PABLO PICASSO
QUICK
VIEW:
Synopsis ;
Pablo Picasso was the most
dominant and influential artist of the first half of the twentieth century.
Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism, alongside Georges Braque, he
also invented collage, and made major contributions to Symbolism, Surrealism,
and to the classical styles of the 1920s. He saw himself above all as a
painter, and yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored
areas as diverse as print-making and ceramics. Finally, he was a famously
charismatic personality: his many relationships with women not only filtered
into his art but may have directed its course; and his behavior has come to
embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.
Key Ideas ;
Picasso first emerged as a
Symbolist influenced by the likes of Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec, and this
tendency shaped his so-called Blue Period, in which he depicted beggars and
prostitutes and various urban misfits, and also the brighter moods of his subsequent
Rose Period. It was a confluence of influences
- from Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau, to archaic and tribal art - that
encouraged Picasso to lend his figures more weight and structure around 1906.
And they ultimately set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he
deconstructed the conventions of perspectival space that had dominated painting
since the Renaissance. These innovations would have far-reaching consequences
for practically all of modern art, revolutionizing attitudes to the depiction of
form in space. Picasso's
immersion in Cubism also eventually led him to the invention of collage, in
which he abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world,
and began to conceive it merely as an arrangement of signs which used different,
sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects. This too would prove
hugely influential for decades to come. Picasso
had an eclectic attitude to style, and although, at any one time, his work was
usually characterized by a single dominant approach, he often moved
interchangeably between different styles - sometimes even in the same artwork. His
encounter with Surrealism in mid 1920s, although never transforming his work
entirely, encouraged a new expressionism which had been suppressed throughout
the years of experiment in Cubism and subsequently during the early 1920s when
his style was predominantly classical. This development enabled not only the
soft forms and tender eroticism of his portraits of his mistress Marie-Therese
Walter, but also the starkly angular imagery of Guernica, the century's
most famous anti-war painting. Picasso
was always eager to place himself in history, and some of his greatest works,
such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, refer to a wealth of past precedents
- even while overturning them. As he matured he became only more conscious of
assuring his legacy, and his late work is characterized by a frank dialogue
with Old Masters such as Ingres, Velazquez, Goya, and Rembrandt.
DETAILED
VIEW:
Childhood ;
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born
into a creative family. His father was a painter, and he quickly showed signs
of following the same path: his mother claimed that his first word was
"piz," a shortened version of lapiz, or pencil; and his father
would be his first teacher. Picasso began formally studying art at the age of
eleven. Several paintings from his teenage years still exist, such as First
Communion (1895), which is typical in its conventional, if accomplished,
academic style. His father groomed the young prodigy to be a great artist by
getting Picasso the best education the family could afford, visiting Madrid to
see works by Spanish old masters. And when the family moved to Barcelona, so
his father could take up a new post, Picasso continued his art education.
Early Training ;
It was in Barcelona that
Picasso first matured as a painter. He frequented the Els Quatre Gats, a cafe
popular with bohemians, anarchists, and modernists. And he came to be familiar
with Art Nouveau and Symbolism, and artists such as Edvard Munch and Henri
Toulouse-Lautrec. It was here that he met Jaime Sabartes, who would go on to be
his fiercely loyal secretary in later years. This was his introduction to a
cultural avant-garde, in which young artists were encouraged to express
themselves.
During the years from 1900 to 1904 Picasso travelled frequently,
spending time in Madrid and Paris, in addition to spells in Barcelona. Although
he began making sculpture during this time, critics characterize this time as
his Blue Period, after the blue/grey palette that dominated his paintings. The
mood of the work was also insistently melancholic. One might see the beginnings
of this in the artist's sadness over the suicide of Carlos Casegemas, a friend
he has met in Barcelona, though the subjects of much of the Blue Period work
were drawn from the beggars and prostitutes he encountered in city streets. The
Old Guitarist (1903) is a typical example of both the subject matter and the
style of this phase.
In 1904 Picasso's palette began to brighten, and for a year or
more he painted in a style that has been characterized as his Rose Period. He
focussed on performers and circus figures, switching his palette to various
shades of more uplifting reds and pinks. And around 1906, soon after he had met
Georges Braque, his palette darkened, his forms became heavier and more solid
in aspect, and he began to find his way towards Cubism.
Mature Period ;
In
the past critics dated the beginnings of Cubism to his early masterpiece Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Although that work is now seen as transitional
(lacking the radical distortions of his later experiments), it was clearly
crucial in his development since it was heavily influenced by African sculpture
and ancient Iberian art. It is said to have inspired Braque to paint his own
first series of Cubist paintings, and in subsequent years the two would mount
one of the most remarkable collaborations in modern painting, sometimes eagerly
learning from each other, at other times trying to outdo one another in their
fast-paced and competitive race to innovate. They visited each other daily
during their formulation of this radical technique, and Picasso described
himself and Braque as "two mountaineers, roped together." In their
shared vision, multiple perspectives on an object are depicted simultaneously
by being fragmented and rearranged in splintered configurations. Form and space
became the most crucial elements, and so both artists restricted their palettes
to earth tones, in stark contrast with the bright colors used by the Fauves
that had preceded them.
