When young and impoverished, Pablo Picasso kept warm by burning his own paintings.

FIRST!!!!!

This is not true. It comes from an older story, perhaps also not true, but told by early biographers. According to this account, in the later winter of 1902, while living in Paris with the poet Max Jacob, Picasso burned some of his drawings to heat the room they shared. Picasso may have burned a few not so important drawings at this time, but he was a near manic hoarder who preserved nearly everything he ever produced. There are a lot of fanciful and untrue stories about Picasso's early life, many based on things Picasso made up himself and told to his early biographer and close friend, Jaime Sabartes.