PABLO PICASSO: The greatest GENIUS of art or a VAMPIRE who drove his women to SUICIDE?

In the history of 20th-century art, there are names written in gold, and there is one engraved in fire and blood: Pablo Picasso. To the world, he was a deity, a titan who grabbed reality by the neck, broke its spine, and rebuilt it in the whimsical forms of Cubism. It was the sun around which the planets of critics, collectors, and admirers revolved.

But every sun has its spots, and the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. To those who were foolish enough to get too close, he was not a genius but a Minotaur, a monster locked in the labyrinth of his own workshop, eternally hungry and demanding sacrifices. We are used to admiring his Guernica or his Weeping Woman without thinking whose tears froze on those canvases.

Behind every brushstroke lies a broken destiny. Look at this list; it reads more like a war report than an artist’s biography. Two of his lovers committed suicide. Two lost their minds and ended their days in psychiatric hospitals. His grandson drank bleach on the day of his grandfather’s funeral, dying in terrible agony.

This is not a coincidence; it is a system. Picasso did not just paint pictures; he absorbed the life of his muses, processed their emotions, their beauty, and their sanity to turn them into his immortal legacy, and then discarded the empty shells. Who was he really? The greatest creator, or a serial killer of souls whom the law could not prosecute?

This story did not begin in Parisian salons or New York museums. It began in Malaga on October 25, 1881, in a stifling room where the midwife sadly moved aside the bluish, lifeless body of a baby. He was not breathing. He was so weak that they considered him stillborn. Death was by his cradle, ready to take away a soul that had not yet had time to incarnate.

The family members had already begun to mourn the loss, unaware that what they should have been mourning was his survival. Salvation came in the person of his uncle, Dr. Salvador. He was a tough man, a man of action. He did not start praying or call a priest. He took a drag on his enormous cigar and exhaled a thick, acrid cloud of tobacco smoke directly into the dead child’s face.

The baby coughed. A grimace of fury distorted his small face, and he let out a sharp scream. Pablo Picasso had returned from beyond the grave. That first breath, mixed with smoke and bitterness, became a prophecy for his entire life. He survived against all odds, and it seems that at that precise moment, he learned his most important lesson: to breathe fully, one must be willing to poison the air around them.

Life was given to him through violence, and he would repay that debt to the world many times over. His childhood was not a childhood in the usual sense. While other children in Malaga kicked a ball around the dusty streets, little Pablo spent hours sitting in a corner observing the world with a concentration that was terrifying for a child. His gaze was already heavy, penetrating, like an X-ray that stripped reality down to its bare bones.

The first word that came out of his lips was not a tender “Mom,” but a demanding, almost hysterical “Piz.” Piz, an abbreviation for pencil. He was not asking for love; he was demanding a tool, a tool to redesign the world to his liking. His father, Don José Ruiz Blasco, was ironically a drawing teacher and curator of the local museum. A decent, academic, and hopelessly mediocre man, he painted doves and lilac bushes, meticulously detailing each feather, believing that art was a craft subject to rules.

Don José saw in his son an extension of himself, his second chance. He put a paintbrush in Pablo’s hand before he had learned to hold a spoon and began to instruct him with a fanaticism that bordered on madness. But he made a fatal mistake. He thought he was raising a successor, but he raised his own executioner.

The outcome of this family drama came suddenly on a sweltering afternoon in 1895. Pablo was only 13 years old. Don José had left the room, leaving an unfinished sketch of a dove on the easel. Only the legs were missing, which required attention to detail. When he returned, he stood frozen in the doorway, as if struck by lightning.

The 13-year-old boy had finished his father’s work, but he did not just draw the legs. He created life on paper, a pulsating, real, terrifyingly perfect life. The boy’s technique surpassed everything his father had learned during decades of work. It was a cruel and irreversible moment of truth.

Don José Ruiz silently approached his son, picked up his brushes, his paints, his palette, and solemnly handed them over to Pablo. That night, the father swore never to paint again. Biographers often present this episode as an act of supreme love and paternal sacrifice, but look at the scene more closely. Does this not remind you of a ritual sacrifice?

The boy accepted his father’s gift not with tears of gratitude, but with a terrifying calmness, as if it were the right thing to do. He stole from his father his passion, his purpose, his voice. Don José fell silent as an artist so that Pablo could speak. It was the first, but not the last time that Picasso’s genius demanded the sacrifice of another.

He learned a terrible lesson. Talent is a predator. For it to grow, someone else must die, figuratively or literally. His father became the first step by which Pablo ascended to eternity, leaving behind only the empty shell of a man who once dreamed of being a creator. At 16, Pablo was already painting like Velázquez. The San Fernando Academy in Madrid, where his parents sent him, suffocated him. The walls seemed too narrow to him, the teachers too blind. Pablo abandoned his studies to head toward where the only living heart of the art world beat: Paris.

October 1901. He was not received with fanfare, but with a penetrating and sepulchral cold. It was not the Paris we see in glossy postcards. It was the bowels of Montmartre: dirty, dangerous, permeated with the smell of cheap wine, urine, and frustrated hopes. Pablo settled into a tiny, unheated studio apartment. There was not even enough money for coal.

Legend has it that on the coldest nights, he would fuel the stove with his own drawings. Watching the fire devour sketches of nude women, turning art into ashes for one more hour of heat, he perhaps understood for the first time the price of survival. But he was not alone. Beside him was Carles Casagemas, his closest friend, his companion, his shadow.

If Picasso was the embodiment of a raw, animalistic vitality, Casagemas was a raw nerve, a poet whose soul was too delicate for this rough world. It was Carles who led them to the edge of the abyss. He fell madly, obsessively in love with the model Germaine Gargallo. She played with him, bringing him closer and pushing him away, mocking his helplessness.

