Picasso, Pablo Ruiz (1881-1973), Spanish painter
and sculptor, generally considered the greatest artist of the 20th
century. He was unique as an inventor of forms, as an innovator of
styles and techniques, as a master of various
media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history. He created
more than 20,000 works
Training and Early Work
Born in Málaga on October 25, 1881, Picasso
was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher, and María
Picasso y
López. 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. Picasso's
genius manifested itself early: 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,
Museo Picasso, 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 sttling 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 assimilated 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, Philips 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 shabbby 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 paintings 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
Gosol, 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, and 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, Brussels) 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.
Guernica
Picasso was moved to paint the huge mural Guernica
shortly after German planes, acting on orders from Spain's
authoritarian leader Francisco Franco, bombarded the Basque town of
Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the
Spanish Civil War. Completed in less than two months, Guernica was
hung in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris
International Exposition of 1937. The painting does not portray the
event; rather, Picasso expressed his outrage by
employing such imagery as the bull, the dying horse, a fallen warrior,
a mother and dead child, a woman trapped in a
burning building, another rushing into the scene, and a figure leaning
from a window and holding out a lamp. Despite
the complexity of its symbolism, and the impossibility of definitive
interpretation, Guernica makes an overwhelming
impact in its portrayal of the horrors of war. It was on extended
loan at New York City's Museum of Modern Art
from 1939 until 1981, when it was returned to Spain at Madrid's Prado
Museum. In 1992 the work was moved to the
city's new museum of 20th-centure art, the Reina Sofía Art
Center. Dora Maar, Picasso's next companion to be
portrayed, took photographs of Guernica while the work was in progress.
World War II and After
Picasso's palette grew somber with the onset of
World War II (1939-1945), and death is the subject of numerous
works, such as Still Life with Steer's Skull (1942, Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany)
and The Charnel House (1945, Museum of Modern Art). He formed a new
liaison during the 1940s with the painter
Françoise Gilot who bore him two children, Claude and Paloma;
they appear in many works that recapitulate his
earlier styles. The last of Picasso's companions to be portrayed was
Jacqueline Roque, whom he met in 1953 and
married in 1961. He then spent much of his time in southern France.
Late Works -Recapitulation
Many of Picasso's later pictures were based on
works by great masters of the past -Diego Velázquez, Gustave
Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, and Edouard Manet. In addition to
painting, Picasso worked in various media, making
hundreds of lithographs in the renowned Paris graphics workshop, Atelier
Mourlot. Ceramics also engaged his
interest, and in 1947, in Vallauris, he produced nearly 2000 pieces.
Picasso made important sculptures during this
time: Man with Sheep (1944, Philadelphia Museum of Art), an over-life-size
bronze, emanates peace and hope, and
She-Goat (1950, Museum of Modern Art), a bronze cast from an assemblage
of flowerpots, a wicker basket, and
other diverse materials, is humorously charming. In 1964 Picasso completed
a welded steel maquette (model) for the
18.3 m (60 ft) sculpture Head of a Woman (unveiled in 1967), for Chicago's
Civic Center. In 1968, during a
seven-month period, he created an amazing series of 347 engravings,
restating earlier themes: the circus, the bullfight,
the theater, and lovemaking.
Throughout Picasso's lifetime, his work was exhibited
on countless occasions. 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.
Source: Microsoft(R)
Encarta(R) 96 Encyclopedia. Copyright copy; 1996
Microsoft Corporation
