Not all great painters are precocious; but Picasso was. In a technical way, he was as much a prodigy as Mozart. and his precocity seems to have fixed his peculiar sense of vocation. He was born in Malaga in 1881, the son of a painter named José Ruiz Blasco (a fine-boned ingles face, nothing like Pablo''''s simian mask; that came from his mother), and by 13 he was so good at
drawing that his father is said to have handed over his own brushes and paints to the
boy and given up
painting. If the story is true, it goes some way to explain the mediumistic confidence with which Picasso worked. "Painting is stronger than I am," he once remarked. "It makes me do what it wants." Painting had won him the Oedipal'''' battle before his career had begun. If one were told that Science and Charity, Picasso''''s sickbed scene from 1897, with its rather conventional drawing but adroit'''' paint handling (especially in the details, like the frame of the mirror above the bed), had been done by a 30-year-old Spanish academician, one would have predicted a competent future for the man. Once one realizes that it was painted by a boy not yet 16, the skill seems portentous, like a visitation-and that is the general impression conveyed by Picasso''''s earliest work.
(Time, May 26,1980)
By Fausto Fabio de Araujo
More summaries about the Picasso