Picasso, Pablo

Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973). Spanish painter, sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker, ceramicist, and designer, active mainly in France, the most famous, versatile, and prolific artist of the 20th century. He was the dominant personality in the visual arts during much of the first half of the 20th century and he provided the incentive for many of the revolutionary changes during this time. Although it is conventional to divide his work into certain phases, these divisions are to some extent arbitrary, as his energy and imagination were such that he often worked simultaneously on a wealth of themes and in a variety of styles. Picasso himself said: ‘The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or future. I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in painting. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I haven't hesitated to adopt them.’

Picasso was born in Málaga, the son of an undistinguished painter and drawing-master, José Ruiz Blasco (1838–1913), and he was remarkably precocious; his first word as a baby is said to have been ‘lápiz’ (pencil), and although he was not quite the child genius he later liked to suggest, he certainly showed exceptional talent by the time he was in his early teens. In 1895 his family moved to Barcelona, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts, 1896–7, before attending the Academy in Madrid for a few months in 1897. By this time he had his own studio in Barcelona, and he thrived on the city's intellectual and bohemian life, centring on the café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats). In 1900 he made his first visit to Paris and by this time had already absorbed a wide range of influences. Between 1900 and 1904 he alternated between Barcelona and Paris, and this time coincides with his Blue Period, when he took his subjects from the poor and social outcasts, and the predominant mood of his paintings was one of slightly sentimentalized melancholy expressed through cold ethereal blue tones (La Vie, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1903). He also did a number of powerful etchings in a similar vein (The Frugal Repast, 1904)

In 1904 Picasso settled in Paris and quickly became a member of a circle of avant-garde artists and writers. A brief phase in 1904–5 is known as his Rose (or Circus) Period. The predominant blue tones of his earlier work gave way to pinks and greys and the mood became less austere. His favourite subjects were acrobats and dancers, particularly the figure of the harlequin. In 1906 he met Matisse, but although he seems to have admired the work being done by the Fauves, he did not share their interest in the decorative and expressive use of colour (indeed his work often shows little concern with colour, and it is significant that—unlike most painters—he preferred to work at night by artificial light). Until 1909 he lived with other artists and non-conformists in the ramshackle Bateau-Lavoir, but he rarely suffered real poverty (see JACOB) and his work soon began to attract the attention of important collectors, even though he did not exhibit at any of the usual salons. In 1905–6 the Americans Gertrude and Leo Stein, the German Wilhelm Uhde, and the Russian Sergei Shchukin began buying his paintings, and in 1907 he was taken up by the dealer Kahnweiler.

The period around 1906–7 is sometimes referred to as Picasso's ‘Negro period', because of the influence of African sculpture on his work at this time, but rather than marking a coherent phase, this influence was ‘the leading feature of a period of indecision which lasted more than a year’ ( Timothy Hilton, Picasso, 1975). Cézanne was another major influence on Picasso at this time, as he concentrated on the analysis and simplification of form. This process culminated in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (MOMA, New York, 1907), which in its distortions of form was as violent a revolt against tradition as the paintings of the Fauves in the realm of colour. The painting shows five sinister-looking naked women, and its title was jokingly suggested by André Salmon, who pretended to see a resemblance between them and prostitutes in the Carrer d'Avinyo (Avignon Street) in Barcelona. At the time the picture was incomprehensible even to other avant-garde artists, including Matisse and Derain, and it was not shown publicly until 1916 or reproduced until 1925. It is now seen not only as a pivotal work in Picasso's personal development but as the most important single landmark in the development of 20th-century painting. It was the herald of Cubism, which Picasso developed in close association with Braque and then Gris from 1907 up to the First World War. Towards the end of this period, Picasso made an almost equally revolutionary contribution to sculpture by creating works from pieces of commonplace material, for example Guitar (Musée Picasso, Paris, 1912), which is made of cardboard, paper, and string. His sculptures of this type (which represent a development of Cubist collage into three dimensions) were generally fairly small and jokey, but the idea was soon developed in a more ambitious way, and through Tatlin (who visited Picasso in 1914) it inspired Constructivism.

During the First World War Picasso continued working in Paris, but in 1917 he went to Rome with his friend Jean Cocteau to design costumes and scenery for the ballet Parade, which was being produced by Diaghilev. Picasso fell in love with one of the dancers, Olga Koklova, and they married in 1918, moving into a grand apartment in a fashionable part of Paris, as the bohemian days of his youth were left behind. The visit to Italy was also an important factor in introducing the strain of monumental Neoclassicism that was one of the most prominent features of Picasso's work in the early 1920s (Mother and Child, Art Institute of Chicago, 1921), but at this time he also became involved with Surrealism—indeed André Breton hailed him as one of the initiators of the movement. However his predominant interest in the analysis and synthesis of form was at bottom opposed to the irrational elements of Surrealism, its exaltation of chance, or fascination with material drawn from dreams or the unconscious.