For Picasso, women were trophies for jewel-hunting deities. That difference proved fatal. On February 17, 1901, the drama reached its climax at the L’Hippodrome café. Carles got up from the table, gave a broken farewell speech, and pointed a gun at Germaine. He shot, but missed. Then, amid the screams of the customers, he brought the barrel to his own temple and pulled the trigger.

The sound of that gunshot split Picasso’s life in two. Pablo was not in the café that night; he was in Spain, but the news of his friend’s suicide hit him like a thunderbolt. And here, at this precise moment, the true and terrifying nature of his genius was revealed. What would a normal person have done? They would have cried, prayed, gone into shock. Picasso did not cry; he started to paint.

He returned to Paris, to the same studio where the spirit of his dead friend still lingered, and began obsessively drawing Casagemas in his coffin. He recorded the bullet hole in the temple with the anatomical precision of a pathologist. He studied the shades of death in the face of the one he called brother. The pain did not paralyze him; it became his fuel.

“I started painting in blue when I started thinking about Casagemas,” he would later say. Thus began the famous Blue Period. The world of his canvases lost its warmth and drowned in shades of bruise, mood, and twilight. Beggars, blind people, alcoholics with empty eyes—all were a reflection of that gunshot.

But behind this great duel lay a terrible truth. The death of his friend gave Picasso his first unique style. He digested Carles’s tragedy. But even the greatest of duels has an expiration date. Picasso, that alchemist of human souls, had squeezed all he could from his friend’s death and now craved new energy. He needed life; he needed flesh.

In 1904, in the dirty, windy building in Montmartre that the poets nicknamed Le Bateau-Lavoir (the laundry boat), he met her: Fernande Olivier. She was the absolute opposite of his somber fantasies: tall, red-haired, with cream-colored skin and a languid, feline grace. She was sensual and did not smell of incense and decay, but of cheap perfumes and musk.

Pablo, small, stocky, with a penetrating gaze from his black eyes, not only fell in love, he sniffed out his prey like a predator. With Fernande’s arrival, the blue in his canvases began to fade. The cool tones gave way to ochre, pink, and terracotta. The famous Rose Period began. Walking acrobats, harlequins, and languid nude women appeared in his paintings.

Art historians will tell you it is a hymn to beauty and love, but if you look more closely, you will see behind those tender colors the iron bars of a cage. Because Picasso’s love was always a form of imprisonment. His jealousy was pathological, suffocating, almost demented. When Pablo left the studio to sell a drawing or buy groceries, he locked Fernande under key, literally.

She would spend hours sitting in the stifling room amidst the smells of turpentine and cigarette butts, isolated from the world, waiting for her owner to return and breathe life back into her. She had no right to an opinion or to look at another man. She became his object, his exclusive model, his property. He worshipped her body but despised her will.

It was with Fernande that his monstrous philosophy began to crystallize, the one he would later formulate with cynical frankness: “For me, there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.” Fernande’s tragedy was that she did not realize how quickly she traveled from the first category to the second. They lived together for seven years.

They were years of poverty, when in winter the water in the cups froze and in summer the heat melted brains. But they were also years of triumph. It was Fernande who stood by him when Gertrude Stein began buying his works, when money appeared in his pockets, and Picasso’s name began to be heard in the salons of Paris. It seemed that now, with the struggle for survival over, they could simply live and love.

But for Picasso, calm was akin to death. He had studied Fernande down to the last inch. He had painted her hundreds of times. He had drunk her image to the dregs, and the empty vessel began to irritate him. Her laziness, which had once seemed enchanting, now infuriated him. Her beauty had become commonplace, like old wallpaper.

He needed a new challenge, a new language that would destroy the old world to its foundations. Fernande was still there. Her warm body still occupied half the bed, but for Picasso, she was already becoming a ghost. His insatiable and cruel mind demanded new nourishment. It was not enough for him to conquer Paris. He wanted to rewrite the very laws of the universe.

Year 1907. Pablo visits the Trocadero Ethnographic Museum. Dusty rooms, the smell of decay, of old wood, and of foreign gods. And there, among African totems and ritual masks, he experiences a revelation that will forever change the course of history. He understood that these masks were not trying to please; they did not copy reality as Europeans had done for centuries. They were tools of magic, weapons against evil spirits, a way to subdue fear.

Art, Picasso realized, is not aesthetics; it is exorcism. He returns to his studio, locks himself in, and takes a canvas to commit the cold-blooded murder of classical painting. The subject seemed banal: a scene in a brothel on Avinyó Street in Barcelona. Five naked women, but what he did with them was unprecedented.

Instead of soft, seductive curves, he used sharp angles like fragments of broken glass, bodies dissected into geometric planes as if by a butcher’s knife. The faces of two figures on the right were erased and replaced by monstrous, deformed masks. The eyes stared at the viewer from different heights. The noses were turned inside out.

They were Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and it was a direct stab to the heart of beauty. When he showed the work to his friends, a silence as heavy as a tombstone fell over the studio. It was not just incomprehension; it was physical horror. Henri Matisse flew into a rage, considering the painting a personal affront and a despicable caricature of modernism.

Georges Braque, the man who would later share the throne of Cubism with Picasso, whispered that night in disgust, “It’s as if you made us eat tow and drink kerosene and then spit fire in our faces.” Even his most loyal allies thought Pablo had gone mad, that he would hang himself behind that painting, unable to bear his own dementia. But they were wrong.

In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso showed for the first time his true face, that of a predator. He demonstrated that he did not need harmony; he needed power. This canvas became the manifesto of his attitude not only toward art but also toward people. Look closely. It destroys the integrity of the female body, dismembers it, strips it of individuality, turning a living being into a collection of building blocks.

Cubism was not born from a desire to see the world in three dimensions, but from a pathological thirst for total control. To truly possess something or someone, Picasso first had to break it. And as soon as Fernande Olivier lost her goddess status and became an ordinary, earthly woman, Picasso treated her like a failed sketch, crumpled her up, and threw her away.

