The Picasso Century

Picasso was born in Andalucía in the south of Spain in 1881; his youth was spent in La Coruña, Barcelona and Madrid. His father, José Ruiz Blasco – a painter of middling talent – encouraged his precocious son by sending him to art school in his early teens, where he quickly mastered the academic principles of late-nineteenth-century painting. In 1898, Picasso moved alone to Barcelona, where he found a stimulating artistic circle centred around the modernist painter Isidre Nonell, whose realist images of poor and marginalised individuals were perhaps Picasso’s first significant influence. When Picasso first travelled to Paris in 1900, he moved to a studio in Montmartre that Nonell had vacated.

Situated on a hill that rises steeply to become the highest point in Paris, Montmartre was like a village on the outskirts of the city, with a diverse population. Picasso soon moved into the ramshackle building known as the Bateau Lavoir (laundry boat), which was home to an astonishing roster of artists and poets. This was where Picasso lived from 1904 to 1909, where he painted his ‘blue period’ works and his 1907 proto-Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and where he met important peers, including Georges Braque, André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Juan Gris, Maurice Utrillo and Marie Laurencin.

By 1906, the Bateau Lavoir residents included André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Kees van Dongen, artists all associated with Fauvism. Henri Matisse, one of Fauvism’s originators, attended gatherings at the home of collector and writer Gertrude Stein, where he met Picasso around March 1906. For these artists, pre-modern, non-European, Naïve or folk-art traditions were ascendent as sources of inspiration, and were often appropriated wholesale with scant regard to their original function or significance.

Like all who visited Paul Gauguin’s posthumous exhibition in Paris in 1906, Picasso witnessed the creative power Gauguin generated from his appropriation of Polynesian culture. Likewise, when travelling or visiting museums, Picasso and his peers sought alternative inspiration to Western classical tradition: Derain sketched Māori sculptures at the British Museum; Matisse visited Algeria to immerse himself in ‘the Orient’; Picasso explored displays of African and Oceanic art at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and ‘discovered’ his own ancestral traditions in Iberian sculpture (created in pre-Roman Spain) on display at the Louvre.

And finally, the death in late 1906 of the great ‘primitivist’ modern painter, Paul Cézanne, and the subsequent retrospective exhibitions of his work, announced the passing of a baton, demanding the deconstruction of aesthetic conventions.

Like many progressive young artists of the time, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were fascinated by recent breakthroughs in scientific thought, from physics to psychology, and eager to reflect new understandings of the world in their art. When the two artists met in 1907 – introduced by Guillaume Apollinaire at the Bateau Lavoir – discoveries such as X-rays and radio waves, Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious, and Einstein’s radical new theories about the interplay of time, space and matter, had all permeated public consciousness and were widely discussed in the Montmartre studios. In Braque, Picasso found a kindred inventive spirit, and both were inspired by the atmosphere of change: soon the two were engaged in a kind of bidding war of painterly experimentation that resulted in Cubism.

For Picasso and Braque, their experiment sought a more ‘realistic’ vision of the world, for which common painterly subjects, such as still lifes and seated figures, became their tools of investigation. Traditional visual devices such as linear perspective were eschewed, and in their place, dissected forms and fragmented surface planes reflected the complex and manifold nature of experience.

Later in life, Braque described Cubism as a mountaineering expedition, and Picasso as his climbing partner (compagnon de cordée). Roped together, each man could only take one or two steps forward before the other followed or took the lead. Frequently, their work is indistinguishable, until one pivots to take a new direction.

In the spring of 1911, the annual Salon des Indépendants exhibition featured a room dedicated to Cubism. Many exhibitors were part of the Puteaux Group, so named for the suburb near Montparnasse in which many members lived. They exhibited in successive salons and, in 1912, more than thirty artists were featured in the Salon de laSection d’Or (The Golden Section), an exhibition with a title implying the mathematical underpinnings of their approach.

