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.