His next victim was Marcelle Humbert, a fragile and quiet young woman, whom he stole from his friend, the Polish artist Luis Marcoussis. But Marcelle’s name was too common for a genius who was redesigning the world. He changed her name, called her Eva like the first woman, implying that with her his true world began.

And in his paintings from that period, he signed her “Ma Jolie” (my pretty one), taking the line from a popular music hall song. It would seem a gesture of tenderness, a touching love, but do not be fooled. For Pablo Picasso, Eva was the ideal companion, not because she inspired him, but because she was his very essence.

She became a shadow that drifted through the studio while he destroyed forms and created Cubism. She was a tranquil harbor, but that tranquil harbor had an unforgivable flaw: it was deadly. In 1915, while Europe drowned in the blood of the trenches of the First World War, Eva fell ill. Tuberculosis or cancer—the diagnoses varied—but the essence was the same. She began to waste away, and here the most terrible trait of Picasso’s character manifested itself.

He had a panic-stricken fear, to the point of trembling knees, of illness and death. The sight of his beautiful woman’s withering body did not provoke compassion in him, but rather disgust and horror. She reminded him that he himself was nothing more than a piece of meat destined to rot. What does a man in love do when his woman dies in torment? He holds her hand; he whispers words of comfort to her.

What did Picasso do? While Eva coughed up blood in the solitude of a hospital room, 34-year-old Pablo began a secret affair with his 27-year-old neighbor, Gaby Lespinasse. It was cynicism of the highest order. While a muse was dying, he was already preparing his next refuge by courting Gaby, giving her drawings, and demanding meetings.

Eva Gouel died on December 14, 1915. Picasso left her alone to face eternity. His selfishness reached its absolute limit. He erased her from his life even before her heart stopped beating, simply to avoid feeling the pain of loss. In a letter, Gertrude Stein would write dryly, almost formally, “Eva has died. It is a great sorrow,” but in that sorrow, there was no humanity. It was the frustration of a master whose useful tool had been broken.

Eva Gouel left, leaving behind only the inscription “Ma Jolie” on another’s masterpieces. It became a lesson that Picasso learned for the rest of his life. Women burn out like matches, but the fire of his genius had to burn eternally. And to keep that fire going, he needed a new and more charitable fuel.

He did not need merely a submissive shadow, but a trophy, someone otherworldly, someone he could break with particular delight. And fate, as if mocking him, led him to Rome, straight into the arms of the Russian Ballets. Rome, 1917. While Europe bled in the trenches of the First World War, here, under the patronage of the great Sergei Diaghilev, art danced on the brink of the abyss.

Picasso arrived not as an impoverished Cubist, but as the set designer for the ballet Parade. And there, amidst the smell of rosin and the dust of the theater, he saw her: Olga Khokhlova. She was the absolute antithesis of everything he had known before. Daughter of a colonel in the Imperial Army, a dancer trained in rigor and chastity, she did not pose nude, drink absinthe, or stage scenes in cheap cafes.

She was cold, melancholic, and impeccably polite. For Picasso, accustomed to the accessible models of Montmartre, Olga became a challenge. She was not a woman, but an impregnable fortress that he had to storm to satisfy his ego. Sergei Diaghilev, seeing how the Spaniard’s predatory gaze followed the dancer’s every move, uttered a phrase that would prove prophetic: “Be careful, Pablo. Russian women are not like French women. With them, you don’t just marry; you stay forever.”

But Picasso only heard the word “marry.” To him, it did not sound like a warning, but like the price of a deal. He was willing to pay that price to possess her. On July 12, 1918, in the Russian Cathedral on Daru Street, the anarchist and destroyer of traditions became a legitimate husband. The transformation was terrifying.

Olga dedicated herself to molding him like a man of her own circle, with the same care he used to mold his sculptures. The dirty overalls were replaced by tailored suits. The dusty studio gave way to a luxurious apartment in La Boétie, furnished with antiques. Picasso played the role of a respectable bourgeois. He attended social receptions and wore a tuxedo, but was he happy?

Look at his portraits of Olga from that period. Olga in an Armchair. Portrait of Olga. It is a return to Neoclassicism. In them, she is beautiful, but static. She is frozen in her grandeur. She is not a living woman; she is a trophy placed on a shelf. He locked her in the gilded cage of his fame, and at first, she thought it was a palace.

The catastrophe began in 1921 with the birth of their son, Paulo. It would seem that a child should solidify that strange union of fire and ice, but the opposite occurred. Olga was transformed into a mother. Her attention, her body, and her thoughts now belonged to the baby, not to the genius. For a narcissist of Picasso’s caliber, this was unforgivable.

He ceased to be the center of the universe in his own home. The goddess descended from her pedestal and became a mere wife preoccupied with diapers and infant toothaches. The aristocratic life, which at first amused him like a new game, began to suffocate him. The order of the apartment provoked in him the desire to destroy the furniture.

He felt like a wild beast that had been chained and forced to eat from porcelain. The gilded cage he had built for Olga became a prison for himself. But he did not know how to leave gracefully; he did not know how to talk things out; he only knew how to find solace in chaos. And while Olga cradled her son, naively believing that their marriage was blessed by the heavens and indestructible, the Minotaur was already sniffing the air of the Parisian streets.

He needed a new victim. He needed a young woman who did not yet know what pain was, and he found her where he least expected it: among the crowds on the metro, in the face of a young woman who did not even know who Picasso was. January 8, 1927, Paris. The entrance to the Galeries Lafayette department store.

Pablo Picasso, 45 years old, already a renowned genius and a millionaire, noticed a young woman in the crowd. She had fair hair, a Grecian profile, and a body that radiated the vitality he so sorely missed in his suffocating aristocratic marriage. She was 17. Her name was Marie-Thérèse Walter.

The scene of their encounter seems like the beginning of a pulp novel, were it not for the author’s name. He simply blocked her path, took her arm, and, fixing her with his famous dark gaze, uttered a phrase that would go down in history: “You have an interesting face. I’d like to paint your portrait. I’m Picasso. Together we’ll do great things.”

