A
SPANISH PAINTER PABLO PICASSO
EXPERIMENTATION OF ART
EXPERIMENTATION OF ART
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SPANISH PAINTER PABLO PICASSO
EXPERIMENTATION OF ART
Spanish painter, sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker,
decorative artist and writer, active in France. He dominated 20th-century
European art and was central in the development of the image of the modern
artist. Episodes of his life were recounted in intimate detail, his comments on
art were published and his working methods recorded on film. Painting was his
principal medium, but his sculptures, prints, theatre designs and ceramics all
had an impact on their respective disciplines. Even artists not influenced by
the style or appearance of his work had to come to terms with its implications.
With Georges Braque Picasso was responsible for Cubism, one of the most radical re-structurings of the way that a work of art
constructs its meaning. During his extremely long life Picasso instigated or
responded to most of the artistic dialogues taking place in Europe and North
America, registering and transforming the developments that he found most fertile.
His marketability as a unique and enormously productive artistic personality,
together with the distinctiveness of his work and practice, have made him the
most extensively exhibited and discussed artist of the 20th century.
You may visit Pablo Picasso exhibition news at Art
Instıtute of Chicago to click below link.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2013/04/picasso-chicago-at-art-institute-chicago.html
2. PRIMITIVISM & CUBISM 1906
- 1915
Source: Oxford University Press
In his paintings immediately
prior to the early Cubist paintings of 1908, Picasso had initiated the
breakdown of illusionistic space that he was to pursue with an apparently
greater intellectual rigour through Cubism, a style that over the course of
a decade secured his prominent place in the history of 20th-century art. For
Picasso, however, the restraint of Cubism was preceded by works
exhibiting a raw intensity and violence in part stimulated by his reading of
non-Western art, and aligned with European currents of primitivism (see Primitivism, §2). This dialogue of apparently
contrasting positions, between the intellect and the emotions, between forms of
classicism and expressionism and between the conscious
and the unconscious, provided the dynamic of much of Picasso’s work.
Picasso and Fernande Olivier
spent the summer of 1906 in Gosol, a remote Catalan village in the Pyrenees
where he came to terms with his experience of Iberian sculptures from Osuna,
which he had seen in the Louvre in the spring. He began in his work to make
reference to forms of archaic art and to make expressive use of distortion with
insistently rhythmical repetitions and contrasts. In Gosol, Picasso made his
first carved sculptures. The resistance of wood produced simplified forms akin
to those in his paintings. Gauguin’s work in the same medium, the most
immediate European precedent available to Picasso, had been known to him
through Paco Durio, a previous tenant in the Bateau-Lavoir; its primitivism had
been given authority by the retrospective held at the Salon d’Automne in 1906,
and it offered access to another major stimulus, the art of the Pacific
Islands. At the same Salon ten paintings by the recently deceased Cézanne were
exhibited. Resolving his response to the achievements of these two artists
preoccupied Picasso over the next year and helped define his later work. On his
return to Paris, Picasso quickly completed his portrait of Gertrude
Stein (1906; New York, Met.; for illustration see Stein,
(3)), which had been left partly obliterated in the spring after over 80
sittings, giving her a mask-like visage of monumental chiselled forms
compressed within a shallow space. The Stein portrait stands as a crucial shift
from observation to conceptualization in Picasso’s practice.
(I) ' LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON '
The primitivism of Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; New York, MOMA) was more shocking still.
While it gestated from a series of preparatory drawings and underwent major
overpaintings during its production, it does not so much summarize Picasso’s
previous work as reframe his understanding of painting; he called it his ‘first
exorcism picture’. This radical picture, seen by friends in his studio and
designated by various appellations, was put aside and shown publicly only in
1916, when it was given its present title by Salmon. It was purchased by the
couturier Jacques Doucet in 1924 and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, in 1939 at the time of Picasso’s retrospective. Embedded in its matrix
are the vestiges of Picasso’s encounters with 19th-century artists: Ingres,
Manet, Delacroix, Cézanne and Gauguin. Initially conceiving it as a narrative
brothel scene, Picasso changed it to a vertical format, adopted a more
discontinuous sense of space for the setting, removed the male visitors and
reorientated the women to confront the (implicitly male) viewer. Controversy
surrounded its stylistic disjunctures, confused by Picasso’s own equivocal
statements. Rubin (1984) has argued that Picasso reworked the painting in late
June and early July after a visit to the African and Oceanic collections in the
Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. Although the painting has defeated
most efforts to specify African or Pacific sources, it records Picasso’s
reassessment of Gauguin’s primitivism and attests to the revelations accorded
by forms of non-Western carving in terms of conceptual principles of
representation and an emotively powerful evocation of magic and ritual. Linking
eroticism and the fear of death, the Demoiselles fixed an
image that was savage in style and violent in its dismemberment of the female
body.
In paintings such as Mother
and Child (1907; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 19) and wood-carvings such
as Figure (1907; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 238), Picasso probed the
fetishistic and conceptually simplifying aspects of primitivism. Although the
juxtaposition of discordant elements in the Demoiselles gave
way to internal pictorial coherence, in general his work of the following year
displays an astonishing diversity of handling. Picasso sundered and isolated
illusionistic conventions, using bright hues contrasted with subdued greys and
earth colours, striated hatchings against angular crumpled planes, and rhythmic
repetitions paired with bar-like outlines. In still-lifes painted in spring and
summer 1908 and landscapes executed in August at La Rue-des-Bois, Picasso
continued to reflect on the work both of Cézanne, which he had studied in depth
at the retrospective held at the Salon d’Automne of 1907, and of Henri
Rousseau, whom Picasso and Olivier fêted with a banquet in November.
By October 1907, and probably
earlier in the spring of that year, Apollinaire had introduced Georges Braque
to Picasso. In the winter of 1908–9 Picasso repainted his monumental Three
Women (St Petersburg, Hermitage). Possibly in response to Braque’s
Cézanne-influenced landscapes from the summer, in this work and a number of
still-lifes Picasso imposed a more consistent control both on the surface and
on illusions of space, after the example of Cézanne but with a greater concern
for physicality. In contrast to Picasso’s usual assertive individualism, the
invention of Cubism was such a joint effort
that even he and Braque sometimes had difficulty in distinguishing each other’s
work; Braque later described their relationship as that of mountaineers roped
together.
(II) ANALYTICAL CUBISM
In summer 1909 Picasso and Olivier spent four months at Horta de Ebro, where he made views of the village and landscape not only in paintings and drawings but also in photographs. The spatial continuity he admired in Cézanne’s work was treated in his own paintings, such as House on the Hill, Horta de Ebro (1909; New York, MOMA), in terms of nearly monochromatic tilted facets that fragment forms into a flow of light-dispersing surfaces. These discoveries were taken one stage further in pictures made in 1910 during a visit to the Catalan town of Cadaqués in the company of André Derain and his wife. In these works facets seem to be depleted of their substance, leaving a fragmented scaffolding of vestigial planar edges. In a series of etchings illustrating Jacob’s Saint-Matorel (1911; Paris, Geiser, 1933, nos 23–6) Picasso moved towards images that were increasingly transparent and difficult to interpret. The growing discontinuity of figurative fragments that characterized these methods, which came to be labelled Analytical Cubism, was especially apparent in three portraits of art dealers: Ambroise Vollard (spring 1910; Moscow, Pushkin Mus. F. A.), Wilhelm Uhde (spring 1910; St Louis, MO, Joseph Pulitzer priv. col., see Zervos cat. rais., ii, no. 217) and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (autumn, 1910; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.). While experiments in painting and sculpture had been closely interconnected in Picasso’s primitivism, in his Analytical Cubist phase he produced only Head of a Woman (Fernande) (1909; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 243) and two less satisfactory sculptures.
Picasso signalled his disaffection with the bohemian existence of the Bateau-Lavoir by moving in the autumn of 1909 to a new studio and apartment with maid in the vicinity of the Place Pigalle; he and Fernande began to hold regular open house there on Sundays. He sold paintings to the Russian collector Sergey Shchukin and to Gertrude Stein and Vollard, and exhibited internationally from Moscow to New York in 1910–12. Like Braque, however, with whom he worked very closely in this period, Picasso refused to participate in the Salon d’Automne or the Salon des Indépendants, in spite of the growing number of adherents of Cubism who made use of the Salons as a platform for their work.
