Pablo Picasso

http://www.pablopicasso.org/africanperiod.jsp

'as we developed the cubism we did not do it intentionally, rather we wanted only to express what was inside of us.  nobody dicatated a program to us and our friends, the poets, attentively followed our efforts without ever forcing anything upon us.'

'i have received apollinaire book about cubism.  i am really depressed by all of this drivel.'

we all know that art is not truth.  art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given to us  to understand.  the artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.'

Unit Title	Unit 5: Contextual Influences in Art & Design
Qualification	BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Art &Design (Photography)
Assessor	Alex Drozd
Start Date	Week 22	5th March 2014
Deadline Date	Week 34	18th June 2014
Feedback Date	Week 36	2nd July 2014

Assignment 1	Essay 1:
This assignment covers Grading Criteria 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of Unit 5: Contextual Influences in Art & Design
The purpose of this assignment is to: Develop learners’ skills and knowledge of how historical and cultural influences inform art, craft and design. Learners will achieve this by researching and recording information, whilst developing critical and analytical skills, and relating this to their own developing practice.
Scenario: Artists, craftspeople and designers have always looked to the past for inspiration and innovation. In order to learn from the past and build on others’ creativity, it is important for learners to appreciate some of the factors that are essential to a practitioner’s professional development by understanding the importance of historical and cultural influences on art, craft and design. Practitioners in every field of the sector also recognise the need to, and value of, keeping abreast of contemporary art, craft and design developments, within and beyond their specialist practice. In this assignment you will learn how artists reflect the time they live in, whether they realise it fully themselves or not. You will also develop a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the influences on our work.
The Brief: You are required to write an essay of 1500 words (with 10% leeway) The subject of the essay is an artist and art movement to be negotiated with your tutor. You will need to detail key dates and key players on your chosen theme, examine cultural and technological influences behind the work produced and discuss at least 3 pieces of work of your chosen artist(s). Note: Good research and a good structure is key to the production of a quality essay so make sure you gather all the information and have an idea of how you are going to tell your story before undertaking more serious writing.

Task 1	Research and planning (P3, P4, M1)	Completion Date: 13th May 2014
·      Research ·         Research your information from a range of sources. This should include the Internet and books, checking the sources accuracy as you go. Films and TV programmes are also useful sources of information ·         Plan the structure of your essay
Task 2	Write the essay (P4, P5, M2, D2)	Completion Date: 18th June 2014
·      Writing ·         Write the essay. You may need to review the essay as well as your facts as you go

Task 3	Bibliography and citations (P3, M2, D1)	Completion Date: 18th June 2014
·         Complete your bibliography using the Harvard method. Make sure you use citations where you have quoted or used images.

Assignment evidence		Tick when complete
Task 1	The essay: complete with bibliography and citations
All of the above Tasks will provide the necessary evidence for: ·         Unit 5: Contextual Influences in Art & Design

Unit
To achieve a pass grade the evidence must show that you are able to:	To achieve a merit grade the evidence must show that, in addition to the pass criteria, you are able to:	To achieve a distinction grade the evidence must show that, in addition to the pass and merit criteria, you are able to:
P1 describe the characteristics and influences of key movements and the work of individuals	M1 research and organise information about art, craft and design developments, effectively linking the contexts in which works were produced	D1 extract and analyse complex information independently, from comprehensive research
P2 show how cultural contexts relate to historical and contemporary art, craft and design	M2 express coherent opinions, supported by examples drawn from established sources.	D2 express informed judgements and argued conclusions, using specialist language fluently.
P3 produce primary and secondary research
P4 review information and produce outcomes
P5 present outcomes

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Cubism was one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L'Estaque in emulation of Cézanne. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works "cubes." Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to Primitivism and non-Western sources. The stylization and distortion of Picasso's ground-breaking Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in 1907, came from African art. Picasso had first seen African art when, in May or June 1907, he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris.

The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening.

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The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.

