Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney

Picasso was a millionaire by 1914 and a multimillionaire by the end of World War I; and his wealth continued to grow, so that by the time of his death he was by far the richest artist who had ever lived. He made a deal with the French government over inheritance taxes, and as a result, in 1985 the Musée Picasso opened in Paris. There, his work of a

until his death, at age ninety-two, he remained a master of spectacular output, working on paper and canvas; in stone, ceramics, and metal; in every possible variety of mixed media. He also designed posters, advertisements, theater sets and costumes, dresses, logos, and almost every kind of object from ashtrays to headdresses. The number of his cre

Picasso was perhaps the most restless, experimental, and productive artist who ever lived. But everything had to be done at top speed. He was incapable of lavishing care, time, or sustained effort on a work of art. By 1900 he was turning out a painting every morning, and doing other things in the afternoon.

Picasso was born two decades before Disney and outlived him by a few years, but both were essentially men of the twentieth century, outstanding creative individuals first and foremost but also representative figures. Each embraced novelty with shattering enthusiasm. But there were essential differences.

In the twentieth century, then, new experiences for our eyes were the product both of relentless impersonal forces frog-marching humanity forward and of powerful creative individuals striving to wrest control of change in order to realize their personal ways of seeing things. Among this last group none were more successful than Pablo Picasso (1881–

Abruptly, like de Gaulle, he retired, shut down his Paris house completely (there was no possible successor), and returned to Spain. He died in 1972, sad and lonely, a great artist broken by the years, one of the many casualties of the lunacy of the 1960s—along with institutions such as the Society of Jesus, the old-style university of scholars and

That world was disappearing even in Balenciaga’s lifetime. The death of Dior in 1957 was the final fatal blow. Dior was a man who loved rich food, he had fought a constant but losing battle against surplus flesh, and his heart inevitably failed. His funeral was a historic gathering of high fashion: only Chanel, who had returned from her exile in Sw

For this reason he did not, like some designers, expect a client to suppress her personality; he expected her to emphasize it—he rejoiced when a woman “added to” his work. Strict and implacable in many ways, he had a certain creative modesty which allowed him to see that his dresses only became alive when worn, and that the wearer was needed to com

That bag became, and remains, a classic. He borrowed the full-length pinkish satin twice from Manet’s Femme au Perroquet at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and he was not above raiding paintings by more vulgar artists, such as Monet’s Les femmes au Jardin at the Musée d’Orsay. But he was never a plagiarist: he transformed touches of the old ma