Picasso

Image 1: Selection of portrait of Picasso

 I merely try to place the greatest humanity possible in my paintings. It is just as valid if it offends some idolaters of conventional human effigies - they just need to look at themselves a little closer in a mirror. What is a face, in truth? (...) What we have in front of us? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone see it in their own way? 
(Picasso, 1946, cited by the Museu Picasso of Barcelona)






Little Pablo

Picasso understood the art of painting on a deeper level, already from when he was very young. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was an artist. Not a very good one, but he also taught painting at the San Telmo School of Fine Arts. As soon as he discovered little Pablo's talent, he focused on teaching his son to paint. When Pablo turned 13, he finished one of his father's paintings, and is known to have said "So he handed me his paint and his brush, and he never painted again." (Walther, 2000, p. 8) At the age of 14, he could paint as realistic as some of the grand masters, but after just one year of impressing everybody at art school, he became bored and decided to take his education into his own hands.

This turned out to be the right thing to do for him, and after painting in Barcelona for some years, Picasso went to Paris with an artist friend, Carles Casagemas, where they both found inspiration and both fell in love. However, Casagemas's girlfriend didn't share his excitement, and turned him down, when he proposed marriage, which lead to Casagemas committing suicide. Picasso was now filled with guilt, and the fact that he's now sleeping with the girl who broke his friend's heart, didn't exactly help. This is believed to have been the main cause for Picasso's famous "blue period", where he painted lonely people, women mostly, in almost exclusively blue tones.

Image 2: "Mother and Son", from Picasso's Rose Period.

Big Picasso

In 1904 Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a new woman who would also inspire him to change his style to what we today know as his more positive Rose Period. Things were going well for Picasso, and two years later he was introduced to Henri Matisse, who turned out to be his life long rival. Picasso was inspired to again create a new style, this time something totally different from what people had ever seen before: Cubism. He started this new style with his painting Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, which didn't get the public praise he had expected.

Together, Picasso and fellow artist  Braque developed Cubism. One must bear in mind, that during this period of time, films where taking over theatre, and photography was taking over portrait painting, so the two gentlemen must have known that this was the time to revolutionize the art of painting.

In 1912 he swops Fernande for a younger model, Fernande's friend Eva Gouel. With her comes his inspiration to become even more playful with cubism, for example by portraying her as a guitar, and even producing cubist sculptures.

His father died in 1913, disappointed with Picasso's choice of style, still not understanding his son's great work. Two years later, in 1915, his lover Eva died of cancer, and Picasso was devastated.

In 1917, Picasso agreed to collaborate with Cocteau in designing a ballet in Rome. Here, far away from the battle front, he met Olga Khokhlova, one of the ballerinas, whom he married shortly after. Olga's extravagant lifestyle, with evenings at the opera or at fancy dress parties, inspired Picasso to embrace classicism again.

Image 3: Portrait of Olga.

Very big Picasso

During a summer stay at Antibes in 1923, a group of intellectuals showed Picasso a new form of expressing one self - surrealism. Picasso was crazy about this new style. He also met a new woman, or girl I should say, 17-year old Marie-Therese Walther. She inspired many of his surreal paintings, and many of her portraits are very sexual. He threw body parts around on the canvas, but it always ends up making sense in some strange way. Often these paintings have more than one image, so that if you turn your head for instance, you suddenly see a different motif than you saw at first.

Next woman in line was Dora Maar, who he met in 1936. By then, his love life was a bit of a mess. He himself was happy with having 2 women, but understandably enough, the women were miserable. Picasso, however, found inspiration in their grief and desperation, and painted these feelings into his art.

In April 1937, the German air force bombs the town Guernica, and Picasso painted the 30 m2 Guernica to be presented at the International Exhibition in Paris. This painting shows dead people and random body parts floating around in the street, and a mother carrying her dead baby. Again, Picasso manages to show the deepest human feelings with a bunch of shapes. This time people got it, and cubism was introduced. (BBC, 2010)

Image 4: "Guernica" (click to enlarge)

Eight years after he first met Dora Maar, Picasso met yet another woman, Françoise Gilot, who also became his lover, and the mother of two of his children. Between 1941-1947 Picasso challenged himself with scriptwriting, pottery and lithography. And finally in1953, Françoise left Picasso, but he already found the woman to take over for her, the of course much younger than him, Jacqueline Roque, who was his lover and protector until his death in April, 1973, 91 years old.

