PICASSO

PABLO PICASSO
1962
Pablo Picasso, a genius and legend in his own lifetime. He is the most famous artist of the 20th century. He also was a very prolific painter. There is a story about Picasso that he could paint three canvases a day. This is not all; he also turn his hands to anything such as pencil, watercolour, oil crayon, sculpture in metal, plaster and stone, made something out of rubbish which he pulled out of a dustbin.

      

He influenced many radical changes in painting, sculpture and printing till the Second World War. He was most properly the richest artist there ever lived.

Pablo was born in Malaga, southern Spain in 1881. His father was an artist who also was teaching drawing and was working as a museum curator. Already as a child Pablo showed an incredible artistic talent. His parents supported and encouraged him. Apparently, when his father saw Pablo's work, he supposed to hand him his own palette and brushes and swore never to paint again.

PAINTING FROM
THE BLUE PERIOD
FEMME AUX BRAS
CROISES 1902

PAINTING FROM THE ROSE PERIOD - GARCON A LA PIPE 1903

Picasso enrolled in the Lonja Academy in Barcelona. From 1900 onwards he went more and more to Paris. In 1904 he decided to move to Paris completely because it was the centre of the art world. From that period he developed his first unique style. This style was about social subjects, poverty and despair. He painted them in cold blue to emphasize the despair.

This period was also a time of his own despair when he had to share a studio with a poet and share a single bed in which they sleep in turns. They even burned drawings to warm themselves; so desperate was his situation.

There followed the 'Rose Period' whereby Picasso replaced the blue with pink. He still painted themes of outcasts. However, with the changeover to pink he showed a positive outlook. He painted harlequins, acrobats and dancers showing the enthusiastic way of the life of circus people. The public also preferred the brighter mood and bought his paintings. From there on Picasso's poverty stricken time was over.

At that time Picasso also looked into other possibilities to move art forward. He looked at the works of Paul Cézanne and African sculpture. Of all the artist of the Post-Impressionists it was Cézanne who went furthest in the abstract art. His work show distorted conventional perspective and added to this the primitive way of painting of the Negro sculpture.

This way of painting also shows in Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'. The painting was so way ahead of its time that it was rejected. This painting of five figures in a brothel is nowadays regarded as the most outstanding work of Picasso's earlier years. The scene of fragmented figures with no background scene was the start of art which doesn't have to describe the whole scene in details.

LES DEMOSSELLES
D'AVIGNON 1907

THREE MUSICIANS 1921

Over the following years Picasso and his friends Georges Braque and Juan Gris tried to find new ways to move art even further. This movement is called Cubism. In their work they tried to encourage the new cubism and encouraged each other distorting surfaces, putting into interlocking faces and using various colours and tones.

Even with their distortions or overlapping of subjects, it became harder to recognize the real theme, but when you look close there it a fragment which was there and recognizable. It didn't matter if the picture was of a paintbrush, chair or figure and in the most extreme abstract painting there is always a piece where you know the subject.

The friendship between Picasso and Braque came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the First World War. Braque joined the French army. There was also a change in Picasso's painting.

1917 Picasso went to Rome on receiving a commission to design sceneries and costumes of Diaghilev's ballet Parade. After this successful commission, Picasso received several others. During this time he was influenced by Classical themes of nymphs, fauns, gods, goddesses and Mintaur. He produced a fine collection of etchings in 1930 for the art collector Ambrose Vollard and they became so popular that it was named The Vollard Suite.

During this time Picasso produced paintings showing violent expression. They also show some sort of anguish and despair. The feelings came most properly from the breakdown of his first marriage. He also with in contact with surrealist artists which added to his tension. These surrealist artists paint according to the artist subconscious mind.

This period resulted into a painting 'Guernica' which expressed his shock after he heard of the bombing of the Basque capital Guernica at the time of the Spanish Civil war. His disgust of the conflict and left-wing sympathies was not in favour with the Nazis. He stayed in France during the time of occupation. After the end of the Second World War he moved to the South of France. There he became interested in the work of ceramic. He found out that this craft began to die out; he started to turn his interest to pottery.

THE RUINS OF GUENICA 1937

PICASSO'S PERSONAL LIFE

When he was in Rome working for Sergei Diglilev he met a ballerina Olga Khokhlova and married her in 1918. They honeymooned in Biarritz. Olga introduced him to the high society of the 1920s Paris. They had a son Paulo. Their opposite upbringing soon came between them and decided to separate. In France the law is that you split your property in half when you divorce and Picasso refused. They remained legally married till Olga died in 1955

In 1927 Picasso met 17 year old Marie-Theresa Walter and had a secret long-standing affair with her. He fathered a daughter, Maia.  Marie-Theresa hoped in vain Picasso would marry her. She hanged herself after his death.

DORA MAAR

All his life Picasso had mistresses and he married twice and had four children by three wives.

Dora Maar was one of his mistresses but she registered the above painting 'Guernica' for him.

MASSAGRE IN KOREA 1951

SCULPTURE IN HALMSTADT

In 1944 Pablo befriended a young artist student Fracoise Gilot. They became lovers and had two children Claude and Paloma.

1953 Gilot left him because of abusive treatment and infidelities. By now he was 70 and he was devastated after the departure of Gilot.

Soon he found another lover Jaqueline Roque who worked in the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris.

They married in 1961. In the meantime Gilot divorced her husband to marry Picasso. In order to give the children legitimate names but Picasso married Jaqueline secretly to have revenge on Gilot because she left him

Towards the end of his life Picasso produced an enormous amount of paintings which were even more daring and hundreds of copper etchings. The art world rejected them as pornographic fantasy or slapdash of an artist past his prime. After his death they saw that Picasso was again ahead of his time and moved on to new-expressionism.

Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougin, France during a dinner, he and his wife, gave to friends. She prevented his children to attend his funeral. Alone and depressed Jacquelin Roque shot herself in 1986 at the age of 60.

Pablo Picasso produced around 50,000 art works included 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 2,880 ceramics and about 12,000 drawings.  As well as thousand of prints, numerous tapestries and rugs.   Picasso never sold any of his paintings unless he had to.  He also collected other artists' paintings. 

He left no will and the death-duty was paid with paintings to France.  This explains the huge collection of Picasso paintings in Paris.