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Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor. One of the most recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of cubism. Cubism is perhaps the quintessential Modernist artist movement. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to present the piece in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles presenting no coherent sense of depth. The background and object (or figure) planes interpenetrate one another to create the ambiguous shallow space characteristic of cubism. The larger cultural significance of cubism pertains to the disintegration of a unified sense of the world that had pervaded pre-modern European Christian culture.
It has been estimated that Picasso produced about 13,500 paintings or designs, 100,000 prints or engravings, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures or ceramics.
Picasso's work
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:
- Blue Period (1901–1904), consisting of somber, blue paintings influenced by a trip through Spain and the recent suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas, often featuring depictions of acrobats, harlequins, prostitutes, beggars and other artists.
- Rose Period (1905–1907), characterized by a more cheery style with orange and pink colors, and again featuring many harlequins. He met Fernande Olivier, a model for sculptors and artists, in Paris at this time, and many of these paintings are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his exposure to French painting.
- African-influenced Period (1908–1909), influenced by the two figures on the right in his painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which were themselves inspired by African artifacts.
- Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), a style of painting he developed along with Braque using monochrome brownish colors, in which objects are taken apart and their shape "analyzed." Picasso and Braque's paintings at this time are very similar to each other.
- Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), in which cut paper—often wallpaper or fragments of newspaper—are pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.
Career
Early life
Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López.
Picasso's father was a painter whose specialty was the naturalistic depiction of birds, and who for most of his life was also a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. The young Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age; according to his mother, his first word was "piz," a shortening of lapiz, the Spanish word for pencil.[1] It was from his father that Picasso had his first formal academic art training, such as figure drawing and painting in oil. Although Picasso attended carpenter schools throughout his childhood, often those where his father taught, he never finished his college-level course of study at the Academy of Arts (Academia de San Fernando) in Madrid, leaving after less than a year.
Picasso used harlequins in many of his early works, especially in his Blue and Rose Periods. A comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, the harlequin became a personal symbol for Picasso. During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a motif which he used often in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and appears in Picasso's painting, Guernica.
Pacifism
Picasso remained neutral during the Spanish Civil War, World War I and World War II, refusing to fight for any side or country. Picasso never commented on this but encouraged the idea that it was because he was a pacifist. Some of his contemporaries though (including Braque) felt that this neutrality had more to do with cowardice than principle. 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 Franco and the 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 for the movement and was friendly towards some of its activists. No political movement seemed to compel his support to any great degree, though he did become a member of the Communist Party.
During the Second World War, Picasso remained in Paris when the Germans occupied the city. The Nazis hated his style of painting, so he was not able to show his works during this time. Retreating to his studio, he continued to paint all the while. When the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso was still able to continue using bronze smuggled to him by the French resistance.
Arguably Picasso's most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. The act of painting was captured in a series of photographs by Picasso's most famous lover, Dora Maar, a distinguished artist in her own right. 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 was displayed at the opening of Madrid's Reina Sofía Museum.
After the Second World War, Picasso rejoined the French Communist Party, and even attended an international peace conference in Poland. But party criticism of him toward a portrait of Stalin judged as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso's interest in Communist politics, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death. His beliefs tended towards anarcho-communism.
Personal life
In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, and writer Gertrude Stein. He maintained a number of mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Picasso, still a struggling youth, began a long term relationship with Fernande Olivier. It is she who appears in many of the Rose period paintings. After garnering fame and some fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom Picasso called Eva. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works.
In 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Parade, in Rome. 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. 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 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.
The photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.
After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso began to keep company with a young art student, Françoise Gilot. The two eventually became lovers, and had two children together, Claude, and Paloma. Unique among Picasso's women, Gilot left Picasso in 1953, allegedly because of abusive treatment and infidelities. This came as a severe blow to Picasso.
He went through a difficult period after Gilot's departure, coming to terms with his advancing age and his perception that he was an old man, now in his 70s, who was no longer attractive, but rather grotesque to young women. A number of ink drawings from this period explore this theme of the hideous old dwarf as buffoonish counterpoint to the beautiful young girl, including several from a six-week affair with Geneviève Laporte, who in June 2005 auctioned off the drawings Picasso made of her.
Picasso was not long in finding another lover, Jacqueline Roque. Roque worked at the Madoura Pottery, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. The two remained together for the rest of Picasso's life, marrying in 1961. Their marriage was also the means of one last act of revenge against Gilot. Gilot had been seeking a legal means to legitimize her children with Picasso, Claude and Paloma. With Picasso's encouragement, she had arranged to divorce her then husband, Luc Simon, and marry Picasso to secure her children's rights. Picasso then secretly married Roque after Gilot had filed for divorce in order to exact his revenge for her leaving him.
