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PICASSO'S BLUE AND ROSE PERIODS
Having first started to paint
in the stimulating artistic climate of Barcelona, where he frequented
anarchist and avant-garde circles,
Picasso spent the first years of the 20th century as a
struggling artist alternating between Barcelona and Paris. In L904, he
finally took up permanent lodgings at the Bateau Lavoir in Paris,
where
Renoir
and
Kees van Dongen
had studios. During this early Blue Period (1901-04),
Picasso used a limited palette of cold blue tones to simbolize
his need for introspection. Drawing his subjects from social outcasts,
he rejected hedonism and concentrated on themes of poverty and
despair. The humanity depicted in his paintings is without hope -
lonely, defeated creatures who have lost their vital spark. His
subjects have a melancholy, wistful look, with bowed heads and folded
arms.
The works from the subsequent Rose Period (1904-07)
reflected a more optimistic and determined attitude to life. Using
delicate shades of pink and darker tones of ochre and terracotta.
Picasso adopted
new subjects for his paintings, which now portrayed harlequins,
actors, acrobats, and circus performers. He was fascinated by the
perfomers and their fanciful costumes, generally depicting them in
real-life situations, away from the limelight. During these years, he
also created his first sculptures and began to explore plastic form in
his paintings. Blue and pink were important colours in late
16th-century Spanish art and held a variety of connotations.
Picasso was influenced by the great Spanish painters
Velazquez and
Goya,
whose works are a constant point of reference in his art.
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Pablo Picasso
The Gourmet (The White Child)
1901 |
Pablo Picasso
Mother and Child
1905 |
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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain
died April 8, 1973, Mougins, France
in full Pablo Ruiz y Picasso Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor,
printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and
most influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with
Georges Braque) of Cubism.
The enormous body of Picasso's work remains, and the legend lives
on—a tribute to the vitality of the “disquieting” Spaniard with the
“sombre . . . piercing” eyes who superstitiously believed that work
would keep him alive. For nearly 80 of his 91 years Picasso devoted
himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to
and paralleled the whole development of modern art in the 20th
century.
Life and career
Early years
Pablo Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of
drawing, and Maria Picasso López. His unusual adeptness fordrawing
began to manifest itself early, around the age of 10, when he became
his father's pupil in La Coruña, where the family moved in 1891.
From that point his ability to experiment with what he learned and
to develop new expressive means quickly allowed him to surpass his
father's abilities. In La Coruña his father shifted his own
ambitions to those of his son, providing him with models and support
for his first exhibition there at the age of 13.
The family moved to Barcelona in the autumn of 1895, and Pablo
entered the local art academy (La Llotja), where his father had
assumed his last post as professor of drawing. Thefamily hoped that
their son would achieve success as an academic painter, and in 1897
his eventual fame in Spain seemed assured; in that year his painting
Science and Charity, for which his father modeled for the doctor,
was awarded an honorable mention in Madrid at the Fine Arts
Exhibition.
The Spanish capital was the obvious next stop for the young artist
intent on gaining recognition and fulfilling family expectations.
Pablo Ruiz duly set off for Madrid in the autumn of 1897 and entered
the Royal Academy of San Fernando. But finding the teaching there
stupid, he increasingly spent his time recording life around him, in
the cafés, on the streets, in the brothels, and in the Prado, where
he discovered Spanish painting. He wrote: “The Museum of paintings
is beautiful. Velázquez first class; from El Greco some magnificent
heads, Murillo does not convince me in every one of his pictures.”
Works by these and other artists would capture Picasso's imagination
at different times during his long career. Goya, for instance, was
an artist whose works Picasso copied in the Prado in 1898 (a
portrait of the bullfighter Pepe Illo and the drawing for one of the
Caprichos, Bien tirada está, which shows a Celestina [procuress]
checking a young maja's stockings). These same characters reappear
in his late work—Pepe Illo in a series of engravings (1957) and
Celestina as a kind of voyeuristic self-portrait, especially in the
series of etchings and engravings known as Suite 347 (1968).
Picasso fell ill in the spring of 1898 and spent most of the
remaining year convalescing in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro
in the company of his Barcelona friend Manuel Pallarès. When Picasso
returned to Barcelona in early 1899, he was a changed man: he had
put on weight, he had learnedto live on his own in the open
countryside, he spoke Catalan, and most importantly he had made the
decision to break withhis art school training and to reject his
family's plans for his future. He even began to show a decided
preference for his mother's surname, and more often than not he
signed his works P.R. Picasso (by late 1901 he had dropped the Ruiz
altogether).
In Barcelona Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artistsand
writers whose eyes were turned toward Paris. These were his friends
at the café Els Quatre Gats (“The Four Cats,”styled after the Chat
Noir [“Black Cat”] in Paris), where Picasso had his first Barcelona
exhibition in February 1900, and they were the subjects of more than
50 portraits (in mixed media) in the show. In addition, there was a
dark, moody “modernista” painting, Last Moments (later painted
over), showing the visit of a priest to the bedside of a dying
woman, a work that was accepted for the Spanish section of the
Exposition Universelle in Paris in that year. Eager to see his own
work in place and to experience Paris firsthand, Picasso set off in
the company of his studio-mate Carles Casagemas (Portrait of Carles
Casagemas, 1899) to conquer,if not Paris, at least a corner of
Montmartre.
Discovery of Paris
One of Picasso's principal artistic discoveries on that trip
(October–December) was colour—not the drab colours of the Spanish
palette, the black of the shawls of Spanish women, or the ochres and
browns of the Spanish landscape, but brilliant colour—the colour of
Van Gogh, of new fashion, of a city celebrating a world's fair.
Using charcoal, pastels, watercolours, and oils, Picasso recorded
life in the French capital (Lovers in the Street, 1900). In Moulin
de la Galette (1900) he paid tribute to French artists such as
Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen as well as his Catalan compatriot
Ramon Casas.
