Picasso subjects tended to involve him in some fashion or autobiographical way; being, being involved with, or knowing many of his subjects. This autobiographical nature is further evidenced by his habit of dating his works to the day. As Hemmingway seemed to require a different lover for each novel, Picasso seemed to need a new lover to create a new style. His styles and techniques spanned and or helped develop the Post-Impressionist, Modernist, Cubist, Synthetic Cubist, Analytic Cubist, Surrealist, Symbolist, Fauvist and Primitivist periods in Modern art. Picasso had also produced some neoclassical paintings.
It is said that one does not need a reason to dislike, but if seeking reasons, they will present themselves. Picasso’s sexual objectification of women is undeniable. Picasso was a narcissist. He was an unapologetic atheist. He refused to participate in both world wars and did not have his life disrupted, too much, by either of them. He was a card holding Communist. He was not a devoted father, husband or friend. But which pieces of his art, would the critics of the man’s character, be willing to sacrifice to eliminate his perceived character defects; Picasso was his art.
Picasso had always enjoyed several mistresses in addition to his significant other or wife du jour. Picasso married twice and had four children with three women: Paulo with Olga Khokhlova, Maya with Marie-Thérèse Walter, Claude and Paloma with Françoise Gilot. Photographer, painter, companion and lover, Dora Maar was a constant to Picasso, in the late 1930s and early 1940s; it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.
Up until 1936 and the start of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso managed to avoid, for the most part, socio-political issues in his art. Picasso had always had close associations with Anarchists, Capitalists, Socialists, Communists and Marxists, however he was able to segregate his leanings from his work; Francisco Franco and the atrocities of Spanish fascists brought that to a crashing end.
At the onset of hostilities, the Spanish Republicans made Picasso Director of Prodo, and though as a Spanish citizen living in France, he took immediate action and funded the evacuation of the museum’s collection to Geneva. Then, in his first solely political work, he produced the project, “The Dream and Lie of Franco”, which combined surreal images with eloquent wording. The art was sold as postcards and the proceeds from the sales funded the Spanish Republicans, who were Communists fighting Franco and Fascism. This was in addition to his most famous work, also in 1937, “Guernica”. Picasso, in 1940, applied for French citizenship, but it was not granted because of his “extremist ideas evolving towards communism”. In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party.
Picasso’s Father, though employed as an art instructor, was not an exceptional artist and never really got past pigeons as subjects for his art. None the less, Ruiz was Picasso’s first formal instructor in figure drawing and oil painting, believing proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. At the age of 13 Picasso painted over one of Ruiz’s pigeon drawings, it was at this point that Ruiz realized that his son had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting.
The family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz persuaded the officials at the School of Fine Arts to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. The month long process was completed in a week and Picasso was admitted. His father rented a small room for Picasso to work alone.
At age 16, Picasso set off alone to attend the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, but disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolment. Madrid exposed Picasso to paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, Francisco Zurbarán and El Greco; all of whom he found influential.
Before 1900, Picasso mastered academic realism and In 1897 began to show a Symbolist influence. His Modernist period followed with exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, as well as more exposure to an old favourite, El Greco. This led Picasso to his version of modernism.
For Picasso, his first trip to Paris in 1900, was a mixed bag, his pre Blue Period, and the desperation that facilitated it. He Shared a studio/living quarters with poet/journalist and friend, Max Jacob. Max taught Picasso the language and its literature, working during the day and sleeping at night, Picasso had the opposite schedule. Cold and impoverished, much of Picasso’s work was burned to keep the small room warm. Picasso lived in Madrid from January – May of 1901, where he and his friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the Young Art magazine, publishing five issues. Soler, an anarchist, solicited articles while Picasso illustrated the journal with sombre cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. This is when “Pablo Ruiz Picasso” or “Pablo R. Picasso”, started to sign his work “Picasso”.
Characterized by sullen subjects and painted in blues and blue-greens, Picasso’s Blue Period began in Spain, early 1901, or in Paris the second half of that year. During this period of prostitutes, beggars ghostly woman and children, Picasso vacillated between Barcelona and Paris. His Blue Period was in part attributed to the suicide of his friend, Carlos Casagemas, as he painted several portraits of Casagemas, after his death. However, it didn’t take Picasso long to warm the bed of his late friend’s fiancé.
Utilizing orange and pink colours, Picasso’s Rose Period was characterized by circus people, acrobats and harlequins. This coincides with Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist, becoming his mistress and making appearances in much of his art of that period. Influenced by this relationship and his relationship to French painting, this work has a positive joyful flavour.
