PABLO PICASSO

(1881-1973)

Unquestionably the most famous Spanish artist of the ^20th century, Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga on October 25, 1881. From childhood, he was surrounded by the arts. His father, don José, was a drawing teacher and curator of the city’s museum. The young Picasso showed exceptional talent from an early age. He received academic artistic training at Barcelona’s School of Fine Arts, La Llotja, and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts San Fernando in Madrid. He made his first visit to Paris in the autumn of 1900, to attend the Universal Exhibition with his friend Casagemas. Casagemas’ suicide the following year had a profound effect on Picasso. His painting became darker and more melancholy. This was the Blue Period. He makes the acquaintance of the poet Max Jacob at an exhibition devoted to him by Ambroise Vollard in his rue Laffitte gallery. Picasso moved to the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, Paris, in May 1904. He met André Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire. They frequented the Medrano circus and Le Lapin Agile. His painting changed. He painted Saltimbanques, acrobats and other circus figures. It becomes lighter. Colors tend toward ochre-pink tones.

For the artists of this generation, the early years of the century were a period of teeming emulation. Picasso met the Americans Gertrude Stein and her brother Léo at the end of 1905. Their Parisian home on rue de Fleurus was an extremely important place for meetings and exchanges in the history of avant-garde art until the First World War. In particular, it was at the Stein home that Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse met. Picasso painted Portrait of Gertrude Stein (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in 1906 in a primitivist vein – the American’s face is reduced to a mask – coinciding with his summer stay in Gosol, his discovery of Iberian art and the Gauguin retrospective at the Salon d’Automne. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (MoMA, New York), undertaken shortly afterwards, were Picasso’s response to Henri Matisse’s Bonheur de vivre(Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania) and the starting point for Cubism, following the autumn 1907 meeting with Georges Braque, his “rope-mate”. That year’s Salon d’Automne devoted a retrospective to the work of Cézanne, who had died the previous year and played an essential role in the development of Cubism. Along with Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made, cubism was undoubtedly the most important revolution in ^{twentieth-century} art at a time when theories of relativity and the fourth dimension were being developed. It completely overturned pictorial space and the representation of reality. For Picasso, cubism was not an isolated moment of experimentation in his work, but an acquired language that he would use throughout his career in a variety of ways.

The 1914 war interrupted this creative effervescence. In August, the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a champion of Cubism and Picasso’s dealer since 1912, was sequestered. Georges Braque, André Derain and Guillaume Apollinaire, to name but a few, were mobilized. Picasso, a Spanish national, was not requisitioned. During and after the war, he developed two aesthetics: one in the continuity of Cubism, as exemplified by Les Trois musiciens, 1921 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia); the other in a classicizing Ingresque vein revisited by a form of primitivism present in Three Women at the Fountain of the same year (MoMA, New York and Musée national Picasso-Paris). This return to classicism, characteristic of the period, was also partly fueled by his several-month stay in Rome in 1917 with Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company to create the sets and costumes for Parade. Predominantly cubist, combined with the dissonance of Erik Satie’s music, the ensemble contrasts with the soft, classicist aesthetic of the curtain. He continued to collaborate with the Ballets Russes until 1924(Le Tricorne in 1919, Pulcinella in 1920, Cuadro Flamenco in 1921, L’Après-midi d’un faune in 1922 and Le Train Bleu in 1924), not forgetting Mercure for Comte Etienne de Beaumont’s Soirées de Paris. This was also the period of Olga Kokhlova, a dancer in Diaghilev’s company, immortalized in the film Portrait of Olga in an Armchair 1917 (Musée national Picasso-Paris). They married in 1918. Their son Paulo is born in early February 1921. Maurice Raynal publishes the first monograph on Picasso (1921). The summer of 1922 in Dinard was marked by a cycle of monumental bathersin motion.