After just two months Picasso returned to Spain with Casagemas, who
had become despondent about a failed love affair. Having tried
unsuccessfully to amuse his friend in Málaga, Picasso took off for
Madrid, where he worked as anart editor for a new journal, Arte
Joven. Casagemas returned to Paris and attempted to shoot the woman
he loved, then turned the gun on himself and died. The impact on
Picasso was deep: it was not just that he had lost his loyal friend
and perhaps felt a sense of guilt for having abandoned him;
moreimportantly, he had gained the emotional experience and the
material that would stimulate the powerful expressiveness of the
works of the so-called Blue Period. Picasso made two death portraits
of Casagemas several months later in 1901 as well as two funeral
scenes (Mourners and Evocation), and in 1903 Casagemas appearedas
the artist in the enigmatic painting La Vie.
Blue Period
Between 1901 and mid-1904, when blue was the predominant colour in
his paintings, Picasso moved back and forth between Barcelona and
Paris, taking material for his work from one place to the other. For
example, his visits to the Women's Prison of Saint-Lazare in Paris
in 1901–02, which provided him with free models and compelling
subject matter (The Soup, 1902), were reflected in his depictions of
Barcelona street people—blind or lonely beggars and castaways in
1902–03 (Crouching Woman, 1902; Blind Man's Meal, 1903; Old Jew and
a Boy, 1903). The subject of maternity (women were allowed to keep
nursing children with them at the prison) also preoccupied Picasso
at a time when he was searching for material that would best express
traditional art-historical subjects in 20th-century terms.
The move to Paris
Picasso finally made the decision to move permanently to Paris in
the spring of 1904, and his work reflects a change of spirit and
especially a change of intellectual and artistic currents. The
traveling circus and saltimbanques became a subject he shared with a
new and important friend, Guillaume Apollinaire. To both the poet
and the painter these rootless wandering performers (Girl Balancing
on a Ball, 1905; The Actor, 1905) became a kind of evocation of the
artist's position in modern society. Picasso specifically made this
identification in Family of Saltimbanques (1905), where he assumes
the role of Harlequin and Apollinaire is the strongman (according to
their mutual friend, the writer André Salmon).
Picasso's personal circumstances also changed at the end of 1904,
when Fernande Olivier became his mistress. Herpresence inspired many
works during the years leading up to Cubism, especially ontheir trip
to Gosol in 1906 (Woman with Loaves), including the sculpture Head
of a Woman (1909) and several paintings related to it (Woman with
Pears, 1909).
Colour never came easily to Picasso, and he reverted to a generally
more Spanish (i.e., monochromatic) palette. The tones ofthe Blue
Period were replaced from late 1904 to 1906 in the so-called Rose
Period by those of pottery, of flesh, and of the earth itself (The
Harem, 1906). Picasso seems to have been working with colour inan
attempt to come closer to sculptural form, especially in 1906 (Two
Nudes; La Toilette). His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) and a
Self-Portrait with Palette (1906) show this development as well as
the influence of his discovery of primitive Iberian sculpture.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Toward the end of 1906 Picasso began work on a large composition
that came to be called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). His violent
treatment of the female body and masklike painting of the faces
(influenced by a study of African art) have made this work
controversial. Yet thework was firmly based upon art-historical
tradition: a renewed interest in El Greco contributed to the
fracturing of the space and the gestures of the figures, while the
overall composition owed much to Paul Cézanne's Bathers as well as
to J.-A-.D. Ingres's harem scenes. The Demoiselles, however, named
by Picasso's friend Max Jacob (to refer to Avignon Street in
Barcelona, where sailors found popular brothels), was perceived as a
shocking and direct assault: these women were not conventional
images of beauty but prostitutes who challenged the very tradition
from which they were born. Although he had his collectors by this
date (Leo and Gertrude Stein, the Russian merchant Sergey Shchukin)
and a dealer (Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler), Picasso chose to roll up the
canvas of the Demoiselles and to keep it out of sight for several
years.
In 1908 the African-influenced striations and masklike headswere
superseded by a technique that incorporated elements he and his new
friend Georges Braque found in the work of Cézanne, whose shallow
space and characteristic planar brushwork are especially evident in
Picasso's work of 1909. Still lifes, inspired by Cézanne, also
became an important subject for the first time in Picasso's career.
Cubism
Picasso and Braque worked together closely during the next few years
(1909–12)—the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in
this way—and they developed what came to be known as Analytical
Cubism. Early Cubist paintings were often misunderstood by critics
and viewers because they were thought to be merely geometric art.
Yet the painters themselves believed they were presenting a new kind
of reality that broke away from Renaissance tradition, especially
from the use of perspective and illusion. For example, they showed
multiple views of an object on the same canvas to convey more
information than could be contained in a single, limited
illusionistic view.
As Kahnweiler saw it, Cubism signified the opening up of closed form
by the “re-presentation” of the form of objects and their position
in space instead of their imitation through illusionistic means; and
the analytic process of fracturing objects and space, light and
shadow, and even colour was likened by Apollinaire to the way in
which the surgeon dissects a cadaver. This type of analysis is
characteristic of Picasso's work beginning in 1909, especially in
the landscapes he made on a trip to Spain that summer (Factory at
Horta de Ebro). These were followed in 1910 with a series of
hermetic portraits (Ambroise Vollard; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler); and
in his 1911–12 paintings of seated figures, often playing musical
instruments (The Accordionist, 1911), Picasso merged figures,
objects, and space on a kind of grid. The palette was once again
limited to monochromatic ochres, browns, and grays.
Neither Braque nor Picasso desired to move into the realm of total
abstraction in their Cubist works, although they implicitly accepted
inconsistencies such as different points of view, different axes,
and different light sources in the same picture. Furthermore, the
inclusion of abstract and representational elements on the same
picture plane led both artists to reexamine what two-dimensional
elements, such as newspaper lettering, signified. A song title, "Ma
Jolie," for instance, could point to events outside the painting; it
could refer narratively to Picasso's new mistress, Eva (Marcelle
Humbert). But it could also point to compositional elements within
the painting, to the function of flat pictorial elements that play
off other flat planes or curvilinear motifs. The inclusion of
lettering also produced the powerful suggestion that Cubist pictures
could be read coming forward from the picture plane rather than
receding (in traditional perspective) into it. And the Cubists'
manipulation of the picture shape—their use of the oval, for
example—redefined the edge of the work in a way that underlined the
fact that in a Cubist picture the canvas provides the real space.