Soon, Picasso garnered some big patrons: Leo and Gertrude Stein along with Michael and Sarah Stein. In 1905, at a Stein gathering, Picasso met lifelong friend and rival Henri Matisse. Through the Steins, Picasso gained Claribel Cone and her sister Etta as further patrons.
In 1907 Picasso experimented in primitivism with his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, inspired by what he experienced in the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro. Ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that followed, were Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s Cubism started to gain popularity. The two men developed another form, Analytic cubism, using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. They artistically reverse engineered objects to analyse them in terms of their shapes. Analytic cubism gave birth to Synthetic cubism, where cut paper fragments were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.
In 1915 Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage. This came to be known, at least by Picasso, as “Crystal Cubism”. This is also defined as his experimentation with classicism called “the return to order”.
Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, and included declarations of his love for her in many Cubist works. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 after the outbreak of World War I. During the war, Picasso was able to continue painting uninterrupted, unlike his French comrades. His paintings became more sombre. Costume design by Pablo Picasso representing skyscrapers and boulevards, for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performance of Parade at Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris 18 May 1917. Towards the end of World War I, Picasso became involved with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Erik Satie’s Parade, in Rome; they spent their honeymoon near Biarritz in the villa of glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz. When the honeymoon was over Picasso was broke. Picasso befriended the art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg funded and rented an apartment in Paris for the newlyweds next to his own house. The deep friendship persisted until the outbreak of World War II.
Picasso needed Rosenberg’s money as Khokhlova was high society, hence there were formal dinner parties, and other functions of the Parisian rich in the roaring 20s. Needless to say, Khokhlova’s social agenda cramped Picasso’s bohemian fare style; the marriage was endless war. Thus in 1927 the marriage came to an end after he had an affair with 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth, so the two got a separation which lasted until Khokhlova’s death in 1955. Picasso fathered a daughter with Marie-Thérèse Walter, “Maya”. Picasso never married Marie-Thérèse, and she hanged herself four years after Picasso’s death.
After World War I, in “the return to order” Picasso dabbled in Neoclassicism via a trip to Italy. As a Surrealist he develop new imagery expressing himself emotionally, violence, existential fear, and erotic subjects. Soon, harlequins, gave way to the minotaur; no doubt an influence of surrealism.
Few would challenge that Picasso’s Guernica is his most famous work. The massive canvas encompasses the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war through the bombing of the town of Guernica. Until 1981, the painting was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, as it was Picasso’s expressed desire that the painting should not be delivered to Spain until liberty and democracy had been established in the country. The Spanish civil war was so savage that war correspondence, like Ernest Hemingway, dropped his pen and picked up arms to join the fight against Franco.
During the Nazi occupation of Paris, there were many times that the Gestapo searched Picasso’s apartment. On one occasion, an officer saw a photograph of the painting Guernica. “Did you do that?” the German asked Picasso. “No,” he replied, “You did”. Picasso isolated himself in his studio continuing to paint. Picasso continued using bronze, smuggled to him by the French Resistance, even though Germans outlawed bronze casting. Picasso did a fair bit of writing as well, this included over 300 poems and two full-length plays.
After the liberation of Paris, In 1944, Picasso, then 63 years old, became romantically involved with Françoise Gilot; she was 40 years his junior. They had two children, Claude Picasso, born in 1947 and Paloma Picasso, born in 1949. Gilot accused Picasso of abusive treatment and many infidelities which led her to leave with the children; Picasso never really got over this. In 1961, Picasso married Jacqueline Roque, who was four years younger than Gilot. The two were together for the remainder of Picasso’s life. Picasso’s relationship with Claude and Paloma was never reconciled.
Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s, Picasso’s style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velázquez’s painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, and Courbetand Delacroix.
In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Picasso made a few film appearances, always as himself, including the cameo in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus(1960). In 1955, he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Picasso’s final years were a mixed bag of tricks, a mixture of style, expression and nonstop modulation. He devoted all focus and energy to his work, becoming utterly uninhibited and far more daring. He became more productive with work that was more colourful and expressive, hence a lot of his final works were labelled as “Pornographic Fantasies”, “an impotent old man” or “an artist who was past his prime”. He was commissioned to design a sculpture for the city of Chicago, “the Chicago Picasso”, after it was finished, no one could figure out what it was or represented. After Picasso’s death, the critics came to see the late works of Picasso as Neo-Expressionism.
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