Pablo Picasso E-Book

Anatoli Podoksik

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In this book one can find many artworks created by Picasso between 1881 and 1914. The first style of the artist was influenced by the works of El Greco, Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec, artists that he discovered when he was a student in Barcelona. Picasso, fascinated by the psychological expression during his Blue period (1901-1904), expresses his own mental misery: his genre paintings, still-lifes and portraits were full of melancholy. Later, Picasso began to paint acrobats during his Circus period. After his voyage to Paris, in 1904, his aestheticism evolved considerably. Cezanne’s influence and Spanish culture led him to Cubism, which is characterised by the multiple points of view over the surface of the painting. Apart from a selection of Picasso’s first paintings, this book presents several drawings, sculptures and photographs.

Leseprobe

ANATOLI PODOKSIK

Pablo Picasso

1881-1973

Raphael’s great superiority is the result of his capacity to feel deeply which, in his case, destroys form. The form in his works is what it should be in ours: only a pretext for the transmission of ideas, sensations, diverse poesies.

Honoré de Balzac.

Text: Anatoli Podoksik

© Picasso Estate / Artists Rights Society, New York, USA

© Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© Parkstone Press USA, New York

© Image Barwww.imagebar.com

ISBN : 978-1-78310-425-3

All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers, artists, heirs or estates. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

Contents

Chronology of the Artist’s Life

Life and Work

Bibliography

Index

Notes

Chronology of the Artist’s Life

1881: 25 October. Birth of Pablo Ruiz Picasso at Málaga. Parents: José Ruiz Blasco, a teacher of drawing at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts and curator of the local museum, and Maria Picasso y Lopez.

1888-1889: The first of little Pablo’s paintings, Picador.

1891: The Ruiz-Picasso family moves to La Coruña, where Pablo studies drawing and painting under his father.

1894: The third year of his studies at the School of Fine Arts in La Coruña. Passing the Drawing and Ornament class and the Life Drawing class, he paints oil portraits of his parents and models, sketches battle scenes. Overwhelmed by his son’s talent, Don José gives him his own brushes and palette, declaring that he himself will never paint again.

1895: The family moves to Barcelona. Pablo visits Madrid, where in the Prado he sees the paintings of Velázquez and Goya for the first time. Enrolls at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, popularly called “La Lonja”, skipping the early classes in favour of the most advanced. His father rents a studio for him.

1895-1896: Paints his first large academic canvas, First Communion.

1897: At the beginning of the year paints a second large academic work, Science and Charity; it receives honourable mention in the national exhibition of fine arts in Madrid, in June, and later receives a gold medal at Málaga. Picasso is admitted to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid.

1898: After a hard winter in Madrid, and a bout of scarlet fever, he returns to Barcelona in June. Together with Manuel Pallarés goes to Horta de Ebro (renamed Horta de San Juan in 1910) and spends eight months there.

1899: In Barcelona joins a group of avant-garde intellectual artists who frequent the café Els Quatre Gats. Modernist tendencies appear in his works: portraits of his friends and a large painting The Last Moments.

1900: Leaves for Paris and settles at 49, Rue Gabrielle in Montparnasse. Meets his first dealers: Pedro Manach and Berthe Weill. Cabaret and Montparnasse themes. The Last Moments is exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle.

1901: During the winter in Madrid, makes portraits of high-society women; together with Francisco Soler publishes the review Arte Joven; makes the acquaintance of Pio Barojo and others of the generation of 1898. That spring in Barcelona, uses divisionist brushwork. Spanish brutalism prevails in the subject matter. Returns to Paris in May; development of pre-Fauvist style; Cabaret period. 24 June-14 July, sixty-five of his works exhibited at the Galerie Vollard. Friendship with Max Jacob. Félicien Fagus publishes review in La Revue Blanche. Visits the St. Lazare prison. Influenced by Lautrec and Van Gogh. The Casagemas death cycle. First Blue paintings. Inmates and Maternities of St. Lazare.

