By the 1970s, he was exorbitantly wealthy thanks to sales of his work, and although he had an unsophisticated attitude to money , it cannot have escaped his attention that the imprimatur of his signature could transform even the most rushed and routine doodle into an expensive work of art.
It is true that Picasso occasionally gave signed pieces to impoverished friends in the knowledge that they would sell them to raise money, but the recipients were for the most part artists or poets whom he knew from his early days in Paris – co-conspirators among the avant-garde, not handymen.
Moreover, although we know that Picasso did occasionally hang on to particular examples of his own work for many years, the pieces he kept for himself were of the highest quality – touchstones, if you like, to remind himself of artistic breakthroughs when his inspiration was at a low ebb. In contrast, the artworks that have come to light in France (including lithographs, gouaches, Cubist collages, a notebook and the Blue Period watercolour) do not appear to be especially important.
It is, therefore, no surprise that Picasso’s son Claude is vigorously contesting the story of the retired French electrician Pierre Le Guennec, who has suddenly come forward with this mouth-watering cache of art. “It doesn’t add up,” says Claude .
And yet, even though our heads tell us to be sceptical of Le Guennec’s claim, in our hearts many of us would like to believe that it is true. The reason for this is that his story chimes with our understanding of Picasso, confirming ideas about the artist that have become part of the bedrock of his myth.
As the preeminent artistic genius of the 20th century, Picasso has come to embody a pinnacle of creativity: vigorous, prolific, never standing still.
His inordinate and sustained artistic fertility is a marvel – he could turn his hand to almost any medium, and quickly master it. Few people can operate at the top of their game for very long, yet such was the primal energy that animated Picasso, he could work at fever pitch throughout his adult life, often producing more than one large canvas a day.
Extremely intelligent, he was aware of the phenomenal capacity of his powers — just as he was self-conscious about the ways in which he could transmute the stuff of his everyday life into art, such as the scraps of newspaper that he used in his wonderful Cubist collages .
Thus the idea that a substantial number of unknown works of art by Picasso might have come to light nearly four decades after his death is not quite as far-fetched as it might seem: after all, when he died in 1973, Picasso left behind an estate of more than 43,000 artworks, so the possibility that 271 of them might have gone missing isn’t entirely ridiculous.
Le Guennec’s claim is so intoxicating partly because it reminds us of Picasso’s whirling, mercurial productivity. We enjoy hearing the Frenchman’s story because it augments what we already know about Picasso’s boundless talent – and promises to tantalise us with new details about his life and art.
The story also reminds us that Picasso could be a diabolical rogue. One of the things I most admire about Picasso is that he questioned everything, including the fundamental tenets of art history such as perspective. In his bid to resist visual clichés, he experimented continuously, so that it is hard to pinpoint any consistent artistic identity or style.
In a sense, he was a monster, who occasionally delighted in perversity for its own sake , This is why it is impossible to dismiss Le Guennec’s story out of hand, since if anyone was maddening and unpredictable enough to exchange hundreds of works of art for routine odd jobs, that person was Picasso.