Self-Portrait, 1901, by Pablo Picasso © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York City/Musée National Picasso-Paris

Picasso is to art as Kleenex is to tissues. Few artists have achieved as much renown: his work, in its extraordinary range and vitality, is simultaneously familiar and unfathomable. Numerous biographies have been written—among them John Richardson’s magisterial four-volume account—a fact that makes one question the necessity of another five hundred pages covering seemingly well-trodden ground. But Annie Cohen-Solal’s Picasso the Foreigner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35), ably translated by Sam Taylor, manages to approach the great artist from…