After working with Braque at Céret in August 1911, Picasso was forced to return hastily to Paris in early September. The confession by Apollinaire’s friend Géry Piéret to the theft of several sculptures, including two Iberian heads sold to Picasso in 1907, had led to Apollinaire’s arrest for the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Although Apollinaire was later exonerated, he and Picasso both suffered concern for their status as foreign residents. The autumn marked a change in Picasso’s personal life. He began a liaison with Eva Gouel (Marcelle Humbert), whose presence in his life he commemorated not in portraits but in the words ‘ma jolie’, taken from a popular song, which he applied to the surface of paintings such as Woman with Guitar (‘Ma Jolie’) (1911–12; New York, MOMA). During his stay at Céret, Picasso had begun to deal openly again with more easily legible imagery after his experiments in the spring with nearly abstract paintings (sometimes labelled Hermetic Cubism). Using a pictorial scaffolding that coincided more clearly with the placement of still-life objects, Picasso filled the interstices with a scintillating touch similar to that used by the Neo-Impressionists. Following Braque’s example he employed stencilled lettering, which he soon exploited in verbal puns, masked meanings and multiple readings.
(III) FIRST COLLAGE
After painting still-lifes that employed lettering, trompe l’oeil effects, colour and textured paint surfaces, Picasso produced Still-life with Chair-caning (May 1912; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 36; for illustration), an oval picture suggesting a café table in perspective surrounded by a frame made of rope. This was the first example of collage, a form of painting or drawing that incorporates pre-existing materials or objects as part of the surface. On to the painted background Picasso applied a piece of oil-cloth printed with an illusionistic chair-caning pattern: the very kind of cloth commonly used as a table-covering in working-class kitchens. The three letters written just above the chair-caning, JOU, can be interpreted both as a fragment of the noun JOURNAL and as a verb indicating Picasso’s perception of his activity as a form of play. In the same year, probably following the invention of collage, Picasso applied similar principles to sculpture in three-dimensional constructions beginning with Guitar (cardboard, 1912; New York, MOMA). A revelation from African art, a Grebo mask, catalysed Picasso’s vision of the possibilities of spatially disjunctive arrangements of signs for object, form and volume. His invention of this radical new sculptural form was to have enormous repercussions not only for his own later work but also for later developments in modern sculpture.
(IV) PAPIERS COLLES & SYNTHETIC CUBISM
Picasso and Eva Gouel spent the summer of 1912 in Céret, Avignon and Sorgues, where they were joined by the Braques, but returned briefly to Paris in September to move into a new studio found for them by Kahnweiler on the Boulevard Raspail; at the end of the year Picasso signed a three-year contract with Kahnweiler, granting him exclusive purchase rights over his paintings. At Sorgues in mid-September Picasso saw Braque’s first papier collé, a variation of collage that employed not only ready-made materials such as newspapers but also purely invented shapes cut out of sheets of blank paper. On his return to Paris in October, Picasso also began to produce works in this medium, for example Violin and Sheet of Music (autumn 1912; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 368). Both collage and papier collé offered a new method not only of suggesting space but also of replacing conventional forms of representation with fragments of images that function as signs. They provided, in other words, a radically new way of dealing with the pictorial language that Picasso had been prising apart and isolating since the Demoiselles. Pasted newsprint helped Picasso to interpose references to tense pre-war politics, to social violence and absurdity and to artistic matters. During two further phases of his development of papier collé in 1913, Picasso discovered that shapes could acquire other meanings or identities simply by their arrangement, without requiring a resemblance to naturalistic appearances. A single shape might wittily and equally convincingly stand for the side of a guitar or a human head. Elements glued on to the surface, or hand-painted imitations of such material in a sophisticated double-take on the relationship between illusion and reality, were incorporated in subsequent paintings such as Geometric Composition: The Guitar (oil on canvas mounted on wood, 870×475 mm, spring 1913; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 38). Each element in the works of this phase, known as Synthetic Cubism, was carefully considered for the ways it could contribute to pictorial meaning.
In the same year that Apollinaire published Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (Paris, 1913), Picasso showed paintings in group exhibitions in Vienna and Prague, at the Armory Show in New York and at the Jack of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow; he also held his first large retrospective, comprising work from 1901 to 1912, at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich. From mid-March Picasso and Eva Gouel spent five months in Céret, accompanied by Max Jacob and later by Juan Gris, and in August they moved into new quarters in the Rue Schoelcher. Although the designation of two phases of Cubism first made by Kahnweiler in Der Weg zum Kubismus (Munich, 1920), which distinguished between an analytical description of objects and a synthesis of information about an object into a more unified self-sufficient structure, has dated, the terminology remains; however, numerous works of this period resist rigid classification as examples of either Analytical or Synthetic Cubism. Woman in an Armchair (autumn 1913; New York, Mrs Victor Ganz priv. col., see Penrose and Golding, 1973, no. 131), resuming a favourite early theme, includes traces of Analytical Cubist colour and faceting as deliberate signs of other systems of representation within a Synthetic Cubist matrix. By contrast the Card Player (1914; New York, MOMA) appears more ironically detached, but it too rejects a single consistent reading by juxtaposing several kinds of pictorial space and illusionistic conventions.
The Demoiselles, as Picasso’s first major painting to feature stylistic disconnectedness, was followed by papiers collés and Synthetic Cubist paintings that significantly ruptured previous conceptions of style. By such means Picasso discovered that sets of pictorial conventions could be manipulated with the same freedom as individual components. In the unfinished painting The Painter and his Model (oil and pencil on canvas, summer 1914; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 53) and in portrait drawings of 1915, he startlingly made use of naturalistic conventions of drawing, shading and space; nevertheless, concurrent with these critiques of the disintegration of consistency and wholeness in Cubism, he both elaborated the decorative possibilities of Cubism and distilled a more purified austerity. The possible variations made room for humour, irony and high seriousness.
(V) WAR YEARS
From June to November 1914 Picasso lived in Avignon. At the outbreak of World War I in August, Braque and Derain were mobilized and Apollinaire applied for French citizenship and joined the artillery. Only Gris, a fellow Spaniard, remained from the Cubist circle. Although, unlike his French colleagues, Picasso was able to carry on painting without interruption, his work became more sombre during the war years as his life altered dramatically. Kahnweiler’s contract had lapsed on his departure from France, and in the autumn of 1914 Picasso’s work began to be sold by Léonce Rosenberg. He suffered deep loss with the death of Eva Gouel on 14 December 1915 but had a brief secret affair with Gaby Lespinasse in 1915–16. In March 1916 Apollinaire returned wounded from the front; although they renewed their friendship, Picasso began to frequent a new social circle, that of the Ballets Russes, with the encouragement of a young poet whom he had recently met, Jean Cocteau, whose admiration quickly approximated adulation.
QUATRE FEMMES NUES ET TÊTE SCULPTÉE (B. 219; BA. 424)
Etching, 1934, Signed in Pencil,
From the Total Edition of 310, Plate 82
From the Vollard Suite,
On Montval Laid Paper With the Vollard Watermark,
Printed by Lacourière, Paris, Published by
Vollard, Framed
Dimensions: Image: 222 by 313 mm, Sheet: 339 by 449 mm
Dimensions: Image: 222 by 313 mm, Sheet: 339 by 449 mm
FIGURE AT THE SEASIDE, 1931
ETCHING: 1,5 MARCH 1972
From 156 Series
Etching, Dry Point and Aquatint on Paper
Dimensions Unconfirmed: 370 x 500 mm
Collection: Tate
READING, 1932
FEMME NUE ASSISE ET TÊTES BARBUES (B. 216; BA.
416)
Aquatint, Scraper, Drypoint, and Etching, 1934,
Possibly Printed in 1939, a Proof Aside From the Total
Edition of 310,
Plate 25 From the Vollard Suite, on
Wove Paper,
Printed by Lacourière, Paris, Framed
Dimensions: Plate: 129 by 179 mm, Sheet: 224 by 317 mm 8
Dimensions: Plate: 129 by 179 mm, Sheet: 224 by 317 mm 8
STUDY FOR LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON 1907
Oil on Canvas - 18.5 x 20.3 cm
Credit Line: Acquired through the
Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society , New York
THE VIOLATION SERIES
Suite Vollard 9 (Vollard Suite 9), 1931
Etching on Laid Paper
Dimensions: Image: 22,1 x 31,2 cm / Support: 34 x
44,5 cm
Category:Graphic Art
WOMAN WITH YELLOW HAIR,1931
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 100 x 81 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser
Collection,
Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978
© 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
WOMAN
WITH YELLOW HAIR
One
year before Picasso painted the monumental still life Mandolin and
Guitar, Cubism’s
demise was announced during a Dada soiree
in Paris by an audience member who shouted that “Picasso [was] dead on the
field of battle”; the evening ended in a riot, which could be quelled only by
the arrival of the police. Picasso’s subsequent series of nine vibrantly
colored still lifes (1924–25), executed in a bold Synthetic Cubist style of
overlapping and contiguous forms, discredited such a judgment and asserted the
enduring value of the technique. But the artist was not simply resuscitating
his previous discoveries in creating this new work; the rounded, organic shapes
and saturated hues attest to his appreciation of contemporary developments in
Surrealist painting, particularly as evinced in the work of André Masson and
Joan Miró. The undulating lines, ornamental patterns, and broad chromatic
elements of Mandolin and Guitar foretell the emergence of a fully
evolved sensual, biomorphic style in Picasso’s art, which would soon celebrate
the presence of his new mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter.
