Pablo Picasso

Picasso remained a prolific artist until late in his life, although this later period has not received universal acclaim from historians or critics. He made variations on motifs that had fascinated him throughout his career, such as the bullfight and the painter and his model, the latter a theme that celebrated creativity. And he continued to paint portraits and landscapes. Picasso also experimented with ceramics, creating figurines, plates, and jugs, and he thereby blurred an existing distinction between fine art and craft.

Picasso’s emotional life became more complicated after he met French painter Françoise Gilot in the 1940s, while he was still involved with Maar. He and Gilot had a son, Claude, and a daughter, Paloma, and both appear in many of his late works. Picasso and Gilot parted in 1953. Jacqueline Roque, whom Picasso married in 1961, became his next companion. They spent most of their time in the south of France.

Another new direction in Picasso’s work came from variations on well-known works by older artists that he recast in his own style. Among these works are Women on the Banks of the Seine, after Courbet (1950, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland) and Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe after Manet (1960, Musée Picasso). What makes these works particularly significant is that they run counter to a basic premise of modern art, Picasso’s included: namely, originality. Although many modern painters were influenced by earlier artists, they rarely made such direct and obvious references to each other’s work because they deemed such references unoriginal. In the postmodern period, which began in the 1970s, artists and critics began to question the modernist directive to be original. In acts of deliberate defiance, many postmodern artists have appropriated (taken for their own use) well-known images from their predecessors or contemporaries. Seen against this context, Picasso’s later variations on paintings by earlier masters hardly seem out of place; on the contrary, they anticipate a key aspect of art in the 1980s.

One of Picasso’s late works, Head of a Woman (1967), was a gift to the city of Chicago. This sculpture of welded steel, 15 m (50 ft) tall, stands in front of Chicago’s Civic Center. Although its semiabstract form proved controversial at first, the sculpture soon became a city landmark.

Because of his many innovations, Picasso is widely considered to be the most influential artist of the 20th century. The cubist movement, which he and Braque inspired, had a number of followers. Its innovations gave rise to a host of other 20th-century art movements, including futurism in Italy, suprematism and constructivism in Russia, de Stijl in the Netherlands, and vorticism in England. Cubism also influenced German expressionism, dada, and other movements as well as early work of the surrealists (see Surrealism) and abstract expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism). In addition, collage and construction became key aspects of 20th-century art.