Pablo Picasso

I

Introduction

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish painter, who is widely acknowledged to be the most important artist of the 20th century. A long-lived and highly prolific artist, he experimented with a wide range of styles and themes throughout his career. Among Picasso’s many contributions to the history of art, his most important include pioneering the modern art movement called cubism, inventing collage as an artistic technique, and developing assemblage (constructions of various materials) in sculpture.

Picasso was born Pablo Ruiz in Málaga, Spain. He later adopted his mother’s more distinguished maiden name—Picasso—as his own. Though Spanish by birth, Picasso lived most of his life in France.

II

Formative Work (1893-1900)

Picasso’s father, who was an art teacher, quickly recognized that his child Pablo was a prodigy. Picasso studied art first privately with his father and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in La Coruña, Spain, where his father taught. Picasso’s early drawings, such as Study of a Torso, After a Plaster Cast (1894-1895, Musée Picasso, Paris, France), demonstrate the high level of technical proficiency he had achieved by 14 years of age. In 1895 his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, after his father obtained a teaching post at that city’s Academy of Fine Arts. Picasso was admitted to advanced classes at the academy after he completed in a single day the entrance examination that applicants traditionally were given a month to finish. In 1897 Picasso left Barcelona to study at the Madrid Academy in the Spanish capital. Dissatisfied with the training, he quit and returned to Barcelona.

After Picasso visited Paris in October 1900, he moved back and forth between France and Spain until 1904, when he settled in the French capital. In Paris he encountered, and experimented with, a number of modern artistic styles. Picasso’s painting Le Moulin de la Galette (1900, Guggenheim Museum, New York City) revealed his interest in the subject matter of Parisian nightlife and in the style of French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a style that verged on caricature. In addition to café scenes, Picasso painted landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of friends and performers.

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III

Blue Period (1901-1903)

From 1901 to 1903 Picasso initiated his first truly original style, which is known as the blue period. Restricting his color scheme to blue, Picasso depicted emaciated and forlorn figures whose body language and clothing bespeak the lowliness of their social status. In The Old Guitarist (1903, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois), Picasso emphasized the guitarist’s poverty and position as a social outcast, which he reinforced by surrounding the figure with a black outline, as if to cut him off from his environment. The guitarist is compressed within the canvas (no room is left in the painting for the guitarist to raise his lowered head), suggesting his helplessness: The guitarist is trapped within the frame just as he is trapped by his poverty. Although Picasso underscored the squalor of his figures during this period, neither their clothing nor their environment conveys a specific time or place. This lack of specificity suggests that Picasso intended to make a general statement about human alienation rather than a particular statement about the lower class in Paris.

Why blue dominated Picasso’s paintings during this period remains unexplained. Possible influences include photographs with a bluish tinge popular at the time, poetry that stressed the color blue in its imagery, or the paintings of French artists such as Eugène Carrière or Claude Monet, who based many of their works around this time on variations on a single color. Another explanation is that Picasso found blue particularly appropriate for his subject matter because it is a color associated with melancholy.

IV

Rose Period (1904-1905)

In 1904 Picasso’s style shifted, inaugurating the rose period, sometimes referred to as the circus period. Although Picasso still focused on social outcasts—especially circus performers—his color scheme lightened, featuring warmer, reddish hues, and the thick outlines of the blue period disappeared. Picasso maintained his interest in the theme of alienation, however. In Two Acrobats and a Dog (1905, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), he represented two young acrobats before an undefined, barren landscape. Although the acrobats are physically close, they gaze in different directions and do not interact, and the reason for their presence is not made clear. Differences in the acrobats’ height also exaggerate their disconnection from each other and from the empty landscape. The dog was a frequent presence in Picasso’s work and may have been a reference to death as dogs appear at the feet of figures in many Spanish funerary monuments.

Picasso may have felt an especially deep sympathy for circus performers. Like artists, they were paid to entertain society, but their itinerant lifestyle and status as outsiders prevented them from becoming an integral part of the social fabric. It was this situation that made the sad clown an important figure in the popular imagination: Paid to make people laugh, he must keep hidden his real existence and true feelings. Living a life of financial insecurity himself, Picasso no doubt empathized with these performers. During this period Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of several women who shared his life and provided inspiration for his art. Olivier’s features appear in many of the female figures in his paintings over the next several years.

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