Pablo Picasso

"Picasso" redirects here. For other uses, see Picasso (disambiguation).

Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso in 1962.
Born	Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (1881-10-25)October 25, 1881 Málaga, Spain
Died	April 8, 1973(1973-04-08) (aged 91) Mougins, France
Resting place	Château de Vauvenargues
Known for	Painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture
Movement	Cubism
Spouse(s)	Olga Khokhlova ​ ​ (m. 1918; died 1955)​ Jacqueline Roque ​ (m. 1961)​
Partner(s)	Fernande Olivier (1904–1912) Eva Gouel (1912–1915) Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927–1936) Dora Maar (1936–1946) Françoise Gilot (1943–1953)
Children	Paulo Picasso (1921–1975), with Olga Khokhlova. Maya Widmaier-Picasso (b. 1935), with Marie-Thérèse Walter. Claude Picasso (b. 1947) and Paloma Picasso (b. 1949), with Françoise Gilot.
Signature

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (Málaga, October 25, 1881 – Mougins, April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor, the creator, together with Georges Braque, of Cubism.

Since the genesis of the 20th century he has been considered one of the greatest painters who took part in the various artistic movements that spread across the world, and he exerted a great influence on other great artists of his time. His works are held in museums and collections throughout Europe and the world. He also took up other genres such as drawing, engraving, book illustration, sculpture, ceramics, and the design of sets and costumes for theatrical productions. He also left a brief literary body of work.

Politically, Picasso declared himself a pacifist and a communist. He was a member of the Communist Party of Spain and of the French Communist Party until his death, which occurred on April 8, 1973, at the age of ninety-one, in his house called "Notre-Dame-de-Vie" in the French town of Mougins. He is buried in the park of the Château de Vauvenargues (Bouches-du-Rhône).

Biography

Childhood

View of the north side of the Plaza de la Merced in Málaga. At number 15 of this building, located at number 36 of the Plaza de la Merced in Málaga, Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born, right where the Picasso Foundation Birthplace Museum is located today.

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso (according to his birth certificate) or Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (according to his baptismal record), was the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso López. He was born on 25 October 1881 in Málaga (Spain), into a bourgeois family. Picasso had two sisters, Dolores (1884–1958) and Concepción (1887–1895). His maternal great-grandfather, Tommaso Picasso (born in 1787), was originally from the town of Sori in Genoa, Italy, and moved to Spain around 1807.

Of his father it is known that he wanted to be an artist and was a drawing teacher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Telmo. Little is known about his mother; she apparently had a stronger personality than her husband, and Picasso always showed her greater respect and tenderness, which some believe they can see in the portrait he drew of her in 1923. Pablo began painting at an early age; in 1889, at the age of eight, after a bullfight and under his father's direction, he painted The Yellow Picador, his first oil painting, which he always refused to part with.

Pablo Picasso and his sister Lola in 1889.

In 1891 the family was forced to leave Málaga because of the little economic stability it enjoyed. José Ruiz Blasco had begun repeatedly requesting a transfer to the city of A Coruña, where a teaching post had been created at the School of Fine Arts, following his dismissal as curator of the Museum of Fine Arts of Málaga in 1888. The move was not at all pleasant for his family, as reflected in the expression Picasso remembered his father using at this stage: "No Málaga, no bulls, no friends, nothing at all." "Only for me was the move to Galicia a celebration." In Galicia, Pablo worked on his drawings and showed strong confidence in himself and his gifts; he was ten years old. His first works, of a vigorous and almost ferocious realism, showed an early predilection for popular characters. In A Coruña he held his first exhibition at the age of thirteen and published caricatures and drawings in the hand-made, self-published magazines "La Coruña", "Azul y Blanco" and "Torre de Hércules".

1895 was a year of important events in his childhood: in January his sister Concepción died, and in September his father obtained a professorship at the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona, where the young Pablo was admitted as a student and studied for two years. This led him to paint, perhaps to please his father, a series of pictures in which the sentimental academicism of the style was surprising after the vitality of the portraits he had made in A Coruña.

A brilliant and precocious student, Picasso passed the entrance examination for the La Llotja School in a single day, at the age of fourteen, and was allowed to skip the first two classes. According to one of the many legends about the artist, his father, having recognized his son's extraordinary talent on seeing his first childhood works, handed him his brushes and palette and promised never to paint again in his life.

Unlike music, there are no child prodigies in painting. What people perceive as premature genius is the genius of childhood. It does not gradually disappear as one grows older. It is possible that this child will become a true painter one day, perhaps even a great painter. But he would have to start from the beginning. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, I was not a genius. My first drawings have never been shown in an exhibition of children's drawings. I lacked a child's clumsiness, his naivety. I made academic drawings at the age of seven, with a precision that frightens me.

— Picasso

Youth: his friendships in Paris

In 1912, during his stay in the city of Paris, Picasso was part of a circle of distinguished friends in the neighborhoods of Montmartre and Montparnasse; they were André Breton, the poet; Guillaume Apollinaire, the writer; Alfred Jarry; and Gertrude Stein. Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion of having stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and of being part of an international gang of thieves. Apollinaire blamed his friend Picasso, who was also subjected to questioning, but both were later exonerated.

First paintings

Entrance to the café Els Quatre Gats.

In the winter of 1895 he made his first large academic canvas, The First Communion (Picasso Museum, Barcelona), in Barcelona, the city where he lived for about nine years, apart from some summer vacations and longer or shorter stays in Madrid and Paris. In 1897 he presented the canvas Science and Charity (Picasso Museum, Barcelona) at the General Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid. During the summer he once again spent his vacation in Málaga, where he painted landscapes and bullfights.