Following his serene Neoclassical paintings, Picasso began to make violently expres sive works, fraught with emotional tension, anguish, and despair. This phase begins with The Three Dancers (Tate Gallery, London, 1925), painted at a time when his marriage was becoming a source of increasing unhappiness and frustration (Picasso could not obtain a divorce, so he remained officially married to Olga until her death in 1955; he remarried in 1961). The life-size figures in The Three Dancers are aggressively distorted in a savage parody of classical ballet; Alfred H. Barr calls the picture ‘a turning point in Picasso's art almost as radical as the proto-cubist Demoiselles d'Avignon'. Following this he became concerned with the mythological image of the Minotaur and images of the Dying Horse and the Weeping Woman. The period culminated in his most famous work, Guernica (Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1937), produced for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1937 to express horror and revulsion at the bombing of the Basque capital Guernica by General Franco's German allies during the Spanish Civil War. It was followed by a number of other paintings attacking the cruelty and destructiveness of war, including The Charnel House (MOMA, New York, 1945). ‘Painting is not done to decorate apartments', he said: ‘it is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.’

Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation, but from 1946 he lived mainly in the South of France, where he added pottery to his other activities (from 1948 to 1955 he lived in Vallauris, a town renowned for its ceramics); he settled at his final home, the Villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie at Mougins, in 1961. In 1944 he had joined the Communist Party, and in the post-war years he attended several International Peace Congresses organized by the Party, including one in Sheffield in 1950. His later output as a painter does not compare in momentousness with his pre-war work, but it remained prodigious in terms of sheer quantity. It included a number of variations on paintings by other artists, including 44 on Velázquez's Las Meninas (the theme of the artist and his almost magical powers is one that exercised him greatly throughout his career). Some critics think that Picasso remained a great master to the end of his long life, but others see a sad falling off in his post-war work. Douglas Cooper, for example, described the paintings of his old age as ‘incoherent doodles done by a frenetic dotard in the anteroom of death', whereas to John Richardson they constitute ‘a phenomenal finale to a phenomenal œuvre'. These pictures are often aggressively sexual in subject and almost frenzied in brushwork (Reclining Nude with Necklace, Tate Gallery, London, 1968); they have been seen as sources for Neo-Expressionism.

Picasso's interest in sculpture was fairly sporadic, much of his three-dimensional work being executed in short bursts of activity, but in this field too he ranks as one of the outstanding figures in 20th-century art. In Modern Sculpture (1965) Alan Bowness writes that ‘Picasso's sculpture sparkles with bright ideas—enough to keep many a lesser man occupied for the whole of a working lifetime … it is not inconceivable that the time will come when his activities as a sculptor in the second part of his life are regarded as of more consequence than his later paintings'. His best-known sculptures include some slight but amusing works in which he demonstrated his remarkable sharpness of eye in transforming found objects (see OBJET TROUVÉ); the most celebrated example is Head of A Bull, Metamorphosis (Musée Picasso, Paris, 1943), made of the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle. However, he also made much more ambitious and considered pieces, the largest being the over-lifesize bronze Man with a Sheep (1943), one cast of which stands in the main square in Vallauris.

As a graphic artist (draughtsman, etcher, lithographer, linocutter), Picasso ranks with the greatest of the century, one of his outstanding achievements being the set of etchings known as the Vollard Suite (see VOLLARD). He was a prolific book illustrator, and as few other artists had the power to concentrate the impress of his genius in even the smallest and slightest of his works. Picasso's emotional range is as wide as his varied technical mastery. By turns playful and tragic, his work is suffused with a passionate love of life, and no artist has more devastatingly exposed the cruelty and folly of his fellow men or more rapturously celebrated the physical pleasures of love. There are several museums devoted to Picasso's work in France and Spain, the largest being in Paris and Barcelona; other examples of his huge output (which has been estimated at over 20,000 works) are in collections throughout the world.

Just as Picasso's work has been more discussed than that of any other modern artist, so his personal life has inspired a flood of writing, particularly regarding his relationships with women. He once described women as either ‘goddesses or doormats’ and he has been criticized for allegedly demeaning them in his work (especially his later erotic paintings) as well as mistreating them in person. Several of the women in his life came out of their relationships with him badly. His first wife became almost deranged, screaming abuse at him in public, and his second wife committed suicide some years after his death, as did Marie-Thérèse Walter, who became his mistress in 1927, when she was 17 and he was 45. Picasso tried unsuccessfully to prevent two of his long-term lovers from publishing their memoirs of life with him: Fernande Olivier's Picasso et ses amis (1933, translated as Picasso and His Friends, 1965), and Françoise Gilot's Life with Picasso (1964). ( Olivier, an artists' model whom he met in 1904, was his first great love; Gilot, a painter, was the mother of two of his children including Paloma Picasso (1949– ), a jewellery designer.) John Richardson describes Gilot's book as telling the story of a ‘young girl seduced, manipulated and betrayed by a sadistic old Bluebeard’ and writes that it outraged Picasso so much (he maintained he was the one who had been betrayed) that it ‘cast a shadow over the rest of his life'. David Sylvester, however, regards it as ‘one of the most illuminating and entertaining books ever written about an artist'.