Actually no, but in 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, the police took in Picasso’s friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire fingered Picasso as a suspect, so the police hauled him in for questioning. Both were later released.
Being a famous artist certainly helped Picasso get the girl. Girls, in fact – many, many girls. Here’s a short list of known wives and lovers of Picasso – Fernande Olivier (Picasso’s first love, she was 18?; he was 23) – Marcelle Humbert AKA Eva Gouel (she was 27, Picasso was 31) – Gaby Lespinasse (he was 34, I don’t know how old Gaby was, but she was young, that’s for sure!) – Olga Khokhlova (Picasso’s first wife; she was 26 and he was 36 when they met) – Marie-Thérèse Walter (she was 17, he was 46) – Dora Maar (she was 29, Picasso was 55) – Françoise Gilot (she was 21 when she met Picasso, who was 61) –…
In 1909, Picasso and French artist Georges Braque co-founded an art movement known as cubism. Actually, it was a French art critic Louis Vauxcelles who first called it “bizarre cubiques” or cubism, after noting that Picasso and Braque’s paintings are “full of little cubes.”
No doubt about it, Picasso was brilliant: artistically, he was years ahead of his classmates who were all five to six years older than him. But Picasso chafed at being told what to do and he was often thrown into “detention”: “For being a bad student I was banished to the ‘calaboose’ – a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly … I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping”
It’s like Picasso was born an artist: his first word was “piz,” short of lápiz the Spanish word for ‘pencil.’ His father Ruiz, an artist and art professor, gave him a formal education in art starting from the age of 7. By 13, Ruiz vowed to give up painting as he felt that Pablo had surpassed him.
Picasso had such a difficult birth and was such a weak baby that when he was born, the midwife thought that he was stillborn so she left him on a table to attend his mother. It was his uncle, a doctor named Don Salvador, that saved him: ‘Doctors at that time,’ he told Antonina Vallentin, ‘used to smoke big cigars, and my uncle was no exception. When he saw me lying there he blew smoke into my face. To this I immediately reacted with a grimace and a bellow of fury’”
Where did the purported plasters come from? By Martin Bailey Some may say that it sounds too good to be true that a full set of Degas sculptures should be discovered nearly a century after his death. So where do they come from? Art dealer Walter Maibaum has described how he was shown the plasters in December 2004 at the Valsuani Foundry, by its proprietor Leonardo Benatov. They were in a locked room at the far end of the workshop: “Inside were 74 Degas plasters that were completely unknown to anyone outside the foundry or its close associates. To me it was the equivalent of opening King Tut’s tomb in Egypt or uncovering the terracotta warriors in China. The moment…