Despite the generally conservative audience, this first public exhibition of Cubist works was largely positively received, and it helped to cement Cubism in the public consciousness. The paintings, with their fragmented and geometricised appearance, created a frisson of modernity as anticipated, but their subjects – portraits, landscapes and mythological scenes – were still recognisable and belonged to the ongoing tradition in European painting. Cubism was thus perceived as a style, rather than a more fundamental philosophical or scientific endeavour. Many Salon Cubists worked with brighter colours than Picasso and Georges Braque, resulting in decorative paintings that became popular with collectors.

For some artists and critics, Salon Cubism represented a deviation from Braque and Picasso’s ‘true’ Cubism (neither Picasso nor Braque exhibited in these salons). Picasso himself singled out only Fernand Léger for praise in the 1911 exhibition, while Braque described Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and others as ‘horrible stragglers’.

In 1917, while working on the stage decor for Parade – a ballet written by Jean Cocteau and performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – Picasso met the dancer, Olga Khokhlova. A year later, they married. Thus began a new phase in Picasso’s life, marking the end of his bohemian years.

Meanwhile, inspired by numerous imitators, Cubism was generating significant debate and controversy. Seeking to escape this suffocating atmosphere, Picasso looked to new – and ancient – sources for inspiration. In Naples, during the winter of 1917, Picasso discovered the gigantic Greek and Roman sculptures in the Farnese Collection. With very little to indicate his recent immersion in Cubism, Picasso began to paint in a Neoclassical style. Mythological subjects and monumental bathers populated his canvases.

Picasso was not alone in his return to a classical mode; it was a current running through poetry and music, as well as painting. Painter and writer André Lhote felt there could be a continuity between Cubism and Classicism, urging his fellow artists to re-examine French classical painting, in particular the works of Le Nain, Poussin and David. While Picasso’s classically inspired paintings reveal the playful and irreverent nature of his relationship with any style he appropriated, the work of many contemporaries strayed seemingly into more aimless aesthetic territory.

Picasso participated in most Surrealist exhibitions, including the first held in 1925. However, he declined to formally join the movement or participate in its ‘demonstrations’. In later life, Picasso said he had never been influenced by the Surrealists except during a ‘brief period of darkness and despair’ in 1933, when his relationship with Khokhlova became acrimonious. However, the influence of André Breton (whom he met in 1923) – and other Surrealists exploring the creative potential of the unconscious – is evident from the mid-1920s, when Picasso’s painting became intertwined with his fantasies and subconscious desires.

Affinities between Picasso and the Surrealists are many: they include a shared fascination for mythology and ancient rituals, including that of tauromachy (bullfighting). Minotaurs and labyrinths, toreadors(bullfighters) and bullfighting arenas proliferate in images by Salvador Dalí, André Masson, Picasso and others. These images foreground the dual forces of eroticism and violence that were understood (through familiarity with Sigmund Freud’s writings on psychoanalysis) to drive human behaviour.

The Surrealist movement is characterised by considerable diversity among its membership in terms of gender, nationality and political association, by a fluidity in its chronological span, and above all in the stylistic and conceptual approach taken by its adherents. Some of the Surrealist artists of the period were close to Picasso, and others extended Surrealism’s reach in later years.

Born in Cuba in 1902 to a Chinese father and a Congolese-Iberian mother, Wifredo Lam seemed predestined, according to French writer Michel Leiris, to create a ‘deeply universalist’ work where ‘four worlds [were] united: Asia, Africa, Europe and, by his birthplace, America’. In May 1938, shortly after completing fine art studies in Madrid and relocating to Paris, Lam arrived at Picasso’s studio with a letter of introduction from sculptor and mutual friend, Manolo. Lam had been fascinated by Picasso’s work since first seeing it seven years earlier.

