Biographies

Pablo Picasso will be remembered as the 20th Century greatest artist as was Michelangelo during the 16th Century.

Picasso was probably the only artist who managed to become a living legend after testing all new forms of art though he was not the only one who invented Cubism. Still he had this rare capacity to pick what others had achieved to achieve his own style and be way ahead of other painters.

He started with classical painting and had enough inventiveness to improve his production always searching original ways to express himself. There has been a strong continuity during his career at least between 1896 and 1965 to make him place on the highest pedestal though his creative instinct appeared somewhat blurred during the last ten years of his life, probably because he had gone through all possible processes.

Picasso was a genius, a man who had art running in his veins but little heart as a common individual as he sacrificed his life for the sake of creation. Nothing else counted, even the many women who fell in love with him. In fact they had become the willing servants of a kind of living god who liked above all to have his ego flattered. Women were simply subjects or objects who nurtured his passion for painting. When he had enough of one he would find another and in every sense of the word Picasso was a vampire.

His first real victims were not women but great artists from whom he drew his inspiration. He would copy them at first and after literally devouring their works he went on to readapt them in his manner so as to climb the ladder leading to fame. He did so with classical masters and with modern painters and was in this way always ahead of others. In fact his genius originated in his aptitude to transform what had already existed.

Many art historians tend to forget that the roots of Cubism can be found in early antique Greek art or in African art. All the more many painters had flirted with that form of art during many centuries. In effect Cubism did not come to light at the turn of the 20th Century but was in the air long ago like a formula that several scientists can sense but not find. Picasso had the genius to open the door to Cubism and to carry out an incredible revolution but before coming to that point he also had an incredible appetite for absorbing all known forms of art thanks to his multiple talents. Finally Picasso, who was the object of dozens of books and whose “catalogue raisonné” covers 34 volumes, was unique as a result of his immense work as a painter, sculptor, engraver and draughtsman

At 12 Picasso painted his first works and in 1895 his family settled in Barcelona. AT 14 he was admitted in the school of Fine Arts of la Lonja and during the winter of 1897-1898 he followed courses at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. After returning to Barcelona in 1899 he frequented the intellectual and artistic circles which used to meet in the El Quatre Gats cabaret.

In 1900, he joined his friend Isidoro Nonell in Paris but only mingled with Spaniard exiles there. However Berthe Weill bought a painting from him and in 1901 Ambroise Vollard showed his works in an exhibition in the French capital. At that time, he started to sign his works, racehorse and cabaret scenes with the name of Picasso.

The young artist returned to Spain at the end of 1901 and went back a year later to Paris where he stayed during some eleven months. Back to Spain for another year in 1903 he finally decided to settle for good in the French capital where he rented a studio in an old wooden building at number 13 of the rue Ravignan, called the house of “the Trapper” and which Apollinaire nicknamed “The Bateau Lavoir” (The boat wash-house).

He lived and worked in this somewhat derelict studio during some years with Fernande Olivier who was his model. Montmartre was then a meeting point for many artists such as Max Jacob, Van Dongen, Matisse, Derain or Braque.

It was in Picasso's studio that was organised the famous Banquet in the honour of the Douanier Rousseau in 1908. From that year the Russian collector Chtchoukine bought works from Picasso who managed to come out gradually from poverty.

He had previously gone through his blue, pink and primitive (African art) periods and was already tackling Cubism, a new form of art.

In 1910 Picasso went with Derain in Cadaques and the following year to Céret with Braque and Juan Gris. In 1912 he was in Sorgues with Braque while the young German-born dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler took him under exclusive contract.

While he was working for the decors of Daghilev's Russian ballets Picasso met Olga Kokhlova, a girl from that troop who fell in love with him. He married her in 1918 and she soon gave him a son. The ballet representation in Paris caused a scandal while Aksionov published a book on Picasso in Moscow. Between 1919 and 1924, the artist worked again for the Russian Ballets and for Manuel de Falla's “Tricorn” and Stravinsky's “Pulcinella”.

In 1928-1929 he was in Dinard and worked there before travelling to Spain twice.

In 1933 and 1934, the years he worked on the theme of the “Minotaur”. At the start of the 1930's he had an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter while still married to Olga whom he left in 1934 without divorcing her.

The Spanish Civil War started in 1937 and after the victory of the fascist regime of General Franco Picasso decided he would not return to Spain. During this sombre period he painted his famous painting “Guernica” and met Dora Maar with whom he lived until 1944.

At the outbreak of World War Two Picasso was in Royan, Southern France, and back in Paris in 1940. He never left the French capital during the Nazi occupation spending the war years like someone who was strangely indifferent to the plight of French people. Such attitude was never clarified. After the war he decided to settle in Southern France.

