Pablo Picasso

Spanish artist

• Born: October 25, 1881
• Birthplace: Málaga, Spain
• Died: April 8, 1973
• Place of death: Mougins, France

Picasso, the most prolific and famous artist of his time, was crucial to the development of modern art. He was an inventor of cubism and one of the prime practitioners of academic realism, post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau, expressionism, Fauvism, abstract expressionism, Surrealism, and Futurism. A skilled craftsman, he was the master of many mediums.

Early Life

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (pih-KAH-soh) first learned how to draw from his father, José Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher and curator of the local museum. Don José was also a skilled painter, and he recognized early that his son possessed considerable artistic talent, potentially vaster than his own. As an old-school pedagogue, he saw to it that Pablo became well grounded in the classical style of art, insisting that he copy the works of the masters with meticulous fidelity and pay close attention to the traditional laws of proportion and harmony of color. So formidable a draftsman did Pablo become that Don José abandoned his own painting and gave his son all of his materials. Pablo was then only thirteen years old.

In 1895, the family moved to Barcelona, where Pablo’s father was to teach at the local School of Fine Arts and where he had his son enrolled to perfect his skills. Pablo stayed at his father’s school for two years and was then sent to continue his studies in the more prestigious Royal Academy of San Fernando at Madrid. Yet Picasso’s developing personal style and growing professional confidence put him increasingly at odds with the strictures of art currently taught by his hidebound professors. Taking advantage of a brief illness, he quit the Madrid academy to return to Barcelona.

The art scene in Barcelona was then in the throes of a modernist revolution, just the sort of atmosphere to stimulate experimentation and independence. Despite such positive reinforcement, Picasso still felt constrained. He wanted to leave, to go to London, and he persuaded his father to come up with the money. On the journey to Great Britain, however, he stopped off in Paris. The city so impressed him that he decided to go no farther. Although he returned to Spain from time to time, the French capital henceforth became his home and continued to be so during the most creative periods of his life. At this time, he definitively adopted his mother’s maiden name as his own, Picasso being less common than Ruiz. The change also dramatically symbolized the artistic break that he was making with the academic and, for him, stultifying artistic values of his father.

This initial association with Paris, and with it a deeper exposure to the works of Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, led Picasso to modify his artistic style. He eliminated the bright colors from his palette and began painting in monochromatic blue. At the same time, he exchanged his carefully modeled figures for flatter, more solid surfaces. The Blue Period prompted by the suicide of a friend is appropriately one of deep melancholy in which Picasso showed his compassion for the Paris poor, its downcast and destitute. To emphasize this sense of desolation, Picasso elongated the bodies of his subjects, making them bony and angular in the style of El Greco, thereby accentuating their condition of hopelessness.

Picasso, however, could not remain faithful to any one style for long. By 1904, his mood had changed; he had fallen in love for the first time in his life, and, abandoning his cold colors, he now used warmer, more romantic tones. His subject matter also became more joyful, as revealed in a series of paintings of circus performers. These works are painted with great skill and sensitivity and with more dimensionality than those of his previous period. Yet soon this Rose Period also disappeared. During a visit to Spain, he used more earth colors. His figures became more classically ponderous, perhaps more naïve, in their reflection of prehistoric art. These paintings exude a strong, sensual vitality. The twenty-four-year-old Picasso seemingly had established himself in a style that he might exploit for years to come. He was on the verge, however, of a sudden change in direction that would lay the foundations of modern art.

