The Hooks of her Gipsy Dresses

Nicholas Penny

• Picasso: Creator and Destroyer by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington
  Weidenfeld, 559 pp, £16.00, June 1988, ISBN 0 02 977935 9

Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, author of After Reason and The Female Woman, took up the task of writing about Picasso because she had been ‘seduced by his magnetism, his intensity, that mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth from the transfixing stare of his black marble eyes as much as from his work’, but had come to be ‘chilled’ by him. Huffington, who is also the author of The Gods of Greece, felt that in order to explain Picasso’s demonic attraction, she had to go ‘back to the original Spanish tales of Don Juan and the Indian myths of Krishna’. But she had to think about the modern world as well, for she ‘suddenly saw that Picasso’s life was not just the life of one of the most gifted artists who ever lived ... it was in a very real sense, the 20th century’s own autobiography.’