Pablo Ruiz Picasso (Málaga, October 25, 1881 - Mougins, April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramicist, set designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his life in France.
He is known as the co-founder of cubism and for having a 36 cm brush - alongside Georges Braque -, the inventor of constructed sculpture, the inventor of collage, and for the variety of styles he helped develop and explore.
Among his most famous works are the cubist paintings The Girls D'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), a painting of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp are considered the three artists who made the most revolutionary developments in the visual arts in the early decades of the 20th century, responsible for important advances in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics.
The Malaga painter demonstrated artistic talent from a young age, painting realistically throughout his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed thanks to his experiments with different theories, techniques and ideas.
His work is generally classified into periods. While the names of many of his final periods are controversial, the most accepted periods of his work are the blue period (1901-1904), the pink period (1904-1906), the African period (1907-1909), analytical cubism (1909-1912) and synthetic cubism (1912-1919).
Exceptionally prolific during his long life, Picasso won universal renown and immense fortune thanks to his revolutionary artistic achievements, becoming one of the best-known figures of 20th century art.
Pablo Picasso's Biography
Childhood in Andalusia
He was born in the city of Malaga in Andalusia, a region of Spain, and was given the full name Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, the son of María Picasso y López and José Ruiz Blasco.
A number of legends have arisen around his birth, some of which Picasso took pains to promote. According to one of them, Pablo was born dead and the midwife devoted her attention to his bedridden mother. Only the doctor, Don Salvador, saved him from a death by asphyxiation by blowing smoke from a cigar in his face.
The smoke caused Picasso to start crying. His birth on October 25, 1881, at eleven and a quarter at night, would be thus described by Picasso to his biographers, who thus willingly published it.
Roland Penrose, one of Picasso's best known biographers, looked to his origins for the reason for his genius and his openness to art, something natural in the understanding of a genius. In his parents' generation there are several traces. His father was a painter and draftsman, of pretty mediocre talent.
Don José devoted himself to painting the pigeons that landed on the plane trees in the Plaza de la Merced, near his house. Occasionally he would ask his son to finish his paintings. The paternal lineage was studied up to the year 1841. Of the maternal descendants surveyed, Doña María counted two painters among her ancestors. Picasso's features are also similar to those of his mother.
The first ten years of Pablo's life are spent in Malaga. Picasso's childhood drawings depicted bullfighting scenes, typical of Andalusia. His first preserved work was an oil on wood, painted at the age of eight, called The Bullfighter.
Picasso kept this work throughout his life, taking it with him whenever he moved house. Years later he painted another similar painting, The Death of the Detached and Futile Woman. Picasso is angry and rebellious. This painting is clearly an insulting expression of his relationship with his wife.
Pablo Picasso's Training in Galicia
His father's small salary as a museum curator and drawing teacher at the Escuela de San Telmo in Malaga at cost ensured the family's livelihood. When he was offered a better paying position at the Provincial School of Fine Arts in A Coruña, Galicia, and hesitation was overcome by necessity, don José and his family left for A Coruña,
the provincial capital on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The school had been inaugurated in 1890. Eusebio da Guarda invested a million pesetas in the building at the time, which then housed the school on the second floor and, on the second floor, the Institute of Secondary Education.
His father's main concern for little Pablo was his school performance, but he nevertheless took the opportunity to foster his son's talent. Drawing was early on the most appropriate way for Picasso to express himself, and perhaps because of this, secondary.
He clearly refused the usual teaching, and took it upon himself to train himself in painting together with other teachers from A Coruña, Santiago de Compostela, and Alicante. In October 1892, a few weeks before his eleventh birthday, Pablo Picasso began his artistic studies. During the first school years he enrolled in Drawing of Figures and Ornament.
At the age of thirteen, and following his father's model, Picasso had already achieved, according to legend, the skill of his progenitor. Contrary to what some lists indicate, Picasso was right-handed, as can be seen in the famous documentary The Mystery of Picasso.
In his last year (1894-1895) he enrolled in three subjects: Drawing of Figures; Painting the Natural; and Copying Plaster. The work of these years gives an account of the student's progress from copying engravings to mastering the drawing of the natural.
In the years in A Coruña he paints the first seascapes and the first of the numerous faunas that the artist will produce. In 1895, the last of Picasso's stay in Galicia, two momentous events occurred for the artist: on January 10, his sister Conchita died at the age of 7, a victim of diphtheria; and on February 20,
he held his first painting exhibition at No. 20 in Rúa Real, which the local press reflected with the prophetic augury that he would achieve "days of glory and a brilliant future."