In September he went to Madrid to begin studies at the Academy of San Fernando, but he soon left the Academy: the intellectual atmosphere of the capital, impervious to the Catalan modernism that Picasso was trying to introduce (he founded a small magazine in 1901, Arte Joven, which had a rather brief existence), did not convince him. Nevertheless, he took advantage of his frequent visits to the Museo del Prado to get to know better the work of El Greco, who was being vindicated by artists and scholars at the end of the 19th century.

From 1898 he signed his works as "Pablo Ruiz Picasso", then as "Pablo R. Picasso", and only as "Picasso" from 1901. The change does not seem to imply a rejection of the paternal figure; rather, it was due to Picasso's desire to distinguish himself as a personality, begun by his Catalan friends, who took to calling him by his maternal surname, much less common than his father's Ruiz.

Ramon Casas: Pablo Picasso, 1900, National Art Museum of Catalonia.

He returned to Barcelona in June 1898, ill with scarlet fever, and moved to Horta de Ebro (present-day Horta de Sant Joan), the village of his friend Manuel Pallarés, located south of the Ebro near the town of Gandesa (Terra Alta, Tarragona). During this stay Picasso reconnected with the primordial roots of the country and with a certain return to nature, more in keeping with the modernist ideals, which constituted one of the first "primitivist" episodes of his career.

Having abandoned the plan of living in Madrid to devote himself to copying the great masters, by February 1899 he was back in Barcelona, where he began frequenting the beer hall Els Quatre Gats, emblem of the modernist bohemia and the place where he held his first solo exhibition and made friends with Jaime Sabartés and Carlos Casagemas. In this milieu Picasso came into contact with anarchist thought, which was established in Barcelona. The misery prevailing in the slums of Barcelona and the sick and wounded soldiers returning to Spain after the disastrous Cuban War created a breeding ground for social violence that undoubtedly marked Picasso's sensibility, at an individual and moral rather than purely political level, and that can be seen in certain drawings made between 1897 and 1901: The Prisoner, An Anarchist Meeting.

In October 1900 he visited Paris with Casagemas to attend the Exposition Universelle, where a work of his, Last Moments, now lost, was on display. In Paris he settled in the studio of Isidre Nonell, a Catalan artist whom Picasso knew from the Els Quatre Gats group, influenced by Impressionism, who reflected the Catalan social situation at the beginning of the century through portraits of marginalized and wretched characters. Nonell's work, together with that of Toulouse-Lautrec, greatly influenced Picasso's style at this time, as can be seen in works such as The Wait (Margot), Dwarf Dancer and The End of the Number, both from 1901. He also met the man who would be his first dealer, Pere Mañach (who offered him 150 francs a month for all his work for a year), and came into contact with the gallery owner Berthe Weill. He returned to Barcelona on 20 or 23 December (according to different sources) with Casagemas, whom Picasso took with him to celebrate New Year's in Málaga.

Between Barcelona and Paris. The Blue Period

Main article: Picasso's Blue Period

The Burial of Casagemas

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–1588, Santo Tomé, Toledo), the best-known work of El Greco. The division of the space into two zones inspired Picasso in his painting The Burial of Casagemas.

Picasso's Blue Period is the name given to the period running roughly from 1901 to 1904: the name comes from the color that dominates the chromatic range of the paintings, and its origin lies in the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas on 17 February 1901, which left him full of pain and sadness. Casagemas, after trying to kill his lover Germaine, a dancer at the Moulin Rouge who frequented the circle of Spanish artists, committed suicide in Paris. Picasso, moved and affected by his friend's death, painted a picture he named The Burial of Casagemas, an allegorical painting that was beginning to show his transition to the Blue Period. The division of the picture's space into two parts, earth and sky, body and spirit, recalls that of El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz.

Van Gogh in a self-portrait dedicated to Gauguin.

Other influences on Picasso's work in this period were those of Van Gogh and Gauguin, the former above all at a psychological level, as reflected in the emotional intensity of the paintings of this time, although one can also see a simplification of volumes and defined contours that call Gauguin to mind, from whom he would also take a universal conception of sentimentality. Picasso expressed the loneliness of his characters by isolating them in an imprecise setting, with an almost exclusive use of blue for a period of more than two years, something practically without precedent in the history of art. Likewise, the elongation of the figures that was gradually being introduced into his works again recalled the style of El Greco.

Between Barcelona and Paris

Picasso was a tireless worker. At the end of April 1901 he returned to Barcelona, where he was exhibiting Woman in Blue (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid) at the General Exhibition of Fine Arts, and then in May he went back to Paris, where he settled at number 130 Boulevard de Clichy, in the place where Casagemas had had his studio. Between June and July of the same year, Picasso and Iturrino held an exhibition at Vollard's gallery in Paris. Without money or work, in June he met the poet Max Jacob, with whom he would maintain a close relationship until Jacob's death in 1944. The poet would later recall that he discovered Picasso's work and, being an art critic, expressed his admiration for the painter's talent. Shortly afterward he received an invitation from Mañach to be introduced to his young client (Picasso was then about eighteen); they spent the whole day looking at Picasso's enormous output—at that time he painted one or two pictures a night and sold them for one hundred and fifty francs on the Rue Laffite. During the autumn he painted The Two Saltimbanques (Harlequin and His Companion) (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Harlequin Leaning (MoMA, New York) and finished The Burial of Casagemas. In winter he painted a series of portraits in blue: the Portrait of Jaime Sabartés (Museu Picasso, Barcelona), the Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto (Picasso Museum, Málaga) and the Blue Self-Portrait (Picasso Museum, Paris).