Life’s Work

During the last half of the nineteenth century, French artists had discovered new ways of expression, either by depicting light through color or by distorting perspective to transform shape and form. Picasso had been influenced by these new directions but until 1906 had yet to go beyond them. In that year, however, he began working on a canvas that would end any associations with the traditional spatial organization of the past. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (the young ladies of Avignon), painted on a canvas nearly eight feet square, he showed the distorted anatomy of five nude women in a jarring assemblage of disorderly facets, triangular and rectangular wedges, and other confusing geometric shapes. Two of the figures are wearing hideous African-like masks. The other three have eyes on different levels and noses jutting out like pieces of architecture. The painting has no rational focus of attention, the viewer being forced to look everywhere as if at pieces of broken glass. Yet Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is now recognized as the first true painting of the twentieth century. When Picasso showed the painting to his friends, however none of whom was exactly a rustic when it came to accepting new ideas the reaction was almost universally negative. As a result, Picasso rolled up the canvas and refused to exhibit it publicly, thereby removing its direct influence on the course of the modern movement. Nevertheless, it had firmly established Picasso’s new artistic direction, marking his great adieu to the past.

In embarking on this more hazardous artistic journey, Picasso had been strongly influenced by the works of Paul Cézanne, who in his mature works had also distorted shapes and contours and broken down images into an infinite series of individual geometric perceptions. Picasso, with the close collaboration of Georges Braque, who had been heading in the same direction, broke down his figures into a series of flat tonal planes that in succeeding pictures became progressively more abstract. He also reduced his palette to only several colors. So close was Picasso’s association with Braque that it was often difficult to tell which painter painted which canvas. The outbreak of World War I, and Braque’s departure for military service, however, ended their partnership.

Although Picasso continued to paint in the cubistic manner, he also returned to realistic portraiture, thus continuing to fluctuate between the academic realism of his youth and the modernist synthesis of his early adulthood. Many of his more traditional figure paintings reflect his interest in sculpture, the subjects frequently being inspired by classical mythology. Sometimes he would do a portrait in one style and follow it by doing one in another. He reintroduced perspective depth into his later cubist paintings, rendering figures less abstract yet more fantastic, a characteristic that pointed the way to yet another direction.

Picasso’s ensuing productivity is almost impossible to classify neatly. Throughout the interwar years, he continued to distort the human anatomy, reemploying a technique he had developed in his early cubist days: the rearrangement of pictorial features so that one part of the anatomy is seen simultaneously from many angles.

Guernica (1937), his most famous painting of this period, shows his preoccupation with violence. The masterpiece, nearly twelve by twenty-six feet, was reputedly inspired by the German bombing of that Basque city during the Spanish Civil War. It is, however, a universal statement of human anguish, heightened by terrorized people and animals. In its exaggerations and distortions its overlapping planes and absence of modeling it reveals both the influences of cubism and expressionism, but without the latter style’s lurid colors. The painting was Picasso’s contribution to the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 International Exposition held in Paris, where it became the center of controversy.

Picasso had become sufficiently famous that anything he did became noteworthy: his many affairs with women, his membership in the Communist Party, his friendships with writers and movie stars, his habits of work and tastes in food. Dora Maar, his mistress during the Guernica days, said that during Picasso’s postcubist days, his style was determined by the woman he loved, the place where he lived, the circle of his friends, poets, and his dog.

Picasso lived frugally and was reluctant to sell many of his finished works. Consequently, the greatest collector of Picassos was Picasso himself. When the artist died, the French government in lieu of collecting monetary death duties, selected over a thousand of the choicest paintings, drawings, and pieces of sculpture about one-fourth of the entire treasure trove and made them the nucleus of a special Picasso museum in Paris.

Significance

In Western society, which so highly prizes artistic change, diversity, and innovation, Pablo Picasso stands out as the quintessential creative genius. A master in every medium to which he put his hand painting, sculpture, graphics, ceramics he, more than any other single artist of his age, was responsible for altering the way people approach, view, and accept art. Constantly moving from one style to another, he destroyed forever the hold that Renaissance concepts of pictorial space held over artists, especially their devotion to the canon that flat images on a canvas are given dimensionality and perspective through diminution in size and change in coloristic atmosphere. Picasso broke his figures into fragments, split them into geometric shapes, and had them occupy diverse planes, ignoring any rational relationship they had to their environment. He made his images exist independently of nature, giving them no unifying point of view and no fixed perspective. He even made them completely abstract. By forging a new tradition, Picasso revealed a more profound reality. He recognized that the human eye is highly selective, that it often glances at objects haphazardly, focusing on bits and pieces, looking at things selectively, highlighting parts and planes and aspects, and divorcing the particular from the totality, independent of any natural arrangement of shapes and lines and colors. Thus, Picasso was able to transcend the times in which he lived. His talent remained fresh and young throughout his entire professional life of more than sixty years. In addition, his creations, despite their great diversity, always remained unified in the strength of his own remarkable personality and vast talent for regeneration.

