Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor. He spent most of his adult life in France. He is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. He helped start the Cubist movement, invented constructed sculpture, helped invent collage, and created many different styles. For other uses, see Picasso (disambiguation).

Two of his most famous works are the proto-Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937). Guernica shows the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. In the painting, Picasso showed how terrible war can be. His career lasted more than 76 years, from his late teens until his death in 1973.

Picasso started learning art from his father, José Ruiz y Blasco, when he was seven years old. He was very talented as a child. He painted in a realistic way when he was young. In the early 1900s, his style changed as he tried many new ideas and methods. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse inspired Picasso to try bolder styles. The two artists became strong rivals, and critics later often named them as the leaders of modern art.

Picasso's work, especially early in his career, is often divided into periods. The most common ones are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), which is also called the Crystal period. Much of his work from the late 1910s and early 1920s has a neoclassical style. His work in the mid-1920s often has features of Surrealism. Picasso worked hard all his life and became very famous around the world. He earned great wealth for his new ideas in art, and he became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

Early life

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on 25 October 1881 in the city of Málaga, in Andalusia, southern Spain. His father, José Ruiz y Blasco, was a painter and an art teacher. The family had a comfortable middle-class life. Picasso loved drawing from a very young age. When he was seven, his father began teaching him to draw and paint. The family later moved to A Coruña, where his father became a professor.

In 1895, Picasso's seven-year-old sister died of diphtheria. He was very sad about her death. The family then moved to Barcelona, which Picasso came to think of as his true home. He joined the advanced class at the city's art school when he was only 13. At 16, he went to Madrid to study at the country's leading art school, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He did not enjoy formal lessons, though. In Madrid, he visited the Prado museum and admired the work of El Greco. You can see El Greco's style in some of Picasso's later paintings.

Career

Further information: Picasso's Blue Period

Further information: Picasso's Rose Period

See also: Picasso's African Period and Proto-Cubism

Main article: Cubism

Main article: Crystal Cubism

Further information: Picasso and the Ballets Russes

Picasso learned to paint from his father before 1890. His early works are kept at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. He is said to have started his career as a painter in 1894. In 1900 he visited Paris for the first time, and in 1901 he lived in Madrid for a few months. His Blue Period (1901–1904) is known for quiet, sad paintings in shades of blue. Many of them show poor people. His Rose Period (1904–1906) used warmer orange and pink colours. It showed circus people, acrobats and harlequins. In 1907 he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which was partly inspired by African art. After that, Picasso worked with Georges Braque to develop cubism, a style that broke objects into shapes. Around 1912 he started gluing paper pieces onto his artworks. This made the first cubist collage.

Picasso's style kept changing throughout his life. In 1937 he painted Guernica, a large work about a town in the Spanish Civil War. The painting shows the sadness and hardship that war brings. Many people see it as a picture of how terrible war can be. During World War II he stayed in Paris and kept making art there. In his later years he made many new versions of works by famous older painters. He also made bold, colourful paintings and prints. In 1973 he helped get 201 of his paintings ready for the Avignon Arts Festival.

Death

Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France. He had a heart attack caused by pulmonary edema. The evening before, he and his wife Jacqueline had friends over for dinner. That night he painted until 3 a.m. and then went to bed. When he woke up late the next morning, he was too unwell to get out of bed. Jacqueline called his doctor for help, but Picasso died before the doctor arrived.

He was buried at the Château of Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence. He had bought this property in 1958. Only his son Paulo was allowed to attend the funeral. Picasso died without a will, which led to a long disagreement over his belongings. French judges decided that his three other children should share them. Jacqueline and Paulo did not agree with this. In December 1976, the family reached an agreement on how to divide the estate, which was worth $240 million.

Works

Picasso made a huge amount of art during his long life. When he died, he had more than 45,000 works that had not been sold. These included 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, and 7,089 drawings. The most complete list of his works is the catalogue raisonné made by Christian Zervos. It includes more than 16,000 paintings and drawings. Picasso made far more art than most artists of his time. One source says that Bob Ross is the only artist who came close to matching how much he made.

Painting was the form of art where Picasso made his most important contribution. He used colour in bold ways. He relied more on drawing than on soft colour to create shapes and space. A scientific test in 2012 confirmed that he often used ordinary house paint. His early sculptures were carved or shaped, but from 1909 to 1928 he built sculptures from many different materials. One example is Guitar (1912), which is made of metal and wire.

Picasso was interested in all kinds of subjects, and he could work in several styles at once. His Cubist works still showed real objects, such as guitars, violins, and bottles. He painted most of his pictures from imagination or memory. Many of his works reflect people who were important to him. The women in his life were an important source of inspiration, and his changing relationships often shaped his style. His early work is often grouped into the Blue Period and the Rose Period. The famous painting Guernica is one of his few large scenes that tell a story.

Personal life

Some people feel that Picasso treated women unfairly, and his own words about women have often been quoted. He had relationships with many women, starting when he was young. He was married twice and had four children with three women.

His son Paulo Picasso was born to him and Olga Khokhlova, whom he married in 1918. His daughter Maya was born to him and Marie-Thérèse Walter. His children Claude and Paloma were born to him and Françoise Gilot. The photographer and painter Dora Maar was a close companion of Picasso in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She took photographs of the painting of Guernica.

