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Picassomania subscriber-only content

Mary Ann Caws

  • Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose by Elizabeth Cowling  Buy this book

A lot of the stories, truthful or otherwise, about Picasso are as colourful as they are improbable. Picasso liked the mystery, was eager for no one to be sure what he would do next. Told that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more natural: animals lurking in the animal. Picasso always wanted the statue to be accessible to everyone, so that the children could play with it and the dogs piss on it.

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Mary Ann Caws has a short illustrated biography of Salvador Dalí coming in June and a cooking memoir about living in Provence coming in November.
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At Tate Britain
David Craig: Mountain Art

Brush for Hire
Eamon Duffy on Protestant painting