The irony of fate was that Marie-Thérèse had no idea who this strapping, strangely dressed man was. To her, the name Picasso was an empty sound. She did not see in him the great reformer of painting. She only saw a man, an authoritarian whose insistence was impossible to resist, and she followed him docilely.

Thus began the most secret and sensual chapter in the artist’s life. Marie-Thérèse became the perfect antithesis of Olga. If his wife was nervous, demanding, and socially conscious, the young lover was absolute submission. She was sweet as honey, athletic, somewhat childlike, and had no interest in art whatsoever.

She demanded nothing, simply waiting for him for hours, for days, ready at any moment to be his model or his lover. For Picasso, she was a blank canvas, the clay with which he could mold whatever he wished. He installed her in an apartment directly across from his house, reveling in the audacity of the situation. While Olga organized social gatherings, he would slip away across the street to immerse himself in a world of forbidden eroticism.

This could not help but be reflected in his canvases. Art historians call this period the return of the curved line. The sharp angles of Cubism with which he dissected reality disappeared. In their place emerged fluid, undulating forms, soft ovals, and vivid, cheerful colors: lilac, yellow, green. He painted her body with the obsession of a maniac—asleep, reading, dreaming.

Picasso reveled in his power. He had created for himself an ideal ecosystem: at home, status and order; in the secret apartment, animal passion and boundless adoration. He felt all-powerful. He stole her youth day after day, year after year, forcing her to live in the shadow of his greatness. Marie-Thérèse knew no other life than waiting for her god.

But paintings have a habit of telling the truth, even when their creator lies. Olga Khokhlova, with the animal instinct of a jealous woman, began to notice the changes—not in her husband’s behavior, for it had always been unbearable—but in his works. The same figure appeared more and more frequently on the canvases: exuberant, luminous, serene. It was not Olga, and it was not an abstraction.

The atmosphere at home was tense. Olga wandered through the rooms like a ghost, scrutinizing her husband’s new masterpieces, trying to decipher the code of his betrayal. She still did not know her rival’s name. She did not know he lived just steps from their family home, but she could smell the scent of someone else’s youth emanating from his clothes. The Minotaur believed himself safe in his labyrinth of lies, but Ariadne’s thread was already stretched to its limit and would soon break.

It was during this period, in the early 1930s, that a new and terrifying figure burst into Picasso’s work: the Minotaur. It is not a simple homage to ancient fashion nor a casual play of the imagination. It is a ruthless self-portrait. Pablo looks in the mirror and sees not a man, but a monster with the head of a bull. A creature guided solely by instinct and lust, trapped in the labyrinth of his own passions.

In the engravings of the time, we see this beast stalking young women, asleep, devouring them, raping them, or letting them die in the sand. Picasso stopped pretending to be a civilized European. He recognized within himself the savage for whom destruction is as great a necessity as creation.

The denouement of this drama came on Christmas Eve of 1934. Marie-Thérèse, his sleeping muse, whispered news that forever changed the balance of power. She was expecting a child. For Picasso, it was the triumph of his masculinity, the confirmation of his animal strength. For Olga Khokhlova, it was a death sentence.

The secret was made public with a deafening roar, and the Russian ballerina, who for years had maintained a facade of well-being, demanded a divorce. It would seem a logical end for a failed marriage, but here we encounter the monstrous selfishness of a boundless genius. According to the marriage contract governed by French law, all the spouses’ assets were to be divided equally in the event of a divorce.

But Picasso’s assets were not houses and bank accounts; they were his paintings. Giving Olga half his canvases was like a physical amputation to him. He loved his creations more than any woman, more than his own children, and certainly more than his own peace. He made a blood-curdling decision: he denied her a divorce, condemning Olga to live in a gilded cage.

Formally, she remained Madame Picasso until the day he died, but in practice, she was cast aside, deprived of the right to new happiness. Olga, having lost her status as his sole muse, slowly began to go mad. She chased him through the streets, staged scenes, wrote delirious letters. And what did our hero do? Did he show compassion for the mother of his firstborn?

He acted like a true vampire. He turned her agony into fuel for his paintings, distorting Olga’s features into caricatures, into a snarling mask of fury. While his legitimate wife went mad with jealousy and his secret lover, Marie-Thérèse, waited docilely in the shadows, a third figure appeared on the threshold of the labyrinth. Someone who pretended to be neither victim nor doormat.

Autumn 1935, the famous Parisian café Les Deux Magots. Picasso notices a woman at the next table. She is beautiful, but with a disturbing, almost sickening beauty. She takes off her black gloves, places her hand on the table, picks up a knife, and begins a game. She strikes with the tip between the separated fingers. Fast, rhythmic, dangerous. Knock, knock, knock.

Sometimes it fails. A drop of blood blooms on the white tablecloth like a rose petal, but she does not even change her expression. Picasso is fascinated. He approaches her not as a man, but as a predator who has smelled worthy prey. After meeting her, he will ask her to give him those bloody gloves. He will keep them in a special display case until the end of his days, like a fetish, like the symbol of a union sealed with blood.

That woman’s name was Henriette Theodora Marković, but the world would remember her as Dora Maar. She was dangerous. Unlike the gentle and uneducated Marie-Thérèse, whose interests were limited to gymnastics and swimming, Dora was an intellectual heavyweight. Photographer, Surrealist, left-wing activist, friend of Paul Éluard and Georges Bataille. And most importantly for Pablo, she spoke fluent Spanish.

With her, he could not only sleep with her, he could talk to her. If Walter was for him a comfortable pillow in which to hide the face of the world’s problems, Dora was a mirror, a sharp and cold mirror that reflected his own gloomy genius. Any other man in Picasso’s place would have made a different decision. Go with the young woman and her softness, or throw yourself into the whirlwind of passion with the intelligent and equal one.

