By Paul Dunwell, writing for EasyFrame
© Copyright EasyFrame 2021
What this article is about
Pablo Picasso was a painter, sculptor, ceramicist, printmaker, set designer, poet and playwright, and undoubtedly one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He shares the credit for inventing cubism, collage and 'constructed sculpture' or 'assemblage', and for much else in modern art. Yet he also had exceptional skills as a traditional fine artist who could paint realistically. It is easy to overlook them, though they underpinned his inventiveness.
In a career of almost eight decades 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. That partly explains the vast wealth that sparked a huge and long-running row, because he left several potential heirs and no will. At his death his net worth was conservatively put at between US0m and US0m. Half a century later, with all the rights, the estate is worth a billion or more.
Early life
He was 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. He 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 wildlife. His mother, María Picasso y López, so encouraged her son that it was her surname he eventually used to sign his work. She always claimed his first words were “piz, piz”, short for the Spanish for pencil.
We might never have known him. He was so nearly stillborn that he was at first thought dead, until, the story goes, his Uncle Salvador's cigar smoke made him cough. He had two younger sisters: Dolores, known as Lola, who lived a long life, and Conchita, who died of diphtheria at 7, when Picasso was 14. It upset him lastingly, as did the suicide of a friend years later. The family moved from Málaga to A Coruña and then Barcelona.
Training, rebellion and influences
From the age of seven he had formal lessons in life drawing and painting from his father. The story goes that when Picasso was 13, his father found him finishing a sketch he had left incomplete and vowed to give up painting, because he couldn't keep up with his son. In fact he did go on painting.
When his father moved to Barcelona's School of Fine Arts, he persuaded it to let his 13-year-old son take the entrance exam for the advanced class. Picasso completed it within a week, when most candidates took months, and got in. But he was thought undisciplined and rebellious, so at 16 he was packed off, apparently with money from an uncle, to Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the top art school in the country. Away from home he went even further off the rails. (Years later, in Paris, he was questioned over the theft of the Mona Lisa.)
In Madrid he could visit the Prado and see Goya, El Greco and Velázquez. This informal self-education was the start of his talent for learning from anybody. He singled out Paul Cézanne as critical, but Rembrandt, Henri Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edvard Munch and African tribal art all inspired him. So did writers such as Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau.
He set about dismantling artistic conventions that had stood since the Renaissance. He was comfortable painting beggars and prostitutes, where great artists had traditionally painted their wealthy patrons. He had a social conscience, and he learned to use his fame as a lever. 'Guernica' shows it. He called it 'art as an instrument in war against the enemy'. It depicts the destruction of a Spanish town by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, and it was not allowed into Spain until the country had returned to democracy. It went to Madrid in 1981.
The phases before the war
Picasso first went to Paris in 1900, by which time he had already been through a 'symbolist' period. Then came his 'blue period', his 'rose period', and involvements with African art, primitivism, cubism, neo-classicism and surrealism. He packed much of this in before the Second World War.
The war and beyond
Predictably, Picasso did not go down well with the Nazis when they rolled into Paris. His work, like that of many non-traditionalists, was classed as 'degenerate'. And he had attitude. When a German officer pointed at a photo of 'Guernica' and asked if he had done it, Picasso famously replied: “No. You did”.
He still painted a little, but largely switched to sculpture, getting the French Resistance to smuggle in the bronze he needed. In later years he reinterpreted great works by Manet, Velázquez, Goya and Delacroix. He began to write too, mostly plays and poems, and once said he thought he would be remembered for his writing.
Later he appeared in films, as himself, and in his last years produced many copperplate etchings and new avant-garde paintings.
A tempestuous love life
Picasso was involved with many women and was, by all accounts, a serial philanderer. The key figures, in order, were:
- Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian ballet dancer, his first wife and mother of his son Paulo. He never divorced her, since she would have been entitled to half his assets, and they remained married until her death nearly 30 years later.
- Marie-Thérèse Walter, a model, with whom he had a daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso. She took her own life four years after he died.
- Dora Maar, a French painter, poet and photographer.
- Françoise Gilot, a much younger artist, mother of his children Claude and Paloma.
- Geneviève Laporte, an even younger writer and film-maker.
- Jacqueline Roque, a potter and his second wife, who took her own life 13 years after his death.
All of which explains the chaos he left behind over his estate.
Conclusion
Pablo Picasso was a one-off, a game-changing artist who still has pulling power today.
You can buy unframed prints of his work easily and affordably. Try www.posters.co.uk/Picasso/E6488.
You'll want to frame whatever you buy. Any good framers will show you a range of solutions and advise on what suits the work and where it will hang. EasyFrame is on 01234 856 501 and sales@EasyFrame.co.uk, and they'll always chat even if you don't want to buy!