At the end of January 1902 he broke his agreement with Mañach and, after the corresponding settlement, returned to Barcelona. He began working in the studio of Ángel Fernández de Soto, at number 6 Carrer Nou de la Rambla, where during the spring the color blue began to dominate his work. With Fernández de Soto he visited the brothels of Barcelona, which was reflected in a series of erotic drawings that include a Self-Portrait with Nude (private collection, Germany); an ink and watercolor drawing of Ángel Fernández de Soto with a Woman and The Pimp (Allegorical Composition), owned by the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

Max Jacob in 1934. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.

In Paris, Mañach arranged an exhibition of paintings and pastels at the Berthe Weill gallery, from 1 to 15 April, with works by Picasso and Lemaire, and another in June at the same gallery with works by Picasso and Matisse. In Barcelona Picasso received a notice to report for military service in October. To avoid it, he had to pay two thousand pesetas, a sum provided by his uncle. Right afterward he went back to Paris with Sébastien Junyer, and showed his blue paintings for the first time from 15 November to 15 December in a group exhibition organized once again by Mañach at the Berthe Weill gallery.

From that date comes a Portrait of Germaine that Acquavella Galleries acquired for 18.6 million dollars at a Christie's auction in 2006. In December 1902 he moved for a time into Max Jacob's apartment at number 87 Boulevard Voltaire; the room had only one bed, so Picasso worked at night and slept during the day, while Jacob worked. At this time he could not buy canvas and had to limit himself to drawing.

La Vie

In January 1903 Picasso returned to Barcelona. In the spring he began the painting La Vie (Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts), one of the largest and most complex canvases of his Blue Period, considered his most important work of these years, a work of a symbolism unusually dark among his early works and subject to multiple academic interpretations, on which the artist never commented. Picasso made four preparatory sketches for the painting, changing the composition of the figures at least twice; it is worth noting that the male figure, which began as a self-portrait, ended up as a depiction of his friend Carlos Casagemas. La Vie sums up most of the themes and atmosphere of the Blue Period: the nihilistic pessimism developed during his formative years in Barcelona, intensified by the material hardships he suffered at the time. "He believes that Art is the child of Sadness and Pain", said his friend Jaime Sabartés. The loneliness of children and the misery of the poor, beggars and the blind are often depicted in the paintings of that moment: The Two Sisters (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), The Poor on the Seashore (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), The Old Guitarist (Art Institute of Chicago), The Ascetic (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), and La Celestina (Carlota Valdivia) (Picasso Museum, Paris) are among Picasso's first masterpieces.

Toward the end of 1903 Picasso began to think that only by settling permanently in France would his reputation cross the borders of Spain. He moved into the studio of the sculptor Pablo Gargallo (1881–1934), who was in Paris at the time, at number 28 Carrer del Comerç in Barcelona, where he finished La Celestina (Carlota Valdivia) and began a new Portrait of Jaime Sabartés (Kunsternes Museum, Oslo) which he finished in the spring of 1904.

Paris, Bateau-Lavoir. The Rose Period

Main article: Picasso's Rose Period

La belle Fernande

Pablo Picasso photographed by Ricard Canals. The snapshot is dedicated to his friends Suzanne and Henri Bloch, Paris, 1904.

In April 1904 Picasso settled in Paris at the Bateau-Lavoir, located in the Montmartre neighborhood, in a studio that his friend the sculptor Paco Durrio was about to leave. There he renewed his contact with several Spanish artists who also lived in the Bateau-Lavoir, especially with Ricardo Canals, who in September of that year taught him the technique of etching, and with his wife; also with Manuel Hugué and his wife Totote, and with Ramón Pichot and Germaine, the dancer for whom his friend Casagemas had killed himself. During the summer he had a relationship with "Madeleine", who appears in several drawings and paintings, such as The Acrobat's Wife (Art Institute of Chicago) and inspired the theme of The Harlequin's Family (1905). In August 1904 Picasso met his first companion: Fernande Olivier (1881–1966), an artists' model and friend of Benedetta, the wife of Ricardo Canals, who was known among the Spanish colony of the Bateau-Lavoir as "la belle Fernande". Both twenty-one years old, Fernande was Picasso's first true love, and she became his source of inspiration until 1910, although their relationship would not end definitively until 1912.

The bohemia of the Lapin Agile

In October 1904 Picasso met the poet André Salmon, and also Guillaume Apollinaire, poet and writer and forerunner of Surrealism, with whom he established a very close relationship. Picasso became a regular at the cabaret Lapin Agile (the "Agile Rabbit") and at the Cirque Medrano. From the time he settled in Montmartre, Picasso's palette and subjects began to change; the poverty and harshness of the lives of circus artists and saltimbanques brought a new lyricism to his paintings in the transition from the Blue Period to the so-called Rose Period. The Rose Period is distinguished by its pastel colors and warm tones, with soft and delicate lines; with special emphasis on line and drawing rather than on color, he continued to work the figures with elongated proportions that recall his admiration for El Greco, as in The Actor (MoMA, New York) or in the watercolor The Madman (Picasso Museum, Barcelona), a recourse to mannerist formulas of which it has been noted that Picasso made constant use throughout his career. The themes he dealt with were joy and existential unease; as in the Blue Period, there is an underlying touch of melancholy, but now dominated by affection, with many references to the world of the zoo and the circus. He painted masks, harlequins, animal tamers and clowns; it is also the period of the rose maternities. Representative works of this period are Acrobat on a Ball (Girl on a Ball) (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Family of Saltimbanques (National Gallery of Art in Washington), Acrobat and Young Harlequin (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and Family of Acrobats with a Monkey (Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg).

