The Man Who Destroyed His Paintings to Make Them

A portrait of Pablo Picasso — prodigy, rebel, force of nature

He refused to go to school in Málaga unless he could bring a pencil. He was four years old. Even then, Picasso could draw a bull, a dog, or a donkey — in one unbroken line, starting from the tail, the nose, or anywhere he pleased — and finish with perfect proportions. He was not practicing. He was simply doing what came naturally, the way other children breathed.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, into an artistic household. His father, Don José Ruiz, was an art teacher in Málaga who painted doves on canvas and sold them locally — works that still hang today in the Museo del Patrimonio Municipal. It was a respectable craft. It would soon be eclipsed entirely by his son.

The Boy Who Outgrew His Teacher

When the family moved to Barcelona and Don José took a position at the city’s finest art academy, young Pablo — just thirteen — immediately became the center of everyone’s admiration. At fourteen, he won a major national Spanish art competition with a large, technically masterful painting called First Communion. His family spoke of him in hushed, reverent tones: would he be Spain’s new Goya? A new Velázquez?

Don José, to his eternal credit, recognized what was in front of him. The father who had once guided the son now accepted that the roles had permanently reversed. He handed Picasso his own brushes and palette, and stopped painting altogether.

At sixteen, Picasso enrolled at Spain’s most prestigious art academy in Madrid — and grew bored almost immediately, despite being the most gifted student there. He spent his time instead studying Vermeer, El Greco, Goya, and Velázquez at the Prado. Some educations happen outside the classroom.

Paris and the Birth of Something New

To his father’s horror, Picasso left for Paris at twenty. He arrived in Montmartre and fell straight into the company of the Impressionists. Within a short time he had painted works that equaled, or arguably surpassed, the style he had just encountered. He absorbed influences the way a drought absorbs rain: completely, immediately, and then moved on.

Legend long had it that the blue paintings — that haunting, cold series of elongated figures and bare interiors — were an expression of grief after the suicide of a close friend. Picasso was more candid about it later: he had simply run out of other colors. The famous Girl with Basket of Flowers, which the penniless Picasso sold immediately upon completion for 250 francs, was auctioned in 2018 for $115 million. A friend had stored the canvases rolled up for years and nearly lost them entirely. “If he hadn’t found them,” Picasso once remarked, “there would be no Blue Period.”

The Rose Period: Two Years That Could Have Defined a Career

Between 1904 and 1906, Picasso fell in love with the model and artist Fernande Olivier — and in those two short years produced what many consider some of the most purely beautiful paintings in twentieth-century art. Acrobats and harlequins rendered in warm, tender pinks and roses: Family of Saltimbanques, Acrobat and Young Harlequin, Mother and Child. At least fourteen masterworks, most now in major museums. Picasso was twenty-three and twenty-four years old.

The Blue Period and the Rose Period together would have been enough to guarantee his place in art history. He was barely getting started.

The Portrait That Changed Its Subject

It was during the Rose Period that Picasso undertook his only commissioned work: a portrait of Gertrude Stein, the American art patron whose Paris salon gathered the poets and geniuses of an era. He painted her many times, struggled with the face, gave up, and took a holiday — coming back electrified by African tribal sculpture he had encountered along the way. In those carved masks he found the expression he had been searching for. When Stein saw the finished portrait she protested: “But I don’t look like that.” Picasso replied: “You will.” He was right.

Cubism, Matisse, and a Painting Made as an Insult

Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism together, working so closely that they sometimes couldn’t tell their own paintings apart. Meanwhile, his great rival — and one of the very few artists he genuinely respected as an equal — was Henri Matisse. Their friendship was also a competition, and their philosophies were genuinely opposed.

Matisse believed that art existed to be decorative, to bring comfort. The idea infuriated Picasso. In direct protest, he set out to paint something deliberately ugly — and produced Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, whose working title translated roughly as “The Brothel of Avignon.” One of the five women was modeled after Fernande Olivier. The painting now hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is widely considered the birthplace of modern art.

