Picasso
Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula
Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito
Ruiz y Picasso Ruiz Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8
April 1973) was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. He is best known
for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied
in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), his portrayal of the German bombing of
Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso demonstrated uncanny artistic talent in his early years, painting in a
realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence; during the first decade
of the twentieth century his style changed as he experimented with different
theories, techniques, and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments
brought him universal renown and immense fortunes throughout his life, making
him one of the best-known figures in twentieth century art.
Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María
de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad, a series of names
honouring various saints and relatives. Added to these were Ruiz and Picasso,
for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish law. Born in the city of
Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José
Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López. Picasso’s family was
middle-class; his father was also a painter who specialized in naturalistic
depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of
art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruiz’s ancestors
were minor aristocrats.
Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age; according to
his mother, his first words were “piz, piz”, a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish
word for ‘pencil’. From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic
training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a
traditional, academic artist and instructor who believed that proper training
required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from
plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the
detriment of his classwork.
The family moved to A Coruña in 1891 where his father became a professor at the
School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion the father
found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the
precision of his son’s technique, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso
had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting.
In 1895, Picasso's seven-year old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria—a
traumatic event in his life. After her death, the family moved to Barcelona,
with Ruiz transferring to its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city,
regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.[7] Ruiz
persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam
for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso
completed it in a week, and the impressed jury admitted Picasso, who was 13. The
student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later
life. His father rented him a small room close to home so Picasso could work
alone, yet Ruiz checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his son’s
drawings. The two argued frequently.
Photos on this page are from this exhibition
Picasso’s father and uncle decided to
send the young artist to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, the country's
foremost art school. In 1897, Picasso, age 16, set off for the first time on his
own, but he disliked formal instruction and quit attending classes soon after
enrollment. Madrid, however, held many other attractions: the Prado housed
paintings by the venerable Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco
Zurbarán. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; their elements, the
elongated limbs, arresting colors, and mystical visages, are echoed in Picasso’s
œuvre.
After studying art in Madrid, Picasso made his first trip to Paris in 1900, then
the art capital of Europe. There, he met his first Parisian friend, the
journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its
literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso
slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty,
cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm.
During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his
anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young
Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso
illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and
sympathizing with the state of the poor. The first issue was published on 31
March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his work simply
Picasso, while before he had signed Pablo Ruiz y Picasso.
Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso
replied, "She will".
In 1907 Picasso joined the art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler was a German art historian, art collector
who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He became
prominent in Paris beginning in 1907 for being among the first champions of
Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Cubism. Kahnweiler championed burgeoning
artists such as André Derain, Kees Van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice
de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and
work in Montparnasse at the time.
In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the
Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume
Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry, and Gertrude Stein. Apollinaire was arrested
on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Apollonaire
pointed to his friend Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both
were later exonerated.d.
In the early 20th century, Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris.
In 1904, in the middle of a storm, he met Fernande Olivier, a Bohemian artist
who became his mistress. Olivier appears in many of his Rose period paintings.
After acquiring fame and some fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert,
whom he called Eva Gouel. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in
many Cubist works. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at
the age of 30 in 1915.
After World War I, Picasso made a number of important associations and
relationships with figures associated with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris and
others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with
Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Parade, in
Rome; and they spent their honeymoon in the villa near Biarritz of the glamorous
Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz. Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high
society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant on the
life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo, who would grow up to
be a dissolute motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova’s
insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso’s bohemian tendencies and
the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that
Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev’s troup, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated
on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several sketches of
the composer.
In 1927 Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair
with her. Picasso’s marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than
divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of
divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two
remained legally married until Khokhlova’s death in 1955. Picasso carried on a
long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter, Maia,
with her. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry
her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso’s death. Throughout his life
Picasso maintained a number of mistresses in addition to his wife or primary
partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women.
Dora Maar au Chat, 1941
During the Second World War, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans
occupied the city. Picasso’s artistic style did not fit the Nazi views of art,
so he was not able to show his works during this time. Retreating to his studio,
he continued to paint all the while, producing works such as the Still Life with
Guitar (1942) and The Charnel House (1944-48) . Although the Germans outlawed
bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to
him by the French Resistance.
In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Picasso started a new relationship with
a young art student, named Françoise Gilot (born 1921) and who was 40 years
younger than him. Having grown tired of his mistress Dora Maar, Picasso and
Gilot began to live together. Eventually they had two children, Claude born in
1947 and Paloma born in 1949. His relationship with Gilot ended in 1953, when
she and the children walked out on him. In her 1964 book Life with Picasso she
explains the breakup as being because of abusive treatment and Picasso's
infidelities. This came as a severe blow to Picasso.
After his relationship with Gilot fell apart, and she left; Picasso continued to
have affairs with even younger women than Françoise. While still involved with
Gilot in 1951 Picasso had a six-week affair with Geneviève Laporte (1926), who
in June 2005 auctioned off drawings that Picasso made of her and gave to her as
a gift. Eventually Picasso began to come to terms with his advancing age and his
waning attraction to young women, by incorporating the idea into his new work;
expressing the perception that, now in his 70s, he had become a grotesque and
comic figure to young women. A number of works including paintings, ink drawings
and prints from this period explore the theme of the hideous old dwarf as
accompaniment to and doting lover of a beautiful young model.
Jacqueline Roque (1927 – 1986) who worked at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris on
the French Riviera, where Picasso made and painted ceramics became his lover,
and in 1961 his second wife. The two were together for the remainder of
Picasso’s life. Gilot had been seeking a legal means to legitimize her children
with Picasso and his marriage to Roque was also the means of Picasso's final act
of revenge against Gilot. With Picasso’s encouragement, she had divorced her
then husband, Luc Simon, with the plan to finally actually marry Picasso;
securing her children’s rights as Picasso's legitimate heirs. However Picasso
had already secretly married Roque after Gilot had filed for divorce. Denying
Gilot, thus exacting his revenge for her walking out on him, and leaving his
children Claude and Paloma estranged in their relationship with him.
