PICASSO

95.2 Million Dollars for a painting.
And we thought gas prices were high.
Picasso's "Boy With a Pipe" (1905) sold for $104.2 million in 2004.
This current canvas is titled "Dora Maar With Cat".
The cat is a little black thing. It looks real.
But Dora Maar looks like she's been in a bad accident.
Not a pretty face.
But that's the style of Picasso.
Twisting torsos---double chins and double noses---an eye here and an eye there.
One wonders what happened to Picasso that he started creating all of these strange-looking portraits.
His "Portrait of Olga in the Armchair" (1917) does not have all of thOse bizarre forms.
Picasso wrote: “I keep doing my best not to lose sight of nature. I want to aim at similarity, a profound similarity which is more real than reality, thus becoming surrealist.”
More real than reality.
Below is a short and rather inscrutable description that I wrote with Pablo Picasso in mind:
Cubism.
That stolid cucaracha
Of cubes and cuboids
Sitting and chewing its abstract cud
On a round cucking stool.
Cubism crawled into a cockeyed and curious cubbyhole
And came out of an ancient coughing cuckoo clock.
Who can ever calculate the damage done
By those who have cuddled this crazy
Cubic cucumber from Picasso's chain-smoking palette?