Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor who spent most of his adult life in France. He is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, for inventing constructed sculpture, for co-inventing collage, and for the many styles that he helped develop and explore. 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 is a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War. His career spanned more than 76 years, from his late teens until his death in 1973.

Picasso began his formal training under his father, José Ruiz y Blasco, at the age of seven. He showed great artistic talent from a young age and painted in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and teenage years. In the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse inspired Picasso to explore more radical styles. This began a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who were later often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.

Picasso's work, especially in his early career, is often divided into periods. The most commonly accepted periods 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, and his work in the mid-1920s often has features of Surrealism. Exceptionally productive throughout his long life, Picasso achieved worldwide fame and great wealth for his revolutionary artistic achievements, 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 a teacher of art, and the family was middle-class. Picasso showed a love of drawing from a very young age, and from the age of seven his father taught 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, and he was deeply upset by her death. The family then moved to Barcelona, which Picasso came to think of as his true home. He was admitted to 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, but he did not enjoy formal lessons. In Madrid, he visited the Prado museum and admired the work of El Greco, whose style can be seen 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, and his early works are kept at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. In 1894 his career as a painter is said to have begun. In 1900 he made his first trip to Paris, and in 1901 he lived in Madrid for a few months. His Blue Period (1901–1904) is known for gloomy paintings in shades of blue, often showing poor people. His Rose Period (1904–1906) used warmer orange and pink colours and showed circus people, acrobats and harlequins. In 1907 he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which was inspired partly by African art. Picasso then worked with Georges Braque to develop cubism, a style that broke objects into shapes. Around 1912 he began pasting paper pieces into his artworks, creating the first cubist collage.

Picasso's style kept changing throughout his life. In 1937 he painted Guernica, a large work showing the German bombing of the town during the Spanish Civil War, which many see as a picture of the cruelty and hopelessness of war. During World War II he stayed in Paris, and he continued to paint and make art there. In his later years he made many new versions of works by famous older painters and produced bold, colourful paintings and prints. In 1973 he helped prepare 201 of his paintings for the Avignon Arts Festival.

Death

Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema. The evening before, he and his wife Jacqueline had friends over for dinner. That night he painted until 3 a.m. before going to bed. When he woke at 11:30 a.m., he could not get out of bed. Jacqueline called his doctor for help, but Picasso died at 11:40 a.m., before the doctor arrived.

He was buried at the Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had bought in 1958. Jacqueline did not let most of his children or his grandson see his body. Only his son Paulo was allowed to attend the funeral. Picasso died without a will, which led to a long argument over his estate. French judges ruled that his three other children could share it, even though Jacqueline and Paulo disagreed. In December 1976, the family reached an agreement on how to divide the estate, which was worth $240 million.

Works

Picasso was extremely productive throughout his long life. When he died, his estate held more than 45,000 unsold works, including 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, and 7,089 drawings. The most complete, though not full, list of his works, the catalogue raisonné compiled by Christian Zervos, includes more than 16,000 paintings and drawings. Picasso made far more art than most artists of his time. One account says that Bob Ross is the only artist who came close to matching his output. Painting was the medium in which Picasso made his most important contribution. He used colour in expressive ways but relied on drawing more than on subtle colour to create shapes and space. A scientific test in 2012 confirmed that he often used ordinary house paint. Picasso's early sculptures were carved or modelled, but from 1909 to 1928 he made sculptural constructions from many different materials, such as the metal and wire Guitar (1912).

Picasso was interested in every kind of subject and 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, and many of his works reflect people who were important in his life. 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 showing a story.

Personal life

Picasso has been described as someone who treated women poorly, and his own words about women have been widely quoted. He had relationships with many women from a young age. 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. Photographer and painter Dora Maar was a close companion of Picasso in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and she photographed 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, which angered him, and he cut ties with Claude and Paloma. His relationship with them never recovered. Later, Picasso's second wife, Jacqueline Roque, became his wife after they had been together for some time.

Political views

Picasso stayed somewhat distant from the Catalan independence movement when he was young, although he generally supported it and was friends with some 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 because of his "extremist ideas evolving towards communism." This was not revealed 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 led to his first openly political work, The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), which criticised Francisco Franco and the fascists. 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, and in 1950 he received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government. A 1953 portrait of Joseph Stalin drew criticism from the Party for not being realistic enough, but he stayed a loyal member until his death. His dealer, D-H. Kahnweiler, described Picasso's communism as "sentimental" rather than political, saying "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 it has long been a subject of debate. Salvador Dalí, who had a strained relationship with Picasso, joked that Picasso was a painter, a Spaniard, and a communist, adding that he was not a communist himself.

The old friend and surrealist poet André Breton, a Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist, was blunter in the late 1940s. He refused to shake Picasso's hand and disapproved of his joining the Communist Party. As a communist, Picasso opposed the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War, and he depicted it in Massacre in Korea.

In 1949 Picasso created Dove, which 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, and Jean Cocteau's diaries record Picasso saying that joining the communists was like joining a family, one "full of shit."

Legacy

Picasso's influence was huge, and both his fans and his critics agreed on it. In 1971, he became the first living artist to have a special exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris, 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 1967 air disaster, the company needed money and decided to sell them, and they were placed in the Kunstmuseum Basel. In 1968, many citizens called for a vote, which 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 donated three paintings and a sketch to the city and its museum, and he was later made an honorary citizen.

Picasso kept many of his paintings and owned works by other famous artists, including Henri Matisse. Because he left no will, his estate tax to the French state was paid with his works, which 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, and 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, with loans 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, and 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 after 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, but it ended in 1993 after disagreements. Two of his children then issued authenticity certificates separately, which made things harder for dealers and auction houses. In 2012, four of his heirs created the Picasso Administration, which 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, and Dora Maar au Chat sold for US$95.2 million there in 2006. In 2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, a painting of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, sold at Christie's for US$106.5 million. In 2015, Women of Algiers sold for US$179.3 million, 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 that had been taken 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 have some Picassos but cannot afford them. Later, he mentions looking at one of Picasso's paintings of a girl with a basket of flowers, possibly related to Young Naked Girl with Flower Basket.

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