In Cubist work up to 1910, the subject of a picture was usually discernible. Although figures and objects were dissected or "analyzed" into a multitude of small facets, these were then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects. During "high" Analytic Cubism (1910–12), also called "hermetic," Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters (1999.363.63;1999.363.11). Their favorite motifs were still lifes with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards (1997.149.12), and the human face and figure. Landscapes were rare.

During the winter of 1912–13, Picasso executed a great number ofpapiers collés (1999.363.64). With this new technique of pasting colored or printed pieces of paper in their compositions, Picasso and Braque swept away the last vestiges of three-dimensional space (illusionism) that still remained in their "high" Analytic work. Whereas, in Analytic Cubism, the small facets of a dissected or "analyzed" object are reassembled to evoke that same object, in the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism—initiated by the papiers collés–large pieces of neutral or colored paper themselves allude to a particular object, either because they are often cut out in the desired shape or else sometimes bear a graphic element that clarifies the association.

While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger (1999.363.35), Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris (1996.403.14), Roger de la Fresnaye (1991.397), Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger (59.86), and even Diego Rivera (49.70.51). Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz.

The liberating formal concepts initiated by Cubism also had far-reaching consequences for Dada and Surrealism, as well as for all artists pursuing abstraction in Germany, Holland, Italy, England, America, and Russia.

Sabine Rewald Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube.htm

 14 10 2014

Pablo Picasso
essay- 1500



Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and i would say in my views as well as he used colour to express his moods, his sadness, his grief, his happiness love and  war time. Colour was his key which I will show and to some extend will discuss.   He experimented in many different styles and changed the world of art during his time.
GRIEF, death of his best friend Carlos Casagemas who shot himself because the love of  his life had rejected him he  could not bare it and he killed himself straight after rejection on February 17, 1901 and Picasso was deeply hurt by this as Casagemas was his best friend and  Picasso was in Spain.

This was the start of the blue period paintings by Pablo Picass between 1901 and 1904.  The Blue Period refers to a series of paintings in which the color blue  is mostly dominates the painting.  

I chose the one below because It shows lots of details, the cross that is being carried by the naked man which is at the top of the painting.

Behind the house you can see a man in grieving and naked women can be prostitutes or even beggars etc
And at the bottom of the painting you can see the dead body of his friend which is surrounded by friends, family and his lover are grieving and the body is ready for the burial and hopeful the soul will go were it came from.

Below the painting you can see his 

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Cultural influences

War- Guernica

Pablo Picasso painted what he saw of an aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica (26 April 1937) which was reported around 1,655 people were killed.  During the aerial attack he saw people running in all directions to safety, no one knew where safety was because no one knew where the next bomb was going to dr0p.  Then later he saw lots of bodies lying on the ground some on top of each other and lots bodies with parts of there body missing and only a few people still running for safety with their mouths open and screaming.  These paintings anti –war, became famous.  

how that effected him?

Pablo Picasso paints (below) paintings in tones and shades in a monochrome to show the horror of the bombing of a Basque town in the Spanish civil war with the subjects mouths wide open screaming and running over each other and over dead bodies etc., for a safe place go to, even the animals can be seen in the picture.  In the painting you can clearly see parts of body with and without the flesh, even thought the painting is in black and white shades and tones no colour has been used the horror of the war can be seen clearly. 

( two original pictures )

The ruins of Guernica, 1937

Paul Preston remembers the journalist and Basque sympathizes who broke the news of the bombing of Guernica on April 26th, 1937.

http://www.historytoday.com/paul-preston/bombing-guernica 30.4. 2014

April 26, 1937: The aftermath of Fascist handiwork in Guernica, Spain

The horrors of Guernica inspired Pablo Picasso to paint an anti- war paintings.  They were the most iconic pictures, an impassioned cry against war in general and targeting civilians visiting a market.

