This landmark biography penetrates the barriers of legend to bring to full and intimate life a man whose burning passions—for painting, women, and ideas—were matched by a compulsion to invent reality in his life no less than in his art. Here is the tragic story of a man who, from his teenage passion for a gypsy boy to the chilling bitterness and betrayals of his old age, was unable to love and was driven to dominate and humiliate the women—and men—who fell under his hypnotic spell.

Drawing on a wealth of startling revelations, including the vivid memories of Picasso’s daughter Maya and the heretofore untold recollections of Françoise Gilot, who shared his life for ten years and bore two of his children, the author has stripped bare the romantic myths to reveal, in all its volatile complexity, Picasso’s lifelong struggle between his power to create and his compulsion to destroy.