1902: Develops Blue style in Barcelona. First preserved statue: Woman Seated. Again returns to Paris in October. Has an exhibition at Berthe Weill’s; Charles Morice reviews the show in Mecure de France and presents Picasso with a copy of Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa. Lives in poverty in Paris with Max Jacob.

1903: Blue Period in Barcelona.

1904: In April leaves for Paris, moves into the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. End of Blue Period. Takes up engraving. Friendship with Apollinaire and Salmon. Meets Fernande Olivier (1881-1965).

1905: In February exhibits his first paintings on the travelling circus theme at Galeries Serrurier. Apollinaire writes first reviews of Picasso for La Revue Immoraliste (April) and La Plume (15 May). In summer goes to Holland. Completes the large canvas Family of Saltimbanques. End of the Circus Period. Meets Leo and Gertrude Stein.

1906: Rose Classicism. Gertrude Stein introduces Picasso to Matisse, who, with delight, shows him an African figurine; meets André Derain. Spends the summer in Gosol (in the Andorra Valley in the Eastern Pyrenees). That autumn in Paris completes portrait of Gertrude Stein, begun in the winter, and paints a self-portrait reflecting Iberian archaic sculpture.

Pablo Picasso. Photograph from 1885.

Pablo Picasso and his sister Lola. Photograph from 1888.

Maria Picasso Lopez, Pablo Picasso’s mother.

José Ruiz Blasco, Pablo Picasso’s father.

Pablo Picasso. Photograph from 1922.

1907:Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. That summer visits the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro, where he discovers for himself African sculpture. Meets D.H. Kahnweiler and Georges Braque. Cézanne retrospective at Salon d’Automne. Death of Alfred Jarry (1 November). Carves wooden sculpture.

1908: Proto-Cubism. Spends August at La Rue-des-Bois, north of Paris. In November Braque exhibits at Kahnweiler’s gallery his L’Estaque works that were not accepted by the Salon d’Automne; the term Cubism is born. Picasso gives a banquet at the Bateau-Lavoir in honour of Douanier Rousseau.

1909: From May to September works in Horta de Ebro, develops Analytical Cubism. In the autumn leaves the Bateau-Lavoir and moves to 11, Boulevard de Clichy. Sculpts Headof Fernande. Sergei Shchukin first shows interest in Picasso.

1910: Travels in summer to Cadaques in Derain. “High” phase of Analytical Cubism. Nine works shown at the Grafton Galleries, London, in the Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition.

1911: Spends the summer at Ceret, where he is joined by Braque and Max Jacob. Apollinaire arrested in connection with the theft of the Mona Lisa (7-12 September). Opening of Salon d’Automne with large Cubist section; although Picasso does not exhibit, the foreign press consistently ties his name to the exhibition. That autumn meets Eva Gouel (Marcelle Humbert, 1885-1915).

1912: In winter, makes his first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning. Leaves with Eva for Ceret, then goes to Avignon and Sorgues-sur-l’Ouvèze (May-October). Transition of Cubism to Synthetic phase. In September moves to a new studio at 42, Boulevard Raspail. First papiers collés and constructions.

1913: Painting influenced by his own three-dimensional constructions and papiers collés. In March departs for Ceret with Eva. Death of his father in Barcelona in May. In August moves to his new studio at 5 bis, Rue Schoelcher.

1914: New group of papiers collés and coloured cardboard reliefs. Spends the summer in Avignon with Eva (June-November). Rococo Cubism combines with Cubist structures in a foreshadowing of Surrealist methods. War declared on 2 August. His friends, Braque, Derain and Apollinaire are mobilized.

1915: “Ingres” portraits. Eva dies (14 December).

1916: Picasso visits Jean Cocteau, who introduces him to Diaghilev and Erik Satie. Moves to Montrouge.