But Pablo Picasso was no ordinary man; he was the Minotaur, and his appetite was limitless. He created a monstrous and cynical system of checks and balances where every woman had her role and her moment. Thursdays and Sundays were the days of Marie-Thérèse and her daughter Maya. The rest of the time was Dora’s undisputed kingdom.

He enjoyed this contrast like a gourmet enjoys the combination of sweet and salty. Walter’s luminous, vital, almost plant-like energy contrasted with the dark, nervous, urban aesthetic of Dora. One gave him peace and the feeling of being a god; the other challenged him and made him feel alive. One was his body, the other his mind, and he had it all.

But the most terrible thing was not the fact itself. The most terrible thing was that he forced them to know about each other. He did not hide the traces; he emphasized them. He turned his life into a bullfight where two women spun around in the arena, bleeding with jealousy while he watched from the stands taking notes.

The inevitable explosion occurred in the spring of 1937. The scene was prepared with diabolical thoroughness: a huge, dusty studio at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, where the air was permeated with the smell of turpentine and impending catastrophe. In the center of this space stood the gigantic canvas of Guernica. That cry of pain that Picasso created day after day.

Dora Maar was there in her own right. He photographed the stages of creation of the masterpiece, documenting every brushstroke, every change in the genius’s thinking. But that day, Marie-Thérèse Walter crossed the threshold of the workshop, breaking the tacit non-aggression pact. She did not come as a muse, but as the mother of his daughter, demanding clarity.

Marie-Thérèse, always so gentle and submissive, suddenly found a voice trembling with offense. She saw Dora standing by the easel and demanded that she leave. Dora, with her sharp mind and glacial calm, just smiled, indicating that she had every reason to stay. After all, she was part of that art.

The verbal altercation quickly escalated into an ultimatum. Both women, driven to despair by the uncertainty, turned toward Picasso. They awaited King Solomon’s decision, hoping that he would finally choose one of them and put an end to that torture. Pablo Picasso was working at that time on the figure of a dying horse.

He stopped with the paintbrush in his hand, observed his women—one crying, the other enraged—and with a terrifying indifference, uttered the phrase that would forever define his essence: “I like you both,” he said, as if choosing between two types of wine. “So you’ll have to fix it yourselves.”

It was not simply an escape; it was an invitation to violence. He threw them a bone like dogs, and with the curiosity of an observer, he leaned back, waiting for the spectacle. And they began to fight. Two women who loved the greatest artist of the 20th century got into a grotesque and humiliating fight on the floor of the workshop at the foot of the large anti-war painting.

Marie-Thérèse and Dora fought, scratched each other, and screamed, losing their humanity as their idol continued applying paint to the canvas. Later, when recalling this episode, Picasso would call it one of his best memories. There would be not a trace of regret in his voice, only nostalgia for a moment of absolute power when reality surpassed his wildest fantasies.

This episode is not simply dirty gossip about bohemian life. This is the key to understanding his mechanics and his work. For Picasso, the people around him were just consumable material, tubes of living paint. That day he mixed his despair, his jealousy, and his humiliation to give Guernica a truly tragic depth. He completely dehumanized them, reducing them to the level of gladiators for the emperor’s delight.

But if Marie-Thérèse was fighting in that battle for her past, Dora Maar, without knowing it, was fighting for her terrible future, which was already taking shape in the master’s canvas. It was at that precise moment, observing Dora’s face distorted by anger and tears, that Picasso found the image that would become the symbol of an era. He did not see in her a woman, but the archetype of suffering.

The battle in the workshop was over, but the real war against Dora Maar’s identity was just beginning, and the weapon in that war would be art itself. On April 26, 1937, the sky over the Basque Country cracked. The German Condor Legion wiped the ancient city of Guernica off the face of the earth. Three hours of uninterrupted bombing, fires, the cries of those buried alive.

When the news reached Paris, Picasso, who had been experiencing a creative block for months, suddenly found clarity. The chaos of the world finally coincided with the chaos of his own soul. He commissioned a canvas 3.5 meters high by almost 8 meters long. He worked like a possessed man, without sleeping, without making concessions.

And beside him, in the stifling dust of the workshop in Rue des Grands-Augustins, was Dora Maar. But now their roles were changing in the strangest way. Dora was a professional photographer and took on the mission of being the chronicler. Thanks to her, we see how the main masterpiece of the 20th century was born. She documented every metamorphosis of the Guernica, how the bull’s position changed, how tragedy emerged from a jumble of bodies.

She believed she was a co-author, partner, and witness to history. What a naive illusion. While she photographed the process of creating the painting, Picasso was engaged in the methodical destruction of her personality. Look at the left side of the canvas. The woman who throws her head back in a silent scream, holding a dead child in her arms, is Dora.

For Picasso, the pain of Spain and the pain of his lover merged into a single torrent of suffering. One painting was not enough for him. That same year he began a manic series of portraits under the general title of The Crying Woman. He painted her face hundreds of times, but it was no longer the face of the proud intellectual who played with a knife.

It was a face that was cracking. Picasso literally anatomized his pain. The tears in those portraits do not flow; they pierce the cheeks like shards of glass, like nails, like an acid that corrodes meat. It distorts her features, turning her nose into a beak and her eyes into twisted funnels of terror. It robs her of her beauty, replacing it with the grotesqueness of agony.

“I could never imagine her laughing,” he would later say, with glacial calm. “For me, she was always a woman who cries. For years I painted her tortured forms, not out of sadism or for pleasure. I was simply following a vision that she herself imposed on me.” Listen to that phrase; it is the pronouncement of a tyrant.

He claims that it was Dora who imposed the image of a victim on him. He shifts the responsibility to the one he himself drove to the brink of madness. He convinced her that suffering was her only authentic form of existence. And the most terrifying thing is that Dora, looking at those canvases day after day, began to believe him.