He then met Françoise Gilot with whom he had two children. During several months in 1946 he worked in the Grimaldi castle, which later became the first Picasso Museum thanks to an important donation he made after his departure.

After 1948 he was much active in Vallauris where he reactivated the local craft of ceramics. He left Françoise Gilot in 1953 and then worked in Cannes two years later. His wife Olga had died in 1955 and in 1958 he bought the Vauvenargues castle and met Jacqueline Roque whom he married. They settled in 1961 in Mougins where he lived until his death in 1973 at 92 producing several paintings every day.

During all his life Picasso produced an enormous amount of engravings which were listed in the Bernard Geiser and Brigitte Baer catalogue: “Picasso painter and engraver, catalogue raisonné of engraved works and lithographs and monotypes”. These including the “Minotauromachie” of 1935, the “ Sueno y mentira de Franco" series and the series of the "Suite Vollard" (1937).

Picasso also illustrated many books (at least 100 illustrations), notably:
The Poems of André Salmon (1905)Alcools by Apollinaire (1908)Saint-Matorel by Max Jacob (four etchings) (1911)The Siege of Jerusalem, also by M. Jacob (1914)Le Cornet à dé (M. Jacob 1917)Calligrammes by Apollinaire (1918)Le Manuscrit trouvé dans un chapeau by A. Salmon (1919)Cravates de Chanvre by Pierre Reverdy (1922)Apollinaire Vivant by André Billy (1923)Les Métamorphoses d'Ovide (1931) (30 etchings)Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu de Balzac (1932) (13 etchings and woodcuts) Lysistrata by Aristophane (1934)La Barre d'appui and les Yeux Fertiles by Paul Eluard (1936)Histoire naturelle (Natural History) de Buffon (1942) and so on.

Picasso produced some 350 sculptures, notably a metal work for the Civic Center of Chicago and “Sylvette”, an 8 metre-high sculpture in cement and granite for the Bowcentrum of Rotterdam. A catalogue of his sculptures, “Das Plastiche Werk. Werkverzeichnis der Skulpturen”, was published by Werner Spies and Christine Piot.

His first known sculpture was the seated woman of 1902, which was made under the influence of Rodin, also like the Fool and the Harlequin of 1905. In 1906-1907 his relief of a head of woman resembled via its primitive style his paintings of the Demoiselles d'Avignon. Working under the influence of African art, he realised also the figures of 1907 like wood totems painted with red and white colours as well as the head of a woman in 1909-1910.

His three-dimensional objects, in cardboard or wood, of the 1913-1914 period often accompanied Cubist paintings. Picasso then ignored sculpture until the 1928-1929 years when he produced his four metallic constructions with the help of Julio Gonzales who made him acquainted with the art of welding and working metal.

In 1950 Picasso made the sculpture of a goat with a pierced basket, a nailed wood plank, ceramic jars, a can, barbed wire and a paddle assembled with plaster which was produced as a unique bronze sculpture two years later. The artist also realised paper and cardboard sculptures after 1960.

Most interesting is his incredible painted work. Picasso was already awarded a prize during the National Fine Art exhibition of Madrid in 1897 and a gold medal at the Provincial Exhibition of Malaga. In 1899 he managed to free himself from classical influences and his admiration for Goya and El Greco. He had also been impressed by the works of Manet, Van Gogh and Gauguin.

The 1900-1903 years correspond to his Blue period when he discovered Degas, Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec. He lived then in misery and his paintings somewhat recall his sufferings as a penniless Spanish immigrant discovering Paris.

His Rose (pink) period dates from the 1904-1906 years when he expressed more hope regarding his future. He no longer painted tramps and ill children but young showmen in carnival costumes and acrobats with some kind of Lautrec's touch. Meanwhile the year 1904 saw the emergence of Fauvism and Expressionism and these movements partly paved the way to Cubism and Abstraction.

At the end of 1906, Picasso became fascinated by African (primitive) art after he had seen some masks and statues in Derain's studio. A year later and after several preliminary studies he painted the “Demoiselles d'Avignon” which was seen as heralding Cubism though this work was more in line with those of the “Die Brucke” movement which was blossoming at the same time in Germany.

The main novelty in this painting was the fragmenting of female bodies seen under various angles. In fact art critics really spoke of “cubes” when they saw Georges Braque's “Houses in l'Estaque” (1908) and some landscapes this artist had painted in 1909 in La Roche-Guyon.

After the Demoiselles d'Avignon Picasso painted figures and still lifes which were reminiscent of those produced by Cézanne and it was only in 1909, in his landscapes of la Horta del Ebro, that he suggested cubes in the manner of Braque. His only other painting that represented a hint to a forthcoming passage to Cubism was the “Family of Harlequins” of 1908.