When
Picasso met Marie-Thérèse on January 11, 1927 in front of Galeries Lafayette in
Paris, she was 17 years old. As he was married at the time and she only a
teenager, they were compelled to conceal their intense love affair. While their
illicit liaison was hidden from public view, its earliest years are documented,
albeit covertly, in Picasso’s work. Five still lifes painted during 1927—incorporating
the monograms “MT” and “MTP” as part of their compositions—cryptically announce
the entry of Marie-Thérèse into the artist’s life. By 1931 explicit references
to her fecund, supple body and blond tresses appear in harmonious, voluptuous
images such as Woman with Yellow Hair. Marie-Thérèse became a constant
theme; she was portrayed reading, gazing into a mirror, and, most often,
sleeping, which for Picasso was the most intimate of depictions.
The
abbreviated delineation of her profile—a continuous, arched line from forehead
to nose—became Picasso’s emblem for his subject, and appears in numerous
sculptures, prints, and paintings of his mistress. Rendered in a sweeping,
curvilinear style, this painting of graceful repose is not so much a portrait of
Marie-Thérèse the person as it is Picasso’s abstract, poetic homage to his
young muse.
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3445
HEAD OF A PACIFIST WARRIOR, 1951
Indian Ink on Paper
Dimensions: 50,5 x 60,5 cm
Category: Work on Paper, Drawing
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
CHILD WITH A SHOVEL
Mougins, 15 July and 14 November 1971 |
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 195 x 130 cm
Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Para el Arte.
Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Para el Arte.
On Temporary Deposit at the Museo Picasso Málaga
© FABA Photo: Marc Domage © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
© FABA Photo: Marc Domage © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
THE TABLE FROM SAINT MATOREL
Author: MaxJacob
August 1910, Published 1911
Etching From an Illustrated Book
with Four Etchings, One With Dry Point
Dimensions: Plate: 20 x 14.2 cm;
Sheet: 26.2 x 21.4 cm
Credit Line: Abby Aldrich
Rockefeller Fund
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
HEAD ( STUDY FOR LES DEMOISELLES
D’AVIGNON ) - 1906
Watercolor on Paper
Dimensions: 22.4 x 17.5 cm
Dimensions: 22.4 x 17.5 cm
Credit Line: The John S. Newberry
Collection
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
MAN WITH GUITAR
1915, published 1929
Engraving, Drypoint, Andaquatint
Dimensions: Plate: 15.5 x 11.5 cm;
Sheet (irreg.): 28.3 x 19.4 cm
Credit Line: Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
WalterBareiss
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
FIGURES BY THE SEA I, 1932
Oil and Black Chalk on Canvas
Dimensions: 130 x 97 cm
Category: Painting
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
FEUILLE D'ÉTUDES TECHNIQUES. NEUF TÊTES (B. 285; BA.
438)
Etching, 1934, Printed in 1961,
Baer's B.b of C, Stamped With the Artist's Signature
and
Inscribed in Pencil Epreuve d'artiste, One of 19 Recorded
Artist's
Proofs Aside From the Numbered Edition of 50,
On Greenish Laid Paper, Printed by Frélaut, Paris
Dimensions: Plate: 317 by 226 mm, Sheet: 525 by 395 mm
Dimensions: Plate: 317 by 226 mm, Sheet: 525 by 395 mm
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
MOTHER WITH DEAD CHILD (II).
POSTSCRIPT OF ‘’GUERNICA’’, 1937
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 130 x 195 cm
Painting
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
MOTHER WITH DEAD CHILD (II). POSTSCRIPT OF ‘’GUERNICA’’
The motif of the mother holding the
dead child is one of the most significant in Guernica, and this
image of motherhood was to become an obsession with Pablo Picasso, who
continued to depict it after the mural was completed. The pictures done once
the painting was finished, on June 4th 1937, are known as the
‘postscripts’ to Guernica, meaning work done in the painting’s wake
but still linked formally and conceptually to it, such as is the case with this
painting, Madre con niño muerto (II). Postscripto de «Guernica» (Mother
with Dead Child [II]. Postscript for “Guernica”, September 26th) or
in a subsequent development of the subject, in the numerous heads of weeping
women.
As in other Picasso artworks known
for their social content, in Madre con niño muerto (II) the
artist decided against the use of colour, in the strict sense of the term. The
choice to use monochrome could be the result, therefore, of a desire to
accentuate the abstract side of reality, resulting in the transformation of a
specific event into a universal archetype.
Paloma Esteban Leal
WEEPING WOMAN’S HEAD WITH HANDKERCHIEF (III).
POSTSCRIPT OF ‘’ GUERNICA ‘’,1937
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 92 x 73 cm
Category: Painting
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
WEEPING
WOMAN’S HEAD WITH HANDKERCHIEF (III).
POSTSCRIPT
OF ‘’ GUERNICA ‘’
One of the central motifs linked to Guernica are the figures known as the “weeping women”, inspired
in their physical appearance by Dora Maar. These portraits would be the
pictures Pablo Picasso redid most often once he had completed the great mural
on June 4th 1937. Picasso introduced at least three formal
variations to the compositions with regard to Guernica itself, the first being the tears that run down the
contorted female faces, which do not appear in the legendary work. The second
element, similarly absent from Guernica, is the handkerchief wiping the
tears and finally, alongside these two iconographic motifs, Picasso includes a
third formal variation; vivid colour, which becomes the protagonist of these
paintings, contrasting with the chromatic range of the great mural, executed,
as everybody knows, in whites, greys and blacks. The “Weeping Woman” was to
become a recurrent motif in Picasso’s output even up to the 1940s, creating a
link with the stylistic cycle begun by the painter in 1937, when he undertook
the renowned painting.
Paloma Esteban Leal
PIPE, GLASS, BOTTLE OF RUM - MARCH 1914
Cut-and-Pasted Colored Paper, Printed
Paper, and Painted Paper,
Pencil, and Gouache on Prepared Board
Dimensions: 40 x 52.7 cm
Credit Line: Gift of Mr. And Mrs.
Daniel Saidenberg
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
WOMAN WITH TAMBOURINE
Beginning of 1939, Published 1943
Etching and Aquatint
Dimensions: Plate: 66.7 x 51.2 cm;
Sheet: 76 x 56.5 cm
Credit Line: Acquired Through the
Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
STUDIO WITH PLASTER HEAD
Juan-les-Pins, summer 1925
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 97.9 x 131.1 cm
Dimensions: 97.9 x 131.1 cm
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
PAINTER WORKING, OBSERVED BY NUDE MODEL
Plate VIII from the Illustrated Book Le
Chef-D'Oeuvreinconnu
(Printexecuted 1927-1928) - Etching
Dimensions: Plate: 19.4 x 27.9 cm;
Page: 33 x 25.2 cm
Credit Line: The Louis E. Stern
Collection
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
FIGURES BY THE SEA I, 1932
Oil and Black Chalk on Canvas
Dimensions: 130 x 97 cm
Category: Painting
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
MAN WITH A HAT 1912
Cut-and-Pasted Colored Paper and
Printed Paper, Charcoal, and Ink on Paper
Dimensions: 62.2 x 47.3 cm
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
WOMAN WITH A GUITAR
Paris, March 1914
Oil, Sand, and Charcoal on Canvas
Dimensions: 115.5 x 47.5 cm
Dimensions: 115.5 x 47.5 cm
Credit Line: Gift of Mr. And Mrs. David
Rockefeller
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
CARD PLAYER
Paris, Winter 1913-14
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions 108 x 89.5 cm
Dimensions 108 x 89.5 cm
Credit Line: Acquired Through the
Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
NUDE WOMAN, STANDING 1912
Ink and Pencil on Paper -
Dimensions: 30.7 x 18.7 cm
Dimensions: 30.7 x 18.7 cm
Credit Line: Louise Reinhardt Smith
Bequest
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
HARLEQUIN AND WOMAN WITH NECKLACE 1917
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 200 200 cm.
