Front of the Class: Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso on the 25^th of October 1881 in Malaga, Spain to Jose Ruiz y Blasco and Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father was a painter, art professor and museum curator. It was from his father that he had his first formal lesson in art. His first exhibited work was in 1986, the First Communion, an academic oil painting. This was followed by another large oil painting “Science and Charity” in 1897 which received the gold medal ward in Malaga. He attended several art schools but never finished his college degree. After dropping out of the Royal Academy of San Fernando he went to Paris in 1904 and lived with poet/journalist Max Jacob.

In his first few years in Paris he lived in extreme poverty. He co-founded the magazine Arte Joven in did the entire first edition. It was there where he started to sign his works Picasso and not his previous signature Pablo Ruiz Picasso. In 1904 he met and started what would be a long term relationship with Fernande Olivier, the woman in the Rose period paintings. However, Picasso would eventually Fernande for Marcelle Humbert later on.

After gaining some popularity, Picasso began enjoying his life in Paris. He had some illustrious friends whom he frequently entertained. Among them are Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein. He also had a number of mistresses, aside from his wife.

In 1818 he married ballerina Olga Khokhlova whom he met while designing the ballet Parade in Rome. He introduced her to the life of high society in the 20s. Olga would give him his first child, Paulo. In 1927 Picasso met Marie-Therese Walter and begun his secret relationship with this seventeen year old lover with whom he had his daughter, Maia. This would lead to his separation with his wife Olga. Another partner was the painter Dora Maar. They were lovers during the late 30s and early 40s. She documented the famous painting Guernica.

During the Second World War Picasso remained in Paris although he was not able to show his works since the Germans appreciated different style in art. He thus remained and painted in seclusion in his studio. When Paris was liberated Picasso found a new love interest in a young art student named Francoise Gilot. They became lovers and had two children, Claude and Paloma. Unlike his other women, Gilot left him for his infidelity. This devastated Picasso particularly since he was no longer the young man that he used to be. Several ink drawings of Picasso during this time showed this sentiment especially his drawing of Genevieve Laport whom he had a very short six-week love affair.

However this did not stop Picasso from having another partner. He met Jacqueline Roque in whom he married in 1961. She would be with him for the remainder of his life. He died on the 8^th of April 1973 in Mougins, France while in the middle of entertaining his friends. His last words were, “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink any more (Picasso, 2007)”.

Although Pablo Picasso achieved great success and fame for his work, his personal life, particularly his love life, became as much an object of interest as his works. His love of women set the course of his life and became the themes in many of his pieces. Even in his early works this is quite evident. Leo Steinberg (n.d.), wrote about one of his 1901 paintings, “It portrays a handsome young woman, perhaps a courtesan, seated at ease and proud of her outfit, which includes, from top down, a spectacular hat, a high choker, and a flatland of immense scope. Anatomically speaking, this décolletage is improbable. But the picture is not about a physique, nor about the cut of a gown. What comes across is the young woman’s cool in braving the profoundest of possible necklines, where every increment of exposure factors a psychic enormity. This vertiginous plunge, so far from informing us about dress design, seems rather to visualize the wearer’s high-risk insouciance, her right to preen as she chooses. So that even here, in a picture by the twenty-year-old Picasso, the given appearance is not so much the catch of a roving eye as a feeling from inside out”.

Another aspect of Picasso’s life which was under great speculation was his views and practice of politics. Picasso did not fight nor took the side of any country during the Spanish Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War. His neutrality in all the three wars became an object of debate, even among his friends. His neutrality during the First and Second World War was forgivable since he was a mere foreigner living in France. However his inaction during the Spanish War made others concluded that he was a coward. Above this he was also a communist. He joined the French Communist Party in 1944. He was an active member and even received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1950. He was its loyal member until his death in 1973.

Picasso’s ambiguous political beliefs and indifference toward the war could be well described by Read’s (n.d.) interpretation of Picasso’s The Kitchen,“The Kitchen is a radical declaration of artistic insubordination, a cat amongst the Jdanovist pigeons. Refuting Jdanov and commemorating Apollinaire were, indeed, perfectly compatible intentions. Apollinaire, always ready to champion freedom of expression, had recognized the subversive nature of certain apparently apolitical works”.