Collage
By 1912 Picasso and Braque were gluing real paper (papier collé) and
other materials (collage) onto their canvases, taking a stage
further the Cubist conception of a work as a self-contained,
constructed object. This Synthetic phase (1912–14) saw the
reintroduction of colour, while the actual materials often had an
industrial reference (e.g., sand or printed wallpaper). Still lifes
and, occasionally, heads were the principal subjects for both
artists. And in Picasso's works the multiple references inherent in
his Synthetic compositions—curves that refer to guitars and at the
same time to ears, for instance—introduce an element of play that is
characteristic of so much of his work (Student with a Pipe, 1913)
and lead to the suggestion that one thing becomes transformed into
another. Absinthe Glass (1914; six versions), for example, is in
part sculpture (cast bronze), in part collage (a real silver sugar
strainer is welded onto the top), and in part painting
(Neo-Impressionist brushstrokes cover planes of white paint). But
the work is neither sculpture, nor collage, nor painting; planes
refer to two-dimensionality, while the object indeed possesses three
dimensions. The work of art thus hovers between reality and
illusion.
By 1915 Picasso's life had changed and so, in a sense, had the
direction of his art. At the end of that year his beloved Eva died,
and the painting he had worked on during her illness (Harlequin,
1915; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) gives testimony to his
grief—a half-Harlequin, half-Pierrot artist before an easel holds an
unfinished canvas against a black background.
Parade
World War I dispersed Picasso's circle; Apollinaire, Braque, and
others left for the front, while most of Picasso's Spanish
compatriots returned to their neutral homeland. Picasso stayed in
France, and from 1916 his friendship with the composer Erik Satie
took him into a new avant-garde circle that remained active during
the war. The self-appointed leader of this nucleus of talents who
frequented the Café de la Rotonde was the young poet Jean Cocteau.
His idea to stage a wartime theatrical event in collaboration with
Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes resulted in the production of
Parade , a work about a circus sideshow that incorporated imagery of
the new century, such as skyscrapers and airplanes. Cocteau went to
Satie for the music and then to Picasso for the sets and costumes.
Work began in 1917, and although Picasso intensely disliked travel,
he agreed to go with Cocteau to Rome where they joined Diaghilev and
the choreographer of Parade, Léonide Massine. It was on this
occasion that Picasso also met his future wife, Olga Kokhlova, among
the dancers.
Parade was first performed in May 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in
Paris, where it was considered no less than an attempt to undermine
the solidarity of French culture. Satie seems to have been the
principal target of abuse (partly because of his inclusion of
airplane propellers and typewriters in the score), while Picasso
disarmed the public with the contrast between his basically
realistic stage curtain and the startling Synthetic Cubist
constructions wornby the characters, the sideshow managers, in the
ballet.
New Mediterraneanism
Picasso's paintings and drawings of the late teens often seem
unexpectedly naturalistic in contrast to the Cubist works that
preceded or sometimes coincided with them (Passeig de Colom, 1917).
After his travels to Italy and a return to Barcelona in 1917 (Parade
was performed there in November), a new spirit of Mediterraneanism
made itself felt in his work, especially in the use of classical
forms and drawing techniques. This was reinforced by a conscious
looking back to Ingres (for example, in Picasso's portrait drawings
of Jacob and Vollard, 1915) and to late Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Even
the direction of Picasso's Cubist work was affected. By clarifying
planes, forms, and colour, the artist imparted to his Cubist
paintings a classical expression (Saint-Raphaël still lifes, 1919;
two versions of the Three Musicians, 1921).
Picasso's only legitimate child, Paulo, was born in 1921. As part of
his new status as darling of the socialites (encouraged particularly
by his wife and Jean Cocteau) Picasso continued his collaborations
with the Ballets Russes and produced designs for Manuel de Falla's
Three-Cornered Hat (1919); Igor Stravinsky's Pulcinella (1920); De
Falla's Cuadro Flamenco (1921); and Satie's ballet Mercure (1924).
André Breton called Picasso's designs for this ballet “tragic toys
for adults” created in the spirit of Surrealism.
Surrealism
Although Picasso never became an official member of the group, he
had intimate connections with the most important art movement
between the two world wars, Surrealism. The Surrealist
establishment, including its main propagandist, André Breton,
claimed him as one of their own, and Picasso's art gained a new
dimension from contact with his Surrealist friends, particularly the
writers. Inherent in Picasso's work since the Demoiselles were many
elements that the official circle advocated. The creation of
monsters, for instance, could certainly be perceived in the
disturbing juxtapositions and broken contours of the human figure in
Cubist works; Breton specifically pointed to the strange Woman in a
Chemise (1913). Moreover, the idea of reading one thing for another,
an idea implicit in Synthetic Cubism, seemed to coincide with the
dreamlike imagery the Surrealists championed.
What the Surrealist movement gave to Picasso were new
subjects—especially erotic ones—as well as a reinforcement of
disturbing elements already in his work. The many variations on the
subject of bathers with their overtly sexual and contorted forms (Dinard
series, 1929) show clearly the impact of Surrealism, while in other
works the effect of distortion on the emotions of the spectator can
also be interpreted as fulfilling one of the psychological aims of
Surrealism (drawings and paintings of the Crucifixion , 1930–35). In
the 1930s Picasso, like many of the Surrealist writers, often played
with the idea of metamorphosis. For example, the image of the
minotaur, the monster of Greek mythology—half bull and half
human—that traditionally has been seen as the embodiment of the
struggle between the human and the bestial, becomes in Picasso's
work not only an evocation of that idea but also a kind of
self-portrait.
