PABLO PICASSOSelf & Relationships

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) SPANISH MODERN ARTIST Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in

Malaga, Spain. He was the first child of Don Jose Ruiz y Blasco, an art

teacher, and Maria Picasso y Lopez. At an early age Pablo showed an interest in drawing.

His first words were "piz, piz", which is short for "lapiz", the Spanish word for pencil.

At the age of 7, Pablo began receiving art instruction from his father. His father believed that an artist's training should include copying the masters and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. The precision of Pablo's painting technique grew until it soon surpassed that of his father.

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) SPANISH MODERN ARTIST In 1900, Picasso made his first trip to Paris. At that

time Paris was considered to be the art capitol of Europe.

While in Paris, Picasso's work began to attract the attention of art collectors.

In 1907, Picasso painted one of his most important works - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, - creating with painter and sculptor Georges Braque the brand new art movement known as "Cubism". Cubism allowed the artist to show his/her model from many different viewpoints.

In the paintings of earlier times, the artist showed his subject from one particular viewpoint. In cubist paintings the artist may show the front and the side of a person's face at the same time.

PICASSO’S STYLE (CUBISM) In Picasso’s work, everything is staked on sensation

and desire. His aim was not to argue coherence but to go for the strongest level of feeling. He conveyed it with tremendous plastic force, making you feel the weight of forms and the tension of their relationships mainly by drawing and tonal structure.

He was never a great colorist but through metaphor, he crammed layers of meaning together to produce flashes of revelation. In the process, he reversed one of the currents of modern art.

Modernism had rejected storytelling: what mattered were formal relationships. But Picasso brought it back in a disguised form, as a psychic narrative, told through metaphors, puns and equivalences. He founded the Cubist movement in collaboration with Georges Braque.

PICASSO’S RELATIONSHIPS

Painter Françoise Gilot lived with Picasso for ten years and bore him two children: Claude and Paloma Picasso.

Picasso and Jacqueline married and moved into Notre Dame de Vie at Mougins in 1961.Picasso fathered two other children - Paulo (with Olga Koklova) and Maya (with Marie-Thérèse Walter).

Picasso also had a long affair with Dora Maar.

“DORA MAAR IN AN ARMCHAIR,” 1939.

Dated 1939, of Dora Maar — “the only one of Picasso’s lovers who was his match in mind and temperament,” according to the catalog — as a grinning, pulled-apart doll. By contrast, Stein remains, in her portrait, recognizably, monumentally herself, possibly because Picasso — who had a hard time with the picture — couldn’t turn her into an extension of his own ego.

To his credit he was fully conscious of that ego and able to call the shots on it in a myriad of direct or oblique self-portraits, as heartthrob, harlequin, minotaur, big-deal artist, classical god and, in the years before his death in 1973, pint-size musketeer.

 

“STANDING FEMALE NUDE,” A 1910 CHARCOAL DRAWING

Cubism was his mold-shattering rebel moment, and a collaborative one, shared with Georges Braque. The leap it represented, however assiduously trained for, is given to few artists to make. It basically redefined Western concepts of space, time, art, beauty, high, low, good, bad — the works.

“Standing Female Nude,” with its near-abstract stack of brackets and shelves, to the radically anti-virtuosic newsprint collages of 1912. Yet this intense, difficult moment of invention, when Picasso was fighting every grandstanding, people-pleasing instinct in him, is disconcertingly outweighed by the backward-looking neo-Classical work that he churned out after World War I.

P O R T R A I T O F “J A C Q U E L I N E”, OIL ON CANVAS    (1 9 5 7)

Picasso's emotional life remained turbulent well into old age. In 1953 Francoise Gilot left him, taking with her Claude and Paloma, her two children by Picasso.

Not long afterwards he met Jacqueline Roque, and lived together in 1955. Over the years that followed, Picasso made hundreds of portraits of Jacqueline, whose strong features and dark hair make her easy to identify despite the variety of styles in which Picasso worked; she even modeled characters in famous paintings which he reinterpreted.

In 1961 Picasso and Jacqueline married and moved into Notre Dame de Vie at Mougins, which was to be Picasso's final home.

REFERENCE:

The New York Times by Holland Cotter NEW YORK (REUTERS) Editing by Patricia

Reaney Source: Life and Works of Picasso

[Hardcover] Nathaniel Harris (Author) http://makingartfun.com/htm/f-maf-art-

library/pablo-picasso-biography.htm