically
accomplished artists do not possess - he had the capacity to load his
drawings and paintings with real feeling.

Picasso famously wrote on one of his sketchbooks "Je suis le
cahier" (sketchbook No.40, 1906-7) or "I am the sketchbook" in
English. He could also have said - 'I am the camera' - for in his
earlier sketchbooks he recorded everything and anything around him;
his family, himself, his pets, his class mates, his bedroom, his
livingroom, the streets of every city he lived in, horses, bull
fights, beggars, prostitutes and so on. If he later went on to make
some of the cruelest and misogynistic images of women ever committed
to canvas - he did so only after a life time of recording them in all
their other facets as; mothers, as siblings, as friends, as lovers, as
idols and Madonnas. While I hid away in my bedroom - painting pictures
based not on real lived experience and human contact, but photographs
cut from magazines and books or scene-gabbed from video tape - Picasso
was interacting in the world, traveling, having sex, make friendships
and establishing a career for himself.

Through out his young life Picasso drew his friends and family -
strengthening his bonds with them and their awe of him. Picasso grew
up making art in public - in front of his father, his academic tutors,
his friends, and his family - so he made art in a fearless manner
unfamiliar with performance anxiety. It is this self-confidence, lack
of restraint and complete freedom - which is what makes his art so
compelling. That is why Picasso could be filmed in 1955 for 'The
Mystery of Picasso' - and work with such brevity and easy - where as
Pollock (a much more conflicted and anxious artist of no natural
facility) had been sent back on the bottle after filming with Hans
Namuth had finished in 1950.

Picasso's childhood life and art is full of myths some made by Picasso
himself, some made by others close to him on his behalf - like Jaume
Sabartes his early friend and later his secretary and biographer and
Ronald Penrose his first major English biographer. No other writer has
done more to dismantle these myths than his friend John Richardson.
One key myth to the Picasso story is that one day his father left him
to finish off the feet on one of his pigeon paintings and after seeing
what his son had achieved - he handed the boy his pallet and brush and
vowed to never paint again - its pure fiction - his father continued
to paint and exhibit locally well into the twentieth century. But the
myth is notable for what its said about Picasso - who felt he had won
the Oedipal battle with his father at the age of thirteen. Later
Picasso famously said: "In art one must kill ones father."

Dull witted critics like to constantly point out Picasso's
mistreatment of women. But in fact that is a smoke screen in my mind
which hides one of his most important betrayals - that of his father.
If you ever had a child, gave him a loving, stable and creative home
life, structured his training, tutored him in conte chalks, charcoal,
watercolour and oils, bought him canvas and paint, and still more
canvas and paint, helped him get into art college, sat for him
constantly, encouraged everything he did and at the end of it all he
turned his back on you and belittled your help - well how would you
feel. Only the great German Historian Carsten-Peter Warnche writing
for Taschen in 1993 so clearly layed out the tutorial role his father
and successive Spanish academy's provided Picasso - drilling him
whether he liked it or not in the ancestral skills of Western art.

Picasso the iconoclast, the innovator, the Modernist is an
uncomfortable hero to today's youth - they like his originality and
crave his success - but they loath his elitist traditional skills. One
of the gross myths of Modernism - expounded by both its advocates and
critics alike is the notion of the Modern artist as self-taught,
inspired lunatic breaking every single rule of traditional craft and
ancestral art. It is a myth Picasso fully embraced. His story as he
put it foreword was that he was a born genius who learned with ease
all the traditional rules of drawing, perspective, shading, brushwork
and colour without even trying very hard and once he had proved his
point he went on to break every rule he had learned. But any close and
attentive study of the oeuvres of Modernists like Picasso, Matisse,
Duchamp, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Kupka, Beckman, Dali even
Dubuffet illustrates another truth - that nearly all the really first
rate innovators of Modernism first acquired a solid (sometimes
exceptional) grounding in realist skills before moving beyond their
limitations.

The young Pablo began exhibiting regularly at the age of fourteen - in
local and later National art exhibitions. Apart from privately
teaching drawing to children for a while at the turn of the century
(when he was in abject poverty because his Blue paintings could find
no dealers or collectors) Picasso never had a regular job - his whole
life from nine onwards had only one purpose - to create art.

In 1896 at the age of fourteen Picasso painted and exhibited First
Communion. Technically I consider it a brilliant display of
traditional Spanish naturalist painting - if I were told it was the
work of a Conservative academic in his late thirties I would have
believed it. In 1897 at the age of fifteen he painted and exhibited
Science and Charity an even larger and more ambitious canvas - though
one I find more awkward looking than his previous masterpiece. But
when it was shown in the national art exhibition in Madrid that year
it won a gold medal. What these paintings and other countless drawings
prove - is that the young Picasso was more than capable of making
complex group-figure compositions of great naturalistic skill and
realism. From the age of fifteen onwards Picasso was able to conjure
figure compositions based on nothing but his imagination or memory. He
often continued to paint from life - but he interpreted and condensed
reality through his own artistic vision - in a manner only a handful
of other Modern masters like Matisse and Beckman were able to match
(needless to say I never achieved their feats of skill).