1917: Joins the Diaghilev troupe in Rome, works on décor and costumes for the ballet Parade (scenario by J. Cocteau, music by E. Satie). Visits Naples and Pompeii. Scandalous opening of Parade at Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris (18 May). Follows the Ballets Russes to Madrid and Barcelona. Meets ballerina Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955). Cubism, “Ingres” style, Pointillism, Classicism.

1918: Picasso and Olga Khokhlova marry (12 July). Summer in Biarritz. Death of Apollinaire (9 November). Picasso and his wife move to 23, rue La Boëtie.

1919: Picasso is in London from May to August with the Ballets Russes to design décor and costumes for the ballet Le Tricorne (composed by Manuel de Falla). Spends the autumn at Saint-Raphael. “Ingres” style, Classicism, Cubism; ballet and commedia dell’arte themes, still lifes.

1920: Continues to work with Diaghilev: the ballet Pulcinella by Stravinsky. Summer in Juan-les-Pins. Linear Classicism in mythological subjects. Cubism in still lifes and commedia dell’arte subjects.

1921: Birth of son Paulo (4 February). Lives at a villa in Fontainebleau. Continues to work for Diaghilev (Cuadro Flamenco). Classicism (mother-and-child subjects), Cubism and Neo-Classicism of “gigantic” order.

1922: Spends the summer in Dinard (Brittany) with wife and son. Neo-Classical mother-and-child scenes

.1923: Spends the summer at Cap d’Antibes. Meets André Breton.

1924: Summer at Juan-les-Pins. Continues to do theatre work, designs décor and costumes for the ballets Mercure and Le Train Bleu. Publication of Breton’s Manifeste du Surréalisme.

1925: Goes to Monte Carlo with the Ballets Russes. Classical drawings of ballet scenes and the large Surrealist painting The Dance. Spends the summer at Juan-les-Pins. Recognized by the young Surrealists, participates in their exhibition.

1926: Spends summer at Juan-les-Pins, October in Barcelona. Paints the large canvas The Milliner’s Workshop. First issue of Cahiers d’Art, founded by Christian Zervos.

1927: In January meets seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. Death of Juan Gris (11 May). Summer in Cannes. Theme of biomorphic bathers. First etchings for Le Chef-d’oeuvre Inconnu by Balzac.

1928: Executes the huge collage Minotaur — the forerunner of this figure in Picasso’s works of the 1930s. Studio theme appears in his painting, and welded constructions in sculpture (aided by Julio González). Summer at Dinard.

1929: Continues to work with González on sculptural constructions. Paints compositions featuring aggressive biomorphic nudes. Summer at Dinard.

1930:Crucifixion based on Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece; continues to work in González’s studio. Buys the Château de Boisgeloup, near Gisors. Summer at Juan-les-Pins. Series of etchings illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

1931: Continues to work in González’s studio and, later, at the Château de Biosgeloup. Summer at Juan-les-Pins. Does engravings that will become part of the Vollard Suite. Images with features of Marie-Thérèse Walter appear in his paintings, drawings and sculptures.

1932: Major retrospective (236 works) in Paris and Zurich. Lives and works at Biosgeloup: the theme of woman (Marie-Thérèse) is combined with motifs of plant life and slumber. Biomorphic/“metamorphic” style. Returns to Grünewald Crucifixion theme in drawings. Zervos publishes the first volume of the Picasso catalogue raisonné.

1933: Sculptor’s Studio theme in etchings of the Vollard Suite. An Anatomy series of drawings. First issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure published with a cover designed by Picasso and with reproductions of his works. Lives and works in Paris and Biosgeloup. Summer in Cannes, trip to Barcelona, where he sees old friends. Bullfight and female toreador themes appears in his paintings. Fernande Olivier publishes her memoirs, Picasso et Ses Amis. Also published is Bernhard Geiser’s catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s engravings and lithographs.

