Pablo Picasso

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881. He began painting at a very young age, and of his little-known period in A Coruña we have written an essay here at theartwolf.com. As a teenager, in Barcelona, he painted “La Primera Comunión” (First Communion), a realistic work in which Picasso showed an almost perfect technique, despite being only 14 years of age. In 1901, just before turning 20, he moved to Paris, and it was there that Picasso began to change the course of art.

In Montmartre, between 1901 and 1904, Picasso had his “Blue Period“, characterized by works with a sad and melancholic background, inspired by the painter’s difficult situation and the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. “La Vie” and “Le Vieux Guitariste” are possibly the most representative works of this period. The Blue Period is followed by the so-called “Rose Period“, with its characteristic images of acrobats and circus characters, as in “Family of Saltimbanques” of 1905. Towards the end of this period (1906-1907), Picasso showed his interest in African art, which would inspire several works until the end of this decade. The influence of African art on Picasso has been much debated, and I agree with Guy Habasque’s observation that Picasso, rather than finding technical solutions in African art, “found in this art -radically removed from Western aesthetic criteria- the confirmation of the possibility of creating a mode of expression totally separate from the classical vision of the world and the traditional means of perceiving it” (Guy Habasque, “Cubism”, 1984).

Pablo Picasso: “La Vie”, 1903. Oil on canvas, 239 x 170 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. ·· Pablo Picasso: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, 1907. Oil on canvas, 244 x 234 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1907, Picasso painted his undisputed masterpiece, and arguably the most important painting of the 20th century: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon“, which many critics believe to be an answer for Henri Matisse’s “Joy of Life”, replacing the colourful and cheerful tone of the former with a dark and disturbing feeling. In this painting, there is no background or foreground, no trace of perspective, and the foreshortening of the five female characters makes it impossible to identify a single point of view, a sensation heightened by the total absence of light and shadow. Inspired by African masks, by the work of Paul Cézanne, and perhaps by El Greco’s “Vision of the Apocalypse“, this work inaugurates the Cubist Period, which would last until the end of the following decade.

After this revolutionary cubist period, Picasso adopted a neoclassical style (such as in “La Flûte de Pan“, today in the Musée Picasso in Paris, as well as in several portraits of his then wife, Olga Khokhlova), with which he would work for most of the 1920s. In 1925 he “officially” joined André Breton’s surrealist movement, although his first works in this style did not arrive until a year later. During this period, he collaborated with the sculptor Julio Gonzalez, and created some of his most outstanding works in the field of sculpture.

In 1927 he began his relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was his muse for much of the following decade, including his “hyperactive” year of 1932, where he painted dozens of works of great sensuality, such as “Woman in front of the mirror” from the MoMA or “Le rêve“, preserved in a private collection. In this decade he made an important series of engravings, the “Suite Vollard”.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Picasso clearly supportsed the Republican side. In 1937 he paints one of the most famous works of the 20th century, “Guernica“, exhibited that same year at the “Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques” in Paris. The work, which was kept in New York until its return to Spain in 1981, is still today a pacifist symbol and a denunciation of the atrocities of war.

Pablo Picasso: “La Rêve”, 1932. Oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm. Private collection. ·· Pablo Picasso: “Guernica”, 1937. Oil on canvas, 349 x 777 cm. Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.

In the following decade Picasso met Dora Maar, who became his muse. The relationship between Maar and Picasso, who still considered Marie-Thérèse Walter as a partner, is still the subject of studies, and there is considerable evidence that Picasso mistreated both of them, most certainly psychologically and probably also physically.

From this point until his death in 1973, Picasso’s work is of much less interest than the works he created from 1904 to 1937, focusing his efforts on ceramics and in his interpretations of classical works, such as “Las Meninas” by Velázquez or “The Women of Algiers” by Delacroix.

Picasso’s works have broken several price records. In 2004, a Blue-Period portrait of a boy -“Garçon à la pipe”- sold for $104 million, and in 2015, the last version of “Les femmes d’Alger” was auctioned for 179.4 million.