Bibliography

Cirlot, Juan-Eduardo. Picasso, Birth of a Genius. New York: Praeger, 1972. This sumptuous volume was published on the occasion of the lavish donation of his works that the artist made to the city of Barcelona to memorialize his friend Jaime Sabartés. Thus, it serves as a catalog of that collection but also provides a complete record of the development of the artist during his crucial formative period before the birth of modernism to the period of World War I. The collection is particularly strong in sketches and drawings. Cirlot organizes his study around the way Picasso worked rather than where he worked.

Daix, Pierre, and Georges Boudaille, with Joan Rosselet. Picasso, The Blue and Rose Periods: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1900-1906. Translated by Phoebe Pool. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1967. More than a listing of the paintings of that important period in Picasso’s creative life, this study also deals with the development of the early modern art movement and discusses Picasso’s relation to its formation. Lavishly illustrated.

Duncan, David Douglas. The Private World of Pablo Picasso. New York: Harper and Bros., 1958. This study is by a famous photographer who, on Picasso’s invitation, lived as Picasso’s guest for three months during the artist’s seventy-fifth year. The several hundred photos that illustrate Picasso in the act of creativity and at play and relaxation there is even a shot of him in the bathtub is a distillation of the more than ten thousand that Duncan took. Duncan’s worship of his subject is evident from his opening sentence: “Maybe this is the happiest house on earth.” As a photographic record of the object of this veneration, it is a true tour de force.

Elgar, Frank, and Robert Maillard. Picasso. Translated by Francis Scarfe. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956. The premise that Picasso’s art cannot be understood without reference to the society in which he lived gives shape to this outline of his corpus, in which the biographical study of Maillard is conveniently juxtaposed with a study of his work by Elgar.

Gedo, Mary Mathews. Picasso: Art as Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Gedo looks at the artist from a psychodramatic point of view. She considers how the experiences, emotions, and images of his childhood relate to his artistic vision. She maintains that his frequent changes of artistic vision corresponded to some alteration or disruption in his life at the time. This central theme of “partnership” is varied and complex and is more related to other men of genius than to women.

Granell, Eugenio Fernandez. Picasso’s Guernica: The End of a Spanish Era. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1967. Through analysis of one of Picasso’s masterpieces, Granell seeks to understand the culture and tradition that gave it life, claiming that its inspiration emanates from two Spanish myths: the myth of Epiphany, which expresses the irrational and passive proclivities of Spanish society, and the myth of the bullfight, which expresses the irrational but active attitudes. In any case, the author rejects the common assumption that the painting represents an episode in the Spanish Civil War.

Karmel, Pepe. Picasso and the Invention of Cubism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Traces the roots of cubism and analyzes Picasso’s works created in that style from 1906 through 1913.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. Extensive survey of Picasso, analyzing all of the periods of his career and significant work. Includes 1,235 illustrations of his art.

Penrose, Roland. Picasso: His Life and Work. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. Penrose provides an outline of the artist’s works from style to style and period to period. While establishing Picasso’s talent as a main part of the landscape of modern art, he reveals the artist’s lack of interest for that period’s continual factional quarrels and any intellectual theorizing.

Wertenbaker, Lael. The World of Picasso. New York: Time-Life Books, 1967. A worthy addition to the acclaimed series of the Time-Life Library of Art. The commentary is perceptive and the illustrations first-rate.