Picasso lead a very interesting life, always searching for new ways of expressing himself, not to mention new inspiration, particularly in the form of women. Every time Picasso fell for a new woman, his style of painting changed completely. According to Zervos's Cahiers d'Art (Green, 2005, p 5), Picasso's work can be seen as a diary. Since he painted not what his eyes saw, but what he felt for the subject, every painting is a personal statement from him.



Some of my thoughts on Picasso

What a macho....
This guy must have been extremely charming, since none of these women gave him what he deserved and threw him off the nearest cliff. Art wouldn't have been what it is today, but still, in the moment I know I wouldn't have considered that.

I think Picasso is a "real artist". Art is supposed to make you feel, and what Picasso did, was to paint feelings and not physical objects. I think that most people nowadays can look at a Picasso painting and get a clear emotional response to what they see, probably even if you show it to the workers down at the harbor. He was also extremely productive, and I think that this was only possible, because he put, not his own, but his lovers' feelings up on the canvas. He didn't sacrifice himself in the name of art, but instead he sacrificed one beautiful young girl after the other.



More of these, please

Image 5: Picasso in the middle of his light drawing.

I think some of his most interesting techniques are seen in his sculptures and when he painted with light. For the light paintings he used a camera set to a very long exposure time, and then he basically drew in the air with some sort of light. I like that it's a way of looking at the whole movement at once, and only then does it make sense. It is like freezing time, but in pretty big chunks at a time. To me, that's almost like stop motion animation, where it really doesn't look like much when you're making it, but once you're done, and you put all the pictures together, it suddenly makes otherwise dead things come alive. Without light, we wouldn't have any kind of pictures at all, so you might say that it's taking the essential and only using that to paint a pure picture.


This one here, with Picasso in the very centre, caught my eye. He always adored attention, and here he puts himself in the middle of this light, that's already long gone, the moment his camera's shutter shuts. I like the thought of him standing there, in an almost completely dark room, swinging around a little flash light like a maniac, and when we then look at the final product, it looks ever so elegant, like he was almost dancing a ballet for us. When I look at his face, he reminds me of stories of mad scientists, who insist on bringing to life different kinds of monsters. Picasso just brings to life the feelings he can collect from the people around him, and in this very picture, it's all about him.

Image 6: "Weeping Woman"

An example of another "pure painting" I think could be this one, "Weeping Woman" (1937). It is a portrait of Dora Maar, after he got tired of her. He drove her almost insane, and that desperation really shines through the canvas here. This painting makes me feel scared of the man Picasso, and I truly feel for her. Even though I know I'm looking at a bunch of strange shapes in funky colors, I understand her, as if she were a real woman sitting right in front of me, screaming and crying her eyes out.

Image 7: "Woman Flower"

A much quieter and more comfortable painting could be The Woman Flower,  which makes me feel totally peaceful, and I just want to stare at it until my eyes hurt from not blinking. Well, that's exaggerating a bit, but I really do think think this is extremely beautiful. Looking at this, I immediately understand how much in love he was with this girl. And as a contrast to "Weeping Woman" I here get an idea of the tender, loving and caring man in Picasso. However, this is maybe not what he felt when he painted it, because according to the documentary Pablo Picasso - A Primitive Soul (2000), he painted this as a reaction to Matisse wanting to portray Picasso's beautiful young lover at the time, Françoise Gilot.