Finally, Picasso's own brand of Surrealism found its strongest
expression in poetry. He began writing poetry in 1934, and during
one year, from February 1935 to the spring of 1936, Picasso
virtually gave up painting. Collections of poems were published in
Cahiers d'Art (1935) and in La Gaceta de Arte (1936, Tenerife), and
some years later he wrote the Surrealist play Le Désir attrapé par
la queue (1941, Desire Caught by the Tail).
Sculpture
Picasso's reputation as a major 20th-century sculptor came only
after his death, because he had kept much of his sculpture in his
own collection. Beginning in 1928, Picasso began to work in iron and
sheet metal in Julio González's studio in Paris. Then, in 1931, with
his new mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, he left his wife and moved
to a country home at Boisgeloup, where he had room for sculpture
studios. There, with Marie-Thérèse as his muse, Picasso began
working on large-scale plaster heads. He also began to make
constructions incorporating found objects, and until the end of his
life Picasso continued working in sculpture in a variety of
materials.
The 1930s
The privacy of his life with the undemanding Marie-Thérèse formed a
contrast to the hectic pace of life kept by Olga and her bourgeois
circle of society friends. Once in Boisgeloup, Picasso lived openly
with Marie-Thérèse (with whom he had a child, Maya, in 1935), and
she became the subject of his often lyrical, sometimes erotic
paintings, in which he combined intense colour with flowing forms
(Girl Before a Mirror, 1932).
Picasso never completely dissociated himself from the women who had
shared his life once a new lover occupied hisattention. This is
evident in his work, in which one mistress often turns into another;
for instance, in a private sketchbook (number 99, 1929) Picasso's
portrait drawings betray his double life, for the pictures of his
then secret mistress evolve into horrific images of screaming Olgas.
Andin 1936, while money and a certain amount of attention were given
to both Olga and Marie-Thérèse, Picasso moved back to Paris and
began to live with the Yugoslav photographer Dora Maar. This change
in his own life coincided with a period of personal preoccupation
with the Spanish Civil War, which had begun in that year.
Although Picasso never returned to his native country after avisit
in 1934, his sympathies always lay with Spain (the short-lived
Republican government named him honorary director of the Prado), and
in early 1937 he produced a seriesof etchings and aquatints (Dream
and Lie of Franco) to be sold in support of the Republican cause.
His major contribution, of course, was the mural painting Guernica
(named for the Basque town bombed in 1937 by the
Fascists)commissioned by the Republican government for the Spanish
pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. As compensation Picasso
was provided with a studio in Paris on rue des Grands Augustins
large enough to accommodate the enormous canvas (11.5 × 25.5 feet;
3.49 × 7.77 metres). Dora Maar worked with him to complete the final
work, which was realized in just over three weeks. The imagery in
Guernica—the gored horse, the fallen soldier, and screaming mothers
with dead babies (representing the bullfight, war, and female
victims, respectively)—was employed to condemn the useless
destruction of life, while at the same time the bull represented the
hope of overcoming the unseen aggressor, Fascism.
World War II and after
The expressive quality of both the forms and gestures in the
basically monochromatic composition of Guernica found its way into
Picasso's other work, especially in the intensely coloured versions
of Weeping Woman (1937) as well as in related prints and drawings,
in portraits of Dora Maar and Nusch Éluard (wife of Picasso's
friend, the French poet Paul Éluard), and in still lifes (Still Life
with Red Bull's Head, 1938). These works led to the claustrophobic
interiors and skull-like drawings (sketchbook number 110, 1940) of
the waryears, which Picasso spent in France with Dora Maar as well
as with Jaime Sabartés, a friend of his student days in Barcelona.
Thereafter Sabartés shared Picasso's life as secretary, biographer,
and companion, and more often than not as the butt of endless jokes
(Portrait of Jaime Sabartés, 1939; Retour de Bruxelles, sketchbook
number 137, 1956).
After the war Picasso resumed exhibiting his work, which included
painting and sculpture as well as work in lithography and ceramics.
At the Autumn Salon of 1944 (“Salon de la Liberation”) Picasso's
canvases and sculpture of the preceding five years were received as
a shock. This plus the announcement that Picasso had just joined the
Communist Party led to demonstrations against his political views in
the gallery itself. At the same time Picasso opened up his studio to
both new and old writer and artist friends, including Jean-Paul
Sartre, Pierre Reverdy, Éluard, the photographer Brassaï, the
English artist Roland Penrose, andthe American photographer Lee
Miller, as well as many American GI's.
Already in 1943 a young painter, Françoise Gilot, had presented
herself at the studio, and within months she became the successor to
Dora Maar. In 1946 Picasso moved to the Mediterranean with Gilot
(with whom he was to have two children, Claude in 1947 and Paloma in
1949). First they moved to Antibes, where Picasso spent four months
painting at the Château Grimaldi (Joie de Vivre, 1946). The
paintings of this time and the ceramics he decorated at the studio
in nearby Vallauris, beginning in 1947, vividly express Picasso's
sense of identification with the classical tradition and with his
Mediterranean origins. They also celebrate his new-found happiness
with Gilot, who in works of this period is often nymph to Picasso's
fauns and centaurs.
Ceramics
Picasso's ceramics are usually set apart from his main body of work
and are treated as less important, because at first glance they seem
a somewhat frivolous exercise in the decoration of ordinary objects.
Plates, jugs, and vases, mostly made by craftsmen at the Madoura
pottery in Vallauris, were reshaped or painted, gouged out,
scratched, or marked by fingerprints, and, for the most part, were
rendered useless. In turning to craft, Picasso worked with a sense
of liberation, experimenting with the play between decoration and
form (between two and three dimensions) and between personal and
universal meaning.
During this period Picasso's fame increasingly attracted numerous
visitors, including artists and writers, some of whom (Hélène
Parmelin, Édouard Pignon, Éluard, and especially Louis Aragon)
encouraged Picasso's further political involvement. Although he
contributed designs willingly (his dove was used for the World Peace
Congress poster in Wrocław, Poland, in 1949), it was not so much
from a commitment to the Communists as from a sincere and lifelong
sympathy with any group of repressed people. War and Peace, two
panels painted in 1952 to adorn the Temple of Peace attached to an
old chapel in Vallauris, reflect Picasso's personal optimism of
those years.