1934: Paintings, drawings, engravings of bullfights. Six etchings for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Trip to Spain with wife and son. Engravings on the Blind Minotaur theme as part of the Vollard Suite.

1935: Engraves Minotauromachy. That summer completely abandons painting in favour of writing. Maia, daughter of Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, born (5 October). Jaime Sabartés, a friend of Picasso’s Barcelona youth, becomes his companion and secretary.

1936: Beginning of friendship with Paul Éluard. With support of the Popular Front, a Picasso exhibition and a series of lectures are organized in Barcelona. That spring, at Juan-les-Pins, gradually returns to painting; drawings, watercolours and gouaches on the Minotaur theme. Does engraving for Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle. Beginning of the Civil War in Spain (18 July); the Republican Government appoints him director of the Prado Museum. Spends the end of summer in Mougins: meets Dora Maar (née Markovic), who becomes his mistress. Together they discover the town of Vallauris, a nearby ceramics centre. Works in Vollard’s house at La Tremblay-sur-Mauldre. Together with Dora, a professional photographer, experiments with photo techniques.

S.I. Shchukin. Photograph from 1900.

M.A. Morozov surrounded by his family (second row in the centre). Photograph From circa 1910.

Pablo Picasso. Photograph from 1960.

Paul Éluard and Pablo Picasso in the painter’s studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. Photograph from 1938.

Guillaume Apollinaire. Photograph from 1910-1911.

1937: Etches the Dream and Lie of Franco. The Spanish Republican government commissions Picasso to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1937. Finds new studio at 7, Rue de Grands-Augustins, where he works on Guernica throughout May. Summer in Mougins with Dora and the Éluards. Portraits of Dora and Guernica motifs in paintings. Travels to Switzerland in October, where he visits Paul Klee, who is critically ill. Addresses a statement to the American Artists’ Congress concerning Franco’s propaganda on the fate of Spain’s artistic heritage: “Artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.”

1938: Makes a wall-size collage, Women at Their Toilette. Series of seated women (Dora) and portraits of children (Maia). Summer in Mougins with Dora and the Éluards. Exhibition of Guernica and sketches for it at the New Burlington Galleries in London.

1939: Death of Picasso’s mother in Barcelona (13 January). Barcelona and Madrid fall. Guernica exhibited in America. Death of Ambroise Vollard (22 July). Summer in Antibes, Monte Carlo, Nice, Mougins. Paints large canvas Night Fishing at Antibes. Outbreak of World War II finds him in Paris. Leaves for Royan, near Bordeaux, where he stays, on and off, until December. Major retrospective, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

1940: Works in Royan and Paris. Returns to occupied Paris, refuses financial aid from the occupation authorities, as well as advice that he had better emigrate to America.

1941: Works in Paris, where he writes, paints, clandestinely has bronzes made of his plaster models.

1942: Death of the sculptor Julio González (27 March). Picasso attacked in the press. Maintains contact with friends in the Resistance. First drawings on the theme Man with Sheep.

1943: Continues to work on Man and Sheep motif, creating drawings and statues. Paints interiors, still lifes, women’s portraits. Makes the acquaintance of the young painter Françoise Gilot.

1944: Max Jacob arrested, dies in Drancy concentration camp (5 March). Paints ascetic still lifes and views of Paris, which is liberated on 25 August. Gouache after Poussin’s Bacchanal. Sees Resistance friends. Opening of Salon d’Automne (Salon de la Libération), where Picasso exhibits 74 paintings and 5 sculptures. Joins the French Communist Party in October, stating this is the logical conclusion of his whole life and work. “I have always been an exile,” he explained, “and I have found in [the French Communist Party] those that I most value, the greatest scientists, the greatest poets, all those beautiful faces of Parisian insurgents that I saw during the August days; I am once more among my brothers.”