Picasso's "Guernica," first displayed July 1937 at the Paris International Exhibition

http://moviesovermatter.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/an-overview-of-1937/ 30.4.2014

Guernica, 1936

“Modern art must be killed.  This means that one also has to kill oneself,

if one is to continue to accomplishing things.” Picasso

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/oct/16/picasso-love-affair-monochrome  29.4 2014 and 30/4/2014

these 3 paintings above of Pablo Picasso  different 

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 THE STILL LIFE WITH GUITAR(1942) another is THE CHARNEL HOUSE(1944-48)

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1OrRgLgsscojnZY4DTB5r8kJeWaNCty0hY7-l8FPnZr0d4F8f12_s_HyJYU6avFhznzwTCuk5nDHq2dxYWnU8Fycl7xXp6zjWgfE-qrwTwD2OJH-KnQyOLwPeDewlqX4DaiQ3UyoIZq4/s1600/Old_guitarist_chicago.jpg 

http://piecesoav.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/pablo-picasso-1881-1973-charnel-house.html 

THE CHARNEL HOUSE(1944-48)

http://auto.img.v4.skyrock.net/9303/12429303/pics/352327105_small.jpg

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The Birth of Cubism

           The art movement of cubism occurred between Picasso and Georges Braque right after they met in 1907.  A new form of artwork complex and ambiguous shapes.

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The art movement known as cubism arose out of the need to define and represent the then new modern reality. This new reality was complex and ambiguous, shaped by new inventions, philosophical speculation and cultural diversity. The new technology and scientific discoveries were radically changing the pace of life and the way society perceived the nature of things. Whereas in the past, life had been static, science and technology were now forcing modern man to experience time, motion and space more dynamically. All of a sudden he was thrust in a world of expanding vision and horizons, of accelerated tempo and mobility and of fluctuating perspectives. Furthermore, the ambiguity and sense of uncertainty generated by this new rush of stimuli was interpreted by the theory of relativity that evolved through F. H. Bradley, Whitehead, Einstein, and the new mathematics. What these philosophical theoreticians suggested was that we live in a world of shifting perspectives, where the appearance of objects is in a constant flux depending on the point of view from which it is seen. Finally, the experience of reality was also being altered by the cultural interactions taking place between the East and West, the primitive and the industrialized. In other words, each culture brought along with it a new, idiosyncratic way of looking at things, and the interchange occurring between cultures obscured the perception of truth. Relativity became everything.

The problem facing the modern artist became how to formally depict this new dynamic vision of life. For the painter, specifically, the dilemma became representing the flux of time, motion and space in a medium that lent itself to the mere capture of the fleeting moment. Cubism was born as a response to this predicament, and it is no accident that the movement was a Parisian phenomenon, considering the city's artistic legacy and its magnetic ability to attract the most gifted young artists and writers from all over the world. Paris offered them great art museums, a tradition of moral and artistic freedom, and an artistic bohemia where they could live cheaply on the margin of bourgeois society.

Perhaps we can say that Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ushered in a revolutionary way of depicting reality. This landmark painting had broken all of the traditional rules that artists at the time followed, especially the one that defined art as imitation rather than creation. Picasso had decided to turn his back on a fixed point of view and harmonious proportion, concepts that had been religiously practiced since the Renaissance. Instead, he replaced these with multiple perspectives and distortion. Furthermore, he incorporated into his painting references to primitive art, a practice that ran counter to the ceremonious adulation of the whole continuum of Western art. For most people, Les Demoiselles was a desecration of everything that had been held as sacred. But fortunately, Picasso's rebelliousness cleared the air for what was to come: a freedom to create rather than imitate and to construct a new pictorial language.