The Picasso myth
After World War II an aura of myth grew up around the name of
Picasso, and in the last decades of his life his work had, in a
sense, moved beyond criticism. Although there were few critics able
to keep pace with his latest work, there were few who attacked him.
One exception was the British critic John Berger (The Success and
Failure of Picasso, 1965), who raised questions about Picasso's
economic motives and speculated about his inflated public
reputation. Picasso's enormous output (especially in printing and
drawing) kept his name before the public, even though his work
seemed at the time to be far from mainstream, nonfigurative imagery.
For example, in the series that characterized the working methods of
his late years he used figurative imagery to weave a kind of
narrative within each series' numerous variations.
In 1953 Françoise Gilot with their two children left Picasso, and he
spent several years as a bachelor, dividing his time between Paris
and his home at La Californie, near Cannes. In 1954 he had met
Jacqueline Roque, who worked in the pottery shop in Vallauris, and
they married in 1961; she not only became his steadfast companion,
but also, as his muse, she became the principal image and source of
inspiration for practically all of the late work. They are both
buried in the castle at Vauvenargues, which Picasso purchased in
1958. But the years from their marriage to Picasso's death they
spent at Mougins.
History of art
In his late work Picasso repeatedly turned toward the history of art
for his themes. He seemed at times obsessed with the need to create
variations on the works of earlier artists; thus in his many prints,
drawings, and paintings of that period, reference is made to artists
such as Altdorfer, Manet, Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Courbet.
Repeatedly Picasso did a complete series of variations on one
particular work, the most famous being perhaps the series on Las
Meninas of Velázquez consisting of 58 discrete pictures. At times
Picasso reworked a specific work because he identified personally
with it. For example, he was attracted to Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger
because the figure on the right bore resemblance to his wife. More
often he seemed moved by the challenge to rework in his own way the
complex pictorial and narrative problems the older artists had
originally posed for themselves. In a sense Picasso was writing
himself into the history of art by virtue of such an association
with a number of his predecessors.
There is a renewed sense of play in the work of Picasso's later
years. He transformed paper cutouts into monumental sculptures, and
in Henri-Georges Clouzot's film Le Mystère Picasso (1955), the
artist, the sole star, behaves like a conjurer, performing tricks
with light as well as with his brush. And finally, just as he turned
to the paintings of earlier masters, redoing their works in many
variations, so he turned to his own earlier oeuvre, prompted by the
same impulse. The circus and the artist's studio became once again
the stage for his characters, among whom he often placed himself
portrayed as an old acrobat or king.
Assessment
Because Picasso's art from the time of the Demoiselles was radical
in nature, virtually no 20th-century artist could escape his
influence. Moreover, while other masters such as Matisse or Braque
tended to stay within the bounds of a style they had developed in
their youth, Picasso continued to be an innovator into the last
decade of his life. This led to misunderstanding and criticism both
in his lifetime and since, and it was only in the 1980s that his
last paintings began to be appreciated both in themselves and for
their profound influence on the rising generation of young painters.
Since Picasso was able from the 1920s to sell worksat very high
prices, he could keep most of his oeuvre in his own collection. At
the time of his death he owned some 50,000 works in various media
from every period of his career, which passed into possession of the
French state and his heirs. Their exhibition and publication has
served to reinforce the highest estimates of Picasso's astonishing
powers of invention and execution over a span of more than 80 years.
Marilyn McCully
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__________
"...The art of painting original
arrangements
composed of elements taken from conceived
rather than perceived reality."
Guillaume Apollinaire, The Beginnings of
Cubism, 1912
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Cubism
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When Les Demoiselles d Avignon by
Pablo Picasso was first seen in
1907, it certainly represented a radical break with the canons of traditional
portrayal. No longer governed by the laws of a single, central perspective,
artists were able to depict the subject from various simultaneous viewpoints. A
purely intellectualized vision - a combination of angular solids and geometric
planes - could now be conveyed within a two-dimensional canvas, thus dismissing
spatial illusionism. Picasso was introduced to
Georges Braque by a mutual
friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The two artists shared a common desire
for a new language and worked together for more than seven years.
Picasso and
Braque sought a way of expressing a more complete and multi-faceted
reality (by painting what is known about space and shapes, not only what
is
seen). Such is the similarity of their paintings, that it is sometimes
difficult to identify each artist's work. However,
Braque seems to have stayed more
in touch with formal values, founded on harmonious and rhythmic composition,
while Picasso, true to his
Spanish blood, was more aggressive, passionate, and dramatic. Recurring themes
in the works of both painters include angular human figures - treated like
wooden sculpture and possessing an almost sacred solemnity - and landscapes in
which small houses were reduced to
geometric cube shapes. It was in Louis Vauxcelles's description of this detail
in Gil Bias in November 1908 that the term "cubism" was coined. Portraits
were often of the painters' dealer and collector friends, such as Kahnweiler,
Vollard, and Uhde, while the still lifes show fragments, silhouettes, and
profiles of objects that appear to interlock tightly as if within a web. Musical
instruments were often represented, chosen partly for their formal values -
piano keys relate well to spatial rhythm, and the shape of the mandolin echoes
the curves of the female body - and partly in the ever-present hope of achieving
a synthesis of painting and music. Within two years, the process of dismantling
form started by Picasso and
Braque took fragmentation and obscurity to such extreme lengths that it
led to cryptic and indecipherable works.
