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Pablo Picasso
The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso (1881-
1973) was one of the most prodigious and revolutionarys artists in the
history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism,
he established the basis for abstract art.
Pablo Picasso was born Pablo Blasco on Oct. 25, 1881, in Malaga,
Spain, where his father, Jos Ruiz Blasco, was a professor in the School
of Arts and Crafts. Pablo's mother was Maria Picasso and the artist used
her surname from about 1901 on. In 1891 the family moved to La
Corua, where, at the age of 14, Picasso began studying at the School of
Fine Arts. Under the academic instruction of his father, he developed his
artistic talent at an extraordinary rate.
But Picasso found the atmosphere at the academy stifling, and he soon
returned to Barcelona, where he began to study historical and
contemporary art on his own. At that time Barcelona was the most vital
cultural center in Spain, and Picasso quickly joined the group of poets,
painters, and writers who gathered at the famous caf Quatre Gats.
In 1900 Picasso made his first visit to Paris, staying for three months. In
1901 he made a second trip to Paris, and Ambroise Vollard gave him his
first one-man exhibition. Although the show was not financially
successful, it did arouse the interest of the writer Max Jacob, who
subsequently became one of Picasso's closest friends and supporters. For
the next three years Picasso stayed alternately in Paris and Barcelona.
First Works
At the turn of the century Paris was the center of the international art
world. In painting it had spawned such masters as Georges Seurat,
Claude Monet, Paul Czanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec. Each of these artists practiced advanced, radical
styles. In spite of obvious stylistic differences, their common
denominator lay in testing the limits of traditional representation. While
their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a
decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction. In effect, they implied
that painting need not be predicated upon the values of Renaissance
illusionism.
In the second half of 1904 Picasso's style exhibited a new direction. For
about a year he worked on a series of pictures featuring harlequins,
acrobats, and other circus performers. The most celebrated example is
the Family of Saltimbanques (1905). Feeling, as well as subject matter,
has shifted here. The brooding depression of the Blue Period has given
way to a quiet and unoppressive melancholy, and the color has become
more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with a prevalence of
reddish and pink tones. Thus this period was called his Pink Period.
In terms of space, Picasso's work between 1900 and 1905 was generally
flat, emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the painting surface.
Late in 1905, however, he became increasingly interested in pictorial
volume. This interest seems to have been stimulated by the late paintings
of Czanne, ten of which were shown in the 1905 Salon d'Automne. In
Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse (1905) and Woman with Loaves (1906)
the figures are vigorously modeled, giving a strong impression of their
weight and three-dimensionality. The same interest pervades the famous
Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906), particularly in the massive body of the
figure. But the face of the sitter reveals still another new interest: its
mask-like abstraction was inspired by Iberian sculpture, an exhibition of
which Picasso had seen at the Louvre in the spring of 1906. This
influence reached its fullest expression a year later in one of the most
revolutionary pictures of Picasso's entire career, Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (1907).
Additional Achievements
The invention of cubism represents Picasso's most important
achievement in the history of 20th-century art. Nevertheless, his
activities as an artist were not limited to this alone. As early as the first
decade of the century, he involved himself with both sculpture and
printmaking, two media which he continued to practice throughout his
long career and to which he made numerous important contributions.
Moreover, he periodically worked in ceramics and in the environment of
the theater: in 1917 he designed sets for the Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau
ballet Parade; in 1920 he sketched a theater interior for Igor
Stravinsky's Pulcinella; and in 1924 he designed a curtain for the
performance of Le Train Bleu by Jean Cocteau and Darius Milhaud. In
short, the range of his activities exceeded that of any artist who worked
in the modern period.
By the late 1920s and the early 1930s surrealism had in many ways
eclipsed cubism as the vanguard style of European painting. Launched
by Andr Breton in Paris in 1924, the movement was not one to which
Picasso was ever an "official" contributor in terms of group exhibitions
or the signing of manifestos. But his work during these years reveals
many attitudes in sympathy with the surrealist sensibility. For instance,
in his famous Girl before a Mirror (1932), he employed the colorful
planes of synthetic cubism to explore the relationship between a young
woman's image and self-image as she regards herself before a
conventional looking glass. As the configurations shift between the
figure and the mirror image, they reveal the complexity of emotional and
psychological energies that prevail on the darker side of human
experience.
Guernica
Another of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the 1930s is Guernica
(1937). Barr described the situation within which it was conceived: "On
April 28, 1937, the Basque town of Guernica was reported destroyed by
German bombing planes flying for General Franco. Picasso, already an
active partisan of the Spanish Republic, went into action almost
immediately. He had been commissioned in January to paint a mural for
the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair; but he did
not begin to work until May 1st, just two days after the news of the
catastrophe." The artist's deep feelings about the work, and about the
massacre which inspired it, are reflected in the fact that he completed the
work, that is more than 25 feet wide and 11 feet high, within six or seven
weeks.
After World War II Picasso was established as one of the Old Masters of
modern art. But his work never paused. In the 1950s and 1960s he
devoted his energies to other Old Masters, producing paintings based on
the masterpieces of Nicolas Poussin and Diego Velzquez. To many
critics and historians these recent works are not as ambitious as Picasso's
earlier productions.
Picasso Politics
Picasso also came out publicly after the war as a communist. When he
was asked why he was a communist in 1947, he stated that "When I was
a boy in Spain, I was very poor and aware of how poor people had to
live. I learned that the communists were for the poor people. That was
enough to know. So I became for the communists."
Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the 1939
victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he gave 800 to 900 of his
earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona. For his part, Franco's
feelings about Picasso were reciprocated. In 1963, Picasso's friend Jaime
Sabarts had given 400 of his Picasso works to Barcelona. To display
these works, the Palacio Aguilar was renamed the Picasso Museum and
the works were moved inside. But because of Franco's dislike for
Picasso, Picasso's name never appeared on the museum.
Picasso was married twice, first to dancer Olga Khoklova and then to
Jacqueline Roque. He had four children, one from his marriage to
Khoklova and three by mistresses. Picasso kept busy all of his life and
was planning an exhibit of 201 of his works at the Avignon Arts Festival
in France when he died.