Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Born: October 25, 1881; Malaga, Spain
Died: 1973
Nationality: Spanish
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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born in Malaga, the son of an art teacher.
The boy showed exceptional talent at an early age, and the artistic
current flowing into Barcelona (where the family had settled) from
France and Northern Europe stimulated him into trying out the
personal languages of Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and other
northern lights.
In 1900, he visited Paris for a short time, and returned in 1901 to join
the cohort of young Bohemians attracted to the capital by the
stimulating and exciting atmosphere then prevailing in the arts.
Lautrec, Gauguin, van Gogh, Steinlen, late Impressionism flit across
his canvases in a bewildering medley and leave behind a passion for
blue, which became the dominant color for his portrayal of the
squalid tragedy of the Paris streets - the beggar, the harlot, the sick
child, the hungry. Through this welter of contemporary influences
ran the steady current of the things he had grown up with: the
elongated forms of Catalan Gothic sculpture and Italian Mannerism,
the simplified color and straightforward approach of Velazquez and
Goya.
These also inform his pictures of actors, mountebanks, and
harlequins, where tender fawns and pinks replace the earlier drab
and sad colors. Until then nothing unusual had transpired: even his
interest in Iberian sculpture in 1906, and the radical simplification of
form and color it led to gave little hint of the position when the Fauve
outbreak was at its height. Picasso took no part in this. He was
questioning the whole basis of painting and was therefore unable to
follow still further the road from Impressionism to the dissolution of
form and its translation into color and imaginative feeling.
Picasso's reply to Matisse's composition is the art of arranging in a
decorative manner the various elements at the painter's disposal for
the expression of his feelings' was to turn to Cézanne, whose petite
sensation never had any truck with pure decoration and whose
composition was based on the rigorous discipline of the relations of
form and space on a two-dimensional surface.
Les demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon (The Museum of Modern Art,
New York) of 1907 was begun in the vein of his harlequin series, but
ended as a semiabstract composition, in which the forms of the
nudes and their accessories are broken up into planes compressed
into a shallow space. The influence of Negro sculptures, which first
appears in the Demoiselles, also fitted in with his quest for the
expression of form and helped, by the bizarre nature of their forms,
to release him from the tyranny of the representational tradition in
art.
In 1907, he met Braque who had drifted into the Fauve circle and out
of it again, and by 1909 they found that they faced the same
problems and were striving to solve them in the same way. Both
rejected decorative arabesques and bright, sensuous color and
were striving to devise a pictorial language which would define
volumes and their relationships without destroying the flat surface of
the picture, and without descending to the imitation of accidental and
superficial appearances. Together they evolved what is now called
Analytical Cubism.
By 1912, color had begun to creep back among the grays, olive
greens, and drab browns, and actual objects - a piece of cane
seating, a newspaper heading - were imported so as to stress by
their complaisant acquiescence in becoming an element in a design
the modest role of nature in the ideal, and also to serve as an
example of the way in which nature may be recreated.
Collage was a natural extension of this. Objects could be literally
reconstituted with bits of wood, wire, paper, and string, their forms
distorted by the artist into a flat composition whose inherent third
dimension is alluded to at the same time as it is suppressed although
Picasso, having started this hare, did not course it, any more than
he did that of Surrealism, born from the juxtaposition of recognizable
objects and reconstituted forms.
Three Dancers, 1925
At the moment when the War broke out in 1914, Braque and Picasso
were separated by a quarrel (the breach was never healed) and
both had consistently held aloof from the host of minor artists who
had by now realized that Cubism was the coming thing and had
climbed aboard the bandwagon - Gleizes, Metzinger, Delaunay,
Marcoussis, DuchampVillon, Picabia, La Fresnaye, and Derain.
From 1915, he had shown his interest in Ingres' drawings by precise
and restrainedly stylized pencil drawings, and his connection with the
Diaghileff Russian Ballet in Rome in 1917 led to works showing a
return to traditional vision, with parallel works in a glitteringly
sophisticated Cubist idiom. Finally, contact with the Antique and with
Roman classicism ushers in a series of paintings and drawings of
monumental female nudes, at first almost motiordess and then, by
1923, galvanized into terrifying movement which distorts them into
frightening caricatures before dissolving them, via calligraphic
curves and lines, into the convulsive and repellent distortions of the
Three Dancers of 1925.
Guernica, 1936
For the next ten years, Picasso developed these distorted and
disquieting figures through what is generally called the Metamorphic
phase, in which he was perhaps somewhat influenced by Miró and
Tanguy. By the early 1930s, he was rather taking the wind out of
Matisse's sails with a series of nudes odalisques almost which
combine brilliance of color with flat pattern of a violent intensity; soon
afterwards, he began the series of bullfighting subjects which
culminated in the imagery present in Guernica (1936: Madrid,
Prado). This huge composition, inspired by the Spanish Civil War,
expresses in complicated iconography and personal symbolical
language, comprehensible after careful study, the artist's
abhorrence of the violence and beastliness of war. This dark mood
persisted in the dislocated forms and frightening imagery of his work
during the Second World War.
He remained in Paris during the Occupation and gradually acquired
by his aloofness the stature of a symbol of resistance, but from 1946
to his death he lived mainly in the South of France. During these
years he experimented with ceramics and also painted a large mural
for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) in Paris.
No man has changed more radically the nature of art. Like Giotto,
Michelangelo and Bernini, he stands at the beginning of a new
epoch. Most museums of modern art throughout the world have
examples. His private collection, of his own work and that of his
friends, has been given to the French State as the Musée Picasso,
Paris.