Family of Saltimbanques

Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory (1891–92), by Paul Cézanne, a precedent for the schematization of the face in Picasso's painting.

From 25 February to 6 March 1905 he exhibited his first rose canvases at the Galerie Sérurier. Critics spoke of the announcement of a luminous transformation of his talent; after the drama of the Blue Period, Apollinaire described the works of the Rose Period in the Revue immoraliste: "Beneath the glittering tinsel of his saltimbanques, one truly feels the piety of the common people, versatile, cunning, crafty, poor and deceitful." According to Fernande Olivier, Picasso seemed to love what he was not made for, what was different from himself: gypsies, bullfights, shady cabarets, clowns and the world of the circus; he loved and immersed himself with delight in everything that had a violent local color.

In the spring of the same year he painted one of his main works of that year, Family of Saltimbanques, a clear evolution toward the Rose Period: a bare and blurred landscape framing, in isolation, the well-drawn and stylized figures of the traveling performers, marginal characters whose solitary lives impressed Picasso. One evening, after leaving the Cirque Médrano with Max Jacob, he decided to model his head in clay, and as he worked on the piece over the following days, he added the cap and bells of a jester, in the style of the circus characters. The piece was called The Jester (Head of a Harlequin) (Picasso Museum, Paris), and the gallery owner Ambroise Vollard had it cast in bronze.

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1935

During the summer he made a trip to the north of the Netherlands, and stayed in Schoorl for six weeks as a guest of the Dutch writer Tom Schilperoort. During his stay he painted a nude, The Beautiful Dutchwoman (Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane), and The Three Dutchwomen (Picasso Museum, Paris), a personal version of the classical theme of the Three Graces. After a brief stop in Paris, he spent a vacation in August with Fernande in Tiana, northeast of Barcelona. On his return in September, Fernande moved into Picasso's modest studio in the Bateau-Lavoir; the beginning of their relationship was very happy, and the paintings and drawings Picasso made of Fernande celebrated her beauty and their personal closeness. Picasso made a habit of visiting the small galleries, and together with Fernande he attended the popular vernissages of the official salons.

Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo had settled in Paris and devoted their fortune to assembling an extraordinary art collection. Leo Stein bought Family of Acrobats with a Monkey from the dealer Clovis Sagot, through whose mediation Leo and Gertrude went to visit Picasso's studio and bought numerous works from him for 900 francs. Picasso became a regular visitor to Gertrude Stein's salon in her Paris apartment; he painted a portrait of Leo and his son Michael and began the first of the eighty to ninety sittings for the famous Portrait of Gertrude Stein (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Gertrude had recently bought Matisse's Woman with a Hat, and decided that the two artists should meet.

Iberian primitivism

The Lady of Elche (National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid).

In 1906, after three months working on the Portrait of Gertrude Stein, he set it aside temporarily and made the first sketches for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. He abandoned the theme of harlequins for horsemen and youths in bucolic landscapes, in the line of Gauguin and Puvis de Chavannes, in a search for classicism both thematic and formal, which led Picasso to the study of ancient art; in March he discovered Spanish primitive art in an exhibition at the Louvre of Iberian sculptures found in Osuna and at the Cerro de los Santos, among which was the Lady of Elche. Ambroise Vollard's gallery acquired most of the rose canvases, also in March. In May he went with Fernande Olivier to Barcelona, where he introduced her to friends and relatives, and then during the summer to Gósol, in Lleida, where he again came into contact with the essential primitivism of popular culture, and painted scenes of bathers and nudes seen through an exquisite mastery of red; this reddish Gósol palette reflects a concern with the modeling of volumes and a return to the roots of an archaic Mediterranean. This inspired a series of paintings with figures that recover certain characteristics of that primitivism, breaking with his earlier style. Although the simplification of features and volumes are traits that anticipate Cubism, this was a stage in its own right, which cannot be included in any recognized style. In these paintings we can see his own facial features even among the female figures, which can be appreciated by comparing them with the self-portraits of this series. This stay had an important impact on Picasso's work, as the Gósol paintings marked the beginning of his Cubist revolution the following year; years later Picasso took up again what would have been the logical course of this style, in his neoclassical period.

Proto-Cubism

Picasso in 1908.

In August 1906, on returning from Gósol, he took up the Portrait of Gertrude Stein again, working from memory (Stein was in Italy), and reduced her face to a kind of Iberian mask, impassive and expressive at the same time. Picasso said of the Portrait of Gertrude Stein: "Everybody thinks she does not look at all like her portrait, but never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it." Under the influence of Iberian sculpture and the painting of Cézanne, which he saw exhibited in the salons, Picasso investigated form and volume, as can be seen in the Self-Portrait with Palette (Philadelphia Museum of Art), a painting of an almost savage archaism that also anticipated the influences Picasso had accumulated since 1905.

The Salon d'Automne of 1906 showed a retrospective of Gauguin that deeply impressed Picasso and had a great influence on his work; the Salon also included ten works by Cézanne, who died around that same time. In the winter Picasso painted Two Nude Women (MoMA, New York), in which he took sculptural stylization to the extreme; the monumentality of the figures and the autonomous use of light and shadow refer to Cézanne's The Large Bathers. Toward the end of the year he stopped painting, and immersed himself in a series of studies and sketches of nudes for a multi-figure composition on the theme of the brothel, which would culminate in 1907 with the revolution brought about by Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

A brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó

The first reaction of Picasso's circle to the preliminary studies of the demoiselles was generally unfavorable: his friends could not quite understand this new style. In a notebook, Apollinaire described it as a "marvelous language that no literature can express, because our words have already been created." During the spring of 1907 Picasso met, through Apollinaire, Georges Braque, who after visiting his studio showed a certain agitation before the large painting.