This phase is known as Analytical Cubism, when pyramidal
structures of geometrical solids tend to dematerialize through the effect of
light shining through them, making them crystalline and forming schemes that
have been mistaken as abstract. In fact, Cubists sought to penetrate reality to
its very depths, investigating its most hidden aspects in order to provide as
much information about it as possible. According to
Jean Metzinger (1883-1957) and
Albert Gleizes (1881-1953) in
Du Cubisme (published in 1912), the Cubists wanted to circle around the
object and, under the control of the intellect, give a concrete representation
of several successive aspects of it. Although
Picasso and
Braque were acknowledged as the two most significant exponents of Cubism
in its analytical phase and subsequent stages, neither of them took part in the
movement's first official viewing held in April 1911 at the Salon ties
Independants. Works by participating artists -
Metzinger,
Gleizes,
Fernand Leger, and
Robert Delaunay (1885-1941)
- showed very different artistic experiences, but were now-grouped under one
name, which acquired its own resonance and historic significance. The five
painters of the Salon were soon joined by Roger de la Fresnaye, Marcoussis, and
the so-called "Puteaux group", comprising the three brothers
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968),
Jacques Villon-Gaston Duchamp
(1875-1963)
(Gaston Duchamp was the elder brother of: Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel
Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889-1963), painter)
, and the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918).
Later on, the Spanish painter Juan Gris
(1887-1927) was associated with the group, albeit loosely. Also in 1911,
contacts were made with the Blaue Reiter at
Delaunay's exhibition in
Munich, and with the Cubo-Futurists
Malevich, and Burliuk.
In the same year, Gris'
Homage to Picasso acknowledged
Picasso
as the father of a new, historic artistic-era, and the Cubist exhibition in
Brussels, which was organized by Guillaume Apollinaire, marked the close of the
movement's first phase. Other Cubist developments followed, such as so-called
Synthetic Cubism, and the distinctive Orphic Cubism. In
these, the object, which had initially been analysed and broken into parts,
losing any recognizable features, was reconstituted. depicted according to its
essential structure, and expressed in terms of its most significant components.
Cubists now sought to avoid the danger of abstraction and mystification.
Instead, they favoured a subtle linguistic game of metaphors and
cross-references between reality and illusionism. Works now featured letters,
numbers, and "pieces of reality", such as cloth, newspaper cuttings, stamps, and
other objets tronres. The use of these items by Cubists launched the
technique of collage and papier colle, which was later adopted
enthusiastically by Dadaists and Surrealists.
Impelled by the need to achieve order, clarity, and increasingly repelled by the
drab and uniform colours of the majority of Cubist paintings,
Juan Gris and, subsequently.
Fernand Leger adopted a
rigorous structure and more luminous and brilliant colours. The Cubism of these
artists is a simple, essential, and schematic language of geometric shapes,
enriched by flat areas of clear, pure colour.
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Cubism
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was
created principally by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat,
two-dimensional surface of the pictureplane, rejecting the traditional
techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro
and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature.
Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and
space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that
depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen
simultaneously.
Cubism derived its name from remarks that were made by the painter
Henri Matisse and the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who derisively
described Braque's 1908 work “Houses at L'Estaque” as composed of
cubes. In Braque's work, the volumes of the houses, the cylindrical
forms of the trees, and the tan-and-green colour scheme are
reminiscent of Paul Cézanne's landscapes, which deeply inspired the
Cubists in their first stage of development, until 1909. It was,
however, “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” a work painted by Picasso in
1907, that forecast the new style; in this work, the forms of five
female nudes became fractured, angular shapes. As in Cézanne's art,
perspective was rendered by means of colour,the warm reddish browns
advancing and the cool blues receding.
The period from 1910 to 1912 often is referred to as that of
Analytical Cubism. Paintings executed during this period showed
the breaking down, or analysis, of form. Right-angle and straight-line
construction were favoured, though occasionally some areas of the
painting appeared sculptural, as in Picasso's “Girl with a Mandolin”
(1910). Colour schemes were simplified, tending to be nearly
monochromatic (hues of tan, brown, gray, cream, green, or blue
preferred) in order not to distract the viewer from the artist's
primary interest—the structure of form itself. The monochromatic
colour scheme was suited to the presentation of complex, multiple
views of the object, which was now reduced to overlapping opaque and
transparent planes. These planes appear to ascend the surface of the
canvas rather than to recede in depth. Forms are generally compact and
dense in the centre of the Analytical Cubist painting, growing larger
as they diffuse toward the edges of the canvas, as in Picasso's
“Portrait of Ambroise Vollard” (1909–10; Pushkin Fine Arts Museum,
Moscow). Paintings frequently combine representational motifs with
letters, the latter emphasizing the painter's concern with
abstraction; favourite motifs are musical instruments, bottles,
pitchers, glasses, newspapers, still lifes, and the human face and
figure.
Interest in this subject matter continued after 1912, during the phase
generally identified with Synthetic Cubism. Works of this phase
emphasize the combination, or synthesis, of forms in the picture.
Colour assumes a strong role in the work; shapes, while remaining
fragmented and flat, are larger and more decorative. Smooth and rough
surfaces may be contrasted with one another; and frequently foreign
materials, such as newspapers or tobacco wrappers, are pasted on the
canvas in combination with painted areas. This technique, known as
collage, further emphasizes the differences in texture and, at the
same time, poses the question of what is reality and what is illusion
in nature and in painting.
While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating the new visual
language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, such
as Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la
Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger. Though
primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound
influence on 20th-century sculpture and architecture. Chief among
Cubist sculptors are Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and
Jacques Lipchitz. The adoption of the Cubist aesthetic by the
architect Le Corbusier is reflected in the shapes of the houses he
designed during the 1920s.
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Raymond
Duchamp-Villon
(b Damville, Eure, 5 Nov 1876; d
Cannes, 7 Oct 1918).