Legacy of Baroness Eva Gourgaud in 1965
Centre Pompidou
SCULPTEURS, MODÈLES ET SCULPTURE (B. 149; BA. 301)
Etching, 1933, Printed in 1939,
From the Total Edition of 310, Plate 41 From
the Vollard Suite,
On Montval Laid Paper, Printed by Lacourière, Paris,
Published by Vollard, Paris
Dimensions: Plate: 194 by 267 mm, Sheet: 330 by 440 mm
Dimensions: Plate: 194 by 267 mm, Sheet: 330 by 440 mm
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
STILL LIFE 1912
STUDY OF PROFILES – DECEMBER
8, 1948)
Lithograph
Dimensions: Composition: 73.3 x 55 cm;
Sheet: 75 x 56.3 cm
Credit Line:Mrs. Bertram Smith Fund
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
THE
DEPARTURE - MAY 20, 1951
Lithograph
Dimensions:
Composition: 53.8 x 64.9 cm; Sheet: 53 x 64.9 cm
Credit
Line: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund
©
2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
PORTRAIT OF SYLVETTE DAVID, 1954
THE EMBRACE. III FROM THE VOLLARD SUITE
April 23, 1933, Printed 1939 - Drypoint
Dimensions: Plate: 29.6 x 36.5 cm;
Sheet: 34 x 45.1 cm
Credit Line: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Fund
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
NUDE WOMAN IN A RED ARMCHAIR 1932
Oil Paint on Canvas
Dimensions Support: 1299 x 972 mm
Collection: Tate
RAPHAËL ET LA FORNARINA. XII: LE PAPE EST BOUCHE
BÉE DANS SON FAUTEUIL
(B. 1787; BA. 1804)
Etching, 1968, Signed in Pencil, a Proof Aside From
the Numbered Edition of 50,
Plate 307 From the 347 Series,
On Wove Paper, Printed by Crommelynck, Mougins
Dimensions: Plate: 148 by 209 mm, Sheet: 283 by 348 mm 11
Dimensions: Plate: 148 by 209 mm, Sheet: 283 by 348 mm 11
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
ON
THE BEACH, 1937
Oil, Conté Crayon & Chalk on Canvas
Dimensions: 129.1 x 194 cm
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice, 1976
© 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York
ON THE
BEACH
During
the early months of 1937 Pablo Picasso was responding powerfully to the Spanish Civil
War with the preparatory drawings for Guernica and with etchings such
as The Dream and Lie of Franco, an example of which is in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. However, in this period he also executed a group of
works that do not betray this preoccupation with political events. The subject
of On the Beach, also known as Girls with a Toy Boat, specifically
recalls Picasso’s Three Bathers of 1920. Painted at Le
Tremblay-sur-Mauldre near Versailles, On the Beach is one of several
paintings in which he returns to the ossified, volumetric forms in beach
environments that appeared in his works of the late 1920s and early
1930s. On the Beach can be compared with Henri Matisse’s Le Luxe, II, ca. 1907–08, in its simplified,
planar style and in the poses of the foreground figures. It is plausible that
the arcadian themes of his friendly rival Matisse would appeal to Picasso as an
alternative to the violent images of war he was conceiving at the time.
At
least two preparatory drawings have been identified for this work. In one
(Collection Musée Picasso, Paris), the male figure looming on the horizon has a
sinister appearance. In the other drawing (present whereabouts unknown),¹ as in
the finished version, his mien is softened and neutralized to correspond with
the features of the two female figures. The sense of impotent voyeurism
conveyed as he gazes at the fertile, exaggeratedly sexual “girls” calls to mind
the myth of Diana caught unaware at her bath.
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3449
PABLO PICASSO'S POSTERS
1.EARLY YEARS, TO 1905
Source: Oxford University Press
(I) SPAIN & PARIS
Picasso received his first lessons in 1888 from his father, José Ruiz
Blasco (1838–1913), a painter specializing in pictures of pigeons and doves,
and a teacher of drawing at the Escuela Provincial de Bellas Artes in Málaga.
It was Picasso’s father who first recognized and encouraged his aptitude for
art. His earliest preserved drawings, produced as a child of nine, display a
precocious grasp of naturalistic conventions. The imagery of his childhood and
teenage drawings reflects his father’s repertory, a fascination with the
bullfight (e.g. Bullfight, La Coruña, 2 Sept 1894; Paris, Mus. Picasso,
401) and conventional academic studies (e.g. Study of a Torso, after a
Plaster Cast, 1894–5; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 405).
In 1891 the family, including Picasso’s two younger sisters, moved to La
Coruña, on the Atlantic coast, where in 1892 Picasso enrolled in his father’s
classes in ornamental drawing at the Escuela de Bellas Artes before progressing
to drawing from figures and plaster casts and to painting from nature. In 1895
he produced about 15 oil portraits both of family friends and of socially
marginal types which sympathetically present the sitter, for example Girl
with Bare Feet (1895; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 2). He also experimented from
1894 with more biting caricatures and satirical sketches in manuscript
‘newspapers’ variously titled Azul (or Asul ) y
blanco and La Coruña (e.g. 16 Sept 1894; Paris, Mus. Picasso,
402), which emulated the subject-matter of popular political journals of the
time.
Picasso’s father changed teaching jobs again in 1895, this time moving to
the Escuela de Bellas Artes (known as La Lonja) in Barcelona. In September,
aged only 14, Picasso passed the examinations to enter the senior course in
classical art and still-life. During the next few years he began to assert his
independence, attending the academy only irregularly. He found a studio with a
friend, Manuel Pallarés, and began exhibiting his work. The First
Communion (1896; Barcelona, Mus. Picasso) and Science and Charity (1897;
Barcelona, Mus. Picasso), awarded a gold medal at the Exposición de Bellas
Artes in Málaga, were both characterized by a sharp delineation and tonal
modelling that contrasted with the light, boldly brushed handling in landscapes
of the same period, such as Mountain Landscape (c. 1896; Barcelona,
Mus. Picasso).
In autumn 1897 Picasso briefly attended the Academia Real de San Fernando
in Madrid, but he was critical of its teaching and instead studied the diverse
range of Old Master paintings in the Prado, where he copied a portrait of Philip
IV by Velázquez. With Pallarés he departed in June 1898 for the
village of Horta de Ebro (now Horta de San Juan). On his return to Barcelona in
February 1899 he began to frequent Els Quatre Gats (Cat.: The Four Cats), a
café that served as a meeting-place for the Catalan modernist movement. There
he became acquainted with a circle of artists and writers; the friendships that
most affected his development as an artist were with the painter Carles
Casagemas (1880–1901) and the poet Jaime Sabartés (1881–1968). Picasso quickly
established himself as provocateur among the younger
generation, taking account of Art Nouveau (especially in his graphic
work) and in his paintings evoking the fin-de-siècle Symbolism of
artists as diverse as Toulouse-Lautrec and Munch; it was through this milieu
that he also came to appreciate the work of El Greco.
Several major events in Picasso’s artistic maturation coincided with the
new century. In February 1900 he exhibited 150 drawings, mostly portraits, at
Els Quatre Gats, directly challenging his older colleague Ramón Casas; several
of these were published. A painting, Last Moments (destr.), was
selected for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and in October he left with
Casagemas for Paris, where he met two dealers, Pedro Mañach and Berthe Weill,
to whom he sold works; Mañach also offered him a regular income in exchange for
paintings. Until 1904 Picasso moved restlessly between Spain and Paris. From
January to April 1901 he lived in Madrid where, in February, he received news
of Casagemas’s suicide. In response he produced several intense images of his
dead friend including the Death of Casagemas (summer 1901; Paris,
Mus. Picasso, 3) and a symbolically complex work, Evocation: The Burial of
Casagemas (1901; Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris), which superimposed
allusions to the art of the past and in particular to El Greco’s Burial
of Count Orgaz (1586–8; Toledo, S Tomé). In Madrid, Picasso and the
Catalan writer Francisco de Asis Soler founded a review, Arte Joven, which
was modelled on the Barcelona publication Pél i Ploma but which ran
for only four issues. This period in Madrid, although brief, marked an
important turning-point in the development of Picasso’s identity; it was at
this time that he began signing his works Picasso rather than P. Ruiz Picasso
or P. R. Picasso as before, favouring his mother’s more distinctive and
uncommon surname.
Picasso’s second visit to Paris lasted from May 1901 to January 1902, and
the third from October 1902 to January 1903. During his third stay he shared
cramped quarters and a rare period of impoverishment with the poet Max Jacob,
whom he had met on his previous visit. In late June 1902, before the opening of
his exhibition at the Galerie Vollard, he sold 15 of the 64 works to be
displayed; most of these paintings, such as The Death of Casagemas,
employed bright hues and broken brushstrokes. The show was favourably reviewed
by Félicien Fagus in the Revue Blanche, and an exhibition of Picasso’s
pastels was held concurrently at the Sala Parés in Barcelona. He also
participated in two exhibitions at the Berthe Weill gallery in Paris in April
and November 1902.
(II) BLUE PERIOD
By the end of 1901, in works such as Self-portrait (late 1901; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 4), Picasso had adopted a predominantly blue palette and shed his motifs of their earlier sardonic social vision. From this time until 1904, known as the Blue Period, his imagery focused on outcasts, beggars and invalided prostitutes, the latter based on observations made at the prison of St Lazare in Paris. He produced his first sculptures: a modelled figure, Seated Woman (1901; see 1967 exh. cat., p. 50), and two bronze facial masks, Blind Singer and Head of a Picador with a Broken Nose (both 1903; see 1967 exh. cat., p. 51). One of the most important works of the period, however, was a painting, La Vie (1903; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.), a complex Symbolist allegory that evolved through numerous sketches. From X-rays it is known to have been painted over Last Moments and to have undergone several revisions. Its synthesis and layering of references rule out a fixed reading. Autobiography is embedded in the male figure, which was begun as a self-portrait but later given the features of Casagemas; the iconically stiff composition, compressed space and enigmatic gestures, however, evoke a more general significance.