In mid-May he painted a Self-Portrait (Národní Galerie, Prague): line becomes a dominant structural element, marking the features and even delineating the remaining areas of the image, nearly all of them filled with color and very few modeled. He even left areas of the canvas unpainted. Toward the end of May he began the definitive canvas of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and the male figures disappeared: one of them, a sailor, was eliminated, and a student placed on the left was replaced by a nude woman holding a curtain.

African influences

19th-century Fang sculpture, similar in style to those Picasso saw in Paris before finishing Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Encouraged by André Derain, Picasso visited the Ethnographic Museum at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris in 1907. This was his first contact with a large number of African and Oceanic pieces, which both Derain and Matisse had been collecting for some time, but to which Picasso had not paid much attention until then. The discovery of non-Western art gave a new impetus to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and also exerted a considerable influence on his sculptural work. Picasso then modified the faces of some of the demoiselles, the two most "Cubist"-looking of the five, which resemble African masks, while the two central ones are closer to the style of medieval frescoes and primitive Iberian sculptures; the face of the figure on the left also presents a profile reminiscent of Egyptian paintings. However, "art nègre, connais pas" ("Negro art? Never heard of it") was Picasso's answer to a question from the magazine Action in 1920; this proto-Cubist period, which is placed between 1907 and 1909, is also known as Picasso's African Period, Black Period or Dark Period; his style was strongly influenced by African sculpture, although the artist always claimed the opposite.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Main article: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (MoMA, New York) marked a new point of departure for Picasso, who eliminated references to tradition by breaking with realism, abandoning the canons of spatial depth and perspective, as well as the ideal of the female body that had existed until then, by reducing the work to a set of angular planes, without a delimited background or spatial perspective, in which the forms are marked by light-and-dark lines. The reddish-ochre tones are characteristic of his gentler Rose Period, but the rawness of the painting makes them aggressive.

The painting may also have been influenced by the elongated figures of El Greco, in particular by his Vision of the Apocalypse, which Picasso possibly saw that summer in Paris; its structure and composition derive from Cézanne's The Large Bathers; Cézanne's painting makes objects a real presence, with special emphasis on their volumes and weight, without the atmospheric shimmer characteristic of Impressionism. According to Fermigier 1969, p. 69, his retrospective at the Salon d'Automne of 1907 determined Picasso's later evolution. Braque, too, inspired by Cézanne, began a series of landscapes showing his transition from Fauvism to his proto-Cubist period.

Toward Cubism

Cézanne's The Large Bathers, 1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art: a possible influence.

The relationship with Fernande went into crisis, and they decided to separate at the end of the summer of 1907, although they reconciled at the end of November. In her absence, Max Jacob and Apollinaire had persuaded Picasso to smoke opium; Picasso wavered between the blessings of the visions and the fear of surrendering to apathy and weariness of work. Picasso's palette filled with bright "African" colors: he painted Nude Woman (The Dancer of Avignon) (private collection, Lausanne), an epilogue to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in which the elements based on Iberian and African art reach a new degree of geometric simplification; in the same style, The Dance of the Veils (Nude with Drapery) (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), begun in the summer and bought by Gertrude Stein together with its preparatory sketches; and also Flowers on a Table (MoMA, New York). In the subsequent works, the flesh tones become ochre and brown, and Picasso tackles many experiments of rupture in his paintings at once: the abandonment of perspective; the conquest of space, fragmenting the planes by means of flat tones with thick, defined contours; the search for relief, by means of exaggerated blue contours on a brown background and thick shading; among them are Friendship (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) and Nude with a Towel (private collection, Paris). Picasso's studio became a center of discussion and debate, and not only about his work. Braque brought his own works there, and Matisse and Picasso exchanged paintings: Picasso's still life Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon (Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel) for the Portrait of Marguerite, Matisse's daughter. The relationship between Picasso and Matisse ranged from competition to mockery, by way of intense mutual admiration; Matisse said that no one had looked at his work as Picasso had, and no one had looked at Picasso's work as he had.

Cubism

With Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as their starting point, Braque and Picasso went on to formulate Cubism in 1908. Cubism was a radical turning point in the history of art that inspired the rest of the artistic avant-gardes to abandon pictorial illusionism, rejecting naturalistic description in favor of compositions of forms abstracted from conventional perception, playing with three-dimensionality and the structure of surfaces. This technique, initiated by Picasso and Braque, had many followers, such as Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, Brancusi, Delaunay and Albert Gleizes.

Cézannian Cubism

Paul Cézanne: Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904), Philadelphia Museum of Art. Cézanne's landscapes inspired the first phases of Cubism.

In January 1908 Matisse opened his school, the Académie Matisse. On the other hand, Derain and Braque were followers of Picasso, which, added to his growing friendship with Gertrude Stein, irritated Matisse. At the Salon des Indépendants in May of that year, Derain and Braque presented paintings inspired by Picasso's new style that made a great impact among critics. Picasso was indignant that the first exhibition of Cubist art should be held without his role as a source of inspiration being acknowledged; especially Woman (1908), a very recent nude by Braque that he had not discussed with anyone, not even Picasso. After the Salon closed, Braque went to L'Estaque until September. The African elements gradually gave way in Picasso's work to relief effects influenced by Cézanne, perhaps related to the Cézannian reductivism of Braque's landscapes.

His friend the German painter Wieghels committed suicide in the Bateau-Lavoir after an evening in which he consumed an excess of various drugs; this tragedy convinced Picasso and Fernande to give up opium; Composition with Death's Head (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), finished at the end of spring, may be a commemoration of Wieghels' death.

