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“... Le Mystère Picasso is how Clouzot entitled his famous film, in which the artist was seen at work before our eyes, and for most of its eight decades our century has been vainly trying to decipher that mystery. To talk about Picasso is to talk about the culture of our time, not just because his work has played such an important part in it, but because in the reactions to it we can discern nearly all the myths and clichés of the age ...”

“... her braid with the unfolding pleats of a fan and the sloping curves of shoulder, neck and breast. Pablo Picasso and Jean Metzinger had both painted several pictures of women with fans in the preceding years. Laurencin’s woman, unlike theirs, locks eyes with the viewer, as if to say ‘I am a Cubist motif.’The war – and the severed plait – marked ...”

“... At the Tate Picasso’s late paintings seem almost to be different paintings from those they seemed to be at Beaubourg. There they looked, by common consent, more aggressive and explosive and electric, here more luminous, more beautiful, more grand. The differences in the selection, the hang and the ground-plan have not been crucial enough to account for so extreme a difference of effect ...”

“... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...”

“... there were no paintings . . . but only packages, piled one atop another to the height, say, of Picasso . . . And do you know what there was inside? Banknotes! Yes, sir, banknotes, the largest denomination that existed in France then, which was enormous.’ Christian Zervos is recollecting the day that Picasso took ...”

“... which gives a good indication of his social or professional circle: James Mason, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso. There are letters related to and surrounding the making of particular films: The River, Le Carrosse d’ or, Elena et les hommes. These really do provide detailed information on how the screenplays are put together, how the actors are ...”

“... fantasised about seducing her and imprisoning her underground, not necessarily in that order. Pablo Picasso claimed that only the princess would be a suitable bride to be the châtelaine of his vast new villa, La Californie. At 5’4”, he would have towered over her. He made paper crowns for the vinegary art critic Douglas Cooper and his scarcely ...”

“... understand it . . . the act of love which nullifies all other feelings.’ ‘I think I’d like Pablo better if his feelings of real tenderness for me were not tainted by desire. Am I different from other people in my horror of the act of love?’ It is even odder that she felt so compelled to keep at it. But addicts can deplore their habit, there is no ...”

“... world – was the Civil War in Spain. It was, for them, the epic event of the mid-20th century. Picasso’s Guernica had given it appropriate, unforgettable form. The painting still does, of course. Arendt may have been right to feel a twinge of embarrassment at the tragic, exalted, ‘catastrophist’ tone of her 1950 preface, and to have thought by 1966 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... younger generation, the Chilean writer and diplomat Jorge Edwards, the most enigmatic thing about Pablo Neruda was the way he could switch in one bound, so to speak, from solitude to sociability. This poet of the sea and of lonely places was also one of the most gregarious people Edwards has ever known. Neruda discusses the contrasting attractions of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the painting as a political act, but ‘was not so crazy, aesthetically or technically, about Picasso’. Six years later, she spotted him across the tables of Le Catalan, a restaurant on the Left Bank, and was equally underwhelmed. Surrounded by friends and his lover Dora Maar, Picasso was 61 and greying. He possessed ...”

“... tattered uniforms, books, posters, manuscripts, letters and film clips. This was the war of Picasso’s Guernica (there is a preparatory drawing); in Belgium the rumble of aerial warfare inspired Magritte’s picture of sinister flying machines against a night sky; in Britain poets tried for words adequate to its hopes and miseries – there are ...”

“... window and went to the Mexican embassy, where Renato Leduc, a poet and diplomat she knew through Picasso, offered to marry her so she could get to America. In New York life as it had been in Paris resumed, at least for a while. Most of her compatriots had fled there: Ernst, now with Peggy Guggenheim, Breton, Ozenfant, Duchamp, Mondrian. Guggenheim included ...”