Cubism was born out of the interaction and collaboration that occurred between Picasso and Georges Braque right after they met in 1907. When Braque saw Les Demoiselles for the first time, he went into a state of shock. However, many months after this initial encounter and much reflection, Braque reconsidered his initial reaction and responded with Large Nude (1908), in which he follows Picasso's lead and combines several points of view in one image. Soon afterwards, an artistic partnership developed between the two artists that was to define the nature of painting for years to come. At first, Picasso was concerned with the formal and technical freedoms that African art and masks had inspired while Braque experimented with the revolutionary innovations in Les Demoiselles. Picasso'sDryad (1907) captures the tribal stance as well as the formal distortion and coarse hatching and scoring of primitive art. But Braque would have a sobering voice in this artistic relationship. His function was to neutralize Picasso's artistic savagery by incorporating it into Paul Cezanne's more conservative formal legacy of reducing reality to basic geometrical shapes that are clearly connected with one another. Out of this artistic reconciliation, Analytical Cubism, the first phase in the evolution of Cubism, was born.

Classicism and surrealism period 1918-1945

In February 1917, Picasso made his first trip to Italy and due to the disturbance of the World War I, Picasso started to  produced work in a neoclassical style.

 This "return to order" is evident in the work of many European artists in the 1920s, includingAndré Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, Gino Severini, Jean Metzinger, the artists of the New Objectivity movement and of theNovecento Italiano movement. Picasso's paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Raphael andIngres.

In 1925 the Surrealist writer and poet André Breton declared Picasso as 'one of ours' in his article Le Surréalisme et la peinture, published in Révolution surréaliste. Les Demoiselles was reproduced for the first time in Europe in the same issue. Yet Picasso exhibited Cubist works at the first Surrealist group exhibition in 1925; the concept of 'psychic automatism in its pure state' defined in the Manifeste du surréalisme never appealed to him entirely. He did at the time develop new imagery and formal syntax for expressing himself emotionally, "releasing the violence, the psychic fears and the eroticism that had been largely contained or sublimated since 1909", writes art historian Melissa McQuillan.^[33] Although this transition in Picasso's work was informed by Cubism for its spatial relations, "the fusion of ritual and abandon in the imagery recalls the primitivism of the Demoiselles and the elusive psychological resonances of his Symbolist work", writes McQuillan.^[33]Surrealism revived Picasso’s attraction to primitivism and eroticism.^[33]

Guernica, 1937, Museo Reina Sofia

During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with thesurrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso'sGuernica. The minotaur and Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter are heavily featured in his celebrated Vollard Suite of etchings.^[34]

In 1939–40 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, under its directorAlfred Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major retrospective of Picasso's principal works until that time. This exhibition lionised the artist, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.^[35]

Arguably Picasso's most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War –Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. Asked to explain its symbolism, Picasso said, "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."^[36][37]

Guernica was on display in New York's Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981, it was returned to Spain and was on exhibit at the Casón del Buen Retiro. In 1992 the painting was put on display in Madrid's Reina Sofía Museum when it opened.

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His family moved to Barcelona in 1895 where Pablo joined an art academy. In his early period the young artist painted life as he observed it around him – in cafes and on the streets. As a young man he took interest inmasterpieces of famous artists like El Greco and de Goya.
http://www.english-online.at/art-architecture/pablo-picasso/picasso-master-of-cubism.htm

Early life

Pablo Picasso and his sister Lola, c.1889

Picasso was baptised Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad, a series of names honouring various saints and relatives.^[8] Added to these were Ruiz and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish law. Born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.^[9]Despite being baptised Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist.^[10] Picasso's family was middle-class. His father was a painter who specialised in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruiz's ancestors were minor aristocrats.

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were "piz, piz", a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for "pencil".^[11] From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son's technique, an apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting,^[12] though paintings by him exist from later years.

Pablo Picasso, 1901, Old Woman (Woman with Gloves, Woman With Jewelery), oil on cardboard, 67 x 52.1 cm,Philadelphia Museum of Art

Pablo Picasso, 1901-02,Femme au café (Absinthe Drinker), oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

In 1895, Picasso was traumatised when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died ofdiphtheria.^[13] After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.^[14] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him, at just 13. The student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.

Picasso's father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid's Royal Academy of San Fernando, the country's foremost art school.^[14] At age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrollment. Madrid held many other attractions. The Prado housed paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbarán. Picasso especially admired the works ofEl Greco; elements such as his elongated limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso's later work.