Born: October 25, 1881; Malaga, Spain
Died: 1973
Nationality: Spanish
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born in Malaga, the son of an art teacher.
The boy showed exceptional talent at an early age, and the artistic
current flowing into Barcelona (where the family had settled) from
France and Northern Europe stimulated him into trying out the
personal languages of Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and other
northern lights.
In 1900, he visited Paris for a short time, and returned in 1901 to join
the cohort of young Bohemians attracted to the capital by the
stimulating and exciting atmosphere then prevailing in the arts.
Lautrec, Gauguin, van Gogh, Steinlen, late Impressionism flit across
his canvases in a bewildering medley and leave behind a passion for
blue, which became the dominant color for his portrayal of the
squalid tragedy of the Paris streets - the beggar, the harlot, the sick
child, the hungry. Through this welter of contemporary influences
ran the steady current of the things he had grown up with: the
elongated forms of Catalan Gothic sculpture and Italian Mannerism,
the simplified color and straightforward approach of Velazquez and
Goya.
These also inform his pictures of actors, mountebanks, and
harlequins, where tender fawns and pinks replace the earlier drab
and sad colors. Until then nothing unusual had transpired: even his
interest in Iberian sculpture in 1906, and the radical simplification of
form and color it led to gave little hint of the position when the Fauve
outbreak was at its height. Picasso took no part in this. He was
questioning the whole basis of painting and was therefore unable to
follow still further the road from Impressionism to the dissolution of
form and its translation into color and imaginative feeling.
Picasso's reply to Matisse's composition is the art of arranging in a
decorative manner the various elements at the painter's disposal for
the expression of his feelings' was to turn to Cézanne, whose petite
sensation never had any truck with pure decoration and whose
composition was based on the rigorous discipline of the relations of
form and space on a two-dimensional surface.
Les demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon (The Museum of Modern Art,
New York) of 1907 was begun in the vein of his harlequin series, but
ended as a semiabstract composition, in which the forms of the
nudes and their accessories are broken up into planes compressed
into a shallow space. The influence of Negro sculptures, which first
appears in the Demoiselles, also fitted in with his quest for the
expression of form and helped, by the bizarre nature of their forms,
to release him from the tyranny of the representational tradition in
art.
In 1907, he met Braque who had drifted into the Fauve circle and out
of it again, and by 1909 they found that they faced the same
problems and were striving to solve them in the same way. Both
rejected decorative arabesques and bright, sensuous color and
were striving to devise a pictorial language which would define
volumes and their relationships without destroying the flat surface of
the picture, and without descending to the imitation of accidental and
superficial appearances. Together they evolved what is now called
Analytical Cubism.
By 1912, color had begun to creep back among the grays, olive
greens, and drab browns, and actual objects - a piece of cane
seating, a newspaper heading - were imported so as to stress by
their complaisant acquiescence in becoming an element in a design
the modest role of nature in the ideal, and also to serve as an
example of the way in which nature may be recreated.
Collage was a natural extension of this. Objects could be literally
reconstituted with bits of wood, wire, paper, and string, their forms
distorted by the artist into a flat composition whose inherent third
dimension is alluded to at the same time as it is suppressed although
Picasso, having started this hare, did not course it, any more than
he did that of Surrealism, born from the juxtaposition of recognizable
objects and reconstituted forms.
Three Dancers, 1925
At the moment when the War broke out in 1914, Braque and Picasso
were separated by a quarrel (the breach was never healed) and
both had consistently held aloof from the host of minor artists who
had by now realized that Cubism was the coming thing and had
climbed aboard the bandwagon - Gleizes, Metzinger, Delaunay,
Marcoussis, DuchampVillon, Picabia, La Fresnaye, and Derain.
From 1915, he had shown his interest in Ingres' drawings by precise
and restrainedly stylized pencil drawings, and his connection with the
Diaghileff Russian Ballet in Rome in 1917 led to works showing a
return to traditional vision, with parallel works in a glitteringly
sophisticated Cubist idiom. Finally, contact with the Antique and with
Roman classicism ushers in a series of paintings and drawings of
monumental female nudes, at first almost motiordess and then, by
1923, galvanized into terrifying movement which distorts them into
frightening caricatures before dissolving them, via calligraphic
curves and lines, into the convulsive and repellent distortions of the
Three Dancers of 1925.
Guernica, 1936
For the next ten years, Picasso developed these distorted and
disquieting figures through what is generally called the Metamorphic
phase, in which he was perhaps somewhat influenced by Miró and
Tanguy. By the early 1930s, he was rather taking the wind out of
Matisse's sails with a series of nudes odalisques almost which
combine brilliance of color with flat pattern of a violent intensity; soon
afterwards, he began the series of bullfighting subjects which
culminated in the imagery present in Guernica (1936: Madrid,
Prado). This huge composition, inspired by the Spanish Civil War,
expresses in complicated iconography and personal symbolical
language, comprehensible after careful study, the artist's
abhorrence of the violence and beastliness of war. This dark mood
persisted in the dislocated forms and frightening imagery of his work
during the Second World War.
He remained in Paris during the Occupation and gradually acquired
by his aloofness the stature of a symbol of resistance, but from 1946
to his death he lived mainly in the South of France. During these
years he experimented with ceramics and also painted a large mural
for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) in Paris.
No man has changed more radically the nature of art. Like Giotto,
Michelangelo and Bernini, he stands at the beginning of a new
epoch. Most museums of modern art throughout the world have
examples. His private collection, of his own work and that of his
friends, has been given to the French State as the Musée Picasso,
Paris.