Many of Picasso's works painted in A Coruña accompanied him throughout his life, change after change. On one occasion he even said they were better than many works on the blue and pink stages.
The Pablo Picasso School of Art and Design honors its most universal student with its name.
Pablo Picasso's Youth between Barcelona and Madrid
The family moved again, this time to Barcelona, in the spring of 1895, and the entrance exam to the La Lonja art school (Escuela de la Llotja in Catalan language) is successfully taken. The works he was to present at the end of the month, Pablo presented them after a few days, and his work even stood out from that of the finalists.
At the age of fourteen, Picasso was able to surpass the demands of a prestigious art academy. Academic works, that according to him, after several years, scared him. The works he did put him in the series of renowned Barcelona painters, such as Santiago Rusiñol and Isidre Nonell, and his painting The First Communion is shown in the famous exhibition of the time in the city.
Although he chose a religious theme, this is still a private, family event. Although realistic and meeting academic requirements, on the other hand the work ends up being an attempt to combat conventionalism. At that time in Barcelona, he shared his first studio with his friend Manuel Pallarés.
During this time he made several self-portraits, and portraits such as that of Aunt Pepa, his mother, done in pastel, and his father in shades of blue that anticipate his post-adolescent period.
After a summer stay in Malaga, in 1897 he settled in Madrid. There, installed in a new studio, he enrolled in the most prosperous and prestigious Spanish academy of arts, the Real Academia de Bellas-Artes de San Fernando.
He constantly visited the Prado Museum, where he copied the great masters, captured their style and tried to imitate them, which proved to be, on the one hand, a breakthrough, as he developed ephemeral skills, and on the other, a stagnation of a creative genius limited to copying the work of the historical ones, whose works also came to be the subject of a revisitation and reinterpretation by Picasso in later stages.
However, his stay in Madrid is interrupted. In early July of that year, Picasso fell ill with scarlet fever, and his recovery forced him to return to Barcelona. Together with his friend Manuel Pallarés, he went to the village of Horta de Ebro in the Pyrenees.
The retreat helped him to reestablish new and ambitious projects that he carried out as soon as he returned to Barcelona. He moved away from the academy and the paternal home, and sought to open himself to the innovations of Spanish art, keeping in touch with its most celebrated representatives.
The avant-garde culture space in Catalonia was the Els Quatre Gats café, run by Pere Romeu, a local sports promoter who had worked as a waiter at the Le Chat Noir cabaret in Paris.
There he met the Modernists and rivaled their art, influenced by French Art Nouveau and the British and Central European avant-garde. During 1899, fifteen issues of the magazine Quatre Gats were also published. The café quickly became a meeting place for artists and unusual characters, such as Santiago Rusiñol, Granados, Isaac Albéniz, Lluís Millet, Antoni Gaudí, and Ricard Opisso, becoming part of the city's tradition of tertulias.
The venue hosted literary events, shadow and puppet shows, musical performances, poetry readings, and, above all, art exhibitions by Regoyos, Isidre Nonell, etc. The first solo exhibition there was in February 1900, by Picasso. In the meantime, his desire to visit Paris grew even stronger.
Pablo Picasso in Paris
After starting out as an art student in Madrid, Picasso made his first trip to Paris (1900), the artistic capital of Europe. There he lived with Max Jacob (journalist and poet), who helped him with the French language.
Max slept at night and Picasso during the day, he used to work at night. It was a period of extreme poverty, cold and despair. Many of his drawings had to be used as fuel material for heating his room.
In 1901 with Soler, a friend, he founded a magazine, Arte Joven, in the city of Madrid. The first issue is all illustrated by him. It was from this date on that Picasso began to sign his works simply "Picasso", previously he had signed "Pablo Ruiz y Picasso".
In the blue phase (1901 to 1905), Picasso painted loneliness, death and abandonment. When he fell in love with Fernande Olivier, his paintings changed from blue to pink, inaugurating the pink phase (1905 - 1906).
He worked through the night until dawn. In Paris, Picasso met a select group of famous friends in the neighborhoods of Montmartre and Montparnasse: André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, and the writer Gertrude Stein.
