By Paul Dunwell, writing for EasyFrame
© Copyright EasyFrame 2021
Pablo Picasso was a painter and sculptor, ceramicist and printmaker, set-designer, poet and playwright who is undoubtedly one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He was responsible for sharing the honours in inventing modern art, cubism, symbolism, surrealism, collage and what is known as ‘constructed sculpture’ or ‘assemblage’. Yet he had exceptional skills as a traditional fine-artist, one who could paint realistically, skills that it is easy to overlook though they underpinned his credentials and inventiveness. During what was almost an eight-decade career he is said to have produced over 16,000 paintings, 35,000 illustrations, hundreds of sculptures and ceramics, and over 100,000 prints and engravings. This partly explains the vast wealth that sparked a huge row (one that’s still going today) because he left a number of potential heirs to his fortune but no will. At the time of his death his net worth was conservatively estimated at anything between US0m and US0m. Yet, half a century later, all of the rights issues mean that the estate is worth a billion or more.
Born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso into a middle-class Spanish family which had originally been minor nobility in Italy where at least one of his ancestors (i.e. Matteo Picasso) appears to have been an artist of note, Picasso was to spend most of his working life in France. His father Don José Ruiz y Blasco was a prominent artist and academic who specialised in depicting wildlife. His mum María Picasso y López was ‘only’ a lowly housewife and mum but so encouraged her son that it was her surname which he eventually adopted when signing his art. She always claimed that his first words were “piz, piz” - referring to a pencil in Spanish.
Actually Picasso could well have been a talent we never knew. It seems that he was so close to being still-born, as may have been a brother before him whom he obviously never knew, that he was initially thought to be dead though his Uncle Salvador’s cigar-smoke made him cough. He was to have two younger sisters, Dolores (also known as Lola, who had quite a long life) and Conchita (who didn’t). The latter died of diphtheria, quite a killer in the Victorian era, when she was just 7 and Picasso was 14. It caused him lasting upset (as did the suicide of a friend years later). The family moved from Málaga to A Coruña then Barcelona.
He started to have formal lessons from his dad, an instructor destined to become a professor in A Coruña, in life-drawing and painting when he was seven. By the age of 13 it is said that, on finding his son colouring a sketch that he’d left unfinished, Picasso’s dad vowed to give up painting because he couldn’t keep up with his son. This may be a true story though in fact he did still paint as works predating that time do exist.
When Picasso’s dad moved to Barcelona’s School of Fine Arts he persuaded it to let his son, then 13, to take the entrance exam for the advanced class. Despite his youth he completed this within a week, when most candidates took months, and got in. But he was thought to be undisciplined and prone to being rebellious against his father and the institution. So at 16 he was packed off (apparently with some funding from an uncle) to Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the top art-school in the country. Yet Picasso was even more off-the-rails now that he was away from home. (He was once accused of stealing the Mon Lisa.)
Having said that, he was able to visit Madrid’s Prado museum and gallery to see the work of artists such as Goya, El Greco and Velázquez. And In this informal self-education were the beginnings of Picasso’s laudable determination to, and talent for, learning what might be learned from anybody. He was to single out Paul Cézanne as critical but Rembrandt, Henri Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edvard Munch and African tribal art inspired him. And, painters apart, he was influenced too by the likes of Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau.
He was into deconstruction of artistic conventions that had been around since the Renaissance. And he was comfortable depicting beggars and prostitutes whereas of course historically great artists painted their patrons, the wealthy and influential. He had a social conscience - and was a mould-breaker in that he learned how to use his formidable fame as a lever. ‘Guernica’ demonstrated this. A painting that constituted ‘art as an instrument in war against the enemy’, it showed the wanton destruction of a Spanish village by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939. It was never allowed back into Spain until the country returned to democracy (arguably that was some time before 1981, but that’s when it went back to Madrid).
Picasso first went to Paris in 1900, by which time he had already gone through a ‘symbolist’ period (when devices within compositions might be metaphorical). Then he was to go through what are referred to as his ‘blue period’, then his ‘rose period’, dalliances with African art, with primitivism, with cubism and neo-classicism and surrealism. And he managed to pack much of this in before the Second World War.
Predictably Picasso didn’t go down a storm with the Nazis when they rolled into Paris. His work, like that of many other non-traditionalists, was classed as ‘degenerate’. Moreover he had attitude. When a German soldier pointed at a photo of ‘Guernica’ and asked if he’d done it, Picasso famously replied “No. You did”.
Although he still painted a little he largely switched to sculpture and got the French Resistance to smuggle in the bronze he needed. Indeed in his later years he’d reinterpret great 2D work by masters including Manet, Velázquez, Goya and Delacroix in 3D. But he started to write too (mostly plays and poems; he was to say at one point that he thought he’d be remembered for his writing rather than his art).
Later Picasso was repeatedly to appear in films (as himself), executing a lot of copperplate etchings and new avant-garde paintings in his last years though much of his work was so surreal that it was unidentifiable.
The artist was intimately involved with many women over his lifetime and was, by all accounts, a serial philanderer. Key women (in chronological order) were his first wife the noble Ukrainian ballet-dancer Olga Khokhlova who bore his son Paulo. He never divorced her as she’d get half his assets so he waited nearly 30 years for her to die. But he’d already been committing adultery with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a model who bore him a daughter Maya Widmaier-Picasso (Marie-Thérèse Walter always held a candle for Picasso and hanged herself four years after he died). Then there was Dora Maar (a French painter, poet and photographer), then the much-younger artist Françoise Gilot who bore two of his children (Claude and Paloma), then the even-younger writer and film-maker Geneviève Laporte, then his second wife, potter Jacqueline Roque (who killed herself with a shotgun 13 years after Picasso died). At least he seemed to show her some loyalty. Though his age may have played a part. Yet all of the above explains the chaos he left in his wake apropos assets.
In summary, Pablo Picasso was a one-off, a game-changing artist who still has pulling-power today.
You can easily and affordably buy unframed prints of his work. Try www.posters.co.uk/Picasso/E6488.
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Article Posted: 11/03/2021 05:15:16