For starters, Pablo Picasso was an asshole, so there’s that. He would carry his revolver around full of blanks so that he could shoot people that did dull things like ask him about his paintings. It was his way of saying, “You’re so unbearably boring you the world would be better without you in it.” Don’t try this in today’s society, though, especially not in California. In many places, it is illegal to point a gun at someone when it’s not self-defense or defense of others. But Picasso, the arrogant jerk, would routinely shoot people with blanks, always in self-gratification, never in self-defense.
How He Got the Idea
Walking around with a gun and shooting blanks at people was not entirely Pablo Picasso’s original idea. Picasso used to totally Stan a French writer named Alfred Jarry, known for writing the play Ubu Roi (King Ubu). This controversial writer wanted to be known as a menace, so he would walk around Paris packing heat. When it would serve his purpose of keeping his bad guy image, he pulled out his gun so everyone would see him with it.
This same gun that Jarry pulled out is the same revolver that Picasso went on to acquire after Jarry’s death. Picasso took it a step further and fired blanks at people who asked about his technique, the meaning of his paintings, etc. so that in his mind he would be, as historian Arthur I. Miller explained, “disposing of bourgeois boors, morons and philistines.” Bad hombre vibes indeed.