His paintings would dictate the course of his life and, vise versa; his life would dictate the course of his paintings. This was quite evident even before he settled in Paris. Prior to his move to Paris, Picasso spent many hours t the El Quatre Gats café. He met and befriended many young artists including the poet Sabartes and the painter Casagemas. It was during this time when he became acquainted with Spanish modernism which caused a strain in his relationship with his parents. His parents could not understand and forgive him for his “betrayal of classicism” (Picasso, n.d.). Later on his life and works would be classified in different periods.

In 1901, one of his closest friend Casagemas committed suicide. “I begun to paint in blue, when I realized that Casademas had died,” he later wrote (Picasso, n.d.). During this time he painted the Death of Casagemas in color and the Death of Casagemas in blue. This was followed by Evocation – The Burial of Casagemas which in style was greatly influenced by El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgas (Picasso, n.d.). As he lived in poverty in Paris and Barcelona, all his works during the period were in Blue, depicting his loneliness and despair. This would be then classified as The Blue Period.

By 1905 he would then have his relationship with Fernande and would live with Max Jacob. His works would take a different form as be begun to enjoy life and the gloom of the death of his friend would be lifted. Picasso then lightened his style, from blue he begun to use pink, yellow, rose and gray. Harlequins and circus performers would be the common subject of his works. This works would mark the beginning of his success financially and as an artist. This was called the Rose Period.

His works would then take another form when he saw the Iberian sculptures. He would then start experimenting with geometrical forms which would later be exhibited in the Cubism Period. In 1907 he painted his first Cubist painting, the Les demoiselles d’Avignon. Here combined his ideas of cubism and “primitive art” (Picasso, n.d.). This was then called by the critics as the Negro Period.

In 1909 Picasso shifted to Analytical Cubism, which shows a central perspective and splits forms. This was marked by his 1909 Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table and was also the style in the paintings of Fernande. It would seem that by 1912 Picasso had exhausted all the avenues of Analytical Cubism since by that time his works would reflect collages of still life as seen in The Guitar. This newspaper and other material cut outs would then be the Synthetic or Collage Cubism (Chew, 2007). His paintings would also show a touch of realism, as seen in Pierrot, since the First World War would disrupt his ideal life.

After his affair with Cubism, Picasso returned to Classicism. His works, such as The Lovers, would mark the Classicist Period although time and again he would revert to cubism, as seen in his 1921’s Three Musicians. When he met and begun a love affair with the young Marie Therese Walters, his works showed a more distorted an deformed style, as seen in his 1932 painting of Marie Therese, the His Woman with Flower. This would be the Period of Surrealism.

War also had great effects on the works of Picasso. His famous and historic Guernica depicted the tragedies of the town in 1937 and would be concluded in his 1945 Charnel House.

According to Picasso (n.d.), “The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present. I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future. I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.”

Critic Gerard Genette wrote, “Picasso is only himself through the vehicle of the styles that belong successively to Lautrec, Braque, Ingres, etc., and Stravinsky by means of his access to impressionism, polytonality, neo-classicism and his late conversion to serial discipline” (Krause, 1998). Yet despite the criticisms, and with much debate about him being the inventor of Cubism, it could not be denied that Picasso contributed much to modern art. His paintings are some of the most expensive paintings today. The Garcon a la pipe was sold at $104 million (Picasso, 2007).

Modern art movement would not have been the way it is today without Picasso’s works. Cubism could not be disputed as initiated, if not invented by Picasso. At the same time, his newspaper clippings elevated collage into an art work. This significant movement in modern art would eventually lead to the present style of pop culture.

His Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was significant in the development of modern art and in development of The Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 2003). Other museums also take pride in housing some of his works including the Musée Picasso in Paris which houses an immense collection of his works.

Works Cited

Chew, Robin. 2007. Pablo Picasso Artist.