Picasso’s language took a new turn around 1925, a time of personal tension with Olga, but also the advent of Surrealism. André Breton published his Manifesto in October 1924. The same year saw the publication of the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, the group’s organ of expression and dissemination of ideas, which regularly reproduced works by Picasso, notably Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in issue no. 4, July 15, 1925 – which the couturier and collector Jacques Doucet, advised by Breton, had acquired the previous year. Picasso’s “Surrealist” period coincided with the movement, although the artist was not, strictly speaking, a member. For his part, Breton set Picasso’s work as an absolute model: “if Surrealism wishes to set itself a course, it has only to go through what Picasso went through and will go through again”.[1]“. During this period, the artist developed a new plastic vocabulary, marked by his experience of linear drawing for the sets of the ballet Mercure – with an elliptical, supple, circulating line – as well as a subjective iconography that is to be found throughout his work. The rather rigid, austere geometry of cubism gives way to organic forms that the artist dislocates, dismantles and recomposes. He is an expressionist Picasso. Distorted bodies and vivid colors framed by black combine to create works of sometimes violent expression. Christian Zervos founded the magazine Cahiers d’Art in 1926. The first of some one hundred and fifty “magic paintings” date from this year. [2]“created by Picasso until 1930. The director of Cahiers d’Art undertook the catalog raisonné of Picasso’s painted and drawn work, the first volume of which appeared in 1932 (the last volume, no. 33, was published in 1978). Picasso falls under the spell of the young Marie-Thérèse Walter in January 1927. He spent the summer of 1927 and the following one in Dinard. He painted a series of small canvases on the theme of bathers, which resembled volume constructions in the round; they were monumentalized in the canvases of 1931 and in the Boisgeloup sculptures that are their perfect extension, Femme assise dans un fauteuil rouge, 1932 (Musée national Picasso-Paris). It was also during this period that the figure of the minotaur appeared in his work , the subject of the large collage of 1928 (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne/ CCI, Paris), a double of the artist who subsequently became omnipresent. In the same year, with the sculptor Julio González, who introduced him to wrought-iron sculpture, he created the Monument à Apollinaire, a type of sculpture described by Kahnweiler as a drawing in space.

The acquisition of the Château de Boisgeloup, near Gisors in the Eure region, in June 1930, where Picasso could escape with Marie-Thérèse, opened a new chapter in his painting, sculpture, engraving and drawing work between 1931 and 1936. In one of the buildings on the estate, Picasso set up a sculpture studio, immortalized by Brassaï in a series of photographs published in the first issue of the magazine Minotaure founded by Albert Skira and Tériade in 1933, featuring a cover composed by Picasso in the effigy of the mythological figure. The Boisgeloup period is one of Picasso’s most prolific in three-dimensional work. The sculptures are of great technical, formal and stylistic variety. Boisgeloup offered Picasso a whole palette of new materials gleaned from the park, as well as an unprecedented animal iconography. Formally, this period of Picasso’s work, under the sign of Marie-Thérèse, is characterized by a language of curves and arabesques, as in Le Rêve of 1932 (private collection). From 1930 to 1936, the artist also produced the famous Suite Vollard, comprising one hundred copper engravings.

The second half of the decade was particularly difficult in more ways than one. “The worst [period] of my life”, he confides to Douglas Duncan[3]. Picasso stopped painting for several months. He devoted himself to writing (in French and Spanish). His poems were revealed in the Cahiers d’Art volume dedicated to him in February 1936. On a personal level, Picasso separates from his wife Olga, who continues to multiply her scenes of jealousy. Marie-Thérèse Walter gave birth to their daughter Maya in early September. At the end of the year or early in 1936, through the intermediary of Paul Eluard, a new female figure enters his life: Dora Maar, a photographer close to the Surrealists. The two women alternated in his work: the voluptuous blond Marie-Thérèse, full of volumes and arabesques, alternated with the jet-haired Dora, translated into a more aggressive, angular geometrical language.

In addition to the context of his private life, the historical situation was no less troubled, with the rise of nationalism leading to tragic events in Spain (the Civil War began on July 18, 1936) and in other European countries, and then to the Second World War. At the beginning of April, Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to paint a large canvas for its pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques Applied to Modern Life, more commonly known as the 1937 Universal Exhibition (the Republican pavilion faced the Nationalist pavilion). Picasso’s response is, as we know, Guernica (Museo de la Reina Sofia, Madrid), named after the Spanish Basque town destroyed by German and Italian air raids on April 26, 1937. Dora Maar photographs the various stages of the work’s development in her studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. The Republican Pavilion, designed by Luis Lacasa and Josep Sert in a modernist style, also features The Reaper by Joan Miró (no longer with us), La Montserrat by Julio González (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), La Fontaine de Mercure by Alexander Calder (Miró Foundation, Barcelona) and, in front of the pavilion, four sculptures by Picasso in cement, including two Tête de femme (Marie-Thérèse); La Femme au vase; and a Baigneuse in bronze. Christian Zervos devotes issue 4-5 of Cahiers d’Art almost entirely to Guernica.

