There must be as many stories about Picasso as the artist had names. At the height of his fame, the man christened – deep breath – Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso would make a quick sketch on a napkin to cover a restaurant bill.

One story has it that, when asked to sign the sketch, he replied that he wanted lunch, not to buy the whole place. You can see why he took to going by his last name.

Other tales are less benign, about his misogyny, his conflicted relationships with his children and his appropriation of African art. In 1911 he was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa. The case went to trial, and although he was innocent of that crime he did turn out to have two Iberian statues stashed in his Paris apartment, each stamped with the Louvre’s mark.

Even beyond a fascination with his genius, Picasso’s life coincides with interesting times. Born in the city of Málaga in 1881, he lived through the Spanish civil war and both world wars, and achieved huge fame, before dying in France in 1973. He is credited, alongside Georges Braque, with inventing cubism, yet his restless quest for truth led him to explore and experiment with a vast variety of media and forms of expression.

When he designed sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in 1917, the writer Jean Cocteau said, “Picasso amazes me every day... A badly drawn figure of Picasso is the result of endless well-drawn figures he erases, corrects, covers over...”

Guilliaume Apollinaire, Picasso’s coaccused in the Mona Lisa affair, described his fellow artist’s ballet designs as “a kind of surrealism”, three years before surrealism became a recognised art form.

Is Picasso just a ‘problematic white guy’?