Career beginnings

Before 1900

Picasso's training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist's beginnings.^[15] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.^[16] The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called "without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting."^[17]

In 1897 his realism became tinged with Symbolist influence, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec andEdvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favourite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.^[18]

Before 1900

Picasso's training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist's beginnings.^[15] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.^[16] The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called "without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting."^[17]

In 1897 his realism became tinged with Symbolist influence, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec andEdvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favourite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.^[18]

Picasso made his first trip to Paris in 1900, then the art capital of Europe. There, he met his first Parisian friend, journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm. During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathising with the state of the poor. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his workPicasso; before he had signed Pablo Ruiz y Picasso.^[19]

La Vie (1903),Cleveland Museum of Art

The Old Guitarist(1903), Chicago Art Institute

Blue Period

For more details on this topic, see Picasso's Blue Period.

Picasso's Blue Period (1901–1904), characterized by somber paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in Spain in early 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year.^[20] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In his austere use of color and sometimes doleful subject matter – prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects – Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901 he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.^[21]

Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will".^[22]

The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904),^[23] which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso's works of this period, also represented in The Blindman's Meal(1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.

Pablo Picasso, 1905, Garçon à la pipe, (Boy with a Pipe), Rose Period

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon(1907), Museum of Modern Art, New York

Rose Period

For more details on this topic, see Picasso's Rose Period.

The Rose Period (1904–1906)^[24] is characterised by a more cheery style with orange and pink colours, and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequinsknown in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemianartist who became his mistress, in Paris in 1904.^[13]Olivier appears in many of his Rose Period paintings, many of which are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e. just prior to the Blue Period) and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.

By 1905, Picasso became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein. Gertrude Stein became Picasso's principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris.^[25] At one of her gatherings in 1905, he met Henri Matisse, who was to become a lifelong friend and rival. The Steins introduced him to Claribel Cone and her sister Etta who were American art collectors; they also began to acquire Picasso and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy. Michael and Sarah Stein became patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picasso.^[26]

In 1907 Picasso joined an art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler was a German art historian and art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism that they jointly developed. Kahnweiler promoted burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris,Maurice de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.^[27]

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Modern art transformed

African-influenced Period

See also: Picasso's African Period and Proto-Cubism

Picasso's African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with the two figures on the right in his painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which were inspired by African artefacts. Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Cubism

Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and "analyzed" them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque's paintings at this time share many similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collagein fine art.

In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry, and Gertrude Stein. Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Apollinaire pointed to his friend Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated.^[28]

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  1909, Femme assise (Sitzende Frau), oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm, Staatliche Museen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
 
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  1909-10, Figure dans un Fauteuil (Seated Nude, Femme nue assise), oil on canvas, 92.1 x 73 cm, Tate Modern, London. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at theHôtel Drouot in 1921
 
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  1910, Woman with Mustard Pot (La Femme au pot de moutarde), oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, Chicago, Boston 1913
 
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  1910, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), oil on canvas, 100.3 x 73.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York
 
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  1910, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Art Institute of Chicago. Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler "What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense?"
 
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  1910-11, Guitariste, La mandoliniste (Woman playing guitar or mandolin), oil on canvas
 
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  c.1911, Le Guitariste. Reproduced in Albert Gleizesand Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme", 1912
 
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  1911, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, oil on canvas, 61.3 x 50.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
 

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WAR

World War II and beyond

During the Second World War, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. Picasso's artistic style did not fit the Nazi ideal of art, so he did not exhibit during this time. He was often harassed by the Gestapo. During one search of his apartment, an officer saw a photograph of the painting Guernica. "Did you do that?" the German asked Picasso. "No," he replied, "You did".^[38]

Retreating to his studio, he continued to paint, producing works such as the Still Life with Guitar (1942) and The Charnel House (1944–48).^[39] Although the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to him by the French Resistance.^[40]

