Because of his heritage, I assume that Liniers knows more about Picasso than I do. I just don’t have the knowledge of his paintings to know what Liniers intended here.
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These are all self-portraits. Since the styles are so different, he’s wondering which one is really him. Of course, they were painted over most of his life as his skills and style evolved, and most of us are different people at different times in our life, so it’s kind of a silly question.
My first thought on glancing at the cartoon as the page loaded was, “There’s Wally!” (Or “Waldo”…)
I could still run with it: Wally’s branching out from the “where” to the “who”; just by taking off his toque, he can do his Pablo Picasso imitation (Wally has gotten older…)
The mistake I made when I first saw this strip was thinking that the things (plural) that were happening to Picasso were contained in the various paintings. Given DemetriosX’s explanation @1, there is just one “event” (occurring in the foreground): his uncertainty about his “correct” identity.
I once read an opinion piece by humorist and trained metal sculptor Ephrahim Kishon, where he claimed that throughout his life Picasso made pleasant realistic portraits of his family members, and that the depictions of people in the style of ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’, or the self portrait to the left in the cartoon were basically a branding or marketing gag, to establish himself as an inscrutable painter genius .
Well, many famous artists, talented though they may have been, got to the pinnacle by relentless marketing. Salvadore Dali and Leonard Bernstein for instance.
Comics I Don't Understand 
These are all self-portraits. Since the styles are so different, he’s wondering which one is really him. Of course, they were painted over most of his life as his skills and style evolved, and most of us are different people at different times in our life, so it’s kind of a silly question.
You can see the evolution of his self-portraits here: https://www.boredpanda.com/pablo-picasso-self-portrait-style-evolution/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
Thank you for your scholarship, DX!
If DemetriosX is right, (he probably is), the artist did a really excellent job of recreating those paintings.
Here’s the Wikipedia bio sketch of Liniers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liniers_(cartoonist)?wprov=sfti1
Ah, thanks!
My first thought on glancing at the cartoon as the page loaded was, “There’s Wally!” (Or “Waldo”…)
I could still run with it: Wally’s branching out from the “where” to the “who”; just by taking off his toque, he can do his Pablo Picasso imitation (Wally has gotten older…)
The mistake I made when I first saw this strip was thinking that the things (plural) that were happening to Picasso were contained in the various paintings. Given DemetriosX’s explanation @1, there is just one “event” (occurring in the foreground): his uncertainty about his “correct” identity.
I once read an opinion piece by humorist and trained metal sculptor Ephrahim Kishon, where he claimed that throughout his life Picasso made pleasant realistic portraits of his family members, and that the depictions of people in the style of ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’, or the self portrait to the left in the cartoon were basically a branding or marketing gag, to establish himself as an inscrutable painter genius .
Well, many famous artists, talented though they may have been, got to the pinnacle by relentless marketing. Salvadore Dali and Leonard Bernstein for instance.