The enormous body of Picasso's work remains, and the legend lives on—a tribute to the vitality of the “disquieting” Spaniard with the “sombre . . . piercing” eyes who superstitiously believed that work would keep him alive. For nearly 80 of his 91 years Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to and paralleled the whole development of modern art in the 20th century.
Pablo Picasso was born on Oct. 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain. His father was an artist who taught his son to draw and paint from an early age. By the time he was 13, Picasso had surpassed his father. Despite his youth his extraordinary application won him a place at Barcelona's prestigious School of Fine Arts. At age 16 he moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando, but spent much of his time skipping classes and wandering the city to paint. When he moved back to Barcelona in 1899, Picasso joined a group of artists and intellectuals. He began to move away from classical painting methods in which he had been trained and began to experiment and innovate in his art. In 1907 Picasso painted "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," the painting which many point to as the forerunner of and inspiration for Cubism. Picasso went on to become one of the most celebrated and influential painters of the 20th century. A revolutionary artist, Picasso had the vision and the courage to try things that had never been done before and he was not afraid to keep changing. As Picasso himself explained it: “Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should."
Family tree (click to enlarge)
Life and career
Early years
Pablo Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of drawing, and Maria Picasso López. His unusual adeptness for drawing began to manifest itself early, around the age of 10, when he became his father's pupil in La Coruña, where the family moved in 1891. From that point his ability to experiment with what he learned and to develop new expressive means quickly allowed him to surpass his father's abilities. In La Coruña his father shifted his own ambitions to those of his son, providing him with models and support for his first exhibition there at the age of 13.The family moved to Barcelona in the autumn of 1895, and Pablo entered the local art academy (La Llotja), where his father had assumed his last post as professor of drawing. The family hoped that their son would achieve success as an academic painter, and in 1897 his eventual fame in Spain seemed assured; in that year his painting Science and Charity, for which his father modeled for the doctor, was awarded an honorable mention in Madrid at the Fine Arts Exhibition.
The Spanish capital was the obvious next stop for the young artist intent on gaining recognition and fulfilling family expectations. Pablo Ruiz duly set off for Madrid in the autumn of 1897 and entered the Royal Academy of San Fernando. But finding the teaching there stupid, he increasingly spent his time recording life around him, in the cafés, on the streets, in the brothels, and in the Prado, where he discovered Spanish painting. He wrote: “The Museum of paintings is beautiful. Velázquez first class; from El Greco some magnificent heads, Murillo does not convince me in every one of his pictures.” Works by these and other artists would capture Picasso's imagination at different times during his long career. Goya, for instance, was an artist whose works Picasso copied in the Prado in 1898 (a portrait of the bullfighter Pepe Illo and the drawing for one of the Caprichos, Bien tirada está, which shows a Celestina [procuress] checking a young maja's stockings). These same characters reappear in his late work—Pepe Illo in a series of engravings (1957) and Celestina as a kind of voyeuristic self-portrait, especially in the series of etchings and engravings known as Suite 347 (1968).
Picasso fell ill in the spring of 1898 and spent most of the remaining year convalescing in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro in the company of his Barcelona friend Manuel Pallarès. When Picasso returned to Barcelona in early 1899, he was a changed man: he had put on weight, he had learned to live on his own in the open countryside, he spoke Catalan, and most importantly he had made the decision to break with his art school training and to reject his family's plans for his future. He even began to show a decided preference for his mother's surname, and more often than not he signed his works P.R. Picasso (by late 1901 he had dropped the Ruiz altogether).
In Barcelona Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers whose eyes were turned toward Paris. These were his friends at the café Els Quatre Gats (“The Four Cats,” styled after the Chat Noir [“Black Cat”] in Paris), where Picasso had his first Barcelona exhibition in February 1900, and they were the subjects of more than 50 portraits (in mixed media) in the show. In addition, there was a dark, moody “modernista” painting, Last Moments (later painted over), showing the visit of a priest to the bedside of a dying woman, a work that was accepted for the Spanish section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in that year. Eager to see his own work in place and to experience Paris firsthand, Picasso set off in the company of his studio-mate Carles Casagemas ( Portrait of Carles Casagemas, 1899) to conquer, if not Paris, at least a corner of Montmartre.
After just two months Picasso returned to Spain with Casagemas, who had become despondent about a failed love affair. Having tried unsuccessfully to amuse his friend in Málaga, Picasso took off for Madrid, where he worked as an art editor for a new journal, Arte Joven. Casagemas returned to Paris and attempted to shoot the woman he loved, then turned the gun on himself and died. The impact on Picasso was deep: it was not just that he had lost his loyal friend and perhaps felt a sense of guilt for having abandoned him; more importantly, he had gained the emotional experience and the material that would stimulate the powerful expressiveness of the works of the so-called Blue Period. Picasso made two death portraits of Casagemas several months later in 1901 as well as two funeral scenes ( Mourners and Evocation), and in 1903 Casagemas appeared as the artist in the enigmatic painting La Vie.