Françoise Gilot left Picasso in 1953 and took their children with her. In 1964 she wrote a book about her life with him. It made him angry, and he cut ties with Claude and Paloma. His relationship with them never got better. Later, Picasso's second wife, Jacqueline Roque, became his wife after they had been together for some time.

Political views

Picasso kept some distance from the Catalan independence movement when he was young. Still, he generally supported it and was friends with some of its activists. He did not join any army during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, or World War II. In 1940 he applied for French citizenship, but it was refused. The reason given was his "extremist ideas evolving towards communism." This was not made public until 2003.

When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Picasso was 54. The Republicans soon named him director of the Prado, and he paid to move the museum's collection to Geneva. The war inspired his first openly political work, The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937). It criticised Francisco Franco and the fascists, and it was made to raise money for the Spanish Republican cause. In 1944 he joined the French Communist Party. He attended the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Poland in 1948. In 1950 he received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government. A 1953 portrait of Joseph Stalin was criticised by the Party for not being realistic enough, but Picasso stayed a loyal member until he died. His dealer, D-H. Kahnweiler, said Picasso's communism was "sentimental" rather than political. He added, "He has never read a line of Karl Marx, nor of Engels of course." Picasso's communism was common among continental intellectuals and artists at the time, and people still debate it today. Salvador Dalí, who had a strained relationship with Picasso, joked that Picasso was a painter, a Spaniard, and a communist. He added that he was not a communist himself.

His old friend, the surrealist poet André Breton, was more direct in the late 1940s. Breton was a Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist. He refused to shake Picasso's hand and disapproved of him joining the Communist Party. As a communist, Picasso opposed the involvement of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War. He showed his feelings about the war in a painting.

In 1949 Picasso created Dove. It was used on a poster for the World Peace Council and became a well-known symbol of peace and communism. In 1962 he received the Lenin Peace Prize. Writer and critic John Berger felt that the communists had "wasted" Picasso's talents. In his diaries, Jean Cocteau recorded Picasso saying that joining the communists was like joining a family, and not a very happy one.

Legacy

Picasso's influence was huge. Both his fans and his critics agreed on this. In 1971, he became the first living artist to have a special exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris. It was held for his 90th birthday. In 1998, Robert Hughes wrote that Picasso dominated 20th-century Western art and was as famous in his lifetime as no painter or sculptor had been before.

In the 1940s, a Swiss insurance company in Basel bought two of his paintings. After a serious air accident in 1967, the company needed money and decided to sell them. They were placed in the Kunstmuseum Basel. In 1968, many citizens called for a vote, and it succeeded. It was the first time in democratic history that a city's people voted on buying artworks for a public museum. The Canton of Basel-Stadt then bought the paintings. Picasso gave three paintings and a sketch to the city and its museum. Later, he was made an honorary citizen.

Picasso kept many of his paintings. He also owned works by other famous artists, including Henri Matisse. He left no will, so his estate paid its tax to the French state with his works. These works now form the core of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, his relatives opened the Museo Picasso Málaga in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona holds many of his early works. The Buitrago del Lozoya collection was set up in 1985 by his friend Eugenio Arias Herranz.

In 2005 and 2006, the Sakıp Sabancı Museum held Picasso in Istanbul. Its works were loaned from the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Museu Picasso, the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern Art, and family collections. From 2010 to 2011, the Seattle Art Museum displayed 150 works from the Musée National Picasso. The exhibition then travelled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

A planned new museum in Aix-en-Provence was cancelled in 2020. Jacqueline Picasso's daughter and the City Council could not agree. In 2012, the Art Loss Register listed 1,147 of his stolen works.

Picasso's heirs formed a committee to check whether his works were real. It ended in 1993 after people disagreed. Two of his children then issued authenticity certificates on their own. This made things harder for dealers and auction houses. In 2012, four of his heirs created the Picasso Administration. It now handles authentication and manages his estate. The Artists Rights Society is its US copyright representative.

Several of Picasso's paintings are among the most expensive paintings in the world. Garçon à la pipe sold for US$104 million at Sotheby's in 2004. Dora Maar au Chat sold for US$95.2 million there in 2006. In 2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust sold at Christie's for US$106.5 million. It is a painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter, a woman he was close to. In 2015, Women of Algiers sold for US$179.3 million. This was the highest price ever paid for a painting. In 2016, a Cubist work sold at Sotheby's London for a world-record price for a Cubist painting. In 2017, The Jerusalem Post reported on a portrait. It was painted during the early years of World War II and later sold at auction. In 2018, Femme au Béret et à la Robe Quadrillée sold for £49.8 million at Sotheby's in London.

In pop culture

In the 1996 movie Surviving Picasso, Picasso is played by actor Anthony Hopkins. He is also a character in Steve Martin's 1993 play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway tells Gertrude Stein that he would like to own some Picassos but cannot afford them. Later, he looks at one of Picasso's paintings of a girl holding a basket of flowers.

Picasso is played by Antonio Banderas in the 2018 season of Genius, which is about his life and art. In the 2011 film Midnight in Paris, directed by Woody Allen, Picasso (played by Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) appears as a member of the art circles of 1920s Paris. In the song "Pablo Picasso", written by Jonathan Richman, the singer compares his loneliness in New York to the life of the painter. In a 1980 interview, Richman said the song was inspired by his own shyness around women when he was a teenager.