Stanisław Lorentz guides Pablo Picasso through the National Museum in Warsaw in Poland during exhibitionContemporary French Painters and Pablo Picasso's Ceramics, 1948. Picasso gifted Warsaw's museum over a dozen of his ceramics, few drawings and color prints. ^[41]

Around this time, Picasso took up writing as an alternative outlet. Between 1935 and 1959 he wrote over 300 poems. Largely untitled except for a date and sometimes the location of where it was written (for example "Paris 16 May 1936"), these works were gustatory, erotic and at times scatological, as were his two full-length plays Desire Caught by the Tail (1941) and The Four Little Girls (1949).^[42]

In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Picasso, then 63 years old, began a romantic relationship with a young art student named Françoise Gilot. She was 40 years younger than he was. Picasso grew tired of his mistress Dora Maar; Picasso and Gilot began to live together. Eventually they had two children: Claude, born in 1947 andPaloma, born in 1949. In her 1964 book amics. She became his lover, and then his second wife in 1961. The two were together for the remainder of Picasso's life.

His marriage to Roque was also a means of revenge against Gilot; with Picasso's encouragement, Gilot had divorced her then husband, Luc Simon, with the plan to marry Picasso to secure the rights of her children as Picasso's legitimate heirs. Picasso had already secretly married Roque, after Gilot had filed for divorce. This strained his relationship with Claude and Paloma.

By this time, Picasso had constructed a huge Gothic home, and could afford large villas in the south of France, such as Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie on the outskirts of Mougins, and in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. He was an international celebrity, with often as much interest in his personal life as his art.

In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Picasso made a few film appearances, always as himself, including a cameo in Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus. In 1955 he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed byHenri-Georges Clouzot.

Later works

The Chicago Picasso a 50-foot high public Cubist sculpture. Donated by Picasso to the people of Chicago

Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at thePhiladelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s, Picasso's style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velázquez's painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.

He was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. What the figure represents is not known; it could be a bird, a horse, a woman or a totally abstract shape. The sculpture, one of the most recognisable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city.

Picasso's final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 to 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime. Only later, after Picasso's death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism and was, as so often before, ahead of his time.

Death

Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was interred at the Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline Roque prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.^[44] Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline Roque killed herself by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.^[45]

Political views

Aside from the several anti-war paintings that he created, Picasso remained personally neutral during World War I, theSpanish Civil War, and World War II, refusing to join the armed forces for any side or country. He had also remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Picasso was already in his late fifties. He was even older at the onset of World War II, and could not be expected to take up arms in those conflicts. As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either World War. In the Spanish Civil War, service for Spaniards living abroad was optional and would have involved a voluntary return to their country to join either side. While Picasso expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco and fascists through his art, he did not take up arms against them. The Spanish Civil War provided the impetus for Picasso's first overtly political work, The Dream and Lie of Franco which was produced "specifically for propagandistic and fundraising purposes."^[46] This surreal fusion of words and images was intended to be sold as a series of postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause.^[46][47]

In 1944 Picasso joined the French Communist Party, attended an international peace conference in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government,^[48] But party criticism of a portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso's interest in Soviet politics, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death. In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso stated: "I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting. ... But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics."^[49] His Communist militancy, common among continental intellectuals and artists at the time (although it was officially banned in Francoist Spain), has long been the subject of some controversy; a notable source or demonstration thereof was a quote commonly attributed to Salvador Dalí (with whom Picasso had a rather strained relationship^[50]):

Picasso es pintor, yo también; [...] Picasso es español, yo también; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco.