French sculptor and draughtsman. The second son of a Normandy
notary, he played a central role in the development of modern
aesthetics, as did his elder brother JACQUES VILLON and his
younger brother MARCEL DUCHAMP. He came from an educated family
and was an assiduous student at secondary school in Rouen; in 1894
he registered at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris, where he
attended classes for several years. Rheumatic fever forced him to
break off his studies in 1898 just before completion and left him
immobilized for a considerable length of time; this unforeseen
event altered the whole course of his life. During this period of
enforced leisure (1899–1900), he modelled small statuettes (of
subjects such as familiar animals and female figures), discovering
his true vocation as a sculptor. He was essentially self-taught
and rapidly attained a high level of mastery and maturity. He
settled in Paris c. 1901 and changed his name to
Duchamp-Villon at his father’s insistence. As early as 1902 he
exhibited a portrait of his future wife (whom he married in 1903)
in the Société Nationale, and he exhibited works regularly at the
Salon d’Automne from its foundation in 1903. In 1905 he held his
first private exhibition with Jacques Villon in the Galerie Legrip,
Rouen.
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The Horse
1914
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Portrait of Professor Gosset
1917 |
Femme assise
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Torso of a Young Man
1910 |
The Large Horse
1914
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The Lovers
1913
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The Eight. The Ashcan School
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The Eight
Group of American painters who
exhibited together only once, in New York City in 1908, but who
established one of the main currents in 20th-century American
painting. The original Eight included
Robert Henri, leader of
the group, Everett
Shinn,
John Sloan,
Arthur B. Davies,
Ernest Lawson,
Maurice Prendergast,
George Luks, and
William J. Glackens.
George Bellows
later joined them. The group's determination to bring art into
closer touch with everyday life greatly influenced the course of
American art.
Reacting against an American academic and aesthetic tradition
that was subservient to European aesthetics, the members of The
Eight established their own artistic society in the bustling
neighbourhoods of New York and set out to create a native
American painting.
Luks,
Sloan,
Glackens, and
Shinn worked as newspaper illustrator-cartoonists. They
and the four other artists used the teeming life they found in
New York as the subject of their art, presenting unidealized
views of city life in the saloons, tenements, pool halls, and
slums. Some members of The Eight
adopted a rough, realistic style, utilizing flashy brushwork on
a dark ground in a manner reminiscent of
Edouard Manet,
Gustave
Courbet,
and the German Dusseldorf school. Other members took different
directions: Prendergast utilized the decorative patterns of
colour he found in the work of the French Nabi group in his
translations of the American landscape;
Davies painted dreamy,
twilight scenes evolved from lyrical allegories rather than from
contemporary life;
Lawson adopted a style
that was lyrically atmospheric. In spite of such deviations in
style, the artists banded together for a group show in 1908 at
the Macbeth Gallery, organizing it as a direct reaction against
slights by the National Academy of Design. The show was
well-attended but received mixed reviews: while some critics
admired the daring of the work, more were shocked by what they
saw as poor draftsmanship and dreary subject matter.
A few years after their only joint exhibition, the eight
painters were absorbed into a larger group called the
Ashcan school, which included
Bellows,
Edward Hopper,
and
Jerome Myers. The Ashcan school, whose principles and aims were
similar to those of
The Eight, further paved the way for the
development of a vital and native trend in American painting of
the 20th century.
The Ashcan School
The Ashcan School was a small group of artists
who sought to document everyday life in turn-of-the-century New York City,
capturing it in realistic and unglamorized paintings and etchings of urban
street scenes. It largely consisted of
Robert Henri and his
circle.
Henri, an influential
teacher, was an admirer of the unpretentious and masculine realism of Thomas
Eakins and Thomas Anshutz. In addition to Henri, the Ashcan School consisted
of
George Wesley Bellows,
William J. Glackens,
Everett Shinn,
George Luks and
John Sloan. The
spirit of the Ashcan School was continued in the American Scene Painting of
the 1920's and 1930's.
Artists who have extensively in
this group include Arthur
B. Davies (1862-1928),
Robert Henri
(1865-1929),
George Luks
(1867-1933),
William J. Glackens
(1870-1938),
John Sloan
(1871-1951), and
Everett Shinn (1876-1953). Others who are considered in
the Ashcan school:
Alfred Maurer (1868-1932),
George Wesley Bellows
(1882-1925), Edward
Hopper (1882-1967), and
Guy Pene Du Bois (1884-1958).
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Jerome Myers
(1867-1940)
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The Playground
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Children at Play
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Sunday Morning
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Guy Pene du Bois
(1884-1958)
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Studio Window
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Trapeze Performers |
Dining Out
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Woman Playing Accordion
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Americans in Paris
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Allied Artists’ Association
[A.A.A.].
Organization
established in London in 1908, dedicated to non-juried exhibitions of
international artists’ work. The main impetus for the A.A.A. came from
Frank Rutter (1876–1937), art critic of the Sunday Times, and the
first exhibition was held at the Albert Hall, London. Inspired by the
Salon des Indépendants in Paris, Rutter wanted to set up an exhibiting
platform for the work of progressive artists. On payment of a
subscription, artists were entitled to exhibit five works
(subsequently reduced to three) and over 3000 items were included in
the first show. Rutter also wanted the A.A.A. to have a foreign
section and for the first exhibition collaborated with Jan de
Holewinski (1871–1927), who had been sent to London to organize an
exhibition of Russian arts and crafts.