1945: Paints the anti-war themed The Charnel House. In summer leaves for Cap d’Antibes. Is attracted to lithography that autumn, in the studio of the printer Fernand Mourlot. The first lithograph is a portrait of Françoise Gilot. Lithograph of a bull.

1946: Painting Monument aux Espagnols. Spring at Golfe-Juan with Françoise. Visits Matisse in Nice. Begins living with Françoise Gilot. She appears in his paintings and drawings. Death of Gertrude Stein (27 July). That autumn in Antibes creates works for the Palais Grimaldi, soon renamed the Musée Picasso; the themes include fauns, naiads, centaurs.

1947: Lithograph David and Bathsheba after Cranach the Elder. Donates ten paintings to the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. Birth of Claude, first child of Françoise and Picasso (15 May). With Françoise and the baby leaves for Golfe-Juan. Takes up ceramics in Vallauris, revitalizing the ceramics industry of the ancient town.

1948: Completes series of lithographs illustrating Pierre Reverdy’s Le Chant des Morts and 41 etchings for Gongora’s Vingt Poèmes. Lives in Vallauris. Together with Éluard, flies to Wroclaw, Poland, for the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace; visits Auschwitz, Krakow, Warsaw; receives Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of the Renaissance of the Polish Republic. Creates paintings, lithographs, ceramics. Exhibits 149 ceramics in November in Paris.

1949: Lithograph of a dove for the poster of the Peace Congress in Paris. This image quickly becomes known as the Dove of Peace — a symbol of the struggle against war. Birth of Paloma (19 April), daughter of Picasso and Françoise Gilot. Works on sculptures in Vallauris.

1950: Lives and works in Vallauris. Attends the Second World Peace Conference in Sheffield, England. Awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

1951: Paints Massacre in Korea, exhibited at Salon de Mai, Paris. Most of the time lives in the Midi, works at Vallauris, visits Matisse in Nice.

1952: Panels War and Peace conceived for Peace Temple in Vallauris. Creates paintings, lithographs, sculptures; does literary work. Paul Éluard dies (18 November).

1953: Major retrospectives in Rome, Milan, Lyons, São Paulo. Works in Vallauris and Paris. Trip to Perpignan. Separation from Françoise Gilot.

1954: Drawings in Painter and Model series. Portrait of Jacqueline Roque, whom Picasso met a year earlier. They begin to live together. Death of Derain (8 September) and Matisse (3 November). Series of paintings based on Delacroix’s Women of Algiers.

1955: Olga Khokhlova dies (11 February). Major retrospective (150 works) at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film Le Mystère Picasso. Moves with Jacqueline to La Californie, a villa overlooking Cannes.

1956: Paints and produces sculptures in Cannes: portraits, studio scenes, bathers. Major exhibitions in Moscow and St. Petersburg on the occasion of Picasso’s 75th birthday.

1957:The Maids of Honour (Las Meninas) after Velázquez.

1958:Fall of Icarus mural for the UNESCO building in Paris.

1959: Moves to Château de Vauvenargues in the shadow of Mont Sainte-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence. Begins long series of works, using different techniques, on theme of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Experiments with linocuts.

1960: Major retrospective in London. Paintings, sketches for “graffiti” and monumental sculpture.

1961: Picasso and Jacqueline Roque marry (2 March). Moves to villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie near village of Mougins, above Cannes. Works on folded and painted metal cutouts.

1962: Awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for the second time.

1963: Opening of Museo Picasso in Barcelona. Death of Braque (31 August) and Cocteau (11 October). At Mougins, works on engravings.

1964: Works on the model for a giant sculpture to appear in Chicago’s Civic Centre. Exhibitions in Canada, Paris, Japan.

1965: Last trip to Paris: operation at clinic in Neuilly. Death of Fernande Olivier. Self-portrait in front of a canvas.

1966: Major retrospective in Paris in honour of 85th birthday.

1967: Paints and draws in Mougins: nudes, portraits, bucolic and circus scenes, artists’ studios. Sculpture exhibition in London.