She looked in the mirror that the genius had placed in front of her and saw not herself, but a broken doll. The Guernica became a black-and-white requiem for those who fell in Spain, but for Dora Maar, it was the beginning of her personal apocalypse. Picasso immortalized his pain, turning it into the most recognizable symbol of tragedy in the history of art.

But the price of that immortality was monstrous. She drank her tears to the last drop, using them as a binder for her paints. And then, when the portrait was finished, he lost interest in the original. Because why do you need a living woman when you have her perfect, suffering replica? The “Dora Viva” became a superfluous detail in the scenery of his life.

Then began a process that can only be described as a psychological vivisection. Picasso not only stopped loving her, he decided to destroy the creator within her, leaving only the woman, crushed by his greatness. He hit the most painful spot. “There is no artist inside you,” he would tell her with the same conviction with which he painted masterpieces. “You’re a photographer; you only record reality, but you’re incapable of creating it.”

In her mouth, the word “photographer” sounded like a condemnation, like an accusation of sterility. He forbade her from taking photos and forced her to pick up a paintbrush so that in her own field, in painting, she would see her insignificance in comparison to him every day. It was sophisticated torture to force a bird to crawl to prove that it cannot fly.

Dora’s mind, weakened by years of emotional ups and downs, began to fracture. She sought salvation in mysticism, in the signs of destiny, but she only found emptiness. Paranoia became her only companion. One day they found her wandering the streets of Paris, completely disoriented, muttering incoherent phrases. The great intellectual, the muse of the Surrealists, had become a madwoman of the city.

She was admitted to the Sainte-Anne clinic. Medicine in the mid-20th century was cruel to the mentally ill. The doctors, not understanding that the source of her madness was not a chemical imbalance but life with a genius, prescribed her electroshock therapy. They were preparing to erase her memory with electric shocks, to eliminate her personality and thus soothe her pain.

Dora was on the verge of a lobotomy, an operation that would have turned the weeping woman into a docile vegetable. She was saved by chance and an old friendship. The poet Paul Éluard, horrified by his friend’s condition, begged for the intervention of the famous psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The doctor literally dragged her out of the room, canceling the barbaric treatment.

It saved her sanity, but it could not give her back her soul. The old Dora Maar, bold, dangerous, who played with a knife, no longer existed. She left the clinic and did what people who have survived an encounter with a deity who turned out to be the devil do: she secluded herself. Dora locked herself in the house in Ménerbes that Picasso had given her, in that golden cage bought at the price of her humiliation.

She surrounded herself with relics of the past, keeping every scrap of paper his hand had ever touched as a sacred treasure. She renounced the world, art, and men. When years later she was asked how she managed to overcome the breakup with Picasso, she responded with a phrase that sounds like an epitaph on the tomb of her own life: “After Picasso, only God.”

But while Dora prayed alone, trying to piece together the fragments of her self, the Minotaur had already found a new labyrinth. And in that labyrinth awaited him a woman who, unlike the others, did not intend to become a victim. She was 40 years younger than him and was prepared to say no.

It happened in occupied Paris in May 1943. In the Le Catalan restaurant, at a table sat Pablo Picasso, 61 years old, a living monument himself, surrounded by his entourage. Opposite, at another table, a 21-year-old woman was having lunch, with the appearance of an ancient statue and the gaze of a prosecutor. Her name was Françoise Gilot.

Picasso, true to his hunter’s instincts, approached her table with a bowl of cherries. It was the classic gesture of seduction, perfected over decades. He offered her the cherries, but in reality, he was offering her the role of the next victim in his theater of cruelty. But Françoise was made of different stuff.

She was neither a submissive muse like Marie-Thérèse, nor a broken intellectual like Dora. She was an artist herself and, more importantly, she was perfectly aware of the “Bluebeard’s” reputation in the art world. “I knew I was entering a tiger’s cage,” she would later say, “but I was interested to see if I could tame it.” It was not love at first sight; it was a pact with the devil signed with her eyes wide open.

Picasso was fascinated. He saw her as a challenge. He began to paint her, transforming her into the “Flower Woman,” a face framed by green leaves, a symbol of spring and rebirth. It seemed that the Minotaur had finally found peace. They moved to the south of France, to the sea and the sun. Their children, Claude and Paloma, were born.

The photographs from that period are deceptively idyllic: the tanned genius playing with his children on Golfe-Juan beach and next to him a young, strong woman smiling. But Picasso did not know how to be happy; he only knew how to possess. As soon as Françoise became a mother and domestic life began to consume her time, the mask of the enamored creator fell away.

Picasso did not tolerate competition, not even if the competitors were his own children. He did not need a companion, but a worshipper who would dedicate every breath to him. What began to irritate him was precisely what had attracted him in the beginning: her independence. The “Flower Woman” had to wither away to fertilize the soil of his ego, but Françoise kept blooming.

She continued painting despite his ridicule. She maintained mental clarity while he tried to plunge her into the chaos of his neuroses. He began his usual game of attrition. First, a few little jabs: “You’re nobody without me. Your paintings are rubbish.” Then came open infidelity, ostentatious contempt. He expected tears, hysteria, pleas for forgiveness—all the things his previous wives had fed on.

He expected her to break, but he made a fatal mistake. He forgot that Françoise had not come to him seeking salvation, but experience. And when the experience turned into torture, she began to prepare her escape plan. She observed him not as a woman in love, but as a researcher studying a dangerous virus under a microscope. And what she saw made her understand that staying meant dying.

A dense and ominous silence settled in the house. Picasso, used to women abandoning him alone in a coffin, did not even suspect that the “Flower Woman” had already developed thorns and was ready to counterattack. Hell in Vallauris was not made of fire and brimstone, but of petty and suffocating prohibitions.

Picasso, the great destroyer of forms, dedicated himself to methodically destroying everyday life, turning every day for Françoise into a walk through a minefield. He became the accountant of her breath, controlling every coin spent in the house and every minute that passed out of his sight. It was not enough for him to possess her body; he longed to annex her will.

