Pablo Picasso
Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y (1881-1973), Spanish
painter and sculptor, is considered
one of the greatest artist of the 20th
century. He was a inventor of forms,
innovator of styles and techniques, a
master of various media, and one of the
most prolific artists in history. He
created more than 20,000 works. Training
and Early Work Picasso was Born in
Málaga on October 25, 1881, he was the son
of José Ruiz Blasco, an art
teacher, and María Picasso y Lopez. Until 1898 he
always used his father's
name, Ruiz, and his mother's maiden name, Picasso, to
sign his pictures.
After about 1901 he dropped "Ruiz" and used his mother's
maiden name to sign
his pictures. At the age of 10 he made his first paintings,
and at 15 he
performed brilliantly on the entrance examinations to Barcelona's
School
of Fine Arts. His large academic canvas Science and Charity
(1897,
Picasso Museum, Barcelona), depicting a doctor, a nun, and a child
at a sick
woman's bedside, won a gold medal. Blue Period Between 1900 and
1902, Picasso
made three trips to Paris, finally settling there in 1904. He
found the city's
bohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people
in dance halls and
cafés show how he learned the postimpressionism of the
French painter Paul
Gauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis.
The themes of the French
painters Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
as well as the style of the
latter, exerted the strongest influence.
Picasso's Blue Room (1901, Phillips
Collection, Washington, D.C.)
reflects the work of both these painters and, at
the same time, shows his
evolution toward the Blue Period, so called because
various shades of blue
dominated his work for the next few years. Expressing
human misery, the
paintings portray blind figures, beggars, alcoholics, and
prostitutes, their
somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of works by the Spanish
artist El
Greco. Rose Period Shortly after settling in Paris in a shabby
building known
as the Bateau-Lavoir ("laundry barge," which it resembled),
Picasso met
Fernande Olivier, the first of many companions to influence the
theme, style,
and mood of his work. With this happy relationship, Picasso
changed his
palette to pinks and reds; the years 1904 and 1905 are thus called
the Rose
Period. Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, which he
visited
several times a week; one such painting is Family of Saltimbanques
(1905,
National Gallery, Washington, D.C.). In the figure of the
harlequin,
Picasso represented his alter ego, a practice he repeated in
later works as
well. Dating from his first decade in Paris are friendships
with the poet Max
Jacob, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, the art
dealers Ambroise Vollard and
Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, and the American
expatriate writers Gertrude Stein and
her brother Leo, who were his first
important patrons; Picasso did portraits of
them all. Protocubism In the
summer of 1906, during Picasso's stay in Gósol,
Spain, his work entered a
new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian,
and African art. His
celebrated portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905-1906,
Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York City) reveals a masklike treatment of her
face. The key work of
this early period, however, is Les demoiselles d'Avignon
(1907, Museum of
Modern Art, New York City), so radical in style—its picture
surface
resembling fractured glass—that it was not even understood by
contemporary
avant-garde painters and critics. Destroyed were spatial depth and
the ideal
form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh,
angular
planes. Cubism—Analytic and Synthetic Inspired by the volumetric
treatment of
form by the French postimpressionist artist Paul Cézanne, Picasso
and the
French artist Georges Braque painted landscapes in 1908 in a style
later
described by a critic as being made of "little cubes," thus leading to
the
term cubism. Some of their paintings are so similar that it is difficult
to tell
them apart. Working together between 1908 and 1911, they were
concerned with
breaking down and analyzing form, and together they developed
the first phase of
cubism, known as analytic cubism. Monochromatic color
schemes were favored in
their depictions of radically fragmented motifs,
whose several sides were shown
simultaneously. Picasso's favorite subjects
were musical instruments, still-life
objects, and his friends; one famous
portrait is Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1910,
Art Institute of Chicago). In
1912, pasting paper and a piece of oilcloth to the
canvas and combining these
with painted areas, Picasso created his first
collage, Still Life with Chair
Caning (Musée Picasso, Paris). This technique
marked a transition to
synthetic cubism. This second phase of cubism is more
decorative, and color
plays a major role, although shapes remain fragmented and
flat. Picasso was
to practice synthetic cubism throughout his career, but by no
means
exclusively. Two works of 1915 demonstrate his simultaneous work in
different
styles: Harlequin (Museum of Modern Art) is a synthetic cubist
painting,
whereas a drawing of his dealer, Vollard, now in the Metropolitan
Museum,
is executed in his Ingresque style, so called because of its
draftsmanship,
emulating that of the 19th-century French neoclassical
artist
Jean-August-Dominique Ingres. Cubist Sculpture Picasso created
cubist sculptures
as well as paintings. The bronze bust Fernande Olivier
(also called Head of a
Woman, 1909, Museum of Modern Art) shows his
consummate skill in handling
three-dimensional form. He also made
constructions—such as Mandolin and
Clarinet (1914, Musée Picasso)—from
odds and ends of wood, metal, paper, and
nonartistic materials, in which he
explored the spatial hypotheses of cubist
painting. His Glass of Absinthe
(1914, Museum of Modern Art), combining a silver
sugar strainer with a
painted bronze sculpture, anticipates his much later"found object" creations,
such as Baboon and Young (1951, Museum of Modern
Art), as well as pop art
objects of the 1960s. Realist and Surrealist Works
During World War I
(1914-1918), Picasso went to Rome, working as a designer with
Sergey
Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He met and married the dancer
Olga
Koklova. In a realist style, Picasso made several portraits of her
around 1917,
of their son (for example, Paulo as Harlequin; 1924, Musée
Picasso), and of
numerous friends. In the early 1920s he did tranquil,
neoclassical pictures of
heavy, sculpturesque figures, an example being Three
Women at the Spring (1921,
Museum of Modern Art), and works inspired by
mythology, such as The Pipes of Pan
(1923, Musée Picasso). At the same time,
Picasso also created strange pictures
of small-headed bathers and violent
convulsive portraits of women which are
often taken to indicate the tension
he experienced in his marriage. Although he
stated he was not a surrealist,
many of his pictures have a surreal and
disturbing quality, as in Sleeping
Woman in Armchair (1927, Private Collection,
Brussel) and Seated Bather
(1930, Museum of Modern Art). Paintings of the Early
1930s Several cubist
paintings of the early 1930s, stressing harmonious,
curvilinear lines and
expressing an underlying eroticism, reflect Picasso's
pleasure with his
newest love, Marie Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to their
daughter Maïa in
1935. Marie Thérèse, frequently portrayed sleeping, also was
the model for
the famous Girl Before a Mirror (1932, Museum of Modern Art). In
1935
Picasso made the etching Minotauromachy, a major work combining his
minotaur
and bullfight themes; in it the disemboweled horse, as well as the
bull,
prefigure the imagery of Guernica, a mural often called the most
important
single work of the 20th century. Throughout Picasso's lifetime, his
work was
exhibited on countless occasions, in many different places. Most
unusual,
however, was the 1971 exhibition at the Louvre, in Paris, honoring
him on his
90th birthday; until then, living artists had not been shown
there. In 1980 a
major retrospective showing of his work was held at the
Museum of Modern Art in
New York City. Picasso died in his villa
Notre-Dame-de-Vie near Mougins on April
8, 1973.