Years later, Picasso told Chagall: “When Matisse dies, you’ll be the only painter who truly understands color — though I’m not particularly fond of your roosters and flying people.” They remained enemies for life.

On another occasion, Picasso painted a deliberate imitation of Matisse’s style so convincingly that France’s leading art magazine published it as a genuine Matisse. He had done it purely to amuse himself — and Matisse.

The Myth of Meaning

Picasso rarely named his own paintings. When his dealers insisted, he gave whatever title flew off his tongue first. When a woman once asked what one of his Blue Period paintings meant — by then sold for an enormous sum during his own lifetime — he told her simply: “It means twenty million dollars.”

He deliberately chose everyday subjects, objects anyone could recognize, while the act of painting remained his private obsession. Those who were privileged to watch him work described a frightening concentration — noise or interruption would break his thread entirely, and the work was lost. He painted late into the night, slept long into the morning, and woke in a bad mood. There exists, it is said, almost no photograph of Picasso with his eyes closed — except one, taken by the photographer David Douglas Duncan, when Picasso’s children were playing trumpet nearby.

A Picture Is a Sum of Destructions

In a rare candid interview from 1935, Picasso described his own process:

“Formerly, pictures went forward toward their completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. With me, a picture is a sum of destructions. I make a picture — then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.”

This was not metaphor. He worked over canvases with turpentine, scraped and rebuilt, found figures hidden in the paint and followed them. For portraits, he would sit and study the sitter for two or three hours — and then, without looking at them again, paint the entire work in an afternoon. Many of those paintings hang in the world’s great museums today. Few visitors know how quickly they were made, or how much was erased to make them.

The Final Chapters

Fame eventually confined him. At the large Villa California in the south of France, and later at the Château de Vauvenargues — filled floor to ceiling with priceless art — he could barely leave. On the rare occasions he dined out, restaurants tried to obtain payment in the form of a quick sketch. A proprietor once asked him to sign a doodle he’d made on a napkin. Picasso said he couldn’t: he had only bought the food, not the whole restaurant.

The most harmonious relationship of his life, by most accounts, was his last. He painted his companion Jacqueline Roque approximately four hundred times during their eleven years together. She inherited the bulk of an extraordinary estate — and was so undone by his absence that she eventually took her own life. They are buried together on a hillside at Château de Vauvenargues, which remains in the family’s possession.

By the time Picasso died in 1973, he had produced more than sixty thousand works. He had also destroyed countless thousands more. Both facts mattered equally to him.

“Why try to understand a bird’s song? Why do you love the night, the flowers, everything around you, without trying to understand them? But when it comes to painting, people feel they must understand. Why?”

— Pablo Picasso

Picasso in Málaga — Places to Visit

Museo Picasso Málaga

The main museum, housed in the 16th-century Palacio de Buenavista in Málaga’s Old Town. Over 285 works spanning eight decades of Picasso’s career, donated by the artist’s own family.

www.museopicassomalaga.org

Casa Natal — Fundación Picasso

The house at Plaza de la Merced where Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, declared a Historic-Artistic Monument of National Interest. Personal objects, family memories, original works, and a specialized library.

fundacionpicasso.malaga.eu

Museo del Patrimonio Municipal (MUPAM)

Where Picasso’s father Don José sold his dove paintings — and some remain here. Essential context for understanding where the story began.

mupam.malaga.eu

Plaza de la Merced

The square where Picasso grew up. A large bronze statue of the artist sits on a bench here. In the evenings it fills with the ordinary life of Málaga, which is perhaps what he would have preferred.

www.malagaturismo.com

Centre Pompidou Málaga

An outpost of the Paris Pompidou in Málaga’s port area, frequently exhibiting works that place Picasso in conversation with the broader currents of twentieth-century art he helped set in motion.

www.centrepompidou-malaga.eu

Museo de Bellas Artes de Málaga

Holds works from the Andalusian tradition that shaped Picasso’s early sensibility — and against which he eventually, magnificently, rebelled.

www.museosdeandalucia.es