When Picasso’s name finally came back to me the other day, what came with it was the later work — the faces with an eye on each side of the nose, ears and features slid around like furniture in the wrong rooms. I’ll be honest: a lot of that stuff has always looked creepy to me. Interesting, some of it. But creepy.

What I tend to forget is that the man who painted those faces started out as the most conventionally gifted teenager in Spain — and that is the really interesting part.

Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881, the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of drawing. The boy drew the way some kids breathe. At the beginning of 1897, when he was fifteen, he started the biggest canvas of his young life: Science and Charity, a sick woman in bed, a doctor taking her pulse on one side, a nun offering a drink on the other, a child in the nun’s arm. It is painted exactly the way the academy wanted paintings painted — sober, skilled, correct down to the bedsheets.

His father was behind all of it. José Ruiz chose the subject (medical scenes were fashionable at the official exhibitions), posed as the model for the doctor, and rented the boy a studio so he could work in peace. The painting went to the national Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid and came home with an honourable mention. The painter was fifteen years old. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona has the canvas now — Picasso gave it to the museum himself, in 1970 — and the museum’s early rooms are full of that first Picasso, the one almost nobody pictures when they hear the name.

Then he spent the next seventy-odd years taking that training apart. The Blue Period, from 1901 to 1904: beggars, blind men, and mothers painted in cold blue, after his closest friend shot himself in Paris. The Rose Period’s clowns and harlequins. In 1907, with Georges Braque, Cubism — Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, faces like masks, the whole five-hundred-year agreement about how a picture represents the world torn up on one canvas. Guernica in 1937, the bombing of a Basque town turned into a gray scream the size of a wall. On and on, style after style, until he died in France in 1973, at ninety-one, still working.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The second Picasso — the one who rearranged the faces — could only exist because the first one had already happened. Breaking the rules is cheap if you never learned them. Picasso had learned them better, at fifteen, than most professional painters learn them in a life, and then chose, knowing exactly what he was doing, to spend three-quarters of a century breaking them on purpose. You don’t have to like where he ended up. I mostly don’t. But it was never a man covering up what he couldn’t do. The evidence is hanging in Barcelona, two yards wide, painted by a kid.

If you only know the rearranged faces, go look at the teenager’s doctor and nun. Two different species of artist. Same hands.

Read more

• On the fifteen-year-old and Science and Charity: Museu Picasso, Barcelona — the museum’s own account of the painting
• On the whole arc, Blue Period to Guernica: Pablo Picasso — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• On the periods in order: Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) — The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History