The Picasso retrospective, Picasso Forty Years of his Art, which opened at MoMA in mid-November 1939, definitively established his reputation in the United States. It also had a major impact on young American artists. Picasso remained in Paris during the war, on rue des Grands-Augustins. His works reflect his sensitivity and anxieties. Les Natures mortes à la cafetière, Nature morte au crâne de taureau, 1942, a tribute to his compatriot and friend Julio González, who had just died (Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kunstsammlung), L’AubadeMay 1942 (Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne/ CCI, Paris), Le Charnier, February-Summer 1945 (MoMA, New York). In 1943, he met a young painter, Françoise Gilot. Picasso joined the French Communist Party on October 4, 1944. The news was immediately relayed by the newspaper L’Humanité, which devoted the front page of its October 5 edition to Picasso, at the opening of the Salon d’Automne, known as the “Salon de la Libération”. Picasso takes center stage with a retrospective of his wartime work (74 paintings and 5 sculptures). The exhibition met with a hostile reception.

In the summer of 1946, while staying in the South of France with Françoise Gilot, Picasso visited the Vallauris ceramics exhibition. There he met Suzanne and Georges Ramié, owners of the Madoura factory founded in 1938, who were keen to renew their ceramic production. Apart from a few trials that summer, Picasso really began to invest in this new medium the following summer. He spent most of the autumn in residence at the Château Grimaldi – Musée d’Antibes, invited by Romuald Dor de la Souchère, the curator at the time. Between September 17 and November 10, the artist painted some twenty works on Mediterranean themes, forming the core of the collection of the future Musée Picasso d’Antibes, including La Joie de vivre, a Matissian reference and expression of the happiness of this period – known as the Antibes period – which celebrated both the return of peace and his reunion with the Mediterranean. Picasso confided to Dor de La Souchère: “Every time I arrive in Antibes, it takes me back again and again, like lice! Why is that? In Antibes I’m taken back by this Antiquity.”[4]populated by nymphs, fauns and centaurs.

Claude was born on May 15, 1947. All three spent the summer in the South of France. In October, Picasso began attending the Madoura studio. At first, he confined himself to decorating dishes, but from the beginning of 1948, with the help of chef-tourneur Jules Agard, he gave free rein to his inspiration as a modeler, modifying the shapes that emerged from the lathe to make a jug, a woman, an owl, a face, etc. In the spring, he moves in with Françoise and Claude at the villa “La Galloise” in Vallauris, not having exhausted all the possibilities he senses in ceramic creation. In the autumn, at the end of November, the exhibition Poteries de Picasso at the Maison de la Pensée Française reveals an unknown Picasso with around one hundred and fifty ceramics. The artist’s interest in ceramics cannot be separated from the prospect of an art form more accessible to all, like printmaking. It is also part of the general trend towards modern art, which is moving away from the strict context of the fine arts towards other traditions (archaic, popular, decorative arts, etc.), in contact with which it is revitalized. In the spring or summer of 1949, Picasso acquired an old warehouse in Vallauris, rue du Fournas, in which he set up a painting studio and a sculpture workshop. Next door, in a meadow, potters threw away all sorts of objects and utensils. The artist regularly goes there in search of wonders to feed his sculpture, such as The GoatLittle girl jumping rope, La GuenonLa Guenon, La Femme à la poussette, etc. From April 20 to 23, 1949, the World Congress of Supporters of Peace was held at Salle Pleyel in Paris. Aragon asked Picasso for a poster to represent the event. The writer chose a print of the lithograph La Colombe (actually a pigeon). On this occasion, the dove became the universal emblem of peace. At the same time, Françoise gave birth to their daughter, named Paloma for the occasion.

The 1950s-1960s are another chapter in Picasso’s work. The post-war period was dominated by the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York and Informal Art in Europe. Resolutely hostile to the very idea of abstract art, even if Cubism had partly fueled it, Picasso instead developed his work in two opposing directions. One, ideological, was that of popular art, through ceramics, which he continued to practice with great enthusiasm, and the other, highly historical, was that of institutionalized painting, turning to some of its masterpieces.

At the end of 1954, he began an explicit dialogue with paintings of the past. Until early 1955, he executed a first cycle of variations on Eugène Delacroix’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Musée du Louvre, Paris). This was followed in 1957 by Les Ménines by Diego Velázquez (Prado Museum, Madrid). Finally, the most fruitful of these series of variations was that after Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in 1959-1962 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).

