| Last month marked half a century since the death of Pablo Picasso, a figure still alive and controversial in popular culture. In recent years, he’s been the subject of works by Jay-Z and Kanye West; in 2018, the comedian Hannah Gadsby reached international fame thanks, in part, to a memorable passage inspired by the artist in the Netflix special “Nanette.” (“The history of Western art is just the history of men painting women like they’re flesh vases for their dick flowers.”) Next month, Gadsby and the Brooklyn Museum will team up to open “It’s Pablo-matic”—an examination, in their words, of the artist’s “complicated legacy” and enduring influence. During Picasso’s lifetime, The New Yorker published not one but two Profiles of the painter, both by the magazine’s longtime Paris correspondent Janet Flanner. Flanner’s earlier Profile, from 1939, deftly explains the revolutionary nature of Picasso’s work and his many styles, but it also reads like a dishy dispatch from Café de Flore. “Even in a crowded café there is a feeling of dominance, abundance, and experience concentrated in the dark presence of Picasso,” she observes. In young Pablo’s broke early years, around 1900, he had been nocturnal and unsociable, carrying a gun, sharing a bed in shifts with a poet, and keeping a pet mouse in a table drawer. By the time of the Profile, he had become world famous and “the costliest painter alive,” but also “sad, sarcastic, with malice in speech taking the place of wit”—a “tragic-minded man” who disregards critics and “takes cruelty for granted,” Flanner wrote. Picasso himself may have loved such a Profile—or at least wouldn’t have worried about his reputation. “Time will sort all those things out,” he remarked to Flanner, referring to a bad painting that sold anyway. “A picture lives by its legend, not by anything else.” | 
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