This very silly painting of a musketeer (1968), I believe it's a self portrait, brings yet a different mood. At first glance, I find it funny and silly. Especially his face, with the way the eyes and the mouth form this happy and careless expression. The first time I looked at this, I thought for a few seconds that he was doing a very naughty hand gesture with his right hand, but that didn't really make sense, and of course I soon realised that it was only a pipe. His oversized feet made me think of Buddhist sculptures, where the feet are made big to show that this particular god is very strong, but in Picasso's painting it really has the complete opposite effect. He is more comparable to a circus clown with big shoes, than a Buddhist god who can take lightening in the head without even blinking. So far so good, he's a funny guy. But after chuckling a bit to myself, I begin getting annoyed with him. Who does he think he is? Sitting there without a worry in his life. He probably doesn't even know how to wipe his own bum! Well.. Pardon my French... This character's attitude has now made him so alive, I seriously want to give him a good punch in the face, to see if he runs away crying for his mom, or stays to fight like the musketeer he's pretending to be.

Image 8: "Musketeer with Pipe"

Something clever...

Trying to make a statement on Picasso's work as a whole makes me dizzy. He has created so much, and in so many different styles and medias, that it is nearly impossible to judge all of it as one. During the research for this blog, I kept thinking "this must be his last change of style then", but it just never ended! This guy understood the painted medium better than anybody else. He was a macho man with the empathy of a woman. He was a monster and a lover, and he was nuts and brilliant. All at once. I deeply hate him for what he did to his loved ones, and I equally deeply respect him for the genius he was, and I think we all owe him for making us able to understand pictures with our feelings, instead of our logic.






Reference list:

Museu Picasso of Barcelona (2008) Picasso in Conversation. Available at: http://www.bcn.cat/museupicasso/en/picasso/conversation.html (Accessed: 30 November 2010)

Walther, I. (2000) Picasso. Germany: Taschen

Green, C. (2005) Picasso - Architecture and Vertigo. London:  Yale University Press

Historic Figure . Pablo Picasso (2010) BBC. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/picasso_pablo.shtml (Accessed: 30 November 2010)

'Pablo Picasso - A Primitive Soul' (2000) Biography. Edited by Dina Potocki. Written by Molly Thompson. First broadcast 2000 [DVD] Canada: History Television Network.


Images:
 
Image 1: Robert Doisneau (1952) Pablo Picasso With Bread Fingers [Photograph].

Image 2:  Picasso, P. (1905) Mother and Son [Gouache on canvas] On-line Picasso Project [Online] Available at: http://picasso.shsu.edu/index.php?view=ArtworkInfo&OPPID=OPP.05:018 (Accessed: 30 November 2010)

Image 3: Picasso, P. (1918) Portrait of Olga Khokhlova [Oil on canvas] On-line Picasso Project [Online] http://picasso.shsu.edu/index.php?view=ArtworkInfo&OPPID=OPP.18:089 (Accessed: 30 November 2010)

Image 4: Picasso, P. (1937) Guernica [Oil on canvas] On-line Picasso Project [Online] Available at: http://picasso.shsu.edu/index.php?view=ArtworkInfo&OPPID=OPP.37:001 (Accessed: 30 November 2010)

Image 5: Mili, G. (1949) Picasso in the Middle [Photograph] Available at: http://www.life.com/image/50378942/in-gallery/24871/picasso-drawing-with-light (Accessed: 30 November 2010)

Image 6: Picasso, P. (1937) Weeping Woman [Oil on canvas] Picasso and Matisse [Online] Available at: http://www.picassoandmatisse.com/product.php?xProd=350&xSec=3  (Accessed: 30 November 2010)

Image 7: Picasso, P. (1946) Femme-fleur (Woman Flower) [Oil on canvas] [Online] Available at: http://allart.biz/photos/image/Picasso_Late_Works_64_Woman_flower.html (Accessed: 30 November 2010)

Image 8: Picasso, P. (1968) Musketeer with Pipe [Oil on canvas] [Online] Available at:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/article-1178258/Tale-Picassos-Madoff-victims-auction-38m-worth-paintings--finds-buyer.html (Accessed: 30 November 2010)


Resource list:

Sateren, S (2002) Picasso. Mankato, Minnesota: Capstone Press.

Mallen, E. (2010) On-line Picasso Project. Available at: http://picasso.shsu.edu/ (Accessed: 30 November 2010)