During the summer, Braque produced in L'Estaque a series of Cubist landscapes in which, rather than an inspiration, the breaking of Cézanne's mechanized perspective is regarded by the painter as an initiation. Picasso rented a farmhouse at La Rue-des-Bois (Creil, Verneuil, Oise), 60 kilometers north of Paris; Fernande mentioned that with this retreat Picasso was seeking to overcome the state of nervous agitation that Wieghels' death had caused him. Both artists began to represent the sensation of relief through the arbitrary application of light and shadow to the detriment of naturalistic shading; forms were simplified to the extreme, with a greater and deeper sculptural quality in Picasso's paintings, whose palette was restricted to a range of browns, grays and greens. In Picasso's landscapes the influences of Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) and an early Cézanne can be seen.

Matisse names Cubism. Green Period

Henri Matisse in May 1933.

When in September Braque submitted his landscapes to the Salon d'Automne, the jury, among whose members was Matisse, rejected the works. According to Apollinaire, Matisse was the first to apply the terms "Cubist" and "Cubism", when rejecting the works Braque submitted to the Salon. Since 1912 this story has been considered the official origin of the movement. Josep Palau i Fabre notes that in the autumn of 1908 began what he calls Picasso's Green Period: the still lifes he painted at that time show a formal stylization that is due, possibly, to the application of Cézanne's postulates, according to which forms should be reduced to cones, cylinders and spheres. This geometric schematization does not entail a loss of corporeality in the objects represented, so one can speak of a flat relief. Throughout the summer and the month of October he completed the final version of Three Women (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), where the African influences of the painting's first studies dissolve into the new style of the Green Period.

The Rousseau banquet

Henri Rousseau: Portrait de femme (1895), Picasso Museum, Paris.

After the exhibition of Braque's works at the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, which was better received by the critics than his works submitted to the Salon des Indépendants, Picasso organized a banquet in the Bateau-Lavoir in honor of Rousseau, to celebrate having just bought a work by the painter, Portrait of a Woman, for five francs at Père Soulier's antique shop. During that winter the exchange of ideas between Braque and Picasso increased to a daily level, while their friendship was consolidated. The fruit still life, an emblematic motif of Cézanne, was one of the subjects both painters shared at this time: Le compotier (Fruit Dish) (MoMA, New York), Still Life with Fish and Bottles (Musée d'Art Moderne de Lille Métropole, Villeneuve-d'Ascq). During the winter he also worked on Carnival at the Bistro (Picasso Museum, Paris), which would crystallize at the beginning of 1909 in Loaves and Fruit Bowl on a Table (Basel Art Museum).

Analytic Cubism

Return to Horta de Sant Joan

Picasso began to be appreciated by collectors; a friend of the Steins, who had just bought Three Women from him, the Swiss Hermann Rupf bought several of his works, and Dutilleul (also a client of Braque) began his collection. In March 1909 an article by Charles Morice was published in the Mercure de France in which the term Cubism appeared in print for the first time. In May, Picasso and Fernande went to Barcelona to visit family and old friends; he painted a Portrait of Manuel Pallarés (The Detroit Institute of Arts) in his friend's studio. They then moved on to Horta de Sant Joan, eleven years after his first visit. There he painted and drew still lifes and numerous portraits of Fernande, among them Nude Woman in an Armchair (private collection, France) and Bust of a Woman (Fernande) (Hiroshima Museum of Art). The series of portraits of Fernande begun in Paris culminated in Woman with Pears (Fernande) (MoMA, New York). He also made six large landscapes, among them The Reservoir (Horta de Ebro) (MoMA, New York); The Factory at Horta (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) and Houses on the Hill (Horta de Ebro) (New National Gallery, Berlin). These were the beginnings of Analytic Cubism, indebted to Cézanne's concepts of relief, "inverse perspective" and modeling.

Hut near the Tortosa–Valdezafán railway line at Horta de Sant Joan. The Catalan landscape, its colors and the almost Cubist structure of the villages and buildings matched Picasso's ideas; "I paint what I think, not what I see", Picasso said.

In the works he painted in Horta, trees and natural forms were left out, and the superficially amorphous rock was analyzed and broken into planes and then reconstructed by superimposing the planes; in some cases the geometrization extended to the sky, and the whole offered a rigorous composition with a depth that had nothing to envy traditional perspective. The use of light was completely arbitrary, strictly to accentuate contours and sharpen reliefs. Nevertheless, Analytic Cubism was still a revision and not a rejection of tradition; the painting remained an illusory window onto a represented, reconstructed world. Synthetic Cubism constituted a negation of the European tradition; collage broke the inviolability of the picture surface, and the representation of reality ceased to be the goal of the painting and became its starting point.

Move to Boulevard de Clichy

In September he moved to Paris, to no. 11 Boulevard de Clichy. He came back loaded with works in the new style and, despite the rejection by the public and critics at the exhibition Vollard organized with them, the select group of collectors led by Gertrude Stein and Sergei Shchukin kept buying them. Shut away in his new studio, he went on developing Cubism, which at that time he shared, besides Braque, with a group of Montmartre artists strongly influenced by the new style, among them Derain, the Spaniard Juan Gris and Léger. Cubism was spreading across Europe, with the Constructivist and Suprematist Malevich in Russia and Mondrian in the Netherlands, although both showed serious differences from Picasso's style: according to Penrose, their pursuit of a pure geometry of forms took them away from the pictorial subject toward abstraction, something that was not part of Picasso's instincts, for whom eliminating symbols and poetic allusions from painting was a form of castration; it also inspired the Futurists led by Marinetti in Italy and the Vorticists in England, who based their aesthetic theory on form and mechanical movement and rhythm, trying to introduce time into pictorial representation. But Picasso was not seeking to develop theories or schools; his need was to break with the past and give the work of art its own inner life.