In 1911, Picasso turned his back on austerity and used vivid colours in his Cubist works when he applied thick patches and dots on his canvasses.

A year later, following Braque's example, he produced works with glued pieces of paper, representations of letters, words, newspaper cuttings, wood imitation, tobacco packs and numbers as well as real objects during his stay in Sorgues. From then on painting became itself an object and such integration of objects in works appeared as a refusal to let analytic Cubism stray towards total abstraction. In 1913-1914, Picasso produced his first assembled sculptures prolonging the process of integrating objects in his works.

The outbreak of the First World War disrupted many modern movements and affected the development of Cubism. Picasso found himself isolated and started to paint synthetic works that showed a modification of his style. He only kept stylistic cubist elements and chose to apply more colours in his paintings, which he treated in a rather Expressionist manner. This led to more freedom in his themes and style.

In 1917 he switched back to some kind of realism while working on “Ballet Parade” whereas Surrealism was emerging. Then followed his antique or neo-classical period where the influence of Ingres seemed to be much present, notably during the early 1920's when Picasso painted nudes inspired by antique Roman statues after his visit to Rome as well as a series of Maternity paintings which followed the birth of his son. Still he produced in 1921 the “Three Musicians” inspired by an early work by Henri Hayden and the “Three Masks”, both works being regarded as being among his most important Cubist paintings.

Following his discovery of Italian Renaissance works he realised a series of Harlequins in 1923 and painted many big still lifes, some reinvented Cubist works, which were exhibited by Paul Rosenberg in 1926.

He then frequented Surrealist artists to whose principles he was somewhat attached and worked in their manner painting mainly monstrous deformed female bodies in a sadistic way while in Dinard from 1925 until 1928. These probably exhaled his mood towards Olga and other women as well as his sexual obsessions or simply his anguish at that time.

Picasso produced this work after the bombing of the small town of Guernica by Nazi warplanes (Hitler had sent troops to help Franco's army), which participated in a kind of rehearsal of the German invasion of Europe three years later.

He showed a Minotaur with human eyes, unmoved and dominating in a scene lit by a lamp under which he placed crying women holding their dead children as well as wounded horses expressing their pain. This spectacular work contributed to the making of Picasso's legend and the artist always refused to show it in Spain until the ending of the Franco regime.

Guernica was deposited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Spaniards waited until 1980 to admire it for good in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

This “Cubo-Expressionist” work was not the only one achieved by Picasso during the late 1930's. He had made several preliminary studies and produced some paintings linked to it such as “The Crying Woman”, “Seated Women” or “The Young girl with a lollipop”.

Dora Maar was then his favourite model and as a well-known photographer she took several snapshots of Guernica in progress. Picasso would often represent her in a somewhat deformed and unflattering way, as he seemed much perturbed by the Spanish Civil War and the mounting dramatic situation in the rest of Europe.

In 1939 his “Fishing at Night in Antibes” appeared as a nostalgic testimony of some lost happiness. During the Second World War, Picasso mainly painted still lifes, which were exhibited in Paris in 1945 (Louis Carré Gallery). His love affair with Dora Maar had ended around July 1944 at a time when he had not yet got rid of his longstanding anguish.

From 1952 he painted many landscapes, still lifes and portraits, including those of Jacqueline Roque, his new companion. He also painted works after several famous masters such as Courbet, Delacroix and others.

In 1955 he started to paint a series of studios in Cannes after paying tribute to Matisse who had died the previous year. He then painted some 50 works after “Las Meninas” by Velazquez until 1958 and produced engravings on bullfights as well as 27 variations of “Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe” by Manet produced in Mougins between 1959 and 1961.

Picasso then painted a series after the “Rape of the Sabines” by David and in 1963 a series of the Painter and his Model which he pursued until the end of his life and in which he showed his love and hatred of women.

From 1960 until his death he produced some 1,000 works and at 90 he still was full of energy though he tended to be quite repetitive and less creative in his production of musketeers, ironic self-portraits and erotic scenes.

There are two important poles in Picasso's career, the Analytic Cubist period of 1910-1913 and the Expressionist cubist period of Guernica in 1937. His period of pure Cubism, which went somewhat against his extrovert temperament, was brief. Most of his works were based on Expressionist Cubism (Synthetic Cubism) culminating with “Guernica” and which was present already in “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”. Such form of painting served to illustrate his passions, his emotions as well as what he admired and loathed throughout his life.

Picasso was called a half god as he created an entire new artistic world in addition to being with Braque the inventor of Cubism, one of the greatest revolutions in art.