The artist, cubed

IN the fall of 1917, Pablo Picasso attended a bullfight with Ernest Ansermet and unwittingly gave the Swiss conductor a tutorial on one of the central issues in modern art: How do you represent a thing? Picasso had brought a sketchbook to the corrida and proceeded to fill it with drawing after drawing of the bull as it was being jabbed by picadors. "[H]e skipped back and forth between cubist and more traditional methods of representation," John Richardson writes in the latest installment of his four-volume biography. Ansermet, baffled and fascinated, recalled Picasso explaining to him, as an art teacher might to a student, "But can't you see? It's the same thing! It's the same bull seen in a different way."

Between 1880 and 1970, the world of modern art, which Picasso created and then exploded through his ceaseless innovation, went through a series of revolutions over just this question -- how best to see -- until virtually all that remained were garage-door-sized blocks of color in Ad Reinhardt's paintings. Picasso thrust his work to the center of nearly all these battles, borrowing from one camp, stealing from another, all the while keeping close and greedy watch over his own artistic flame. He did this with a virile physical restlessness. Almost no medium was beyond his reach -- sculpture, painting, ceramics, set design -- and he earned the envy of his contemporaries for this virtuosity.

To read Richardson's third volume of "A Life of Picasso," then, is to understand why a man with such abilities would find himself at the swirling center of malice and flattery, money and attention -- in other words, fame. The book opens in February 1917, in Rome, where Picasso is holed up in a studio working on sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's carnivalesque dance performance, "Parade." The ballet's scenarist, campy young poet Jean Cocteau, was so dutiful in paying Picasso court that he even took a female lover. Picasso dedicated his energies to winning over Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova. "I heard Picasso in the passage knocking at her door," Ansermet recalled of one night at his hotel, "and Olga on the other side of it saying, 'No, no, Monsieur Picasso, I'm not going to let you in.' "