In the studio of Manuel Hugué he made sculptures such as Head of a Woman (Fernande) (Picasso Museum of Barcelona) inspired by the canvases he painted in Horta. Fernande did not feel at ease with the changes taking place in their surroundings and way of life; she missed the spontaneity of their early days together.

The Cubist portraits

As early as 1909 Picasso made a series of portraits in which the rigor of his discipline in seeking a new conception of space led him to a progressive reduction in the use of color; in the Horta landscapes and in Woman Sewing (Claire B. Zeisler Collection, Chicago), painted during the winter of 1909–1910, the palette was restricted to ochres, grays and greens, until he eliminated the latter color and entered a monochrome that was occasionally broken by subtle gradations of grays and ochres. In 1910 he painted, among others, the portraits of Ambroise Vollard (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Wilhelm Uhde (Pulitzer Collection, St. Louis) and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Art Institute of Chicago), in which, despite his growing tendency to paint with the eye of thought rather than directly from nature, he worked in numerous sittings with the models, as with that of Gertrude Stein earlier; despite the progressive process of analytical segmentation of space and form, Picasso captured the physiognomy of his sitters.

Picasso and Fernande spent the summer of 1910 in Cadaqués (Girona, Spain), where his friend Ramón Pichot was vacationing; they rented a house by the sea, and Derain and his wife joined them. After the vacation, Picasso came back loaded with unfinished works in which an advance toward the new language of Cubism became evident; in the Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler that he painted after the vacation, the sitter is treated as a three-dimensional structure manifested in elements displaced in space within a transparent grid, seen from multiple angles and still forming a coherent whole, as also happens in paintings such as Standing Female Nude (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

In the winter of 1910–1911 Picasso and Braque maintained such a close collaboration that it is difficult to venture where the ideas they set in motion originated, and since they did not sign their paintings there were times when it was difficult for them to tell their own work from the other's; as they advanced in their analysis of the object, Picasso and Braque felt they were losing the reference to its recognizable reality. The inclusion of elements of reality in their Cubist compositions later led them to trompe-l'œil, and from there to the invention of collage, with which they broke with the tradition of using no more than one medium for a work and called into question the principles of painting itself.

Recognition of Cubism

Portrait of Picasso by Juan Gris (1912) in Cubist style.

Picasso traveled to Céret, a French town in the historic region of Roussillon, in July 1911. Fernande Olivier and Braque joined him in August, and the two painters continued their close collaboration in defining Cubism. They made several paintings in which they introduced the masthead of the local newspaper into their works, with a recognizable Gothic typeface, such as The Fan ('L'Indépendant') (private collection, Ascona, Switzerland). On 5 September Picasso returned to Paris, and the Salon d'Automne of 1911 presented a Cubist room from which both he and Braque were absent. This shocked the press of New York, Madrid and Amsterdam, which were covering the event, since it was known that they were the founders of the style; several articles and essays about Picasso and Braque were published all over Europe. The relationship with Fernande had deteriorated, and in the autumn of that year Picasso met Eva Gouel (Marcelle Humbert), until then the partner of the Polish painter Louis Markus, whom he called ma jolie (my pretty one) in several of his paintings.

At the beginning of 1912 Picasso made his first constructed sculpture, Guitar (MoMA, New York), made of cardboard, string and wire. Picasso largely initiated a process that led to the liberation of sculpture from classical concepts such as volume and to the replacement of the processes of modeling or carving by all kinds of constructive techniques, which constituted a revolutionary transformation in sculpture. In a parallel with the technique of Cubist collage, whose first example is Still Life with Chair Caning (Picasso Museum, Paris), created in the spring of 1912, forms were reduced to planes that could be freely articulated. The concepts of assemblage and construction made possible the introduction of new techniques and materials; the decomposition of volume brought new perspectives, and the valuing of void and light as sculptural elements of equal importance to mass.

Hermetic Cubism

Between Céret and Sorgues

Between 1912 and 1915, Picasso and Braque developed the second phase of Cubism, in which they brought back into their work an equivalent of the traditional concepts they had broken or eliminated in the previous phase; forms, objects and words became recognizable while the surface was reconstituted; they recovered the use of a more solid and brilliant color, the planes were outlined and clearly demarcated, overlapping one another, and an involvement with textured surfaces and decorative patterns appeared.

Between April and May 1912 a Cubist exhibition was held at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona without works by Picasso or Braque. The relationship with Fernande came to an end; Picasso wrote to Braque: "Fernande has dumped me for a Futurist." On 18 May he arrived in Céret with Eva, where he made some drawings in which he applied 19th-century wallpaper and pieces of newspaper. When in June Picasso learned that Fernande was planning to go to Céret for the summer with Pitxot and his wife, he wrote to Kahnweiler asking him to tell her not to expect anything from him, that he would be happy if he never saw her again, while reaffirming his love for Eva, saying that he was going to write it in his paintings. It is likely that between June and September he worked on Female Nude ('J'aime Eva') (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio), where the declaration of love appears written in the painting; it is a work lighter in color, with touches of acid colors, in which the construction of the female figure derives from the collage technique he was applying in his drawings. Escaping Fernande's visit, on 25 June he settled in the Villa des Clochettes, in Sorgues-sur-l'Ouvèze. The Céret paintings impressed Braque; Picasso asked his opinion of Violin ('Jolie Eva') (New State Gallery of Stuttgart), in which he painted surfaces imitating additions of wood and written papers, or of The Aficionado (Le torero) (Basel Art Museum). Braque settled in Sorgues in August, where they resumed their work and continued refining their artistic concepts.