1968: Death of Jaime Sabartés (13 February). In his memory Picasso donates his Las Meninas series to the Museo Picasso in Barcelona. Paints and draws in Mougins: the 347 Engravings series (March-October).

1969: Mougins: paintings, drawings, engravings. Illustrations for El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz (The Burial of Count Orgaz).

1970: Picasso’s relatives in Barcelona donate all paintings and sculptures to Museo Picasso, Barcelona. Some 45 drawings and 167 oils, made between January 1969 and end of January 1970, exhibited at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. The Bateau-Lavoir destroyed by fire on 12 May. Death of Christian Zervos (12 September).

1971: Exhibition in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in honour of Picasso’s 90th birthday.

1972: Continues to work in Mougins: engravings, drawings, paintings. Prepares a new exhibition of most recent works for the Palais des Papes in Avignon.

1973: Exhibition of 156 engravings at Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris. 8 April: Picasso dies at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins. Buried on 10 April in the grounds of the Château de Vauvenargues.

Olga Khokhlova, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau in Rome. Photograph from 1917.

Pablo Picasso in his studio in the villa “California”. Photograph from 1955-1958.

Pablo Picasso in his studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. Photograph from 1938.

The great café room “Els Quatre Gats”. Photograph from 1899.

Picasso’s room in S.I. Shchukin painting gallery.

Life and Work

Although, as Picasso himself put it, he “led the life of a painter” from very early childhood, and although he expressed himself through the plastic arts for eighty uninterrupted years, the essence of Picasso’s creative genius differs from that usually associated with the notion of “artiste-peintre”. It might be more correct to consider him an artist-poet because his lyricism, his psyche, unfettered by mundane reality, his gift for the metaphoric transformation of reality are no less inherent in his visual art than they are in the mental imagery of a poet. According to Pierre Daix, “Picasso always considered himself a poet who was more prone to express himself through drawings, paintings and sculptures.”[1] Always? That calls for clarification. It certainly applies to the 1930s, when he wrote poetry, and to the 1940s and 1950s, when he turned to writing plays. There is, however, no doubt that from the outset Picasso was always “a painter among poets, a poet among painters”.[2]

Picasso had a craving for poetry and attracted poets like a magnet. When they first met, Guillaume Apollinaire was struck by the young Spaniard’s unerring ability “to straddle the lexical barrier” and grasp the fine points of recited poetry. One may say without fear of exaggeration that while Picasso’s close friendship with the poets Jacob, Apollinaire, Salmon, Cocteau, Reverdy, and Éluard left an imprint on each of the major periods of his work, it is no less true that his own innovative work had a strong influence on French (and not only French) twentieth-century poetry. And this assessment of Picasso’s art — so visual and obvious, yet at times so blinding, opaque and mysterious — as that of a poet, is dictated by the artist’s own view of his work. Picasso once said: “After all, the arts are all the same; you can write a picture in words just as you can paint sensations in a poem.” He even expressed the following thought: “If I had been born Chinese, I would not be a painter but a writer. I’d write my pictures.”[3]

Picasso, however, was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to the artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy concentration drawing spirals with a sense and meaning known only to himself; or, shunning children’s games, trace his first pictures in the sand. This early self-expression held out promise of a rare gift.

The first phase of life, preverbal, preconscious, knows neither dates nor facts. It is a dream-like state dominated by the body’s rhythms and external sensations. The rhythms of the heart and lungs, the caresses of warm hands, the rocking of the cradle, the intonation of voices — that is what it consists of. Now the memory awakens, and two black eyes follow the movements of things in space, master desired objects, express emotions. Sight, that great gift, begins to discern objects, imbues ever new shapes, captures ever-broader horizons. Millions of as yet meaningless visual images enter the infantile world of internal sight where they strike immanent powers of intuition, ancient voices, and strange caprices of instinct. The shock of purely sensual (visual-plastic) impressions is especially strong in the South, where the raging power of light sometimes blinds, sometimes etches each form with infinite clarity.