Picasso returned in April 1904 to Paris, where he settled in a studio at le Bateau-lavoir and soon surrounded himself with a ‘Parisian family’. From this time he made France his home. He was introduced to the poet and critic André Salmon by Max Jacob, and in the autumn he met Guillaume Apollinaire. He began a liaison at this time with Fernande Olivier, whose features were given to many of his female figures during the next few years. His first important etching, The Frugal Meal (1904; Geiser, 1933, no. 21), was typical of Blue Period paintings such as The Blind Man’s Meal (1903; New York, Met.) in its subject-matter of a gaunt, impoverished couple in spartan surroundings. The end of the Blue Period was marked by an exhibition in October 1904 at the Berthe Weill gallery of 12 works from the previous three years.
(III) ROSE PERIOD
By the end of 1904 both the colour schemes and subject-matter of Picasso’s paintings had brightened. His pictures began to be dominated by pink and flesh tints and by delicate drawing; although the works were less monochromatic than those that preceded them, this phase came to be labelled his Rose Period. A fascination with images of saltimbanques, harlequins and clowns may be linked both to frequent visits to the Cirque Médrano and to an identification with such characters as alter-egos, a legacy of the 19th century. Family of Saltimbanques (1905; Washington, DC, N.G.A.), which includes figures that have been identified as disguised portraits of Picasso and members of his circle, sums up his preoccupations during this time. The idea of a group of figures who appear alienated and unable to communicate with each other, placed in a flattened and disjunctive space, seems to have been derived from Manet’s Old Musician (1862; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). Details of more anecdotal subject-matter are visible in preliminary sketches and X-ray photographs, but these were eliminated in the course of painting. Picasso’s debt to late 19th-century Symbolism remains in evidence, here evoking a state of being rather than an allegorical allusion, as had been the case in La Vie.
(IV) SCHOORL
In summer 1905 Picasso visited the town of Schoorl in the Netherlands at the invitation of a writer, Tom Schilperoort. In the few paintings made by him during this month, such as Dutch Girl (Brisbane, Queensland A.G.), he began to introduce weightier figures, and the works that he produced in the autumn developed in gravity and opacity; figures viewed frontally and in strict profile impose an archaizing stylization on a classical simplicity, as in the slightly later La Toilette (1906; Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox A.G.). Two of these works were purchased by Leo Stein and his sister Gertrude, who soon became two of Picasso’s most important patrons and frequent hosts to him at their weekly salons. The other major artist promoted by the Steins during this period was Henri Matisse, who with fellow painters made a sensation at the Salon d’Automne of 1905 as instigators of a new movement, Fauvism. The Fauvists’ use of bright, unmodulated colour was not immediately reflected in Picasso’s paintings, but the same Salon d’Automne included an Ingres retrospective, a room devoted to Cézanne and three paintings by Henri Rousseau; the work of each of these artists was to play an important role in the evolution of Picasso’s art.
PABLO PICASSO'S POSTERS
PICASSO MUSEUM
PICASSO MUSEUM
PABLO PICASSO'S POSTERS
3. VARIATIONS OF STYLE,
CLASSICISM & THE THEATRE, 1916 - 1924
Source: Oxford University Press
(I) THEATRE DESIGNS, 1916 - 1922
Cocteau had already begun to plan the ballet that was to
become Parade by the time he met Picasso. In May 1916 he introduced
Picasso to Serge Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, and by August
Picasso joined the enterprise. Picasso designed five complete ballet
productions by 1924, four of them for the Ballets Russes. Theatre design
encouraged his protean qualities and offered new challenges. It brought him
into contact with an expanded public and with the dancer Olga Koklova, whom he
married in July 1918, and professional associates in other fields. Each ballet
had different demands. The first, Parade (première 18 May 1917), and
the last, Mercure (première 18 June 1924), spawned the most
radical ideas. Parade evolved as a collaborative effort between
Picasso, Cocteau, the composer Erik Satie and the choreographer Léonide
Massine. The self-referentially theatrical scenario drawn from popular
entertainment afforded Picasso scope for his first major juxtaposition of Cubism (the décor) and naturalism
(the drop curtain) and his most comprehensive retrospective of imagery to date.
Large Cubist constructions were worn as body masks by several ‘Managers’.
Costumes for other characters employed found elements or refashioned the image
of the body in terms of art.
Later Ballets Russes projects adopted more unified, decorative use of
pictorial conventions and extended theatrical self-consciousness by displacing
the action to a stage within a stage. Diaghilev’s rejection of some sketches
gave Picasso a taste of the constrictions of commercial collaboration.
For Mercure, staged as part of the Soirées de Paris, an enterprise
sponsored by Etienne, Comte de Beaumont (1883–1956), he devised several moving
tableaux with ‘poses plastiques’ by Massine and music by
Satie. Mercure baited audience taste with a grotesque parody of
Classical mythology and seriously challenged conventional dance theatre, quite
literally absorbing the dancers into the visual conception of the stage.
Picasso also designed a set for Cocteau’s adaptation of Antigone (Dec
1922), his only work for the dramatic theatre during this period; the couturier
Coco Chanel (1883–1970) supplied the costumes.
Theatre design sanctioned Picasso’s use of style as a convention in the
painter’s vocabulary, as an element that could be donned and put aside like a
theatrical role, costume or mask. His contact with dance may also have
encouraged him to look more closely at bodily gesture and to explore an imagery
of motion. Encouraged by Koklova’s bourgeois aspirations, Picasso also assumed
a new way of life, moving into a more elegant apartment on the Rue La Boëtie in
November 1918, spending time in fashionable resorts, associating with
socialites and appearing in fancy dress costume as a matador at one of the
Comte de Beaumont’s parties.
(II) THREE MUSICIANS
In spite of the pressures on his time of both his theatre work and social
life, Picasso maintained his ambitions as a painter. Cubism continued to inform his
work, but his last large pronouncements of pure Synthetic Cubist order were two
versions of Three Musicians (1921; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A., and New
York, MOMA). The tightly interlocked, decoratively detailed and visually
punning Philadelphia version contrasts with the New York version’s more
enigmatic treatment set in a shallow spatial stage. The commedia
dell’arte characters, besides referring to Picasso’s past imagery and to
his current theatrical preoccupations, may also form part of a tribute to a
specific period in his life. According to Reff (1980), Harlequin represents
Picasso; Pierrot stands for Apollinaire, who had died on 9 November 1918; and
the monk-like figure is a substitute for Max Jacob, who went into seclusion at
the Benedictine abbey at St Benoît-sur-Loire in June 1921 and at whose baptism
in 1915 Picasso had acted as godfather.
(III) CLASSICISM IN THE 1920s
During the 1920s, concurrent with his continuing investigations of Cubism, Picasso devised a personal form of neo-classicism. Cocteau referred to such retrospective tendencies in the arts after World War I as a ‘rappel à l’ordre’; Picasso, however, had entertained such alternatives to Cubism as early as 1914. As a counterpart to Three Musicians he produced Three Women at the Spring, also in two versions (1921; New York, MOMA; and Paris, Mus. Picasso, 74), referring directly to Classical precedent in the physiognomy and garb of the figures and in the massively volumetric suggestion of carved high relief. Not all the classicizing works so directly evoke a golden age; monumental forms are sometimes clothed in modern dress, Classical gravity and order are sometimes unsettled (as in Still-life with Pitcher and Apples, 1919; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 64), and some works display a delicate linear lyricism or more elastic distortions. During this period Picasso also paraphrased and parodied work by Manet and the Le Nain brothers, for example The Happy Family, after Le Nain (1917–18; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 56). A soft-focus naturalism, sometimes alluding to Renoir or Corot, served for numerous portraits of Olga and of their son Paulo (b 4 Feb 1921).
Picasso travelled more extensively than before during these years. From February to April 1917 he was in Rome for the preparations of Parade and from there visited Naples and Pompeii. This direct experience of Italy and Roman Antiquity may have encouraged his classicizing investigations. In June and July of the same year he accompanied the Ballets Russes to Madrid and Barcelona and in May 1919 to London. He spent his summers in fashionable seaside towns: Biarritz, Saint-Raphaël, Juan-les-Pins, Dinard, Cap d’Antibes and Monte Carlo. While he lost his two closest friends, Apollinaire and Jacob, he made new acquaintances of a younger generation, such as fellow Spaniard Joan Miró in 1919 and the American Gerald Murphy. His friendship was also courted by poets such as Cocteau and the burgeoning Surrealists Louis Aragon and André Breton.
