Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y

V

Cubist Painting

In the summer of 1906, during a stay in Gosol, a remote Catalan village in the Pyrenees, Picasso’s work entered a new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African art. The key work of this early period is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York); the title comes from the name of a street in the red-light district of Barcelona and the painting depicts five prostitutes, their figures aggressively distorted and the faces of two of them recalling the African masks that Picasso admired and collected at this time. So radical in style was this picture—its surface resembling fractured glass—that it was not understood even by contemporary avant-garde painters and critics. Spatial depth is absent and the ideal form of the female nude is restructured into facets—the essential features that distinguish Cubism.

From the time of their first meeting in 1906 until the outbreak of World War I, Picasso and Braque worked closely together. Inspired by the volumetric treatment of form seen in the late work of Paul Cézanne, they began to paint landscapes in a style later described by a critic as being made of “little cubes”, thus leading to the term “Cubism”. They were concerned with breaking down and analysing form, and together they developed the first phase of Cubism, known as Analytical Cubism. Monochromatic colour schemes were favoured in their depictions of radically fragmented motifs, whose several sides were shown simultaneously. Picasso’s favourite subjects were musical instruments, still-life objects, and his friends; one famous portrait is Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1910, Art Institute of Chicago). In 1912, pasting paper and a piece of oilcloth to the canvas and combining these with painted areas, Picasso created his first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning (Musée Picasso, Paris).

The technique marked the transition to Synthetic Cubism. This second phase of Cubism is more decorative, with colour playing a major role. Picasso used Synthetic Cubism throughout his career, but by no means exclusively. Two works of 1915 demonstrate his simultaneous work in completely different styles: Harlequin (Museum of Modern Art, New York) is a Synthetic Cubist painting, whereas a fine pencil drawing of his dealer, Vollard (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), is executed in his Ingresque style, so called because the draughtsmanship emulates that of the 19th-century French Neo-Classical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

VI

Cubist Sculpture

While he was creating this revolution in painting, Picasso was doing almost equally innovative work in sculpture. Traditionally there had been two approaches to sculpture—modelling (in which the form is built up from a substance such as clay) and carving (in which the form is created by removing material from a block of stone or other suitable material). Picasso changed this by putting together sculpture from pieces of commonplace material (a development of the collage elements that he sometimes included in his Cubist paintings). An example is Guitar (1912, Musée Picasso, Paris), made of cardboard, paper, and string.

Picasso’s sculptures in this vein were generally small and almost in the nature of jokes, but the idea was soon taken up by other sculptors in much more ambitious form. Among them was the Russian painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, who visited Picasso in 1914. Tatlin’s variations on Picasso’s method became the foundation of Constructivism, a major movement in abstract art.

VII

Realism and Surrealism

After the outbreak of war in 1914, Picasso continued to work in Paris. In 1917 he visited Rome with the writer Jean Cocteau to meet the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, whose company was preparing for a production of Parade (the storyline of which was by Cocteau and the music by Erik Satie). Picasso designed the costumes and drop curtain. One of Diaghilev’s dancers, Olga Koklova, became Picasso’s first wife. In a realist style, Picasso painted several portraits of her around 1917, of their son (for example, Paulo as Harlequin; 1924, Musée Picasso, Paris), and of numerous friends. The couple moved into a grand apartment in Paris and Picasso became part of the fashionable world, losing touch with his bohemian youth.

In the immediate post-war period Picasso painted for a time in a style that has been called “classical” and that marked a reaction against the experimental fervour of the pre-war years. Several of Picasso’s most imposing works of this time feature monumentally powerful figures that have something of the solidity and grandeur of ancient sculptures, for example Three Women at the Spring (1921, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Others, such as The Pipes of Pan (1923, Musée Picasso, Paris), were inspired by mythology.

This serenity was short-lived, however, for in the mid-1920s Picasso became interested in Surrealism and then started painting violently expressive pictures that reflected his despair at his increasingly unhappy marriage. The Three Dancers (1925, Tate Gallery, London) is a key work in this phase of his career.

Several Cubist paintings of the early 1930s, stressing harmonious, curvilinear lines and expressing an underlying eroticism, reflect Picasso’s pleasure with his newest love, Marie Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Maïa in 1935. Marie Thérèse, frequently portrayed sleeping, was also the model for the famous Girl Before a Mirror (1932, Museum of Modern Art). In 1935 Picasso made the etching Minotauromachy, a major work combining his minotaur and bullfight themes; in it the disembowelled horse, as well as the bull, prefigure the imagery of Guernica, a painting often called the most important single work of the 20th century.

VIII

Guernica

Picasso was moved to paint Guernica shortly after German planes, acting in support of General Franco, bombarded the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Completed in less than two months, Guernica was hung in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of 1937. The painting does not portray the event; rather, Picasso expressed his outrage by employing such imagery as a bull, a dying horse, a fallen warrior, a mother and dead child, a woman trapped in a burning building, another rushing into the scene, and a figure leaning from a window and holding out a lamp. Despite the complexity of its symbolism, and the impossibility of definitive interpretation, Guernica makes an overwhelming impact in its portrayal of the horrors of war. It now hangs in Madrid’s museum of 20th-century art, the Reina Sofía Art Centre. Dora Maar, Picasso’s companion at the time, took photographs of Guernica while the work was in progress.

IX

Later Works

Picasso remained defiantly in Paris during the German occupation of the city in World War II, but after the war he lived mainly in the South of France, in Vallauris from 1948 and at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a villa in Mougins, from 1961 until his death. He continued to be extremely productive to the end of his long life (not least in ceramics, which he took up in 1946), but it is generally agreed that his post-war output is of lesser importance and interest than his earlier work. He died on April 8, 1973, aged 91.