And the still mute, inexperienced perception of a child born in these parts responds to this shock with a certain inexplicable melancholy, an irrational sort of nostalgia for form. Such is the lyricism of the Iberian Mediterranean, a land of naked truths, of a dramatic “search for life for life’s sake”,[4] in the words of Garcia Lorca, one who knew these sensations well. Not a shade of the Romantic here: there is no room for sentimentality amid the sharp, exact contours and there exists only one physical world. “Like all Spanish artists, I am a realist”, Picasso would say later.

Gradually the child acquires words, fragments of speech, building blocks of language. Words are abstractions, creations of consciousness made to reflect the external world and express the internal. Words are the subjects of imagination, which endows them with images, reasons, meanings, and conveys to them a measure of infinity. Words are the instrument of learning and the instrument of poetry. They create the second, purely human, reality of mental abstractions.

In time, after having become friends with poets, Picasso would discover that the visual and verbal modes of expression are identical for the creative imagination. It was then that he began to introduce elements of poetic technique into his work: forms with multiple meanings, metaphors of shape and colour, quotations, rhymes, plays on words, paradoxes, and other tropes that allow the mental world to be made visible. Picasso’s visual poetry attained total fulfilment and concrete freedom by the mid-1940s in a series of paintings of nudes, portraits, and interiors executed with “singing” and “aromatic” colours; these qualities are also evident in a multitude of India ink drawings traced as if by gusts of wind.

“We are not executors; we live our work.”[5] That is the way in which Picasso expressed how much his work was intertwined with his life; he also used the word “diary” with reference to his work. D.H. Kahnweiler, who knew Picasso for over sixty-five years, wrote: “It is true that I have described his œuvre as ‘fanatically autobiographical’. That is the same as saying that he depended only on himself, on his Erlebnis. He was always free, owing nothing to anyone but himself.”[6] Jaime Sabartés, who knew Picasso most of his life, also stressed his complete independence from external conditions and situations. Indeed, everything convincingly shows that if Picasso depended on anything at all in his art, it was the constant need to express his inner state with the utmost fullness. One may, as Sabartés did, compare Picasso’s œuvre with therapy; one may, as Kahnweiler did, regard Picasso as a Romantic artist. However, it was precisely the need for self-expression through creativity that lent his art that universal quality that is inherent in such human documents as Rousseau’s Confessions, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. Let it also be noted that Picasso looked upon his art in a somewhat impersonal manner, took pleasure in the thought that the works, which he dated meticulously and helped scholars to catalogue, could serve as material for some future science. He imagined that branch of learning as being a “science of man — which will seek to learn about man in general through the study of the creative man.”[7]

Pablo Picasso, Photograph, 1904. Dedicated to Suzanne and Henri Bloch.

Portrait of the Artist’s Father, 1896. Oil on canvas and cardboard, 42.3 x 30.8 cm. Museo Picasso, Barcelona.

Academic Study, 1895. Oil on canvas, 82 x 61 cm. Museo Picasso, Barcelona.

Study of a Nude, Seen from the Back, 1895. Oil on wood, 22.3 x 13.7 cm. Museo Picasso, Barcelona.

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1896. Pastel on paper. Museo Picasso, Barcelona.

But something akin to a scientific approach to Picasso’s œuvre has long been current in that it has been divided into periods, explained both by creative contacts (so-called influences, often only hypothetical) and reflections of biographical events (in 1980 a book called Picasso: Art as Autobiography[8] appeared). If Picasso’s work has for us the general significance of universal human experience, this is due to its expressing, with the most exhaustive completeness, man’s internal life and all the laws of its development. Only by approaching his œuvre in this way can we hope to understand its rules, the logic of its evolution, and the transition from one putative period to another.