Mutual admiration and respect were quickly established between the two artists, who maintained an intense dialogue in person over several months. Picasso introduced Lam (whom he called his ‘cousin’) to friends including Braque, Matisse, Miró, Léger and Leiris. On the eve of the German occupation of Paris in June 1940, Lam fled to Marseille – temporarily sheltering with a group of Surrealists, including André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Max Ernst, André Masson, Benjamin Péret and Remedios Varo – before returning to Cuba in 1941. Lam then experienced a very productive period, during which his works in this room were created.

Lam’s paintings synthesise his interests in Cubism and Surrealism, in ancestral cultures (particularly those of the African diaspora), and in concepts from Cuba’s syncretic religion Santería. The freedom with which Lam accessed and expressed these diverse elements in his paintings greatly appealed to Picasso.

Around 1927, Picasso’s art underwent another great stylistic shift. This has often been linked to the start of his affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, but his works of the late 1920s and early 1930s were also informed by his creative and intellectual dealings with Julio González and Alberto Giacometti.

In 1930, Picasso purchased the Château de Boisgeloup, in Normandy. He converted the chateau’s stables into a studio, which he filled with large plaster sculptures expressing rounded, organic forms. Seeking to transform his two-dimensional experiments in painting into three-dimensions, Picasso enlisted the technical assistance of González, a skilled metalsmith who worked with iron to produce expressive sculptures. González masterfully cast bronze versions of sculptures that Picasso had moulded in plaster or assembled from found objects. In the early 1930s, González experienced his own creative revolution, creating minimal anthropomorphic forms from welded iron rods, which bear the mark of influence from Picasso’s paintings of the late 1920s.

Picasso’s friendship with Swiss sculptor Giacometti –which began in 1931 – was sparked by their mutual deep affinity with Surrealism. For Giacometti, art was a means of exploring the fundamental human fight for survival, expressed as an eternal struggle between man and woman. Forms that merge human and insect anatomy represent the battle of desire and the death-drive, echoed in Picasso’s paintings and sculptures from this period.

I did not paint war because I am not that kind of painter who goes, like a photographer, in search of a subject. But there is no doubt that war does exist in my paintings.
– Pablo Picasso, 1944

The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the Second World War (1939–45) both had a profound impact on Picasso and his artistic community. Some argue that politics entered Picasso’s art when the historic Basque town of Guernica was destroyed by incendiary bombs in 1937, an event that compelled him to create his great anti-war painting, Guernica.

Along with some of his peers, Picasso remained in Paris throughout the German occupation of the city. His work from this period is characterised by a sombre palette and symbolism pertaining to the horrors of war. A particularly powerful example is the series of drawings and paintings depicting the ‘weeping woman’, a laden symbol of suffering produced by Picasso between May and October 1937.

Similarly universal symbols of the grim reality of war were adopted by the other artists represented in this room, such as Georges Braque’s stark still lifes, Pierre Bonnard’s austere self-portrait and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s exploration of the psychological implications of conflict.

In late 1944, following the liberation of France from Nazi oppression, Picasso joined the French Communist Party (PCF). In a published statement, he said, ‘I have become a Communist because our party strives more than any other to know and to build the world, to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy’.

Picasso’s commitment to communist ideals was expressed in works directly related to contemporary events such the Korean War and the Cold War. However, Picasso’s growing mistrust of the idolatry surrounding Joseph Stalin in the years before his death in 1953 led him to create works that generated significant controversy within the PCF, after which he ceased producing overtly political art.

In this room, examples of Picasso’s expressly political works appear alongside works by artists also affiliated with the PCF. The PCF’s favoured artist was André Fougeron, whose paintings reveal his adoption of the principles of Socialist Realism introduced from Soviet Russia. Picasso’s friend Édouard Pignon produced works that reflect a synthesis of gestural expressivity and representation of the heroism and sacrifice of the coal mining community from which he came.

From around 1954, Picasso’s main political activity was his association with the International Peace Movement, for which his drawing of a dove became the international emblem, appearing on posters, scarves, badges and in many editioned prints, sold to raise money for the cause.

