Señor Ruiz had been a gay-spirited Andalusian wit and artist, had married late, and, by the time his son was born, had become an acrimonious, ill-paid art teacher, with his wife, his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law, and his own growing family to support. The precocity of his gift for drawing was so manifest that while he was still at a tender age, his father, José Ruiz, a teacher in the local School of Arts and Crafts, began giving him highly competent academic art instruction. From the first, even among artistic geniuses, Picasso was clearly the white blackbird, the rara avis. His juvenile instinct against authority has matured unchanged, and his Iberian spirit of anarchy is still one of his few traditional elements.ĭuring his childhood, he was, naturally, not comparable to normal little boys, but he was also nothing like the other great artists of today when they were small if one can judge from what is known, reported, and recorded of them, they were reliably ordinary children who merely grew up into astonishing men. He later swore that he had not even learned to read and write at school but had taught himself. At school in his birthplace of Málaga, he generally had with him a pigeon from his father’s pigeon cote, which he put on his desk and drew pictures of during class, as a protest against authority and against being taught anything at all. He began drawing as soon as his fingers could grasp a pencil. He apparently started his life by being already intact-by being precociously ready and functioning to begin with-rather than by proceeding classically through the tentative, qualifying stages of development customary to the average very young human being. More than sixty years after the event, while watching a child of his own try his first steps, he suddenly said in reminiscent satisfaction to his most intimate Spanish friend, “I remember that I learned to walk by pushing a big tin box of sweet biscuits in front of me, because I knew what was inside.” What must have early distinguished him as beyond normal was his unconventionally high state of consciousness. Even the opening report on him comes from an unusual source-his own vivid memory of how he learned to walk. The excesses of his artistic endowment, of his will, of his life appetites, and of his character appear to have been idiosyncratic from earliest childhood, so that becoming prodigious and phenomenal has been, for him, the only form of being natural. Pablo Ruiz Picasso began being an artist at the age of prodigy-at about seven-and at seventy-five he remains the complete phenomenon he has been throughout the intervening years. Photograph by Gjon Mili / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty
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