Picasso's personal circumstances also changed at the end of 1904, when Fernande Olivier became his mistress. Her presence inspired many works during the years leading up to Cubism, especially on their trip to Gosol in 1906 ( Woman with Loaves), including the sculpture Head of a Woman (1909) and several paintings related to it ( Woman with Pears, 1909).
Colour never came easily to Picasso, and he reverted to a generally more Spanish (i.e., monochromatic) palette. The tones of the Blue Period were replaced from late 1904 to 1906 in the so-called Rose Period by those of pottery, of flesh, and of the earth itself ( The Harem, 1906). Picasso seems to have been working with colour in an attempt to come closer to sculptural form, especially in 1906 ( Two Nudes; La Toilette). His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) and a Self-Portrait with Palette (1906) show this development as well as the influence of his discovery of primitive Iberian sculpture.
In Barcelona Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers whose eyes were turned toward Paris. These were his friends at the café Els Quatre Gats (“The Four Cats,” styled after the Chat Noir [“Black Cat”] in Paris), where Picasso had his first Barcelona exhibition in February 1900, and they were the subjects of more than 50 portraits (in mixed media) in the show. In addition, there was a dark, moody “modernista” painting, Last Moments (later painted over), showing the visit of a priest to the bedside of a dying woman, a work that was accepted for the Spanish section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in that year. Eager to see his own work in place and to experience Paris firsthand, Picasso set off in the company of his studio-mate Carles Casagemas ( Portrait of Carles Casagemas, 1899) to conquer, if not Paris, at least a corner of Montmartre.
Discovery of Paris
One of Picasso's principal artistic discoveries on that trip (October–December) was colour—not the drab colours of the Spanish palette, the black of the shawls of Spanish women, or the ochres and browns of the Spanish landscape, but brilliant colour—the colour of Van Gogh, of new fashion, of a city celebrating a world's fair. Using charcoal, pastels, watercolours, and oils, Picasso recorded life in the French capital ( Lovers in the Street, 1900). In Moulin de la Galette (1900) he paid tribute to French artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen as well as his Catalan compatriot Ramon Casas.After just two months Picasso returned to Spain with Casagemas, who had become despondent about a failed love affair. Having tried unsuccessfully to amuse his friend in Málaga, Picasso took off for Madrid, where he worked as an art editor for a new journal, Arte Joven. Casagemas returned to Paris and attempted to shoot the woman he loved, then turned the gun on himself and died. The impact on Picasso was deep: it was not just that he had lost his loyal friend and perhaps felt a sense of guilt for having abandoned him; more importantly, he had gained the emotional experience and the material that would stimulate the powerful expressiveness of the works of the so-called Blue Period. Picasso made two death portraits of Casagemas several months later in 1901 as well as two funeral scenes ( Mourners and Evocation), and in 1903 Casagemas appeared as the artist in the enigmatic painting La Vie.
Blue Period
Between 1901 and mid-1904, when blue was the predominant colour in his paintings, Picasso moved back and forth between Barcelona and Paris, taking material for his work from one place to the other. For example, his visits to the Women's Prison of Saint-Lazare in Paris in 1901–02, which provided him with free models and compelling subject matter ( The Soup, 1902), were reflected in his depictions of Barcelona street people—blind or lonely beggars and castaways in 1902–03 ( Crouching Woman, 1902; Blind Man's Meal, 1903; Old Jew and a Boy, 1903). The subject of maternity (women were allowed to keep nursing children with them at the prison) also preoccupied Picasso at a time when he was searching for material that would best express traditional art-historical subjects in 20th-century terms.The move to Paris
Picasso finally made the decision to move permanently to Paris in the spring of 1904, and his work reflects a change of spirit and especially a change of intellectual and artistic currents. The traveling circus and saltimbanques became a subject he shared with a new and important friend, Guillaume Apollinaire. To both the poet and the painter these rootless wandering performers ( Girl Balancing on a Ball, 1905; The Actor, 1905) became a kind of evocation of the artist's position in modern society. Picasso specifically made this identification in Family of Saltimbanques (1905), where he assumes the role of Harlequin and Apollinaire is the strongman (according to their mutual friend, the writer André Salmon).Picasso's personal circumstances also changed at the end of 1904, when Fernande Olivier became his mistress. Her presence inspired many works during the years leading up to Cubism, especially on their trip to Gosol in 1906 ( Woman with Loaves), including the sculpture Head of a Woman (1909) and several paintings related to it ( Woman with Pears, 1909).