Despite the fluctuation in prices brought about by sales in 1921 and 1923 of the Uhde and Kahnweiler collections sequestered by the French government, Picasso’s reputation prospered. He showed pre-Cubist works in a joint exhibition with Matisse at the Galerie Paul Guillaume (Jan–Feb 1918) and had several exhibitions at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery (1919, 1920 and 1924); he also exhibited in Rome, Munich and New York. His illustrations were published in books by his poet friends, and the first monograph on his work, by Maurice Raynal, appeared in German in 1921 and in French translation in 1922.
© 2009 Oxford University Press
PABLO PICASSO'S POSTERS
WOMAN DRESSING HER HAIR
Royan, June 1940
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 130.1 x 97.1 cm
Dimensions: 130.1 x 97.1 cm
Credit Line: Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
THE SWIMMER, 1934
Black Chalk on Canvas
Dimensions: 182 x 216 cm
Painting
Entry date: 1988 (from the redistribution of the Museo
Español de Arte Contemporáneo [MEAC] collection)
THE
SWIMMER
The theme of bathers, and indeed beach scenes in general,
always held a great fascination for Pablo Picasso, who depicted them from
different approaches and in a succession of styles. However, both for the
atypicality of its iconography and the size and technique, La nageuse (The Swimmer) constitutes a special case within
Picasso’s universe of sea-themed figures and objects. Unlike most cases, in
this picture from 1934 Marie-Thérèse Walter primarily inspires fear. Her blond
hair has been transformed into a stiff plume, which seems to end in a
knifepoint, and the magnetism emanating from her squinting eyes is surpassed
only by the sensation of greed transmitted by her funnel-like mouth, waiting to
swallow a hypothetical prey. Brandishing her femininity – embodied in her heavy
breasts – like a banner, rather than enjoying the welcoming embrace of the
water, this ambiguous and terrifying character, with its huge stiff fin-like
hands, seems to be preparing for an imminent attack. Given the proximity of
armed conflict in his own country, it would not be too farfetched to believe
that Picasso conceived this ghostly apparition as a distant antecedent of Guernica itself.
Paloma Esteban Leal
BUSTE D'HOMME
WOMAN AT THE WINDOW 1952
Medium Aquatint and Dry Point on Paper
Dimensions: 902 x 635 mm
Collection: Tate
WEEPING WOMAN’S HEAD WITH HANDKERCHIEF (I).
POSTSCRIPT OF ‘’ GUERNICA ‘’, 1937
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 55 x 46 cm
Painting
Entry date: 1988 ( From the Redistribution of
the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo [MEAC]
Collection )
THE
CHARNEL HOUSE , 1944-45
Oil
and Charcoal on Canvas
Dimensions: 199.8 x 250.1 cm
Dimensions: 199.8 x 250.1 cm
Credit
Line: Mrs. Sam A. Lewisohn Bequest (by exchange), and Mrs. Marya Bernard Fund
in Memory of Her Husband Dr. Bernard Bernard, and Anonymous Funds
©
2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
THE CONVENT FROM SAINT MATOREL 1911
Author: MaxJacob
Etching From an Illustrated Book With
Four Etchings, One With Dry Point
Dimensions: Plate: 19.9 x 14.2 cm ;
Sheet (irreg.): 26.1 x 20.6 cm
Credit Line: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Fund
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
PORTRAIT OF JACQUELINE WITH GLOSSY HAIR
Feb. 16, 1962, Published 1963 - Linoleum Cut
Dimensions: Composition: 63.8 x 52.5
cm; Sheet: 75 x 61.9 cm
Credit Line: Gift of the Saidenberg
Gallery, New York
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
THREE STANDING NUDES, WITH SKETCHES OF
FACES
Plate IX From the Illustrated Book Le
Chef-D'Oeuvre In Connu
(Print executed 1927-1928) - Etching
Dimensions: Plate: 19.4 x 27.8 cm;
Page: 33 x 25.2 cm
Credit Line: The Louis E. Stern
Collection
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
ACCORDIONIST CERET 1911
STILL LIFE WITH BOTTLE OF MARC
1911, Published 1912 - Drypoint
Dimensions: Plate: 49.8 x 30.5 cm;
Sheet (irreg.): 62 x 42.4 cm
Credit Line: Acquired Through the
Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
PIPE, GLASS, BOTTLE OF VIEUX MARCH - PARIS 1914
WOMAN SITTING ON AN ARMCHAIR 1941
L'HOMME AU CHIEN (RUE SCHŒLCHER) (B. 28; BA. 39)
Etching, 1915, Signed in Red Crayon,
From the Total Edition of 102,
On Laid Japan Paper,
Published by Lucien Vollard-Marcel Lecomte, Paris,
Framed
Dimensions: Plate: 279 by 218 mm, Sheet: 458 by 290 mm
Dimensions: Plate: 279 by 218 mm, Sheet: 458 by 290 mm
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
VIOLIN
AND GRAPES 1912
Oil
on canvas - 61 x 50.8 cm
Credit
Line: Mrs. David M. LevyBequest
©
2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
THE SONG OF THE DEAD, 1948
Lithograph on paper
Dimensions: 42,5 x 32,5 cm
H.C. IV/XX
Category: Graphic Art
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
BOTTLE OF VIEUX MARC, GLASS, GUITAR & NEWSPAPER 1913
JACQUELINE IN A STRAW HAT, 1962
Linocut, Gouge and Linoleum Printed in Four Inks on Paper,
Linocut, Gouge and Linoleum Printed in Four Inks on Paper,
Dimensions: 63.8 x 53 cm
Museo Picasso Málaga. Purchased 2010
© Museo Picasso Málaga. Photo: Rafael Lobato
Museo Picasso Málaga. Purchased 2010
© Museo Picasso Málaga. Photo: Rafael Lobato
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
JACQUELINE IN
A STRAW HAT
The
starting point for the period defined as “late Picasso” is now considered to be
the early 1960s. While art history needs to define concrete periods, there were
still numerous other “Picassos” at that time. This is evident in the present
linocut of 1962 depicting Jacqueline, whom the artist had married the year
before and who would be his last partner in life. Linocut was one of Picasso’s
final techniques, which he first started to use in the 1950s for various
posters but which reached a new high point in 1958 with the tour de force of Portrait
of a Woman after Cranach the Younger.
Jacqueline
in a Straw Hat belongs to the
three most intensive years for the artist’s use of this technique, 1959 to
1962. The result was a vast body of work that astonished observers at the time,
not only for the combinations and superimpositions of colours but also for the
artist’s unorthodox working method. Picasso’s dealer Kahnweiler was amazed when
he saw his first works in this medium: “At first he limited himself to three or
four colours, now he’s doing prints with twelve colours on a single plate! It’s
diabolical” He has to anticipate the effect of each colour as there’s no going
back. I don’t know what name to give to this mental operation.” As he did with
ceramics, Picasso’s experiments with this new technique took it to its limits
in an all-encompassing approach that aimed to discover all its technical
procedures and to achieve the most difficult aspect, which is mentally
anticipating the final composition.
In Jacqueline
in a Straw Hat Picasso created the face using a
calligraphy identical to that seen in various drawings of the same day. This is
a work in which the artist constructed the face in the most economical way from
a combination of straight and curved lines and bright colours which contrast
strongly with the white background; a type of colouring and forms that to some
extent recall Joan Miró’s graphic language. Once again we have the classic
doubling of the face-mirror, which is very similar to the above-mentioned
drawings of this date. In fact, in that month of January 1962, Jacqueline’s
face would be Picasso’s primary focus, giving rise to various linocuts. This
month also saw the start of various celebrated series in the same technique
such as his versions of the Danaë and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. This
“penultimate” Picasso breaks out at different moments, embarking on new
directions and new experiments which, as in this case, would remain unfinished
as he abandoned working in linocut around 1963 with the exception of a few
works created up to 1968.
Text:
Eduard Vallés
BACCHANALE II,1955
STUDY FOR A CONSTRUCTION 1912
Ink on Transparentized Paper
Dimensions: 17.1 x 12.7 cm
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
LIFE 1903
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 196.5 × 129.2 cm
Dimensions: 196.5 × 129.2 cm
Scala / Art Resource, NY / Picasso,
Pablo (1881-1973) © ARS, NY
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
GIRL WITH A MANDOLIN 1910
PIERROT & RED HARLEQUIN, STANDING -
C. 1920 - Stencil
Dimensions: Composition: 27.5 x 21.3
cm; Sheet: 30.5 x 23.8 cm
Credit Line: Lillie P. Bliss Collection
© 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
GUERNICA, 1937
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 349,3 x 776,6 cm
Painting
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017
GUERNICA
The
government of the Spanish Republic acquired the mural "Guernica" from
Picasso in 1937. When World War II broke out, the artist decided that the
painting should remain in the custody of New York's Museum of Modern Art for
safe keeping until the conflict ended. In 1958 Picasso extended the loan of the
painting to MoMA for an indefinite period, until such time that democracy had
been restored in Spain. The work finally returned to this country in 1981.