He also executed the “interior landscapes” series, the subject of which is the studio, another double of the artist. They are a form of homage to Henri Matisse, whose death on November 3, 1954, affected him deeply. This was the period of La Californie, where Picasso moved in with Jacqueline Roque in June 1955. As the exhibition of Jacqueline’s photographs, Picasso intime, at the Galerie de l’Institut in winter 2021 so aptly demonstrated. California is a wonderful place for creation and conviviality, where family, children and long-time friends gather. After Henri Matisse by François Campaux in 1946 and Georges Braque by André Bureau in 1950, Henri-Georges Clouzot films Picasso at work in the Victorine studio in Nice. Le Mystère Picasso won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. This period was also rich in sculptural inventions.

Between early December 1957 and late January 1958, he produced black and color studies for La Chute d’Icare, a wall decoration in the Delegates’ Foyer of the UNESCO building in Paris. As is often the case in the course of his career, he returns to sculpture. In the regular dialogue between two and three dimensions that characterizes all his work, sculpture represents a distance, another point of view, a means of verification and enrichment. In 1957, he created three heads composed of profiles that intersect at 90° on a vertical axis. Sculptures in cardboard or sheet metal, the result of his work on Têtes de Sylvette, enable him to combine painting and sculpture. Picasso confided to Pierre Daix: “In the La Californie studio, I used to shine a very bright light on these cut-out heads, and then I’d try to capture them in my painting. I did the same with Les Baigneurs. First I painted them, then I sculpted them, and then I painted the sculptures again on canvas. Painting and sculpture really talked together[5]“. These new sculptures were to be a springboard for painting.

In 1958, Picasso bought the Château de Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a landmark in Cézanne’s paintings. The couple stayed there from time to time. There is a Vauvenargues palette in which green contrasts with bright yellow and red. In 1959, two masterly canvases pay tribute to Cubism: Femme nue sous un pin, January 20, 1959 (The Art Institute, Chicago) and Femme nue assise, 1959 (coll. pr.). In these, he expresses the classical mastery and maturity of the style of the late Fifties. At Vauvenargues, in August 1959, he began Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the last of his large-scale variations, which he completed in July 1962 at Mougins. The Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, where he settled with Jacqueline in 1961, was Picasso’s final home and studio.

The last ten years of Picasso’s life were still dominated by painting. Rembrandt was behind the revival of the theme of The Painter and his Model in 1963, which marked a transition to the very last period of his exceptionally fertile oeuvre. The Dutch master also irrigated the then ubiquitous motif of the musketeers, in a form of synthesis with the painting of the Golden Age, Velázquez and El Greco. Picasso wrote on the reverse of one of his first musketeers, painted on March 28, 1967, the unequivocal phrase: “Domenico Theotocopulos van Rijn da Silva” (Ludwig Museum, Budapest). Alongside the Musketeers, and with the same prodigious energy, Picasso painted nudes, couples, men, women and still lifes. Stylistically, the works of this period are characterized by rapid execution and the concomitance of two pictorial scripts: one stenographic, elliptical; the other more material, with drips and impastos. In many paintings, the white of the canvas plays an equal role to that of the colors. Color also makes a strong comeback in the works of this period, with bright, luminous tones such as in Le Vieil homme assis 1971 (Musée national Picasso-Paris). Three major exhibitions punctuated the last decade. A major retrospective in 1966, organized by Jean Leymarie at the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, was intended by André Malraux to be as comprehensive as possible. Two exhibitions at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, one in 1970, conceived by Yvonne and Christian Zervos, the other in 1973, successively revealed his recent works, which aroused astonishment, if not scandal, by the virulence of their colors and the eroticism of their subjects. Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins. He is buried in the grounds of the Château de Vauvenargues.

Picasso the engraver

Picasso’s engraving output is colossal. A passionate experimenter, engraving was a formidable field of exploration for him. No technique was foreign to him. He extracted every resource from every etching technique he used. For each of them, he has experimented with processes and combinations that go off the beaten track. His output is divided between independent etchings and illustrative engravings, at a time when illustrated books were booming. Apart from copperplate engraving, to which Picasso devoted himself consistently throughout his career, his etching practice developed in periods corresponding to the predominance of a specific technique: lithography from 1919 to 1930, then from 1945 to 1962, linocut from 1958 to 1963.