Colour never came easily to Picasso, and he reverted to a generally more Spanish (i.e., monochromatic) palette. The tones of the Blue Period were replaced from late 1904 to 1906 in the so-called Rose Period by those of pottery, of flesh, and of the earth itself ( The Harem, 1906). Picasso seems to have been working with colour in an attempt to come closer to sculptural form, especially in 1906 ( Two Nudes; La Toilette). His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) and a Self-Portrait with Palette (1906) show this development as well as the influence of his discovery of primitive Iberian sculpture.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Toward the end of 1906 Picasso began work on a large composition that came to be called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). His violent treatment of the female body and masklike painting of the faces (influenced by a study of African art) have made this work controversial. Yet the work was firmly based upon art-historical tradition: a renewed interest in El Greco contributed to the fracturing of the space and the gestures of the figures, while the overall composition owed much to Paul Cézanne's Bathers as well as to J.-A-.D. Ingres's harem scenes. The Demoiselles, however, named by Picasso's friend Max Jacob (to refer to Avignon Street in Barcelona, where sailors found popular brothels), was perceived as a shocking and direct assault: these women were not conventional images of beauty but prostitutes who challenged the very tradition from which they were born. Although he had his collectors by this date (Leo and Gertrude Stein, the Russian merchant Sergey Shchukin) and a dealer (Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler), Picasso chose to roll up the canvas of the Demoiselles and to keep it out of sight for several years.
In 1908 the African-influenced striations and masklike heads were superseded by a technique that incorporated elements he and his new friend Georges Braque found in the work of Cézanne, whose shallow space and characteristic planar brushwork are especially evident in Picasso's work of 1909. Still lifes, inspired by Cézanne, also became an important subject for the first time in Picasso's career.
As Kahnweiler saw it, Cubism signified the opening up of closed form by the “re-presentation” of the form of objects and their position in space instead of their imitation through illusionistic means; and the analytic process of fracturing objects and space, light and shadow, and even colour was likened by Apollinaire to the way in which the surgeon dissects a cadaver. This type of analysis is characteristic of Picasso's work beginning in 1909, especially in the landscapes he made on a trip to Spain that summer ( Factory at Horta de Ebro). These were followed in 1910 with a series of hermetic portraits ( Ambroise Vollard; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler); and in his 1911–12 paintings of seated figures, often playing musical instruments ( The Accordionist, 1911), Picasso merged figures, objects, and space on a kind of grid. The palette was once again limited to monochromatic ochres, browns, and grays.
Neither Braque nor Picasso desired to move into the realm of total abstraction in their Cubist works, although they implicitly accepted inconsistencies such as different points of view, different axes, and different light sources in the same picture. Furthermore, the inclusion of abstract and representational elements on the same picture plane led both artists to reexamine what two-dimensional elements, such as newspaper lettering, signified. A song title, “Ma Jolie,” for instance, could point to events outside the painting; it could refer narratively to Picasso's new mistress, Eva (Marcelle Humbert). But it could also point to compositional elements within the painting, to the function of flat pictorial elements that play off other flat planes or curvilinear motifs. The inclusion of lettering also produced the powerful suggestion that Cubist pictures could be read coming forward from the picture plane rather than receding (in traditional perspective) into it. And the Cubists' manipulation of the picture shape—their use of the oval, for example—redefined the edge of the work in a way that underlined the fact that in a Cubist picture the canvas provides the real space.
Cubism
Picasso and Braque worked together closely during the next few years (1909–12)—the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in this way—and they developed what came to be known as Analytical Cubism. Early Cubist paintings were often misunderstood by critics and viewers because they were thought to be merely geometric art. Yet the painters themselves believed they were presenting a new kind of reality that broke away from Renaissance tradition, especially from the use of perspective and illusion. For example, they showed multiple views of an object on the same canvas to convey more information than could be contained in a single, limited illusionistic view.As Kahnweiler saw it, Cubism signified the opening up of closed form by the “re-presentation” of the form of objects and their position in space instead of their imitation through illusionistic means; and the analytic process of fracturing objects and space, light and shadow, and even colour was likened by Apollinaire to the way in which the surgeon dissects a cadaver. This type of analysis is characteristic of Picasso's work beginning in 1909, especially in the landscapes he made on a trip to Spain that summer ( Factory at Horta de Ebro). These were followed in 1910 with a series of hermetic portraits ( Ambroise Vollard; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler); and in his 1911–12 paintings of seated figures, often playing musical instruments ( The Accordionist, 1911), Picasso merged figures, objects, and space on a kind of grid. The palette was once again limited to monochromatic ochres, browns, and grays.
Neither Braque nor Picasso desired to move into the realm of total abstraction in their Cubist works, although they implicitly accepted inconsistencies such as different points of view, different axes, and different light sources in the same picture. Furthermore, the inclusion of abstract and representational elements on the same picture plane led both artists to reexamine what two-dimensional elements, such as newspaper lettering, signified. A song title, “Ma Jolie,” for instance, could point to events outside the painting; it could refer narratively to Picasso's new mistress, Eva (Marcelle Humbert). But it could also point to compositional elements within the painting, to the function of flat pictorial elements that play off other flat planes or curvilinear motifs. The inclusion of lettering also produced the powerful suggestion that Cubist pictures could be read coming forward from the picture plane rather than receding (in traditional perspective) into it. And the Cubists' manipulation of the picture shape—their use of the oval, for example—redefined the edge of the work in a way that underlined the fact that in a Cubist picture the canvas provides the real space.