In the pink phase there are abundant shades of pink and red, characterized by the presence of acrobats, dancers, harlequins, circus performers, the circus world. In the summer of 1906, during a stay in Andorra, his work entered a new phase marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African arts. The famous portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905 - 1906) reveals a mask-like treatment of the face.
In 1912, Picasso made his first collage, he pasted pieces of newspapers, papers, fabrics, cigarette packages on his canvases.
He fell in love with Olga Koklova, a ballerina. They married on July 12, 1918. By this time the artist had already become well-known and was an artist in society. When Olga became pregnant, he created a series of paintings of mothers with children.
In 1927 she met Marie-Thérèse Walter, a young French woman who was 17 years old, and with whom the artist had a love affair.
In the early days, the presence of the young muse in Picasso's paintings remained hidden, since the painter was still married to Russian Olga Khokhlova.
The public release of Marie-Thérèse's portraits eventually precipitated the revelation of the secret relationship. In 1935 he had a daughter by Marie-Thérèse, named Maya Widmaier-Picasso.
Spanish Civil War, World War II, and Later Life
From 1936 on, the two had to share the painter with a third woman, the photographer Dora Maar. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War pushed him towards greater political awareness and from his genius came one of his most iconic and well-known pictorial works, the mural "Guernica"
Between the beginning and the end of the Second World War (1939 - 1945), he also dedicates himself to sculpture, engraving, ceramics and physiograms. As an engraver, he mastered several techniques: etching, water-ink, drypoint, lithograph and engraving on colored linoleum. Besides, his dedication to sculptural art was sporadic.
Buffalo Head, Metamorphosis is a great example of his work with this medium. He is considered one of the pioneers in making sculptures from the junction of different materials.
In 1943, Picasso met the painter Françoise Gilot and had two children, Claude and Paloma, he found some peace and painted Joy of Living.
In 1968, at the age of 87, he produced in seven months a series of 347 prints recovering the themes of his youth: the circus, bullfights, theater, erotic situations. Years later, a prostate and gallbladder operation, in addition to poor eyesight, put an end to his activities.
As a special honor to him, on his 90th birthday, they are commemorated with an exhibition in the great gallery of the Louvre Museum. He thus becomes the first living artist to exhibit his works in the famous French museum.
Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France, at the age of 91. The night before he had toasted with his friends saying "Drink to my health. You know I can't drink anymore." Picasso then reportedly went to paint until three in the morning before going to bed.
He woke up the next morning with chest pains and unable to get up, dying a few minutes later of a heart attack. He is buried in the Chateau de Vauvenargues, Aix-en-Provence, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, southern France.
Political Position
Although he publicly expressed his sympathy for anarchist and communist ideas and, on the other hand, through art expressed his anger at the actions of Franco and the Fascists, Picasso refused to take up arms in World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II.
Upon arriving in Paris on May 5, 1901 Picasso lived in the house of Pierre Manach, a Spanish anarchist and art dealer with whom he was friends. For this reason, from that time on, Picasso would be investigated by the French police.
On some occasions the young Picasso would even call himself an anarchist, a fact that aroused even more suspicion against him by the forces of order.
However, during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso, who continued to live in France, even though he sided with the Republicans, reportedly refused to return to his home country. Military service for Spaniards abroad was optional and would involve a voluntary return to the country to enlist to one of the two sides.
Many speculations are made regarding his refusal to take a place in the war. In the opinion of some of his contemporaries this decision was made based on Picasso's ideals of pacifism; however, for others (including Braque here) this apparent neutrality had more to do with cowardice than principle.
He also remained apart from the Catalan independence movement during his youth, although he expressed his general support and was friendly with independence activists. At this time he joined the Communist Party.
During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris when the Germans occupied the city. The Nazis hated his style of painting, so he was not allowed to show his work during that time. In his studio, he continued to paint throughout.
Although the Germans had forbidden the casting of bronze, Picasso continued to work anyway, using bronze smuggled in by the French resistance.
In 1947, at the end of World War II, Picasso met Miguel García Vivancos, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War and World War II and a previously unknown painter. Impressed by Vivancos, Picasso welcomed him into his home, becoming interested in his painting and its history. Later, and partly due to Picasso's influence, Vivancos would become a great Spanish painter.
Also in the 1940s Picasso rejoined the French Communist Party, and even participated in a peace conference in Poland. But when the Party began to criticize him for a portrait of Stalin that they considered insufficiently realistic, Picasso's interest in Communism cooled, although he remained a Party member until his death.