Picasso had constructed a huge gothic
structure and could afford large villas in the south of France, at
Notre-dame-de-vie on the outskirts of Mougins, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.
By this time he was a celebrity, and there was often as much interest in his
personal life as his art.
In addition to his manifold artistic accomplishments, Picasso had a film career,
including a cameo appearance in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus. Picasso
always played himself in his film appearances. In 1955 he helped make the film
Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife
Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. His final words were “Drink to me,
drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.” He was interred at the
Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958
and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline Roque prevented
his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. Devastated and lonely
after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline Roque took her own life by gunshot in
1986 when she was 60 years old.
* Paulo (4 February 1921 – 5 June
1975) (Born Paul Joseph Picasso) — with Olga Khokhlova
* Maya (5 September 1935 – ) (Born Maria de la Concepcion Picasso) — with Marie-Thérèse
Walter
* Claude (15 May 1947 –) (Born Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso) — with Françoise
Gilot
* Paloma (19 April 1949 – ) (Born Anne Paloma Picasso) — with Françoise Gilot
Picasso remained neutral during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World
War II, refusing to fight for any side or country. Some of his contemporaries
felt that his pacifism had more to do with cowardice than principle. An article
in The New Yorker called him “a coward, who sat out two world wars while his
friends were suffering and dying”. As a Spanish citizen living in France,
Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either
World War. In the Spanish Civil War, service for Spaniards living abroad was
optional and would have involved a voluntary return to the country to join
either side. While Picasso expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco
and fascists through his art, he did not take up arms against them. He also
remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite
expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it.
In 1944 Picasso joined the French Communist Party, attended an international
peace conference in Poland, and in 1950 received the Lenin Peace Prize from the
Soviet government. But party criticism of a portrait of Stalin as insufficiently
realistic cooled Picasso’s interest in communist politics, though he remained a
loyal member of the Communist Party until his death. In a 1945 interview with
Jerome Seckler, Picasso stated: “I am a Communist and my painting is Communist
painting. ... But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else,
I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics.”
His Communist militancy, not uncommon among intellectuals and artists at the
time although it was officially banned in Francoist Spain, has long been the
subject of some controversy; a notable source or demonstration thereof was a
sarcastic quote commonly attributed to Salvador Dalí (with whom Picasso had a
rather strained relationship), ostensibly casting doubt on the true honesty of
his political allegiances.
According to Jean Cocteau's diaries, Picasso once said to him in reference to
the communists: "I have joined a family, and like all families, it's full of
shit".
He was against the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in
the Korean War and he depicted it in Massacre in Korea. In 1962, he received the
International Lenin Peace Prize.
Picasso’s work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his
later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are
the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1905–1907), the African-influenced
Period (1908–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism
(1912–1919).
In 1939–40 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, under its director Alfred
Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major and highly successful retrospective of
his principal works up until that time. This exhibition lionized the artist,
brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted
in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.
Picasso’s training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be
traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in
Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any
major artist’s beginnings. During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work
falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun. The
academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The
First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In
the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous
and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called “without a doubt one
of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.”
In 1897 his realism became tinged with Symbolist influence, in a series of
landscape paintings rendered in non naturalistic violet and green tones. What
some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of
Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his
admiration for favorite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal
version of modernism in his works of this period.
The Blind Man's Meal
Picasso’s Blue Period (1901–1904) consists of somber paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. This period’s starting point is uncertain; it may have begun in Spain in the spring of 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year. Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from this period. In his austere use of color and sometimes doleful subject matter—prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901 he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904), which
depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare
table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso’s works of this period, also
represented in The Blindman’s Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in
the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other works include Portrait of Soler and
Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.
The Rose Period (1904–1906)[43] is characterized by a more cheery style with
orange and pink colors, and featuring many circus people, acrobats and
harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character
usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for
Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a model for sculptors and artists, in
Paris in 1904, and many of these paintings are influenced by his warm
relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting.
The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is
reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e. just prior to the Blue Period) and
1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.
Picasso’s African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with the two figures on
the right in his painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which were inspired by
African artifacts. Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into
the Cubist period that follows.
Cubism
Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed along with
Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colors. Both artists took
apart objects and “analyzed” them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque’s
paintings at this time have many similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was
a further development of the genre, in which cut paper fragments—often wallpaper
or portions of newspaper pages—were pasted into compositions, marking the first
use of collage in fine art.
In the period following the upheaval of World War I, Picasso produced work in a
neoclassical style. This “return to order” is evident in the work of many
European artists in the 1920s, including André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, and
the artists of the New Objectivity movement. Picasso’s paintings and drawings
from this period frequently recall the work of Ingres.
During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in his
work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists,
who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso’s Guernica.
Arguably Picasso’s most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of
Guernica during the Spanish Civil War—Guernica. This large canvas embodies for
many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. Asked to explain its
symbolism, Picasso said, “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols.
Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public
who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”
Guernica hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981
Guernica was returned to Spain and exhibited at the Casón del Buen Retiro. In
1992 the painting hung in Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum when it opened.
Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture
International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s,
Picasso’s style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of
the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velazquez’s
painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin,
Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.
He was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50-foot (15 m)-high public
sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He
approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture
which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. What the figure represents is
not known; it could be a bird, a horse, a woman or a totally abstract shape. The
sculpture, one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was
unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the
people of the city.
Picasso’s final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colorful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime. Only later, after Picasso’s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism and was, as so often before, ahead of his time.
Text from Wikipedia
linoleum block print