PICASSO, Pablo (Malaga, 1881 – Mougins, 1973)
Born in Malaga on 25 October 1881, Pablo Ruiz y Picasso undertook his artistic career when he was still a child, receiving an early academic training from his father, an art teacher of the local Escuelas de Bellas Artes. His first works, which mainly featured outcasts and ordinary people, were characterised by an accentuated naturalism that he further developed during his stay in Barcelona where he moved in 1895, following his family. In 1899 he began to attend the meetings of the artistic circle Els Quatre Gats, cornerstone of the Catalan Modernism, and met Carles Casagemas who became a stimulating companion for his personal artistic and theoretical development. In 1900 Picasso travelled to Paris where he permanently settled from 1904. Picasso’s first endeavour towards to new type of art is attested by the research that coincided with the so-called Blue Period (1901–1904), a time that he spent between Madrid and Paris, assimilating the lesson of disruptive masters such as El Greco. Together with La Repasseuse (1904, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), the composition Life (1903, Cleveland Museum of Art) greatly epitomised Picasso’s effort to convey a new perception of space, distorted and condensed, generally rendered through the use of a suffused blue palette. The uncanny sobriety that characterised his production of the period also resulted from the sorrow provoked by Casagemas’ suicide in 1901. From 1904 until 1906 Picasso maintained the solemn atmosphere distinctive of the Blue Period but gradually dropped its “grisaille” melancholy for lighter compositions permeated with a beige-rose chromatism. The artist hence embarked on a new phase in his artistic quest producing works such as The Organ Grinder and Harlequin (1905, Zürich, Kunsthaus), that formed part of the series of Saltimbanques. Around the same time, Picasso integrated his considerations on both the avant-garde inventions of Cézanne and the Fauves, and the observation of non-Western arts and crafts. The merging of these different elements resulted into an abrupt desertion from the illusionistic perception of the real, seeking simplified and somehow aggressive forms that emerged from a bi-dimensional space. Picasso’s pivotal step was marked by the execution of the Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and The Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, New York, Museum of Modern Art). In 1907 the young artist was introduced to the art dealer Kahnweiler who, impressed by his bold experiments, consistently contributed to the circulation of his works and secured him a regular financial income. That same year coincided with the meeting of Georges Braque with whom he came to develop, from 1909, the avant-garde movement Cubism. Picasso’s style expanded from an initial phase defined as Analytical Cubism (1907–1911), to a more sophisticated mode entitled Synthetic Cubism (1911–1914). During that time, he extensively experimented with the three-dimensional values of painting by introducing hybrid materials within the composition, and engendering new artistic forms designated as collages and papiers collés. By the end of World War I, Picasso began to collaborate with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, designing costumes and sets. Simultaneously, his style underment a change resulting from a personal interpretation of archaic types, in conjunction with a return to figurative representation commonly defined as neo-Classicism. During the following two decades Picasso experienced a sequence of artistic metamorphoses, encompassing a brief Surrealist period (1925–1930), characterised by a resuming meditation on primitive forms, eroticism and symbolism, as illustrated by his 1933–1935 corpus of works unified under the theme of Minotauromachy. By 1930 the artist had moved his studio to Boisgeloup where he intensively experimented with sculpture as demonstrated by the series of Bust of Woman and Bathers. The horrors of the Spanish Civil War plunged the artist into a period of suffering that led him to the conception of Guernica (1937, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía). By 1944 Picasso had committed to the Communist Party, concurrently with a contemporary production of politically engaged works centred on a murder narrative. In 1955 he purchased La Villa Californie, near Cannes, where he devoted himself to public commissions such as the mural Fall of Icarus (1958, Paris, UNESCO), together with personal research based on the study of masters of the past, including Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1957) and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1959–1963). Celebrated as no other artist during his lifetime, throughout Europe and the United States, Pablo Picasso died on 10 April 1973 at Mougins. His unprecedented prolific oeuvre encompasses a wide spectrum of artistic mediums such as painting, graphic works, sculpture and ceramic, among others.
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