Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y (1881-1973), Spanish painter and sculptor, is consideredone 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 themost prolific artists in history.
He created more than 20,000 works. Trainingand Early Work Picasso was Born in Mlaga on October 25, 1881, he was the sonof Jos Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher, and Mara Picasso y Lopez. Until 1898 healways used his father’s name, Ruiz, and his mother’s maiden name, Picasso, tosign his pictures. After about 1901 he dropped Ruiz and used his mother’smaiden 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’sSchool of Fine Arts. His large academic canvas Science and Charity (1897,Picasso Museum, Barcelona), depicting a doctor, a nun, and a child at a sickwoman’s bedside, won a gold medal. Blue Period Between 1900 and 1902, Picassomade three trips to Paris, finally settling there in 1904. He found the city’sbohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance halls andcafs show how he learned the postimpressionism of the French painter PaulGauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis. The themes of the Frenchpainters Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the style of thelatter, exerted the strongest influence.
Picasso’s Blue Room (1901, PhillipsCollection, Washington, D. C. ) reflects the work of both these painters and, atthe same time, shows his evolution toward the Blue Period, so called becausevarious shades of blue dominated his work for the next few years. Expressinghuman misery, the paintings portray blind figures, beggars, alcoholics, andprostitutes, their somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of works by the Spanishartist El Greco. Rose Period Shortly after settling in Paris in a shabbybuilding known as the Bateau-Lavoir (laundry barge, which it resembled),Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of many companions to influence thetheme, style, and mood of his work.
With this happy relationship, Picassochanged his palette to pinks and reds; the years 1904 and 1905 are thus calledthe Rose Period. Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, which hevisited 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 aswell. Dating from his first decade in Paris are friendships with the poet MaxJacob, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, the art dealers Ambroise Vollard andDaniel Henry Kahnweiler, and the American expatriate writers Gertrude Stein andher brother Leo, who were his first important patrons; Picasso did portraits ofthem all. Protocubism In the summer of 1906, during Picasso’s stay in Gsol,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 herface. The key work of this early period, however, is Les demoiselles d’Avignon(1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), so radical in styleits picturesurface resembling fractured glassthat it was not even understood bycontemporary avant-garde painters and critics. Destroyed were spatial depth andthe ideal form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh,angular planes.
CubismAnalytic and Synthetic Inspired by the volumetrictreatment of form by the French postimpressionist artist Paul Czanne, Picassoand the French artist Georges Braque painted landscapes in 1908 in a style laterdescribed by a critic as being made of little cubes, thus leading to theterm cubism. Some of their paintings are so similar that it is difficult to tellthem apart. Working together between 1908 and 1911, they were concerned withbreaking down and analyzing form, and together they developed the first phase ofcubism, known as analytic cubism. Monochromatic color schemes were favored intheir depictions of radically fragmented motifs, whose several sides were shownsimultaneously. Picasso’s favorite subjects were musical instruments, still-lifeobjects, 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 thecanvas and combining these with painted areas, Picasso created his firstcollage, Still Life with Chair Caning (Muse Picasso, Paris).
This techniquemarked a transition to synthetic cubism. This second phase of cubism is moredecorative, and color plays a major role, although shapes remain fragmented andflat. Picasso was to practice synthetic cubism throughout his career, but by nomeans exclusively. Two works of 1915 demonstrate his simultaneous work indifferent styles: Harlequin (Museum of Modern Art) is a synthetic cubistpainting, whereas a drawing of his dealer, Vollard, now in the MetropolitanMuseum, is executed in his Ingresque style, so called because of itsdraftsmanship, emulating that of the 19th-century French neoclassical artistJean-August-Dominique Ingres. Cubist Sculpture Picasso created cubist sculpturesas well as paintings.
The bronze bust Fernande Olivier (also called Head of aWoman, 1909, Museum of Modern Art) shows his consummate skill in handlingthree-dimensional form. He also made constructionssuch as Mandolin andClarinet (1914, Muse Picasso)from odds and ends of wood, metal, paper, andnonartistic materials, in which he explored the spatial hypotheses of cubistpainting. His Glass of Absinthe (1914, Museum of Modern Art), combining a silversugar strainer with a painted bronze sculpture, anticipates his much laterfound object creations, such as Baboon and Young (1951, Museum of ModernArt), as well as pop art objects of the 1960s. Realist and Surrealist WorksDuring World War I (1914-1918), Picasso went to Rome, working as a designer withSergey Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He met and married the dancer OlgaKoklova. In a realist style, Picasso made several portraits of her around 1917,of their son (for example, Paulo as Harlequin; 1924, Muse Picasso), and ofnumerous friends.
In the early 1920s he did tranquil, neoclassical pictures ofheavy, 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, Muse Picasso). At the same time, Picasso also created strange picturesof small-headed bathers and violent convulsive portraits of women which areoften taken to indicate the tension he experienced in his marriage. Although hestated he was not a surrealist, many of his pictures have a surreal anddisturbing quality, as in Sleeping Woman in Armchair (1927, Private Collection,Brussel) and Seated Bather (1930, Museum of Modern Art). Paintings of the Early1930s Several cubist paintings of the early 1930s, stressing harmonious,curvilinear lines and expressing an underlying eroticism, reflect Picasso’spleasure with his newest love, Marie Thrse Walter, who gave birth to theirdaughter Maa in 1935. Marie Thrse, frequently portrayed sleeping, also wasthe model for the famous Girl Before a Mirror (1932, Museum of Modern Art).
In1935 Picasso made the etching Minotauromachy, a major work combining hisminotaur and bullfight themes; in it the disemboweled horse, as well as thebull, prefigure the imagery of Guernica, a mural often called the most importantsingle work of the 20th century. Throughout Picasso’s lifetime, his work wasexhibited on countless occasions, in many different places. Most unusual,however, was the 1971 exhibition at the Louvre, in Paris, honoring him on his90th birthday; until then, living artists had not been shown there. In 1980 amajor retrospective showing of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art inNew York City. Picasso died in his villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie near Mougins on April8, 1973.Arts and Painting