He forbade her from cutting her hair, claiming that short hair deprived a woman of her femininity, although in reality he just wanted to see her as unchanging as a frozen statue. He forced her to wear long, shapeless dresses that hid the legs he had once so admired. It was not care; it was censorship. Picasso edited Françoise, erasing from her image everything that made her alive, brilliant, and, above all, a person independent of him.

He tried to turn her into a shadow that knew its place, half a step behind the genius. But the most terrible weapon in his arsenal was the publicity surrounding his infidelities. For Picasso, adultery was not a weakness of the flesh, but an instrument of absolute power. He did not hide his adventures; on the contrary, he served them up with a cynical smile.

He could bring a new lover to the workshop while Françoise fed the children in the next room, enjoying how the humiliation corroded the walls of his home. He openly compared her to others, saying that she was getting old, that her beauty was fading, while he, a 70-year-old man, remained an eternal source of energy.

The children, Claude and Paloma, also became pawns in this monstrous game. In the morning he could be the most tender father drawing doves in the sand, and in the afternoon he would transform into a cold tyrant, ignoring her tears only to punish the mother. He created an atmosphere in which joy was a doled-out privilege, granted personally by him in exchange for good behavior.

Françoise watched as that poison penetrated the souls of her children and understood that staying there meant being complicit in a crime against her own offspring. She looked in the mirror and saw Dora Maar’s features appear, the features of a hunted beast. Picasso expected her to break. He was expecting a hysterical fit that would give him the right to call her crazy and send her to a psychiatric clinic after Olga and Dora.

He was sure he had her in a secure cage, with bars forged from his fame and her dependence on him, but he underestimated an artist’s survival instinct. Françoise understood a terrible truth: to continue being a creator, she had to stop being a muse. In the silence of the workshop, while the Minotaur slept, she began to realize that the only way out of the labyrinth was not to look for the center, but to tear down the walls.

“I wasn’t going to go crazy; I was going to make it impossible.” In September 1953, the air in Vallauris was electrified as before a storm capable of splitting the earth in two. Françoise did not pack her bags in a fit of hysteria. She did not break dishes or threaten suicide, as her predecessors had done.

She acted with the terrifying calm of a surgeon amputating a gangrenous limb to save the rest of the body. She was taking Claude and Paloma with her. She was carrying herself. When she uttered the words, “I’m leaving,” Picasso at first did not even understand their meaning. For him, it was a set of sounds without logic, an absurdity comparable to the declaration that the sun had decided to turn off of its own free will.

He looked at her with that arrogant disbelief with which an emperor looks at a rebellious slave. “Nobody abandons Picasso,” he said. It was not a threat, but the confirmation of a fact, an axiom of his universe. “You are heading to the desert. Without me, nothing. Even if you think people love you, they only love my reflection in you.”

But Françoise had already crossed the threshold, and at that moment, the mask of genius cracked. The great Minotaur, accustomed to victims entering the labyrinth alone and begging for their own destruction, was facing for the first time someone who had found the way out. His fury was terrible. It was not the pain of losing a beloved woman; it was the agony of a wounded deity. He could not believe that the “Flower Woman” was made of steel and not malleable clay.

Picasso’s revenge was total war. He declared a vendetta against Françoise, using all his colossal influence in the art world. He personally called the gallery owners in Paris, giving them an ultimatum: “If you exhibit even a single sketch of hers, I won’t live to see it. You will never see my works again.”

He forced his friends, poets, and critics to take sides, and many, fearing the titan’s wrath, turned their backs on her. He tried to erase her name, make her invisible, and suffocate her career with hunger and oblivion. He wanted to prove his point: without him, she was dust. But he was wrong. Françoise not only survived in that desert, but she built her own oasis there.

She continued painting, she continued fighting, and 11 years later, she launched a counterattack that proved to be more terrible than any physical violence. She published the book My Life with Picasso. It was a sacrilege. For the first time, someone dared to tear off the golden garments of the idol and show the world not the great creator, but a mean, cruel, and superstitious old man who feared death and fed on the energy of others.

The book became a bestseller, shattering the myth of the untouchable genius. Picasso tried to sue her, demanding that the edition be banned, but he lost. The whole world saw him naked. Françoise Gilot became the only woman to defeat the Minotaur. She emerged from the labyrinth alive, preserving her sanity and talent.

But for Picasso himself, this defeat was a sign. His charms were fading. He was left alone in his enormous, cold castle, surrounded only by the echo of his own fame and the ghosts of those he had destroyed. He was over 70 years old and understood that to silence the fear of imminent eternity he needed a new victim. The last victim, one who would not dare to leave, who would voluntarily close the doors of the mausoleum behind him.

And so, in the year 1953, in the Madoura ceramics workshop, Jacqueline Roque found him. She was 27; he was 72. A 45-year age difference is not just a generational gap; it is an abyss that can only be filled in one way: with absolute, fanatical, and servile adoration. Picasso was injured. Françoise’s departure and her revealing book had ripped his skin off, and now he didn’t need a muse, an intellectual, or much less a rival.

He needed a caregiver, a priestess willing to sacrifice herself on the altar of his decadent ego. And Jacqueline fit that role perfectly. Not only did she love him, she deified him physically. She called him “My Lord” and “Monsignor.” He would kiss her hands when he met her and would address her exclusively with the formal “usted.”

Imagine this grotesque theater. The great revolutionary of art, the destroyer of canons, ending his days surrounded by a Byzantine ceremony that he himself had orchestrated. But this worship came at a terrible price. Jacqueline, with her dark, unsettling eyes and sphinx-like profile, quickly understood that to possess the sun she had to pay for all the other stars.

She began to erect an invisible but impenetrable wall around Picasso. Vauvenargues Castle and later the village of Notre-Dame-de-Vie became impregnable fortresses. She became his guardian. When his children, Claude and Paloma, came to visit, the doors remained closed. “The sun sleeps, the sun works, the sun cannot receive anyone.”