An accurate depiction of a cruel,
dramatic situation, Guernica was created to be part of the
Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris in 1937. Pablo
Picasso’s motivation for painting the scene in this great work was the news of
the German aerial bombing of the Basque town whose name the piece bears, which
the artist had seen in the dramatic photographs published in various
periodicals, including the French newspaper L'Humanité. Despite that, neither the studies nor the finished picture
contain a single allusion to a specific event, constituting instead a generic
plea against the barbarity and terror of war. The huge picture is conceived as
a giant poster, testimony to the horror that the Spanish Civil War was causing
and a forewarning of what was to come in the Second World War. The muted
colours, the intensity of each and every one of the motifs and the way they are
articulated are all essential to the extreme tragedy of the scene, which would
become the emblem for all the devastating tragedies of modern society.
Guernica has attracted a number of controversial
interpretations, doubtless due in part to the deliberate use in the painting of
only greyish tones. Analysing the iconography in the painting, one Guernica scholar, Anthony Blunt, divides the protagonists of the
pyramidal composition into two groups, the first of which is made up of three
animals; the bull, the wounded horse and the winged bird that can just be made
out in the background on the left. The second group is made up of the human
beings, consisting of a dead soldier and a number of women: the one on the
upper right, holding a lamp and leaning through a window, the mother on the
left, wailing as she holds her dead child, the one rushing in from the right
and finally the one who is crying out to the heavens, her arms raised as a
house burns down behind her.
At this point it should be remembered that two
years earlier, in 1935, Picasso had done the etching Minotauromaquia, a synthetic work condensing into a single image all the
symbols of his cycle dedicated to the mythological creature, which stands as Guernica’s most direct relative.
Incidents in Picasso’s private life and the
political events afflicting Europe between the wars fused together in the
motifs the painter was using at the time, resulting both in Guernica itself and all the studies and ‘postscripts’, regarded
as among the most representative works of art of the 20th century.
Paloma Esteban Leal
http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/guernica
4. INTERACTIONS WITH SURREALISM,
1925 - 1935
Source: Oxford University Press
André Breton, the chief theorist
and promoter of Surrealism, claimed Picasso as ‘one of ours’ in his article ‘Le
Surréalisme et la peinture’, published in the fourth issue of Révolution
surréaliste (1925); the Demoiselles was first reproduced in the same issue. At
the first Surrealist group exhibition (Nov 1925) Picasso showed some of his Cubist
works. He never yielded completely to the concept of ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’ as
defined in the first Manifeste du surréalisme—poisson soluble (Paris, 1924),
but the movement did lead him to a new imagery and formal vocabulary for
emotional expression, releasing the violence, the psychic fears and the
eroticism that had been largely contained or sublimated since 1909. This shift
towards a more overt expressiveness was heralded by The Dance (1925; London,
Tate). Although it emerged from studies related to the ballet and was dependent
on Cubism for its conception of
space, the fusion of ritual and abandon in the imagery recalls the primitivism
of the Demoiselles and the elusive psychological resonances of
his Symbolist work. Resurrecting the memory of Casagemas, it also prefigures
Picasso’s ritually staged Crucifixion (1930; Paris, Mus.
Picasso, 122). Numerous images of women with devouring maws coincide with the
breakdown of Picasso’s marriage to Olga, while polymorphously eroticized
figures can be associated with a new liaison with Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he
met in 1927, although she did not openly appear in his work until the 1930s.
Images of sexual intercourse between schematic stick figures or inflated
monsters, as in Figures by the Sea (12 Jan 1931; Paris, Mus.
Picasso, 131), suggest violent or ambivalent emotions.
(I) RENEWED INTEREST IN CLASSICISM
Surrealism not only rekindled
Picasso’s fascination with the primitive and the erotic but also encouraged a
conflation of his abiding interests in Classicism and the bullfight. The
mythical hybrid monster known as the Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, became a
favourite Surrealist image and the title of a Surrealist periodical, Minotaure,
whose first cover Picasso designed in 1933 (original collage, New York, MOMA).
Symbolizing both destructive and creative powers, the Minotaur served Picasso
as a new artistic identity. The complex etching Minotauromachy (1935;
Bloch, no. 288, I–V) provokes multiple narrative and symbolic associations,
ultimately stressing private meanings and never yielding a definite reading. In
another etching, Model and Surrealist Sculpture
(1933; Bloch 187), Picasso wittily confronts the Classical with the fantastic,
revealing his growing preoccupation with artistic practice and creativity. His
treatment of the theme of the artist’s studio in late Cubist paintings such
as Artist and Model (1928; New York, MOMA) and more
naturalistic etchings culminated in 1933–4 in the classical idyll of The
Sculptor’s Studio, a subsection of 46 of the 100 etchings gathered together
in 1937 but offered for sale as the Vollard Suite only in 1950. In these works
the artist is represented both as a contemplator and lover of his model/muse
and as an active practitioner; and, in contrast to Picasso’s own experience,
the making of art is depicted as a natural and unproblematic activity.
(II) EXPERIMENTS WITH DIFFERENT
MEDIA
During these years less
productive periods of painting alternated with outpourings of etchings and
sculptures. In addition to the Vollard Suite, Picasso illustrated
Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (Paris, 1931) for Vollard with
etchings produced in 1927, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Lausanne,
1931) for Skira and an English translation of Lysistrata (New
York, 1934) for the Limited Editions Club. In spring 1926, having produced few
sculptures or reliefs since 1915, he executed a group of assemblages, on the theme of guitars, out of
cloth, nails and other materials, some protruding aggressively from the
surface. Austere and disturbing, they were succeeded in summer 1930 by
Surrealist-influenced bas-reliefs mounted on canvas and coated in sand, for
example Construction with Bather and Profile (1930; Paris, Mus.
Picasso, 125).
In 1921 Picasso had been
approached to design a monument to Apollinaire. Finally in 1928, with the
assistance of Julio González, a sculptor and trained metalworker, he realized
some maquettes made of metal rods such as Figure (1928; Paris,
Mus. Picasso, 264). This linear scaffolding became fleshed out with flattened
metal shapes in Woman in the Garden (1929–30; Paris, Mus. Picasso), a
homage to Marie-Thérèse as well as a proposal for the Apollinaire monument.
Although the submissions for the monument were rejected as too radical, the
renewed association with González, whom he had known since 1902, produced ten
collaborative sculptures over four years in Picasso’s most fruitful artistic
dialogue since the Cubist venture with Braque.
Unlike the frontal and opaque
earlier Cubist constructions, these metal sculptures proposed an open
three-dimensional structure that described and marked out a transparently
conceived space. Although their radicality portended much for the future of
20th-century sculpture, Picasso returned to a more Classicizing conception of
mass and volume in the large metamorphic bronze heads produced in 1931–2 at
Boisgeloup, for which Marie-Thérèse served as the inspiration; in works such
as Head of a Woman (1931–2; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 300) her features
were sometimes recast into a fetishized hermaphroditic image. In autumn 1935,
having produced no paintings since May, Picasso wrote some Surrealist automatic
poetry; this new venture marked the end of a decade of innovation, response to
younger artists, doubt, inner reliance and self-assessment.
(III) PERSONAL LIFE
The routine of Picasso’s private
life at this time was also punctuated by periods of instability. He continued
to spend the summer at seaside resorts, a habit he had established in the early
1920s. In 1933 and 1934 he took his family to Spain, visiting Barcelona (where
he saw the Romanesque art in the Museu d’Art de Catalunya in 1934) as well as
Madrid, the Escorial, Toledo and Saragossa. After considering and rejecting
divorce, Picasso separated from Olga in June 1935. On 5 October Marie-Thérèse
gave birth to a daughter, Maïa (María de la Concepción), named after Picasso’s
sister. Although by now regarded as a major artist, he began to receive
negative notices from those who perceived a decline in his more recent work. He
exhibited widely, winning the Carnegie International prize in October 1930 and
holding his first large retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, in
June 1932. The proliferation of publications on his work included the
monumental catalogue raisonné by Christian Zervos (first volume, 1932),
followed one year later by the first volume of Bernard Geiser’s Picasso: Peintre-graveur.
In July 1935, confronting fame and an apparent crisis in his work, Picasso
invited his old friend Sabartés to join him as his secretary and business
manager in November.