From their first meeting in 1906, Picasso viewed Henri Matisse as his one true rival. The artists had remained in each other’s orbit throughout their careers and were in frequent contact following Picasso’s move to the south of France in 1946. When Matisse died in 1954, Picasso paid Matisse his finest tribute: he began to paint subjects characteristic of the work of his late friend – studio interiors, odalisques and reclining nudes and framed views. As with all his ‘borrowings’, Picasso transformed these in his own inimitable way. Picasso’s grief resulted in a great surge in painting, but a pervasive sense of melancholy remained. ‘No-one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I’, Picasso remarked, ‘and no-one has looked at mine more carefully than he’.

The paintings in this room also signal a significant shift in Picasso’s personal life: his separation from Françoise Gilot. The couple had met in 1943 and moved to Vallauris in 1948. Choosing her own painting practice over a tumultuous domestic life with Picasso, Gilot and the couple’s two children returned to Paris in 1953. Soon after, Picasso met Jacqueline Roque, who became his final companion and inspiration for many paintings during this period.

In July 1946, Picasso visited an exhibition of local handcrafts in Vallauris and was introduced to Georges and Suzanne Ramié, the owners of the Madoura Pottery. Picasso was given the opportunity to model a couple of works, and upon returning the next year, he was delighted to find them successfully fired. Picasso was given his own working area and for the next twenty-five years, he returned annually to continue his ceramic production, which eventuated in some 4000 works.

Picasso worked closely with Suzanne Ramié and the Madoura potters, in particular their master craftsman Jules Agard, learning techniques of decorating and glazing. He used the Pottery’s standard forms while also commissioning new forms and inventing his own unique models. Picasso’s interest was focused as ever on the dialogue between invention and tradition.

In 1965, art critic and writer John Berger published The Success and Failure of Picasso. Berger’s critical assessment of Picasso’s life and career is symbolic of the broader reappraisal of the artist that took place in the final decades of his life. Reviewing a 1973 exhibition of Picasso’s late works, art historian Douglas Cooper likened the works to ‘incoherent scribbles performed by a terrified old man in the antechamber of death’. Critics and art historians began to label Picasso irrelevant and belonging to another era.

In his last decade, Picasso studied the work of past masters such as Rembrandt, Goya and Velázquez, and referenced and reinterpreted their distinctive iconography. Picasso’s engagement with these historical artists found expression in loosely executed paintings with transgressive and erotic imagery that rebelliously declare the vigour of their maker.

Within a decade of Picasso’s death in 1973, younger artists were reclaiming Picasso as a kindred spirit, and his late, gestural paintings were perceived as expressive of a ‘new spirit’ that would reanimate art after the formalist program of modern art – that argued for abstraction as art’s ultimate goal – had run its course. In 1981, at London’s Royal Academy, Picasso’s musketeers were included in the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting, alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Willem de Kooning and younger artists who were similarly allegiant to painting’s expressive potential.

It’s up to the public to see what it wants to see.
– Pablo Picasso

Rineke Dijkstra’s three-channel video was inspired by a residency at Tate Liverpool in 2008. Observing the ritual of the school art gallery trip and what she describes as the children’s ‘uninhibited quality’, Dijkstra invited nine students, aged eleven to twelve years, to respond to Picasso’s 1937 Weeping woman painting, in the Tate’s collection. Her choice of this artwork was largely influenced by its emotive quality and interpretive potential.

With little information on the work’s art historical content, the students offer their impressions of the grief-stricken woman before them. Responses range from the plausible to the nonsensical. As the process of interpretation unfolds, three cameras zoom in and out, shifting between the larger group and the faces of individual students. Eventually the children agree that Picasso ‘paints how people feel’ and that the abstract shapes and forms in the painting might represent ‘inside emotions’.

Beyond illuminating the diversity of the interpretive process, which often remains silent and hidden during the gallery visit, this work provides an opportunity to reflect on Picasso’s artistic legacy and relevance today.