Pablo Picasso. (1881-1973).
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Pablo Picasso. (1881-1973).
It is the “ modern ” artist most known and most complete of the 20th century. Spanish, born in Malaga, it practices all the modes of expression artistic, painting, sculpture, engraving, ceramics and he is also writer. He can adapt to the tendencies of the moment, precede them, cause them or influence them. It is the pioneer of the modern art. André Malraux indicates it like: “ more the large company of destruction and creation of forms of our time ”.
Sons of an art teacher Jose Ruiz Blasco and Maria Picasso his gifts are early and his father recognizes them very quickly. Until 1898, it uses the name of his father, Ruiz, and the maiden name of his mother, Picasso, to sign his creations. After 1901 it gives up “ Ruiz ” and uses only the maiden name of his mother. It is allowed at 16 years with Beautiful arts of Madrid but it is more often with the museum of Prado than in progress. Its large academic painting Science and Charity (1897) where his father plays the part of a doctor near a nun, a child and a sick woman, reflects its traditional formation and its Catalan anchoring. Between 1900 and 1902, Picasso accomplishes 3 travels to Paris, then is established there in 1904.He discovers there works of Theophilus-Alexander Steinlen, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas and Henri of Toulouse Lautrec which one feels the influence in the Mill of the Wafer (1900). It is the beginning of its blue period. It gives up tons them blazing for a mix of cold blue and gives more strength to its feature. In the blue Room of Picasso (1901) one recognizes the influence of Degas (The Tub.1886). This blue period is named thus because of the dominant colors in works expressing misery and death following the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas, the paintings have as a subject of the blind men, the musicians, the beggars, the alcoholics and the prostitutes to the lengthened bodies which point out the style mannerist of Greco. Three pictures are very characteristic of this period, the Drinker of Wormwood (1901), the Dormant Drinker (1902), the Life (1903). To be itself installed shortly after in Paris in the building of the Boat wash-house, Picasso meets Fernande Olivier, the first of his partners to influence his style, his topics and the environment of his works. Its pallet becomes pink and red.
Years 1905 and 1906 constitute the pink period, which is a sentimental painting, characterized by the supremacy of the drawing on the color. A large number of its characters are inspired by the world of the circus, like the Travelling acrobats (1905), the Harlequin and the acrobat, of the Travelling acrobat populate the imaginary one of the painter. The forms are softer, tons them hotter, the details emerge. (Family of Acrobats to the Monkey) (1905). Acrobat with the Ball (1905), or they are portraits of women to their toilet. (Toilet 1906). Especially the paintings are spontaneous. In 1907 Picasso meets Henri Matisse, in the Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) who announces the Young ladies of Avignon (1906-07) it treats the face like a mask, by transforming the masses into geometrical figures such of the superimposed sculptures, as in the African masks.
The Young ladies of Avignon (1906-07) is a radical painting in the treatment of the pictorial depth. This one seems broken. The space prospect and the ideal form of naked female are reversed with a bursting of the plans represented simultaneously on the plane surface of the picture.
Inspired by the treatment of volume and the form at Cézanne, Picasso and Georges Braque painted in close cooperation of the painting defined negatively by the critic like “Cubists”, because reduced to geometrical diagrams. They worked together between 1907 and 1914. Rather atypical Portraits: Ambroise Vollard, Daniel Kahnweiler. Picasso works also regularly with André Derain and Juan Gris.
During the summer months d' between 1911 and 1913 in Céret and Avignon with Georges Braque it launches out in joinings (Sheet of Music and Guitar) which make it pass from the analytical cubism to the synthetic cubism. Initially to define the forms chosen precisely, they reduce them to geometrical outlines,
while multiplying on the same plan the various axes of vision establish by the traditional prospect. The pictorial fact becomes the subject of the picture. This first phase of the cubism is called analytical cubism. The painting : The Poet (1911) is a perfect example of the analytical cubism. The architecture of the objects is completely broken up.
The synthetic cubism does not aim to him breaking up the object to extract it from reality but at binding the elements to facilitate the identification of the object as in the still life Cort. Joinings are synthetic cubism because the pieces of newspapers, the wallpapers and the musical partitions move away from the pure abstraction by restoring a bond towards concrete objects. Joinings of Picasso lead it to integrate decorative effects on works and to use colors more and more sharp as in the Woman with the Guitar (1914). The characteristic of Picasso is a simultaneity of often contradictory styles. It takes sometimes its distances compared to the cubism, It returns to a more traditional form while giving its characters of the colossal statures (3 Women with the Fountain 1921), the folds of the tunics evoke ancient columns.
Or paintings inspired by mythology like the Panpipes (1923). It is interested in the round forms even if sometimes it works again on compositions deprived of plastic effects (the Guitar 1920). In 1922 it approaches surrealist and exposes with them (the Dance 1925), works become violent showing creatures deformed, convulsive, catches of a hysterical rage: Woman in a Sitted Armchair (1927) and Bather (1930).
The influence of the surrealist artists is undeniable in this will to expose interior a personal hell. Several Cubist paintings of the beginning of the year 1930, rather erotic, marked by curved and harmonious lines, translate a new stage in love at Picasso, his meeting with Marie Therese Walter, of which it had a girl, Maya, in 1935. Marie Therese, is the model of the famous Young girl In front of a Miror (1932). He travels to Spain and impassions himself for the bullfighting which becomes one of its favorite topics (the Bullfight 1934). He carries out a series of engravings in 1935 : Minotaurmarchie. The Spanish civil war the fact of reacting in the Dreams and Lies of Free (1936). Republican dice the beginning it becomes in 1936 director of Prado. The Spanish government, for its house of the International exhibition, of Paris in 1937, order with Picasso a great mural composition. It is inspired then by an episode of the war of Spain, the bombardment of the Basque city of Guernica by the German planes of the legion Condor, on April 26th, 1937. Completed in less than two months, Guernica does not represent the event directly. Picasso rather symbolizes there the horror of the human conflicts by the use of forms expressing eternal cruelty : the bull, the failing horse, the falling warrior, the mother and her dead child, the woman imprisoned in a building in flames. The composition in triangles, which points out that of the pediments of the Greek temples or the Romance pinions, gives to work its tragic dimension. It is an allegory of the hatred which composes there Picasso, a war memorial in black and white. The pallet of Picasso becomes darker with the beginning of the Second world war and the denunciation of the human insanity remains the subject of a large number of works like the Mass grave (1944-1945) or Massacres in Corée (1951 which takes as a starting point Goya.
Whereas it made alternate the surrealist visions and the figurative abstractions as from the Forties its manner of creating is stabilized. It leaves bets for the Riviera and in its workshops of Vallauris and Antibes it discovers ceramics, it carves, engraves and draws. The colors are sharp, certain will say Mediterranean. The maturity of its work is expressed through a fabric like the Guitarist (1965).
Author of a rich work of more than 20,000 parts, it tests himself with all the supports, lithographs, engraving on linoleum, ceramics, sculpture, posts and painting which approach as many topics as techniques, revealing an exceptional creative freedom. It remains until its death the witness of its time, non conformist, equipped with a formidable creative energy which makes of him the figurehead of all the modern art.