Picasso rejected the
label "Cubism," especially when critics began to differentiate
between the two key approaches he pursued - Analytic and Synthetic. He saw his
body of work as a continuum. But it is beyond doubt that there was a change in
his work around
1912.
He became less concerned with representing the placement of objects in space
than in using shapes and motifs as signs to playfully allude to their presence.
He developed the technique of collage, and from Braque he learned the related
method of papiers colles, which used cut-out pieces of paper in addition
to fragments of existing materials. This phase has since come to be known as
the "Synthetic" phase of Cubism, due to its reliance on various allusions
to an object in order to create the description of it. This approach opened up
the possibilities of more decorative and playful compositions, and its
versatility encouraged Picasso to continue to utilise it well in the 1920s.
For
some years Picasso had occasionally toyed with classical imagery, and he began
to give this free rein in the early 1920s. His figures became heavier and more
massive, and he often imaging them against backgrounds of a Mediterranean
Golden Age. They have long been associated with the wider conservative trends
of culture's so-called rappel a l'ordre ("return to order") in
the 1920s.
His
encounter with Surrealism in the mid 1920s again prompted a change of
direction. His work became more expressive, and often violent or erotic. This
phase in his work can also be correlated with the period in his personal life
when his marriage to dancer Olga Koklova began to break down and he began a new
relationship with Marie-Therese Walter. Indeed, critics have often noted how
changes in style in Picasso's work often go hand in hand with changes in his
romantic relationships: his partnership with Koklova spanned the years of his
interest in dance and, later, his time with Jacqueline Roque is associated with
his late phase in which he became preoccupied with his legacy alongside the old
masters. Picasso frequently painted the women he was in love with, and as a
result his tumultuous personal life is well represented on canvas. He was known
to have kept many mistresses, most famously Eva Gouel, Dora Maar and Francoise
Gilot. He married twice, and had four children, Claude, Paloma, Maia, and
Paolo.
In the late
1920s he began a collaboration with the sculptor Julio Gonzalez. This was his
most significant creative partnership since he had worked alongside Braque, and
it
culminated
in some welded metal sculptures which were subsequently highly influential.
As
the 1930s wore on, political concerns began to cloud Picasso's view, and these
would continue to preoccupy him for some time. His disgust at the bombing of
civilians in the Basque town of Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War,
prompted to create the painting Guernica, in 1937. During WWII he stayed
in Paris, and the German authorities left him sufficiently unmolested to allow
him to continue work. However, the war did have a huge impact on Picasso, with
his Paris painting collection confiscated by Nazis and some of his closest
Jewish friends killed. Picasso made works commemorating them - sculptures
employing hard, cold materials such as metal, and a particularly violent follow
up to Guernica, entitled The Charnel House (1945). Following the
war he was also closely involved with the Communist Party, and several major
pictures from this period, such as War in Korea (1951), make that new
allegiance clear.
Late Years and Death
Throughout
the 1950s and 1960s, Picasso worked on his own versions of canonical
masterpieces by artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Lucas Cranach, Diego
Velazquez, and El Greco. In the latter years of his life, Picasso sought solace
from his celebrity, marrying Jacqueline Rogue in 1961. His later paintings were
heavily portrait-based and their palettes nearly garish in hue. Critics have
generally considered them inferior to his earlier work, though in recent years
they have been more enthusiastically received. He also created many ceramic and
bronze sculptures during this later period. He died in the South of France in
1973
ARTISTIC INFLUENCES:
Below are
Pablo Picasso's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced
in turn.
|
|
|
|||
|
Francisco
Goya
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
Pablo Picasso
Years Worked: 1892 – 1973
|
|
MOVEMENTS
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
Quotes ;
"Every
act of creation is first an act of destruction."
"Our goals can only be reached through a
vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must
vigorously act. There is no other route to success."
"For
those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography"
Major Works:
Title: The Old Guitarist
Description: The Old
Guitarist is characteristic of the sombre melancholy of Picasso's Blue
Period, and it was produced at the same time as a series of other pictures
devoted to themes of destitution, old age, and blindness. The picture conveys
something of Picasso's concern with the miserable conditions he witnessed while
coming of age in Spain, and it is no doubt influenced by the religious painting
he grew up with, and perhaps specifically by El Greco. But the picture is also
typical of the wider Symbolist movement of the period. In later years Picasso
dismissed his Blue Period works as "nothing but sentiment"; critics
have often agreed with him, even though many of the pictures remain moving.