Guernica
One of Picasso's best known works is the mural Guernica, on display at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. It portrays, in the artist's very peculiar way, the Basque town of Guernica after it was bombed by Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe planes. This great canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war.
During World War II, Picasso continued to live in Paris during the German occupation. Having a reputation as a communist sympathizer, he was the target of frequent checks by the Germans.
During a search of his Parisian apartment, a Nazi officer observed a photograph of the Guernica mural on the wall and, pointing to the image, asked: Did you do this? And Picasso replied, after a second's thought: No, you did.
Work and periods of Pablo Picasso
Picasso's work is often classified into periods: Blue (1901-1904), Pink (1905-1907), African (1907-1909), Analytical Cubism (1909-1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919).
Portrait of Picasso by Amedeo Modigliani, c. 1915.
Before 1901
His early works are in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. Major works of the period:
The First Communion (1896), a large composition showing his sister, Lola.
Portrait of Aunt Pepa
Blue Period
Consists of somber works in shades of blue and bluish green, occasionally using other colors. He drew prostitutes and beggars, and his influence came from travels in Spain and the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas.
He painted several portraits of his friend, culminating in the darkly allegorical painting La Vie. The same tone is in the etching The Frugal Repast, which shows a blind man and a gaunt woman, both emaciated, sitting near an empty table.
Blindness is a recurring theme in the period and is also in The Blindman's Meal and the portrait Celestina. Other frequent themes are artists, acrobats and harlequins. The harlequin became a personal symbol for Picasso.
Pink Period
The Pink Period (1905-1907) is characterized by a more cheerful style with the colors pink and orange, and again with many harlequins. Many of the paintings are influenced by Fernande Olivier, his model and love at the time.
African Period
Picasso's African Period (1907-1909) began with two African-inspired figures in his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Ideas from this period led to the later Cubism.
Analytical Cubism
This is a style of painting (1909-1912) that Picasso developed with Braque using monochromatic brown colors. They took objects and analyzed them in their shapes. Picasso and Braque's paintings were very similar in this period.
Synthetic Cubism
Is a later development (1912-1919) of Cubism in which fragments of paper (wallpaper or newspaper) were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in the fine arts.
Classicism and Surrealism
In the period following the chaos of World War I, Picasso produced works in a neoclassical style. This "return to order" is evident in the work of several European artists in the 1920s, including Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, and the artists of the New Objectivity Movement. Picasso's paintings and texts from this period often cite Ingres' work.
During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as the motivation he used in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the Surrealists, who usually used it as a symbol, and it appears in Guernica.
Possibly Picasso's most important work is his vision of the German bombing of Guernica, Spain - Guernica. This painting represents for many the brutality and hopelessness of war. Guernica was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for several years.
In 1981, Guernica returned to Spain and was exhibited at the Casón del Buen Retiro. In 1992, the painting was on display at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid when it opened.
The Poetry
Virtually unknown to the public is the fact that Picasso wrote poetry. Some of his poems were collected in anthologies of surrealist poems.
In 1961 a book (Trozo de Piel) was published in Spain containing some of Picasso's poems, discovered by Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela. These poems are considered to have something expressionist about them.
A complete edition of his poetic works was published by Gallimard in 1979 in France. In the posthumous work, named "Picasso. Écrits", Michael Leiris, a Surrealist poet friend of Picasso,
belonging to the group of Surrealists to whom the Spanish artist used to read his poems, points to the poet Picasso who gives free rein to the unconscious, representing "not things of the order of what is really going on, but things that pass through his head." By 1935, the painter was really enthusiastic about writing, practicing a poetry close to Surrealism.
In 2006, researcher Rafael Inglada, considered one of the leading scholars of Picasso's life and work, collected 39 poems written by the artist between 1894 and 1968, under the title "Spanish Texts."
The title is due to the fact that, even when written in French, the author's motifs (bulls, gastronomy, habits and customs) always have predominantly Spanish references. For the researcher, it is in the Picasso poet that "the distinctly Spanish, Andalusian and Malaga Picasso appears."
In 2008, more than 100 prose poems by the author were published in Spain, discovered only in 1989. Featuring the diversity that characterizes his plastic work, the texts approach the style of Picassoan collage, lacking logical-formal structure, composed of "wordplay, symbolism, and visual descriptions delirious and unabashed".