How did the young, talented, unruly Spanish artist known to his friends as Pablo arrive at the place in his life and work that entitled him to be known as Picasso?

The story of this transformation unfolds in Pablo, the graphic novel-style bio written by Julie Birmant, drawn by Clément Oubrerie, colored by Sandra Desmazières, published in France by Dargaud and released here by Abrams. It’s a story of youthful life, love, striving and adventure—artistic and otherwise. 

Ms. Birmant based her text on the memoir of Picasso’s great love, Fernande Olivier, who wrote about the life they shared for ten years in Souvenirs In Time, a memoir published after the artist’s death. 

In the rowdy quartier of Monmartre, in a ramshackle anthill of artists’ studios called le Bateau Lavoir (Laundry Boat) that drew many a starving artist, including Modigliani, Andre Derain, and Georges Braque, the story unfolds. Here Pablo encounters Fernande, known to the artists of Monmartre as “la belle Fernande,” who works as a model. For him, it’s love at first sight, although Fernande is not pleased with his vulgar friends, or the wild parties they hold in his filthy studio. 

The book is a visual narrative of Belle Époque Paris, the world capital of art with its flourishing network of studios, dealers and salons. Major figures in the art world, including Ambrose Vollard, populate the salons, where adventurous collectors try to stay up to date with new trends in art. 

What the author and artist have done so masterfully in Pablo is to show how Picasso developed as an artist through a kind of vision through which he saw the world in shards, cubes and sometimes in crazy colors that had nothing to do with reality. The result of his way of seeing later informed the abstractions he and Georges Braque produced together called Cubism.

The book, published in four separate editions in France, and here as a 342-page doorstopper, is structured around four signal moments that changed Picasso’s life. First, the poet Max Jacob introduces the young Spaniard to toute Paris, and sells his erotic drawings for enough to buy coal; next, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who shared the painter's view of the transitory states of existence, stirs the artist’s intellectual pursuits; then Pablo meets Henri Matisse, an artist quite his opposite, with a talent so large it provokes his envy. Toward the end of the book, through the process of creating the legendary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [MoMA], Pablo sheds his uncertainties to become the creator of the first truly “modern art,” and the larger-than-life Picasso.

Pablo: Art Masters Series, by Julie Birmant, drawn by Clément Oubrerie. Abrams/Self Made Hero. Information

Picasso Sculpture, through February 7, 2016. MoMA, 11 West 53^rd Street, NY, NY. Information

Picasso Mania, opens today at Grand Palais Galeries Nationales, Paris. Information