© 2009 Oxford University Press
5.WAR YEARS & LATER WORK,
1936 - 1973
Source: Oxford University Press
(I) SPANISH CIVIL WAR TO WORLD
WAR II
Events of the next years impelled
Picasso towards more public meanings for his hitherto personal symbols. On 14
July 1936 he contributed to Popular Front festivities in France. An enlargement
of a gouache, Composition with Minotaur (28
May 1936; Paris, Mus. Picasso), became the drop curtain for a performance of
Romain Rolland’s play Le 14 juillet; although this belonged to a series of
drawings on the Minotaur theme, the gestures and their context suggest a
politicized imagery. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War on 18 July
1936, the Republican government appointed Picasso director of the Museo del
Prado. In January 1937 he etched The Dream and Lie of Franco I and II (Bloch,
nos 297 and 298) and wrote an accompanying poem to be sold for the benefit of
the Spanish Republic. The sequence of scenes depicts the General as a grotesque
polyp reminiscent of Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu.
In January 1937 the Spanish
Republican government asked Picasso to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion
at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, due to open in June. After a few
preliminary sketches relating to the theme of the artist’s studio, on 1 May
Picasso set to work on a vast painting, Guernica (oil on canvas, 3.51×7.82 m;
Madrid, Cent. Reina Sofía), finally spurred into action by the aerial bombing
by the Falangists of the Basque town of Guernica five days earlier. He then
worked intensively, producing more than 50 studies and making extensive
revisions on the large canvas. dora Maar, a Surrealist artist
and new companion whom he had met in 1936, photographed seven moments in the
production of the final work. Guernica was installed in Paris in mid-June;
redolent with political allusions, reportage and historical references, it has
since attracted numerous efforts at decipherment. Although a rich mine for
analysis, its success as painting or political statement has been obscured by
the fact that history has turned it into an icon. Its motifs produced numerous
progeny of a more personal nature, but responses to the worsening situation in
Spain and preparations for war in the rest of Europe are less in evidence; one
such work is Night Fishing at Antibes (Aug 1939; New York, MOMA), which adopts
jarring formal devices in a ritualized image of killing and detached
observation.
After the invasion of France by
the Germans in 1940, Picasso lived in his Paris studio on the Rue des
Grands-Augustins. Although watched by the German authorities, he was able to
work and even to cast some sculpture in bronze.
Skulls and death’s heads evoke the sombre mood, for example in Death’s Head
(1943; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 326). Similar imagery featured in paintings such as
Skull, Sea Urchins and Lamp on a Table (27 Nov 1946; Paris, Mus. Picasso, 198).
Le Désir attrapé par la queue (Paris, 1945), a play written by him in January
1941, deals with the privations of the occupation through the language of
poetic automatism. On 19 March 1944 it received a
private reading at the home of Michel and Louise Leiris; the participants, in
addition to the Leirises, included Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul
Sartre and Dora Maar, and among the audience were the Braques, Brassaï, Jacques
Lacan and Sabartés.
Shortly after the Liberation on 5
October 1944 L’Humanité announced that Picasso had joined the French Communist
Party. The imagery of Massacre in Korea (1951; Paris, Mus.
Picasso) and the War and Peace murals (oil on
fibre board, each 4.7×10.2 m, 1952, installed 1954; Vallauris, Mus. N. Picasso)
was designed to win party approval. Picasso attended international peace
conferences in Warsaw (1948), Paris (1949) and Sheffield (1950), received the
Lenin Peace Prize (Nov 1950) and designed posters and a portrait of Stalin at
the party’s request. From August 1947 he made ceramics at the Madoura potteries
in Vallauris, partly motivated, it would seem, by political concerns. In
contrast to this humble medium, however, he also produced a considerable number
of bronze sculptures in the early 1950s, including some of his best-known works
in the medium such as She-goat (h. 1.21 m, 1950; Paris, Mus.
Picasso, 340) and Baboon and Young (h. 533 mm, 1951; New York, MOMA).
(II) PERSONAL LIFE, LATE 1930s TO
1953
Picasso’s emotional life during
this period continued to be turbulent. In the late 1930s he had liaisons with
both Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar, continuing his involvement with Maar
even after meeting a young painter, Françoise Gilot (b 1921), in 1943. Gilot
and Picasso began living together in 1946 and had two children, Claude (b 15
May 1947) and Paloma (b 19 April 1949). The years of Picasso’s most active
involvement with the Communist Party coincided with this relationship, but
Françoise left in 1953. By contrast with these unstable romantic entanglements,
Picasso had a profound and durable friendship from early 1936 with Paul Eluard,
a supporter of the left and a Communist Party member from 1942, which ended
only with the poet’s death in 1952. Before and after World War II Picasso spent
an increasing amount of time in the Mediterranean; with the purchase in the
summer of 1948 of La Galloise, a villa near Vallauris, he settled more
permanently in the south of France, although he retained residences and studios
in Paris. His international reputation had expanded and popularized during
these years, beginning in 1939 with the publication in Life magazine of
photographs of him taken by Brassaï in Paris and with the exhibition Picasso:
Forty Years of his Art at MOMA in New York. After the Liberation Picasso’s
marketability in the media was confirmed by a film, Visite à Picasso (1948),
directed by the art critic Paul Haesaerts. Picasso was granted a retrospective
at the first Salon d’Automne held after the Liberation, his first Salon showing
in France. In 1946 he decorated the museum in Antibes, which was then renamed
in his honour. International retrospectives took place in 1953 in Rome, Milan
and São Paulo. Despite his political affiliations during the Cold War period,
Picasso enjoyed prosperity and worldly success.
(III) VARIATIONS ON OLD MASTER
WORKS
During his final decades Picasso became more obsessed with history than
with the present: with earlier art as subject-matter, with his own development
and with his place in art history. A watercolour and gouache after
Poussin’s Bacchanale (Aug 1944; untraced) heralded numerous
paraphrases and variations. Delacroix’s two versions of the Women of
Algiers (e.g. 1833; Paris, Louvre) prompted 15 paintings and 2 lithographs
between December 1954 and February 1955 (e.g. 3 versions in New York, Mrs
Victor W. Ganz priv. col., see Late Picasso, 1988 exh. cat., pp. 153–5).
This was followed by another sequence, The Maids of Honour (Las meninas),
after Velázquez (1957; Barcelona, Mus. Picasso), and series based on
Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959–61; e.g. 10 July 1961; Stuttgart,
Staatsgal.; and 30 July 1961; Humlebæk, Louisiana Mus.) and on works by Lucas
Cranach, Rembrandt, Murillo and Courbet. The final series, Rape of the
Sabines (e.g. 4 and 8 Nov 1962; Paris, Pompidou), conflated references to
Poussin and David and alluded to current international tensions; taken as a
group, this was his last major political statement. In such works Picasso was
not simply borrowing motifs to make up for a diminished imagination. Rather, he
pitted himself in competition with his chosen references, breaking them down,
recomposing them and becoming ever bolder in his marriages of imagery and style
across history.
The Old Master took a place as a character in Picasso’s late images, in
which series of works interrelate in a vestigial private narrative. Mingling
with acrobats, strolling players, commedia dell’arte figures and
memories from Picasso’s youth, he represents one of the many possible guises of
the artist, who may also be a child genius or an impotent old man. In works
such as 25.5.68 I (aquatint) his 17th-century garb recollects
Velázquez or Rembrandt (Picasso referred to this character as a musketeer), and
occasionally he appears as a specific historical personage; in the etchings
published as Suite 347 (1968; Bloch 1481–1827) Raphael lives out an
erotic fantasy with his mistress, La Fornarina, as imagined by Picasso through
Ingres. Much of Picasso’s late work equates art with the erotic, painting with
sexual potency, spectating with voyeurism. The obsessive production of such
images seems to rebel against the inevitable cessation of work, while some late
portraits with staring and gaunt features like death’s heads starkly contrast
with the erotic fantasies. At the end of his life Picasso again became
obsessively preoccupied with Eros and Thanatos, sexual love and death, which
had been constant themes in the paintings of his youth.
(IV) PERSONAL LIFE, AFTER 1953
Picasso’s life was more settled in his last two decades. He met Jacqueline
Roque in 1953, and she became his companion that autumn. In 1955 he purchased a
new villa, La Californie, at Cannes; its studio provided the motif for some of
his most spacious, light-filled paintings, such as The Studio in a Painted
Frame (2 April 1956; New York, MOMA). Seeking a quieter working place, in
1958 he bought the Château de Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence. The death of
Olga on 11 February 1955 left him free of matrimonial ties, and on 2 March 1961
he married Jacqueline. Numerous tributes marked each year. Another film, Georges
Cluzot’s Le Mystère Picasso (1955), focused on his working methods.
An enormous retrospective was staged at the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais
in Paris, but he rejected some of the establishment’s laurels, refusing the
Légion d’honneur in 1967. In his late compulsive productivity, interrupted only
by an operation in 1965, he sought to redefine art historical traditions while
resisting the historical fixing of his own work. He died intestate at the age
of 91.
© 2009 Oxford University Press