Year: 1903
Materials: Oil on canvas
Collection:
Art Institute of
Chicago
Title: Portrait of Gertrude Stein
Description: Gertrude Stein was an author, close friend, and even
supporter of Picasso, and was integral to his growth as an artist. This
portrait, in which Stein is wearing her favorite brown velvet coat, was made
just a year before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and marks an important
stage in his evolving style. In contrast to the flat appearance of the figures
and objects in some of the Blue and Rose period works, the forms in this
portrait seem almost sculpted, and indeed they were influenced by the artist's
discovery of archaic Iberian sculpture. One can almost sense Picasso's
increased interest in depicting a human face as a series of flat planes. Stein
claimed that she sat for the artist some ninety times, and although that may be
an exaggeration, Picasso certainly wrestled long and hard with painting her
head. After approaching it in various ways, abandoning each attempt, one day he
painted it out altogether, declaring "I can't see you any longer when I
look," and soon abandoned the picture. It was only some time later, and
without the model in front of him, that he completed the head.
Year: 1905
Materials: Oil on canvas
Collection:
Metropolitan Museum
of Art
Title: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Description: Although it is
probably the single most heavily analyzed picture of the century, ironically, Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon was not exhibited in public until 1916. Picasso's
friends felt that the highly distorted brothel scene would be too controversial.
The work of Paul Cezanne, and also African masks, were crucial in shaping it,
and for many years it was regarded as the first Cubist painting. Critics have
since concluded that it is a transitional work, but this has done nothing to
dampen its enormous power or influence. Willem de Kooning's Woman series,
for example, was directly informed by this work.
Year: 1907
Materials: Oil on canvas
Collection:
Museum of Modern Art
Title: Still Life with Chair Caning
Description: Still Life with Chair Caning is celebrated for being modern art's
first collage. Picasso had affixed pre-existing objects to his canvases before,
but this picture marks the first time he did so with such playful and emphatic
intent. The chair caning in the picture in fact comes from a piece of printed
oilcloth - and not, as the title suggests, an actual piece of chair caning. But
the rope around the canvas is very real, and serves to evoke the carved border
of a café table. Hence the picture not only dramatically
contrasts visual and
sculptural/tactile information, it also confuses our sense of what is
horizontal and what is vertical.
Year: 1912
Materials: Collage on canvas
Collection:
National Gallery,
London
Title: Bowl
of Fruit, Violin and Bottle
Description: Picasso's Bowl
of Fruit, Violin and Bottle is typical of his Synthetic Cubism, in which he
uses various means - painted dots, silhouettes, grains of sand - to allude to
the depicted objects. This combination of painting and mixed media is an
example of the way Picasso "synthesized" color and texture -
synthesising new wholes after mentally dissecting the objects at hand. During
his Analytic Cubist phase Picasso had suppressed color, so as to concentrate
more on the forms and volumes of the objects, and this rationale also no doubt
guided his preference for still life throughout this phase. The life of the
café certainly summed up modern Parisian life for the artists - it was where he
spent a good deal of time talking with other artists - but the simple array of
objects also ensured that questions of symbolism and allusion might be kept
under control.
Year: 1914
Materials: Oil on canvas
Collection:
National Gallery,
London
Title: The Three Musicians
Description: Picasso painted
two version of this picture. The slightly smaller version hangs in Philadelphia
Museum of Art, but both are unusually large for Picasso's Cubist period, and he
may have chosen to work on this grand scale because they mark the conclusion of
his Synthetic Cubism, which had occupied him for nearly a decade. He painted it
in the same summer as the very different, classical painting, Three Women at
the Spring. Some have interpreted the pictures as nostalgic remembrances of
the artist's early days: Picasso sits in the center - as ever the Harlequin -
and his old friends Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918, and Max Jacob,
from whom he had become estranged, sit on either side. However, another
argument links the pictures to Picasso's work for the Ballets Russes, and
identifies the characters with more recent friends. Either way, the costumes of
the figures certainly derive from traditions in Italian popular theatre.
Year: 1921
Materials: Oil on canvas
Collection:
Philadelphia Museum
of Art
Title: Three Women at the Spring
Description: Picasso made
careful studies in preparation for this, his most ambitious treatment of what
is an old classical subject. It makes reference to earlier pictures by Poussin
and Ingres - titans of classical painting - but it also draws inspiration from
Greek sculpture, and indeed the heavy, massy gravity of the figures is very
sculptural. Critics have speculated that the subject appealed to him because of
the recent birth of his first son, Paulo; the sombre attitude of the figures
may be explained by the contemporary preoccupation in France with mourning the
dead of the First World War.
Year: 1921
Materials: Oil on canvas
Collection:
Museum of Modern Art
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
References
Ø
Other net survey.
.
THANK YOU EVERY ALL
No comments:
Post a Comment