(Picasso is a painter, so am I; [...] Picasso is a Spaniard, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.)^[51][52][53]

In the late 1940s his old friend the surrealist poet and Trotskyist^[54] and anti-Stalinist André Breton was more blunt; refusing to shake hands with Picasso, he told him: "I don't approve of your joining the Communist Party nor with the stand you have taken concerning the purges of the intellectuals after the Liberation".^[55]

In 1962, he received the Lenin Peace Prize.^[56] Biographer and art critic John Berger felt his talents as an artist were "wasted" by the communists.^[57]

According to Jean Cocteau's diaries, Picasso once said to him in reference to the communists: "I have joined a family, and like all families, it's full of shit".^[58]

He was against the intervention of the United Nations and the United States^[59] in the Korean War and he depicted it inMassacre in Korea.

Style and technique

Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. The total number of artworks he produced has been estimated at 50,000, comprising 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, roughly 12,000 drawings, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.^[60]

The medium in which Picasso made his most important contribution was painting.^[61] In his paintings, Picasso used color as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of color to create form and space.^[61] He sometimes added sand to his paint to vary its texture. A nanoprobe of Picasso's The Red Armchair (1931) by physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012 confirmed art historians' belief that Picasso used common house paint in many of his paintings.^[62] Much of his painting was done at night by artificial light.

Picasso's early sculptures were carved from wood or modeled in wax or clay, but from 1909 to 1928 Picasso abandoned modeling and instead made sculptural constructions using diverse materials.^[61] An example is Guitar (1912), a relief construction made of sheet metal and wire that Jane Fluegel terms a "three-dimensional planar counterpart of Cubist painting" that marks a "revolutionary departure from the traditional approaches, modeling and carving".^[63]

From the beginning of his career, Picasso displayed an interest in subject matter of every kind,^[64] and demonstrated a great stylistic versatility that enabled him to work in several styles at once. For example, his paintings of 1917 included the pointillistWoman with a Mantilla, the Cubist Figure in an Armchair, and the naturalistic Harlequin (all in the Museu Picasso, Barcelona). In 1919, he made a number of drawings from postcards and photographs that reflect his interest in the stylistic conventions and static character of posed photographs.^[65] In 1921 he simultaneously painted several large neoclassical paintings and two versions of the Cubist composition Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art).^[32] In an interview published in 1923, Picasso said, "The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting … If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them."^[32]

Although his Cubist works approach abstraction, Picasso never relinquished the objects of the real world as subject matter. Prominent in his Cubist paintings are forms easily recognized as guitars, violins, and bottles.^[66] When Picasso depicted complex narrative scenes it was usually in prints, drawings, and small-scale works; Guernica (1937) is one of his few large narrative paintings.^[65]

Picasso painted mostly from imagination or memory. According to William Rubin, Picasso "could only make great art from subjects that truly involved him …. Unlike Matisse, Picasso had eschewed models virtually all his mature life, preferring to paint individuals whose lives had both impinged on, and had real significance for, his own."^[67] The art critic Arthur Danto said Picasso's work constitutes a "vast pictorial autobiography" that provides some basis for the popular conception that "Picasso invented a new style each time he fell in love with a new woman".^[67] The autobiographical nature of Picasso's art is reinforced by his habit of dating his works, often to the day. He explained: "I want to leave to posterity a documentation that will be as complete as possible. That's why I put a date on everything I do."^[67]

Artistic legacy

At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such asHenri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Málaga.

The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of his early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal his firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father's tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabartés, his close friend and personal secretary.

Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. Garçon à la pipe sold for US$104 million at Sotheby's on 4 May 2004, establishing a new price record. Dora Maar au Chat sold for US$95.2 million at Sotheby's on 3 May 2006.^[68] On 4 May 2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie's for $106.5 million. The 1932 work, which depicts Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter reclining and as a bust, was in the personal collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November 2009.^[69] The previous auction record ($104.3 million) was set in February 2010, by Alberto Giacometti's Walking Man I.^[70]

As of 2004, Picasso remained the top-ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) according to the Art Market Trends report.^[71] More of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist's;^[72] the Art Loss Register has 550 of his works listed as missing.^[73]

The Picasso Administration functions as his official Estate. The US copyright representative for the Picasso Administration is the Artists Rights Society.^[74]