According to Richardson, Picasso is said at the age of fourteen or
fifteen - to have lost his virginity to a prostitute in the Barri Xino
district of Barcelona. It is thought that his older classmate Pallares
treated Picasso - since his pocket money would not have sufficed.
Picasso would continue to frequent brothels throughout his late
teenage years - this was not unusual at the time - no respectable
woman would have sex before marriage. I too would later lose my
virginity to a prostitute - but it would be at the age of twenty-one
and in Amsterdam - because my fear, shame and guilt had prevented me
going to one earlier in Dublin. While Picasso drew women to him and
used them up as he sought fit - I would struggle all my life to court
girls.

His close relationships with his mother and sister Lola and early
initiation into the mysteries of sex might explain the natural and
healthy nature of Picasso's sexuality even if it is often
characterized as misogynistic. In the Spaniard's work there is none of
the twisted perversion of Salvador Dali his fellow country man or the
anguished and morbid sexuality of the young Austrian Egon Schiele. On
the other hand his female nudes were always more earthy than the
decorative Matisse or the aesthete Modigliani. He could place women on
a plinth and worship their beauty, sexiness and fecundity but he could
also tear them down to the level of a base animal showing them
menstruating or urinating. But frankly if Picasso in the eyes of women
was a 'manly' misogynist - I was a perverted sicko in comparison.
Personally I thought the word 'misogynist' was too political, too
simplistic and too dishonest to explain the complexities of any man's
sexuality.

In 1897 Picasso won admittance to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in
Madrid, it was his first time in the Spanish capital and his first
time away from his fathers control. He rarely attended the academy -
preferring to spend his time in the Prado museum or drawing the people
in the parks and streets. After eight dissolute months he left the
academy. The following two years was a period of immense growth from
boy to man ( a growth it would take me into my mid twenties to
achieve). Through friends he became aware of philosophers like
Nietzsche and the catch phrases of the Anarchist movements. But his
art lost some of its direction. He dabbled with style after style -
never settling long in any. However by 1900 he had begun to find his
feet as a modern painter influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the
Symbolist's.

At the age of nineteen Picasso traveled to Paris to make his name -
even he found it hard to make a decisive breakthrough early on. Over
the next few years he would shuttle back and forth from France to
Spain. His early Parisian paintings were wonderfully energetic Post-
Impressionist inspired studies of nightclubs, theaters, prostitutes,
street life and the sexual loquaciousness of the French. Stylistically
there were not original - rather they were a clever mix of the tricks
and mannerisms of the likes of Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas.
Everyone knows that that Picasso's impotent and neurotic friend
Casagemus killed himself over a woman called Germaine. Everyone has
seen the paintings Picasso made of Cassagmus in his coffin with a
bullet hole in his head. What few people know is that Picasso had a
sexual dalliance with Germain after his death - it's a rather
distasteful betrayal in my opinion - but just one of many Picasso's.
But it was the guilt, shame and sorrow provoked by Casagemas death
that provoked Picasso into producing his first truly great art - the
work of his Blue Period. The Blue Period was an expression of his
feelings for the down trodden, the poor and the marginalized - the
same experiences he was suffering as a poor artist in Paris. While
there are a great many gems in the Blue Period - the overall effect I
find very monotonous. This dark era in his life ended with his
relationship with the lusciously beautiful Fernand Oliver - his first
serious girlfriend. His pallet became warmer, his paint creamier and
more gentle - and he painted some of the most tender and beautiful
images of young women and adolescent boys. From here he could easily
have stopped developing and churn out such saleable canvases - but he
had a crisis of faith. He recognized that Modernism was about
innovation and he was jealous of the fame and notoriety artists like
Matisse were achieving. With Les Demoiselles he made his bid for
immortality and the rest is history.

By 1909 Picasso days of poverty were over. By the dawn of World War
One he was being hailed as a genius by artists, dealers, collectors
and art lovers alike. By the 1920's Picasso was already the most
famous artist in the world, a multi-millionaire with a townhouse in
Paris and a Chateau in the countryside. He was constantly interviewed
by the press and photographed by the greatest photographers of the
day. He was a regular name in the society columns and a figure of awe,
fear, worship and resentment to every artist in the world. As the
decades passed - his fame, notoriety and mystique only grew and grew.
Dali had to act the lunatic in public to even come close to Picasso's
column inches, while Warhol would later have to employ assistants and
silkscreen mass-production to beat Picasso's personal output of
handmade canvases.

So through out his youth Picasso attempted and passed every test of
skill required of a naturalistic painter. He moved from drawings of
plaster casts, to drawings of life models, oil paintings of life
models, compositions with multiple figures, street scenes, landscapes,
still-lifes, nightclub scenes, allegorical paintings and finally in
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-7) - into a uniquely original
recasting of form as revolutionary in Western painting as Giotto's
fresco's of Padua in 1303-6. Later Picasso and Braque's invention of
Cubism (a profound extension of the paintings of Cezanne with their
shifting view points, Iberian carvings and Africa tribal masks) was no
mere stylistic novelty - it was a radical reordering of reality on
canvas.

