“YOU ARE WHAT I LOVE MOST in the world”, wrote the poet and catholic convert Max Jacob, “after God and the Saints who regard you as one of them.” The subject of such praise was born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Crispin Crispiniano Santisima Trinidad Ruiz, in Malaga in 1881, but quickly discovered that none of those names would do.
He took another, one whose three forceful syllables now vibrate like the primary colours of twentieth-century art. It was a killing kind of self-invention that severed him from his father, a painter who had done everything he could to help his son. “In art, it is necessary to kill one’s father,” he commented later.
Creative destruction or destructive creation?