Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, formally Pablo Ruiz Picasso, (October 25, 1881�April 8, 1973) is one of the recognized masters of 20th century art.

His name in full is Pablo (or El Pablito) Diego Jos� Santiago Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crisp�n Crispiniano los Remedios Cipriano de la Sant�sima Trinidad Ruiz Blasco y Picasso L�pez. His father was Jos� Ruiz y Blasco; his mother, Mar�a Picasso y L�pez. In his early years, he signed his name Ruiz Blasco after his father, but, from about 1901, he switched to using his mother's name.

Pablo Picasso was born in M�laga, Spain, and is probably most famous as the founder, along with Georges Braque, of Cubism. He produced a wide and varied body of work, the best-known being the Blue Period works, which feature moving depictions of acrobats, harlequins, prostitutes, beggars and artists.

While Pablo Picasso was primarily a painter (in fact he believed that an artist must paint in order to be considered a true artist), he also worked with ceramic and bronze, collage and even produced some poetry. "Je suis aussi un po�te," as he quipped to his friends,("I am also a poet").

Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. On May 4, 2004, Picasso's painting Garcon � la Pipe was sold for USD $104 million at Sotheby's, establishing a new price record (see also List of most expensive paintings).

When he wasn't working, Pablo Picasso hated to be alone. In Paris, in addition to having a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including Andr� Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein and others, he usually maintained a number of mistresses, in addition to his wife, or primary partner.

Picasso's most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica, Spain, "Guernica". This large canvas embodies, for many, the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. The painting of it was captured in a series of photographs by Picasso's most famous lover, Dora Maar, a distinguished artist in her own right.

"Guernica" hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art for many years. Pablo Picasso stipulated that the painting should not return to Spain, until democracy was restored in that country. In 1981, "Guernica" was returned to Spain and exhibited at the Cas�n del Buen Retiro. In 1992, the painting became one of the main attractions in Madrid's Reina Sof�a Museum.

Pablo Picasso was extremely talented as a painter and draughtsman, even by the standards of the world's great artists. He worked with equal facility in oil, watercolour, pastels, charcoal, pencil and ink.

He famously rendered complex scenes as just a few geometric shapes in his mixed-media Cubist works, but, he also produced masterful realist portraits throughout his life. His pen and ink sketches, of his friends from the Cubist era and afterward, are valued for their understated intimacy, examples of the fluidity of his skills.

Indeed, Pablo Picasso moved with ease among the plastic arts, despite limited academic training (he finished only one year at the Royal Academy in Madrid). His natural talents were augmented by a ferocious work ethic that survived into the final years of his long life.

Early life

Picasso's father, Jos� Ruiz y Blasco, was himself a painter and curator and for most of his life was a professor of art at Spanish colleges. It is from Don Jos� that Picasso learned the basics of formal academic art training; figure drawing and painting in oil. Although Pablo Picasso attended art schools thoughout his childhood, often those where his father taught, he never finished his college level course of study at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, leaving after less than a year.

The Picasso Museum in Barcelona features many of Picasso's early works, created while he was living in Spain, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabart�s, Picasso's close friend from his Barcelona days and for many years Picasso's personal secretary. There are many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father's tutelage, as well as rarely seen works from his old age, that clearly demonstrate Picasso's firm grounding in classical techniques.

Picasso and Pacifism

Picasso remained neutral during the Spanish Civil War, World War I and World War II, refusing to fight for any side or country. He never commented on it. However, it gave evidence to the idea that it was because he was a pacifist. Some of his contemporaries, including Braque, felt that this neutrality had more to do with cowardice than with principle.

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 necessitated a voluntary return to the country to join either side. While Picasso expressed anger and condemnation of Franco and the Fascists through his art, he did not take up arms against them.

He also remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth, despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it. No political movement seemed to compel his support to any great degree.

After the Second World War, Picasso joined the French Communist party, and even attended an international peace conference in Poland. However, party criticism of a portrait he had made of Stalin, as being "insufficiently realistic", cooled Picasso's interest in Communist politics.

Personal Life

Picasso had a long string of lovers, four children by three women, and two wives. In the early years of the 20th century, Picasso, still a struggling youth, began a long term relationship with Fernande Olivier. It is she who appears in many of the Blue and Rose Period paintings. After garnering fame, and some fortune, Picasso left Fernande for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva. When it became clear that Eva was dying, Picasso left her as well.

In 1918, Picasso married Olga Khoklova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe. Olga introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant on the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo, who would grow up to be a sometime motorcycle racer, sometime chauffeur to his father, and dissolute.

Olga's insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso's bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of near constant conflict. In 1927, Picasso met 17 year-old Marie Th�r�se Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Olga soon ended in separation. French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce and Picasso did not want Olga to have half his wealth. Therefore, the two remained legally married until Olga's death in 1955.

Picasso carried on a longstanding affair with Marie Th�r�se and fathered a daughter, Maya, with her. Marie Th�r�se lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her. She hanged herself after Picasso's death.

The photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s and it was Dora who documented the painting of Guernica. Like all the women in his life, Dora was cruelly emotionaly abused by the narcissistic Picasso.

After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso began to keep company with a young art student, Fran�oise Gilot. The two eventually became lovers, and had two children together, Claude, and Paloma. Uniquely, among Picasso's women, Fran�oise left Picasso in 1953 because of his abusive treatment and infidelities. This came as a severe blow to Picasso, who was used to submissive women.

He went through a difficult period after Fran�oise's departure, coming to terms with his advancing age, now in his seventies, who was no longer attractive to young women. A number of ink drawings from this period explore this theme of the hideous old dwarf, a buffoonish counterpoint to the beautiful young girl.

Picasso was, however, not long in finding another lover, Jacqueline Roque. Jacqueline worked at the Madoura Pottery, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. The two remained together for the rest of Picasso's life, marrying in 1961. Their marriage was also the means of one last act of revenge against Fran�oise. Fran�oise had been seeking a legal means to legitimize her children with Picasso, Claude and Paloma. With Picasso's encouragement, she had arranged to divorce her then husband, Luc Simon, and marry Picasso to secure her children's rights. Picasso then secretly married Jacqueline after Fran�oise had filed for divorce in order to exact his revenge for her leaving him.

In his 80s and 90s, Picasso, no longer quite the energetic dynamo he had been in his youth, became more and more reclusive. His second wife, Jacqueline Roque, screened all but the most important visitors and closest friends, even excluding Picasso's two children, Claude and Paloma.

This reclusive existence intensified after Picasso underwent surgery for a prostate condition in 1965. This surgery is rumored to have left Picasso largely impotent. To a man for whom sexual adventure was a very important part of life, this was a serious life-change and Picasso seems to have dealt with it by redoubling his already prolific artistic output.

Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colorful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate engravings. At the time, these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slap-dash works of an artist who was past his prime. One long time admirer, Douglas Cooper, called them "the incoherent scribblings of a frenetic old man in the antechamber of death". Only a decade 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 usual, ahead of his time.

Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973, in Mougins, France, and was interred at Castle Vauvenargues' park, in Vauvenargues, Bouches-du-Rh�ne. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.

At the time of his death, Picasso, by now a multi-millionaire, owned a vast quantity of his own work, consisting of personal favorites which he had kept off the art market or which he had not needed to sell.

In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works.

Since Picasso left no will, his death duties, or 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 Mus�e Picasso in Paris. And recently in 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him, in his hometown of M�laga, Spain, called the Museo Picasso M�laga.

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