After a first, isolated attempt in 1899, El Zurdo, an etching heightened with watercolor, his etching activity began in earnest with Le Repas frugal, an etching from 1904, in the style of works from the blue period. Prints from this period were published by Ambroise Vollard in 1913 in the album Les Saltimbanques. Picasso then worked exclusively on copper (etching, drypoint) in a language dominated by Cubism until 1917. From 1919 onwards, he also tried his hand at lithography, dividing his output between antique-style nudes and portraits, mostly of writers such as Paul Valéry and André Breton, intended for frontispieces. Copperplate engraving regained its monopoly in the field of printmaking in September 1930, when Picasso undertook the illustration of Ovid’s Métamorphoses (32 etchings) commissioned by Albert Skira and La Suite Vollard; a set of one hundred compositions, commissioned by the merchant-publisher on subjects chosen by the artist, including a dozen minotaurs and three Portraits de Vollard (March 1937) which complete the series. His engraved work is also a story of circumstances, notably encounters. Fernand Mourlot’s encounter in 1945 sparked off a “lithographic frenzy”; that of the printer Arnera in Vallauris in 1958 gave rise to a flowering of linocuts, until the Crommelynck brothers, Aldo, Piero and Milan, moved to Mougins in 1963, next to the mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie. The proximity of their studio led to Picasso’s return to intaglio, a technique that dominated his etching work over the last ten years of his exceptionally rich career, in particular the 347 etchings executed between March 16 and October 5, 1968, as well as the 156 etchings he created between January 1970 and March 1972. In these two series, Picasso revisits the great themes that have shaped his work and explores all the possibilities of etching, multiplying the marriage of processes with extraordinary virtuosity. His etchings include La Minotauromachie, etching and scraping, from 1935, a masterpiece of complexity; La Colombe, from January 1949, which, according to Mourlot, is “the maximum of what can be obtained with lithographic ink used as a wash”.[6] ” .

The catalog of Picasso’s illustrated books contains one hundred and fifty-six numbers. These include works for which Picasso simply supplied one or two prints, usually for the frontispiece, the cover or as part of a set of works by other artists, and illustrated books in the strict sense of the term, which comprise a set of plates related to a specific text and executed especially for that purpose.

Apart from two books published by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in 1911 and 1914, which Picasso illustrated in the Cubist style – Max Jacob’s Saint Matorel and Le Siège de Jérusalem by the same author – it was really with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published by Albert Skira in 1931, that his practice of illustrated books began. He continued to do so regularly, and increasingly so, right up to the end of his career. La Célestine was his last book, published by Atelier Crommelynck in 1971. The texts that inspired Picasso were both ancient and contemporary. He illustrated classic authors such as Aristophanes, Ovid, Buffon and, among the best-known, Fernando de Rojas, whose La Celestina(La Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea) is one of the major works of Spanish literature. Among his contemporaries, Picasso accompanied texts by writers and poets from his friendly circle, such as Pierre Reverdy, Paul Eluard, René Char and Aimé Césaire. The most frequent publishers of his books were Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and, after the Second World War, Galerie Louise Leiris, Ambroise Vollard, Pierre Antoine Benoit, Iliazd, Gustavo Gili in Barcelona (Ediciones de la Cometa) and Atelier Crommelynck. Among his most remarkable achievements: Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide, illustrated with pure etchings in a classicizing style, published by Albert Skira in 1931 – to be compared with Poésies de Mallarmé illustrated with etchings by Matisse, also published by Skira in 1932 – and Le Chant des morts by Pierre Reverdy, Picasso’s only book published by Tériade in 1948. The artist embellished Reverdy’s handwritten pages with illuminated red ornaments.

In addition, Picasso also wrote the texts of his books. They reveal another facet of the artist, inaugurated in 1935, that of writer-poet. His writings were published in Christian Zervos’ Cahiers d’Art (n°7-10, 1935). In 1937, his first “total” book was Sueño y mentira de Franco, in which, as in his great composition Guernica, he expresses his opposition to the actions of General Franco. This was followed by two other books: Pablo Picasso, Poèmes et lithographies, Paris, galerie Louise Leiris éd., 1954 and Pablo Picasso, El Entierro del conde de Orgaz, Barcelona, Editions de la Cometa, 1969, written in 1957, to which he gave the title of the painting by El Greco (Toledo, Santo Tomé church).

Anne Coron

Art historian (PhD)

[1] André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris, N.R.F., 1928, republished Paris, Gallimard, 2002, p. 19.

[2] Formula from Christian Zervos, “Tableaux magiques de Picasso”, Cahiers d’Art, n°3-10, 1938, p. 73-136.

[3] David Douglas Duncan, Les Picasso de Picasso, Genève, La Bibliothèque des arts, [1961] 1970, p.. 110.

[4] Jean Louis Andral (ed.), Musée Picasso Antibes, Paris, Hazan, 2015, pp. 51.

[5] Pierre Daix, Picasso créateur, Paris, Seuil, 1987, p. 342.

[6] Pierre Daix, Dictionnaire Picasso, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1995, p. 201