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Noucentisme
Cultural movement that influenced all areas of artistic
activity in Catalonia between 1908 and 1923. The term was
coined by the philosopher EUGENIO D’ORS, who used it to refer
to a new ‘20th-century’ spirit that he perceived in Catalan
art at the beginning of the century. In a series of articles
in periodicals d’Ors qualified as Noucentistes those
artists and writers whose work in his opinion was
characterized by a new sensibility, and the designation was
established in 1911 with the publication of the Almanac
dels Noucentistes, a collection of drawings and poems that
had in common a reversion to classicism, a particular interest
in urban life and a special concern for the determining
aspects of private life. Noucentisme was influential in
Catalan art for more than two decades and constituted a
parallel movement to that of avant-garde art, towards which,
however, it showed only a detached curiosity. Noucentisme
encouraged a return to order and normality after the
radicalism, bohemianism and individualism that had
characterized some of the major figures of modernism. Among
painters, its leading exponents were JOAQUÍM SUNYER, Jaume
Mercade (1887–1967), Francesc Gali (1880–1965) and (in their
early work) Josep Torres Garcia (1874–1949) and JOAN MIRÓ,
while in sculpture the leading figures were ARISTIDE MAILLOL,
MANOLO, JOSEP CLARÀ, Fidel Aguilar and, to some extent, PABLO
GARGALLO. In architecture, the classicizing aspects of the
Vienna Secession influenced Rafael Massó and Joseph Maria
Pericas, while a stricter classicism marked the work of Adolf
Florensa (1889–1968), Francesc Folquera (1891–1960), the
brothers Ramón (1887–1935) and Josep (1886–1937) Puig Gairalt
and Nicolau Maria Rubio i Tuduri (1891–1981). Other influences
derived from Modernisme, the Catalan version of Art
Nouveau, were introduced by such architects as J. PUIG I
CADAFALCH and J. Torres Grau (1879–1945). Noucentisme
also inspired the foundation of such cultural institutions as
the Universitat Industrial, the Escola Nova, the Bernat Metge
Foundation (for the translation into Catalan of Greek and
Latin classics) and the Institut d’Estudis Catalans.
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Vasily Kandinsky
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THE NEW ARTISTS' ASSOCIATION
Alexei
von Jawlensky,
Alfred
Kubin,
and
Gabriele Munter,
along with other artists who no longer wanted to work within the
Munich Secession movement, founded the New Artists' Association of
Munich in 1909. Led by
Wassily Kandinsky
as president, the group met to discuss the need to make art less bound
by realism and more inspired by emotions, and to express this "inner
world" directly with "necessary" forms rather than in the hackneyed
"secondary" forms of existing artistic styles.
The association held its first two
shows in 1909 and 1910. including work by many French Fauves and
Cubists, which provoked strong criticism. Such hostility, together
with the rejection from the group's exhibition of
Kandinsky's
Composition V, which marked his turn towards abstraction, caused
the group to break up.
Neue Kunstlervereinigung (New
Artists' Association group)
English New Artists' Association group founded in 1909 by
Wassily Kandinsky,
Alexei von Jawlensky,
Gabriele Munter,
and numerous others who were united by opposition to the official art
of Munich rather than by similarity of style. Joined by Adolf
Erbsloh, Alexander Kanoldt,
Alfred
Kubin,
Marianne von Werefkin, Karl Hofer, and several other artists as
wellas lay people, the group held its first exhibition in December
1909, at Moderne Galerie Tannhäuser, Munich. The works exhibited,
which primarily reflected Jugendstil and Fauvist styles, were not
favourably received by the critics or the public. Their second
exhibition, held September 1910 at Tannhäuser, was international in
scope, including, in addition to their works. The exhibition was denounced for, among other things,
including foreign artists, especially Russians, who were considered
dangerous to Bavarian culture.
While preparing for their third exhibition, held December 1911 at
Tannhäuser, differences in aesthetic outlook caused a split in the
group, partially brought on by the jury's rejection of Kandinsky's
large, rather abstract painting, “Last Judgment.” Franz Marc (the last
painter to join the group) and Kandinsky, favouring freedom of
expression, were aligned against the more conservative art historian
Otto Fischer (who later became the group's spokesman), Kanoldt, and
Erbslöh.
Kandinsky
left the association (as did
Munter and
Kubin)
and together formed Der Blaue Reiter, exhibiting their works
that same month at Tannhäuser, in rooms adjoining those of the Neue
Künstlervereinigung.
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Adolf Erbsloh
(1881-1947)
Germany
Gebirge, Brannenburg, 1911
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Badende Frauen, 1913
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Schlafende Frau, Akt, 1913
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Alexander Kanoldt
(1881-1939)
Still Life
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Marianne von
Werefkin
(1860-1938)
Self-Portrait
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Karl Hofer
(1878 - 1955)
Wopan
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The
Eight
(Hung. Nyolcak)
Hungarian avant-garde group founded in early 1909 and
consisting of the painters Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Dezso
Czigány, Károly Kernstok, Odon Márffy, Dezso Orbán
(1884–1986), Bertalan Pór and Lajos Tihanyi. Later the
sculptors Márk Vedres (1870–1961) and Vilmos Fémes Beck and
the industrial designer Anna Lesznai (b 1885) also
became members. The group was originally called the Searchers
(Keresok) and had formed the most radical section within MIENK
(Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists), a broad-based
group of artists. They left MIENK in order to develop a more
modern aesthetic. The name the Eight was adopted on the
occasion of the second exhibition in 1911, and its leader and
organizer was Kernstok. Unlike the earlier Nagybánya school or
other contemporary Western movements, the Eight had no
homogeneous style, individual artists being influenced by a
variety of sources ranging from Cézanne to Cubism. Though
unified by a sense of the social function of art, the details
of this belief again varied with each artist.
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Robert
Bereny
(1887- 1953)
Woman in a Red Dress
1908
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Dezso Orban
(1884–1986)
Still-life with Green Pear
1909
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Septem group
Finnish
group of painters founded in 1909 and named after the number
of its co-founders. The leaders were Alfred William Finch
and Knut Magnus Enckell, and the other members were
Yrjö Ollila (1887–1932), Mikko Oinonen (1883–1956), Juho
Rissanen, Ellen Thesleff and Verner Thomé (1878–1953). The
formation of the group was prompted by the poor reception of a
Finnish exhibition in Paris in 1908, with critics claiming
that Finnish art was dull and gloomy. Its inspiration came
from a Franco-Belgian exhibition held in Helsinki in 1904.
This comprised Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist works by
Paul Signac, Henri Edmond Cross, Théo Van Rysselberghe and
Finch among others, these styles being virtually unknown in
Finland at the time. Finch himself had been one of the
co-founders of Les XX in Belgium and had since 1897 been
living in Finland, where he had been invited to run the
ceramics department of the Iris factory at Porvoo. He had also
been a friend of Signac and Georges Seurat and was therefore
well placed to introduce these artistic innovations into
Finland.
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