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.
Later works
Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 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 of art by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix. During this time he lived at Cannes and in 1955 helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
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. From the media he received much attention, though there was often as much interest in his personal life as his art.
He was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50 foot 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 colourful 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. One long time admirer, Douglas Cooper, called them "the incoherent scribblings of a frenetic old man". 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.
Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France, and was interred at Castle Vauvenargues' park, in Vauvenargues, Bouches-du-Rhône. Jacqueline Roque prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. His final words were "drink to me."
Legacy
At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he didn't need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Málaga.
The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of Picasso's early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal Picasso's firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father's tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabartés, Picasso's close friend from his Barcelona days who, for many years, was Picasso's personal secretary.
In the aftermath of Picasso's death, at the suggestion of Dustin Hoffman, Paul McCartney wrote a song in tribute to him which was released on his album Band on the Run later that year.
The film Surviving Picasso was made about Picasso in 1996, as seen through the eyes of Françoise Gilot. Anthony Hopkins played Picasso in the movie.
Some paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. These include:
- "Nude on a black armchair|Nude on a Black Armchair" - sold for USD $45.1 million in 1999 to Les Wexner, who then donated it to the Wexner Center for the Arts.
- Les Noces de Pierrette - sold for more than USD $51 million in 1999.
- Garçon à la pipe- sold for USD $104 million at Sotheby's on May 4, 2004, establishing a new price record.
- Dora Maar au Chat - sold for USD $95.2 million at Sotheby's on May 3, 2006. [2]
Awards
- International Lenin Peace Prize (1962)
Anecdotes and trivia
A man once criticized Picasso for creating unrealistic art. Picasso asked him: "Can you show me some realistic art?" The man showed him a photograph of his wife. Picasso observed: "So your wife is two inches tall, two-dimensional, with no arms and no legs, and no color but only shades of gray?" [1]
The Guinness Book of Records names Picasso as the most prolific painter ever.
Picasso suffered from dyslexia [2] .
Children
- Paulo (February 4, 1921 - June 5, 1975) - with Olga Khokhlova
- Maya (September 5, 1935 - ) - with Marie-Thérèse Walter
- Claude - with Françoise Gilot
- Paloma (1949 - ) - with Françoise Gilot
Notes
- ↑ Hughes, Robert, "Anatomy of a Minotaur", Time Magazine, 1971-11-01. Retrieved 2006-09-01.
- ↑ Picasso portrait sells for $95.2 million. Retrieved May 4, 2006.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- The Museum of Modern Art. Pablo Picasso, a retrospective. Ed. William Rubin, chronology by Jane Fluegel. New York. 1980. ISBN 0-87070-519-9
- Kobi Ledor, MD. "A Guide to Collecting Picasso's Prints", at http://ledorfineart.com/forum.html.
- Enrique Mallen. The Visual Grammar of Pablo Picasso. Berkeley Insights in Linguistics & Semiotics Series. Berlin: Peter Lang. 2003.
- Enrique Mallen. La Sintaxis de la Carne: Pablo Picasso y Marie-Thérèse Walter. Santiago de Chile: Red Internacional del Libro. 2005.
- Olivier Widmaier Picasso. Picasso: The Real Family Story. Prestel Publ. 2004. 320 p. ISBN 3-79133-149-3
- William Rubin, ed. Pablo Picasso, a retrospective. Chronology by Jane Fluegel. Museum of Modern Art|The Museum of Modern Art. New York. 1980. ISBN 0-87070-519-9
External links
Museums:
- Pablo Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York
- Museum Berggruen (Berlin, Germany)
- Museo Picasso Málaga (Málaga, Spain)
- Museu Picasso (Barcelona, Spain)
- Musée National Picasso (Paris, France)
- Musée Picasso (Antibes, France)
- Guggenheim Museum Biography
- National Gallery of Art list of paintings
- Pablo Picasso at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Online galleries:
- On-Line Picasso Project: Comprehensive summary of his life and his work.
- Pablo Picasso Art Gallery
- Pablo Picasso's paintings in the Private Art Collection
- Paintings from 1912 to 1923 - and from 1924 to 1937
- Picasso at Olga's Gallery
- Pablo Picasso: A Virtual Art Gallery
Essays:
- Power and Tenderness in Men and in Picasso's 'Minotauromachy' by Chaim Koppelman
- Federal Bureau of Investigation files: Summary of FBI investigation of Picasso
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