Pablo Picasso: Car Thief

These days, the Spanish town of Malaga is more synonymous with bawdy British tourists expunging the benefits of twelve pints of lager, complaining that the breakfast isn’t as good as their Mum makes, and attempting in vain to reach Gloria Gaynor’s high notes on the [non]-traditional English pub karaoke night.

However, in the early part of the 20th Century, Malaga was ruled with an iron fist by the Picasso crime family. The Godfather, Don José Ruiz y Blasco, had a son, Pablo. Jose had nurtured young Picasso to one day take over the crime gang, but Pablo had other ideas. Pablo moved to France and began his career as a master car thief. Even though there weren’t that many cars around, Pablo carved a reputation as a creative crook and a little abstract.

Early, unconfirmed Gendarmerie reports have the wayward Pablo stealing everything from baby carriages to a Wankel Rotary Engine. He was questioned on several occasions, but the cars he stole were always untraceable, or crushed into cubes and sold for scrap, which became known as his cubist period.

In 1920, Picasso started a jazz band called The Wild Beasts with local pick pocket, Henry Matisse. With a colourful sound, and figurative lyrics, they had minor hits with 99 Vermillion Ballons, Battlestar Guernica and Another One Bites the Symbolist. After a fall out with Matisse, Picasso formed a partnership with con man and arsonist, Georges Braque. It was Braque who convinced Picasso that he needed to streamline his thieving, suggesting that while most cars of the time were black or gamboge, a new and bourgeoning market in blue cars was de rigueur. For three years, Picasso stole nothing but blue cars, until his spray painter and part-time singer, Suzanne Bloch convinced him to change his ways.

For the next two years, Picasso gave up stealing cars and became a florist before running away with the circus to be a saltimbanque. The combination of flowers and colourful harlequin costumes would lead to his contemporaries referring to this period as his Rose Period.

He returned to car theft after a short spell in Africa, focussing on stealing Nazi staff cars, tanks and motorcycles with sidecars during the German occupation of France.

It seemed, however, that his crimes had finally caught up with him when, during one drunken night in 1957, Picasso spent a night in jail after attempting to steal the entire Presidential cavalcade of limousines. His claimed that he was, “Attempting to subjugate the transformative approach of neo classical performance psychologically involving the viewer with the making process, provoking instinctive responses to his precarious assemblages”. He confused the officer in charge so much, they just let him go.

Picasso died in 1973 at 3am. His last words were,
“Drink to me, drink to my health. You know I can’t drink any more”.
At least according to Paul McCartney.

He is remembered by both his family and his chiropodist.