People who knew him characterized him as demonically charismatic
bursting with vitality, virility and unshakable self-confidence (just
more gifts I was denied in life). He had his moments of black self-
doubt - no serious artist does not - but his mental health was
remarkably good in an era of depressive or manic-depressive artists
often set on a path of self-destruction.

In her memories Fernande Olivier his first girlfriend recalled one
night when Picasso after taking Hashish tablets thought that he might
as well kill himself because he had nothing left to learn. He feared
that drugs would make things too easy and remove from him the slow
process of learning that he evolved in his sketchbooks leading him to
gimmicky art and ultimately creative sterility. I was later to spend
my adult life intoxicating my brain - in the hope that drugs would
unleash apparitions to me and give my work complexity and rawness - it
rarely did - in fact it made my work look wonky and aggressive. My
life in contrast to Picasso's proves that there is no chemical that
can make you a genius. It is a gift - Picasso had it - and I never
did.

Picasso could scribble a masterpiece on a calling card or menu in a
few minutes but could also work (like he did on Les Demoiselles) non
stop for three-quarters of a year on a massive canvas that would
change the course of art history - amassing over 809 preparatory
drawings in the process. He could make art with the apparent
simplicity of a child - yet in the same day draw a naturalistic study
that bore comparison with the old masters for brevity, grace and
subtlety of tone. Idiots who know nothing of painting or drawing or
real creativity - and spend their life with magnifying glasses looking
in awe at some tedious and dumb photo-realist canvas - simply don't
get Picasso. His work looks raw, uncouth and unfinished - but with the
sketchbooks of Da Vinci his oeuvre is the greatest expose of the
creative mind in action. What you see is what you get - raw, brutal
technical skill and intellectual gravity. Creatively Picasso's oeuvre
is pure technical command sustained over eighty years - he is like a
noble marathon runner in a race with incompetents who use every trick
in the book to keep up - steroids, blood transfusions, bikes, mopeds
and cars ( I tried to cheat with my backdating, and use of
photographs).

Picasso was one of those very rare artists who knew just when to stop.
A huge amount of his work was in traditional terms unfinished - but he
always seemed to suggest so much genius in what he did do that one
forgave him his sloppiness and often slap-dash approach. Picasso was
incapable of drawing a crude or uninteresting line no matter what
style he deployed. He was never a very painterly painter - but he was
infinitely more painterly than me and a host of other fourth rate
painters. He was never a natural colorist - but he had more than
enough to hold his own against second rate Fauvists or Expressionists.
As for black - he was its master - and he played with it more
inventively than anyone of the twentieth century. For me the Spaniard
was also the greatest print-maker, ceramist and sculptor of the
twentieth century.

That said I still found much of Picasso's Cubist work boring, dry and
indecipherable. In his Cubist paintings the figure became increasingly
abstracted or substituted with Still-Lifes - which is perhaps why I
found them so tedious. For me Picasso was at his best when dealing
with the human figure. Which is why I much preferred his later work
from Guernica on when he used the lessons of Cubism to twist and
distort the human form - creating savage almost Surrealist looking
nudes and odes to femininity. However that said the collages he and
Braque made from 1912 onwards were some of my all time favorite works
of the Twentieth century.

Then there was the curious case of Picasso's cardboard assemblages
made in 1912 - these Cubist sculptures made of the humblest materials
became when photographed and published in art magazines of the day
quite simply the most influential force on Modernist sculpture from
the Italian Futurists, Russian Constructionists, Dada, right up to
artists like David Smith and Antony Caro. Every time I saw a pompous
and monstrous bronze by the likes of Henry Moore, Richard Serra or
Damien Hirst - I thought with fondness of these humble assemblages.

It is a measure of my self-delusion and lunacy that I ever thought I
could beat Picasso. Looking back now I smile at my youthful arrogance
and artistic ignorance. In those days I did not need drugs for self-
belief I buzzed on natural cocaine in my blood. I knew I was ugly,
hopeless with women and a dreadful son, but I was convinced I was
intellectually brilliant and a great artist in the making! My battle
with Picasso was debilitating - I spent endless hours counting all the
paintings Picasso had made by my age and pushed myself to make as
many. Like a neurotic I played this endless numbers game with Picasso
from 1988 - 1995 - it was only around the age of twenty-six that I
loosened the grip on my obsession, and it was only in my early
thirties that I came to terms with my failure. By the way, I often
approached or surpassed Picasso in numbers but never remotely in terms
of quality in depth. If I had beaten Picasso - I would have turned out
to have been one of the greatest artists who had ever lived - but what
I did not know was that I lacked and would always lack Picasso's sheer
technical skill and manifest genius.

My Website - www.thepanicartist.com

My Blog on Art - ttp://thepanicartist.livejournal.com/