She isolated him from his friends, from the gallery owners, from the past. She methodically eradicated everything that wasn’t her. Jacqueline convinced Picasso that the whole world wished him harm and that she alone was his only shield. And the aging, paranoid genius believed her. He allowed himself to be walled up alive.

Look at the paintings from this later period. In 20 years of living together, he painted her portraits more than 400 times. 400 canvases with the same face, more than he painted of any other woman. But look closely at those faces. There is neither the tenderness that existed in the Marie-Thérèse stories nor the intellectual challenge that Dora posed.

They are portraits of an owner marking his possession. He deforms her face, twists her body, turns her into a Turkish odalisque or a grotesque old woman. It was the chronicle of an obsession. Jacqueline remained motionless for hours, for years, while he absorbed her life to transfer it to the canvas. She was getting older, becoming uglier, losing her mind, but she remained seated.

She became the last prisoner of the Minotaur, the one who voluntarily closed the door of the labyrinth from the inside and threw away the key. But the most terrifying thing was yet to come, because even gods are mortal, and when the sun went out, in that darkness, the real nightmare would begin.

On April 8, 1973, the silence in the villa of Mougins became deafening. 91 years of an insatiable and ferocious thirst for life came to an end. The Minotaur had breathed his last breath. But if anyone believes that with his death the labyrinth opened and freed its victims, they are profoundly mistaken. The death of a tyrant does not bring peace, but chaos.

Picasso’s departure signaled the beginning of the last and bloodiest harvest. Jacqueline Roque, the widowed priestess driven mad by grief, turned the funeral into a monstrous farce. She entrenched herself in Vauvenargues Castle as the commander of a besieged fortress. When Pablito, Picasso’s grandson, arrived to say goodbye to his grandfather, he found the door closed.

They denied him entry. They did not even allow him to see the body of the one whose surname he carried like the heaviest of crosses. Jacqueline coldly declared that Pablo would not have liked to see them. And then the boy, rejected in life and humiliated after death, broke down completely. That same day, Pablito drank a bottle of bleach.

It was not a theatrical and beautiful death, worthy of his grandfather’s brush. It was a dirty and tortuous agony. The chlorine burned his internal organs slowly, centimeter by centimeter. Doctors fought for his life for three months. Three months of hell, while the heirs and lawyers were already beginning to divide up a multimillion-dollar fortune.

Pablito died in torment, without receiving a single word of compassion from the one who called herself Madame Picasso. But the blood had only just begun to flow. The curse of inheritance worked flawlessly, like a guillotine whose blade was coated with poison. Two years later his son Paulo died. His liver could not withstand decades of alcoholic neglect in which he hid from the contempt of his great father.

Two years later, in 1977, Marie-Thérèse Walter, that golden muse whose body we see on the most expensive canvases in the world, hanged herself in her garage. She wrote that she should take care of Pablo even in the afterlife. She simply did not know how to exist in a world where her master was no longer there.

And what became of Jacqueline, the last one, the jailer? She resisted more than anyone, guarding the temple of their god, turning Vauvenargues Castle into a mausoleum where even the dust was considered sacred. Jacqueline slept in sheets that still held the scent of his skin and talked to his portraits, but the silence was unbearable.

On October 15, 1986, 13 years after her husband’s death, Jacqueline Roque lay down in bed and pulled the trigger of a revolver. A shot in the temple put the final, bloody point in this saga. Now the list was complete. When we observe the life of Pablo Picasso from a safe distance, we do not simply see a biography, but a battlefield strewn with bodies.

Two suicides, two who lost their minds. A grandson who wasted away from the inside, a son destroyed by alcohol, and countless other people whose names history doesn’t even remember, squeezed like tubes of paint and thrown into the garbage dump of eternity. Who was he really? Was he the greatest genius? A demiurge who rebuilt reality and taught humanity to see the world anew? Definitely.

But he was also a monster, a vampire whose creative longevity fed on the life force of others. The answer is equally affirmative, and herein lies Picasso’s most terrifying paradox. Art is shameless, and if it is modest, it is not art. He lived according to this principle, with a chilling consistency. For him, morality, good, or evil did not exist. There was only one religion: painting. And that god demanded human sacrifices.

Pablo did not kill his wives with his own hands; he did not do anything much more terrible. He murdered their personalities, turning living, breathing people into raw material for his canvases. He stole their joy, their pain, their madness. He preserved it in oil on canvas and left the empty shell to rot.

Cruelty can be justified with genius. History’s judgment is cynical. We forgive tyrants their crimes if they leave us pyramids, empires, or Guernica. We admire the woman who cries, forgetting that those tears were real, that behind them were years of humiliation and electroshocks in a psychiatric clinic. We pay to enter museums to touch the sublime, without thinking that the price of that greatness is broken destinies.

But perhaps this was the essence of his tragic mission. Picasso was a mirror of the 20th century: cruel, fragmented, selfish, and brilliant. It showed us ourselves broken into pieces. He was a Minotaur who knew that the labyrinth has no exit and the only salvation from the fear of death is creation—a frenetic, devouring, infinite creation.

The history of art is full of such figures, people who burned with such intensity that they consumed everything around them. And our investigation into the nature of genius has only just begun. In upcoming episodes of “Personalities in Detail,” we will descend into the hells of other great creators to understand where the line is drawn between a divine gift and a demonic curse.

For now, the next time you find yourselves in a museum and stop in front of a Picasso canvas, observe those broken lines, those displaced eyes, and those distorted mouths. Do not look away, for now you know the truth. Behind the layers of paint, the millions of dollars at auction, and the grandiloquent words of the critics, they are hidden: Fernande, Eva, Olga, Marie-Thérèse, Dora, Françoise, Jacqueline.

They are watching you. They scream in the silence of museum halls. Picasso promised them immortality and kept his word. He locked them away in his paintings forever. And that is the most exquisite and cruel prison ever created by a human being.