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This story appears in the May 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Genius：PICASSO（III）
The artist found promise in everything, etching（蚀刻） an owl or a goat onto a stone from the sea. He formed the face of a sculpted baboon（狒狒） using two of his son’s toy cars, and crafted his famous “Bull’s Head” out of a bicycle seat and rusty（生锈的） handlebars plucked（拽；解脱） out of a junk pile. Picasso produced incessantly—paintings, sculpture, ceramics（陶瓷）, even jewelry. “He had the ability to renew himself constantly,” Diana says. “He was so prolific, it’s almost disarming.” Picasso said he didn’t know where his creative bursts came from, but they rampaged（横冲直撞） through his head, discrete（分离） parts becoming whole through his hands and his paintbrushes.
The artist’s sharp and colossal memory served as a storehouse for inspiration. “He was a sponge,” says Emilie Bouvard, a curator at the Musée Picasso Paris. In her office, not far from the bustle of visitors, I ask Bouvard to pick the quality that best exemplifies（是…的典型） Picasso’s prowess. “In my opinion, it’s assemblage（聚集）,” she says, the artist’s ability to sift through layered memories—a conversation with a poet, the haunting expressions in an El Greco painting, the medley of sensations from Málaga, a pot of paint in his studio. As she reflects, Bouvard calls up the French expression faire feu de tout bois (to make fire of all wood). “That’s the genius of Picasso,” she says.
Talent, nurturing, opportunity, personality: Picasso had it all. He was also lucky. The artist came of age when photography overturned the focus on traditional realism in paintings. The art world was primed for rule breaking and disruption, says András Szántó, a sociologist of art in New York City, and the media was newly equipped to celebrate it. Picasso, well aware of his stature, was masterful at branding his image. “He was so aware of his talent,” says Diana’s brother and Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso. “He understood that he would be important in the future.”
Early on, the artist shed his father’s name, Ruiz, and adopted his mother’s more memorable Picasso. He began dating his paintings so they could one day be assembled in chronological（按时间先后顺序排列的） order. He invited photographers to capture him posing with bravado（虚张声势） in front of his canvases, dancing bare-chested with his lover, and playing with his children on the beach. By 1939 Picasso had vaulted onto the cover of Time magazine, which deemed him “Art’s Acrobat.” In 1968, five years before he died, Life magazine dedicated（献出） a 134-page double issue to him. “He was able to layer his biography over these enormous inflection points in our culture,” Szántó says. “He happened to play it really well.”
The legacy（遗产） of genius is a sweeping affair with eminence（显赫） and acclaim, often tied to personal anguish. The traits that promoted Picasso’s creations—his infatuation（痴迷） with his work and his rule breaking—led to praise and even cultlike worship. Until Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold for more than $450 million last year, Picasso’s $179.4 million “Les Femmes d’Alger” was the most expensive painting ever auctioned. Picasso exhibits continue to draw record-breaking crowds: The spotlight now is on a blockbuster exhibition in London called “Picasso 1932—Love, Fame, Tragedy.” His works inspire people as disparate（迥然不同的） as artist Allison Zuckerman, who made her debut at Art Basel in Miami Beach in December, and Wang Zhongjun, a Chinese media mogul who periodically paints with a cigar clamped between his teeth and the Picasso he purchased in 2015, “Femme au Chignon dans un Fauteuil,” set up nearby.
These same qualities, however, also tainted Picasso’s relationships, sometimes to the point of ruin. Fearful of illness and death, he cycled through women, many of them decades younger than he, perhaps in part to defy the odds of growing old. He craved women, and his charisma（非凡的个人魅力） attracted them. Picasso had “a radiance, an inner fire,” wrote Fernande Olivier, who lived with him from 1905 to 1912 in Paris, “and I couldn’t resist this magnetism.”
But he could be jealous and misogynistic（厌恶女人的男人）, displaying behaviors that are now fueling a public debate about whether an artist’s conduct should affect the perception of his art. “Throughout his life there was a thing of women being sacrificed to feed his art,” biographer Richardson once said. Fran?oise Gilot, a painter in her own right and the mother of Claude and his sister, Paloma, met Picasso in a Paris café in 1943 when she was 21 and he was 61. In a memoir, she recounted Picasso holding a cigarette against her cheek and threatening to throw her over the Pont Neuf into the Seine River. His most lasting love was his art. Tragedies piled up after the artist’s death with the s of Picasso’s widow—Jacqueline—his paramour（情人） Marie-Thérèse, and his grandson Pablito.
Picasso’s surviving children and grandchildren have complex feelings about him.
Marina Picasso, his son Paulo’s daughter, has issued the harshest judgment. “His brilliant oeuvre（全部作品） demanded human sacrifices,” she wrote in her 2001 memoir. “He drove everyone who got near him to despair and engulfed（吞噬） them.”
But others, including Marina’s half-brother Bernard, who was 14 when Picasso died, and their younger cousins Olivier and Diana, who never knew him, have processed their grandfather’s life differently. While acknowledging the trauma（精神创伤）, they also express gratitude for Picasso’s work and the fortune he left behind, which has not only deeply influenced the direction of their lives but also provided financial freedom. Olivier has co-produced two documentaries and written two books about his grandfather. Diana, who feels an obligation to work with the tenacity（顽强） of her grandfather, is completing a comprehensive catalog of Picasso’s sculptures. And besides overseeing the Museo Picasso Málaga, Bernard and his wife, Almine Rech-Picasso, built an art foundation around his grandfather’s work. “Life is full of drama. We are not the only ones,” Bernard tells me. “I’m deeply grateful for what Picasso gave me.”
In the end, Picasso’s journey from prodigy to legacy is a story of ultimate conquest.
“He left few corners untouched and unturned,” says Claude, as he sits surrounded by his father’s and his mother’s paintings in his home, midday sun streaming in. Still, when I ask how he explains his father’s genius, he answers with the most uncomplicated reply: “How do I explain it? I don’t explain it,” he says. “I just understood it. It was obvious to me as a tiny child.”
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生词

etching（蚀刻）
baboon（狒狒）
rusty（生锈的）
plucked（拽；解脱）
ceramics（陶瓷）
rampaged（横冲直撞）
discrete（分离）
exemplifies（是…的典型）
assemblage（聚集）
chronological（按时间先后顺序排列的）
bravado（虚张声势）
dedicated（献出）
legacy（遗产）
eminence（显赫）
infatuation（痴迷）
disparate（迥然不同的）
charisma（非凡的个人魅力）
misogynistic（厌恶女人的男人）
paramour（情人）
oeuvre（全部作品）
engulfed（吞噬）
trauma（精神创伤）
tenacity（顽强）