Move to Boulevard Raspail

Poster of the Armory Show (1913).

In September 1912 he visited Paris for a couple of weeks to arrange his move to a new studio at 242 Boulevard Raspail, but returned to Sorgues, where he worked on The Aficionado (Le torero) and The Poet (Basel Art Museum). The hardening and flattening of forms characterizes Hermetic Cubism, which marks the beginning of the transition to Synthetic Cubism. Toward the end of September he returned to Paris with Eva to collect his belongings and move into the new studio, where they settled on the first of October. In mid-November he began the first series of papiers collés, in response to Braque's work in this medium, applying the techniques of assemblage and incorporation of materials in Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass (McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas): on a background of wallpaper, Picasso pasted fragments of paper, among them a headline from Le Journal in which he preserved the words La bataille s'est engagé[e] (the battle has begun).

In mid-December he returned to Céret, from where he traveled to Barcelona with Eva for the Christmas holidays. He returned to Paris on 21 January 1913, where he began working on Violin Hanging on the Wall (Museum of Fine Arts, Bern), in which he put into practice the use of adding sand to paint and, in a double imitation, simulated the effect of collage by means of planes recalling the cut-out papers (which in turn imitate a wood texture) that Braque and Picasso used to use in their collages, while he made a second series of papiers collés in which he used contemporary newspapers from Paris (in several of them he used Le Figaro) or from Céret, in which an increase in abstraction and greater color can be observed.

At the end of February the first Picasso retrospective in Germany was held, at the Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich; eight of his works and three by Braque were also included in the International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show) in New York, at the 69th Regiment Armory, which would later travel to Chicago and Boston, one of the most influential events in the history of American art, which also featured Marcel Duchamp's famous Nude Descending a Staircase.

Synthetic Cubism

Poetic Cubism

Picasso and Eva returned to Céret in March 1913, although he would travel to Barcelona on several occasions. His father died at the beginning of May and Picasso attended his funeral. Eva's health was not good either, and it worsened at the end of spring. In June Picasso returned to Paris, while he fell ill with tonsillitis or bronchitis (from which he would recover at the end of July), as did Eva, who apparently never fully recovered. In August they returned to Céret, where he completed Man with a Guitar (MoMA, New York), which shows fully developed Synthetic Cubism: fragmented motifs of Analytic Cubism synthesized into large, flat forms that are "signs" of objects. After a short stay, they returned to Paris on 19 August, where they began moving into a new studio at number 5 bis Rue Schoelcher, on Boulevard Raspail, overlooking the Montparnasse Cemetery. At that moment the period called Poetic Cubism began.

Around the time of the Salon d'Automne, Picasso painted two large works of particular importance, the Card Player (MoMA, New York), which contains many elements of trompe-l'œil collage, and Woman in a Chemise Seated in an Armchair (private collection, New York), in which the color of Analytic Cubism and the schematic patterns of Synthetic Cubism are combined. He also continued developing his assemblages; toward the end of the year the Russian Vladimir Tatlin, who knew his work from the Shchukin collection in Moscow, visited Paris to see Picasso and his studio, where he saw the latter's constructions. On his return to Moscow, Tatlin made his first constructions.

Surrealist Cubism

In 1914 Picasso made a third series of papiers collés. On 14 January Kahnweiler published Max Jacob's The Siege of Jerusalem, illustrated by Picasso. It was the beginning of Surrealist Cubism. He also worked on his constructions, among which The Glass of Absinthe (MoMA, New York) stands out, of which his dealer Kahnweiler ordered six bronze copies, painted in different ways, some highly colored, others with a sand texture.

Pointillist Cubism and cold Cubism

Modigliani, Picasso and André Salmon in front of the Café de la Rotonde, Paris, in 1916.

At the end of June Picasso and Eva settled in Avignon, near Derain, who was in Montfavet, and Braque in Sorgues. The Sarajevo assassination, in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were killed, triggered the outbreak of the First World War. Apollinaire applied for French citizenship in order to enlist as a volunteer; Braque and Derain were mobilized, and Picasso said goodbye to them at the Avignon station on 2 August 1914. In the autumn, still in Avignon, Playing Cards, Glasses, Bottle of Rum ('Vive la France') (Leigh B. Bloch Collection, Chicago) opened the period of Pointillist Cubism. He worked on series of drawings of men leaning on a balustrade, a table or a chair, in styles ranging from naturalism to Cubism; the unfinished canvas The Artist and His Model (Picasso Museum, Paris), presumably of Eva, shows a tendency toward a return to representational figuration that would resurface later.

Back in Paris in mid-November, his somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the war and his relationship with his German patrons Kahnweiler and Thannhauser, together with the fact that most young men were at the front, caused Picasso to be viewed with suspicion. In the winter he painted the oil Still Life: Guitar, Newspaper, Glass and Ace of Clubs (Picasso Museum, Paris), which introduced the period called cold Cubism, in which the composition was worked in cold colors, with a predominance of blue.

Illness and death of Eva

In January 1915 he made the pencil drawing Portrait of Max Jacob (Picasso Museum, Paris), in a naturalistic style. Eva's health continued to decline and she underwent an operation; in May, while she was in a sanatorium, Picasso had an affair with Gabrielle Depeyre, with whom that same year he made a secret trip to Saint-Tropez. In August he made another drawing, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), of classical technique and almost photographic likeness. Drawings of this kind continued to be contemporary with Cubist paintings, such as Harlequin (MoMA, New York), an austere composition of large monochrome geometric areas on a black background, part of a long series on that theme, which can be understood as an allegory of loss, particularly the fatal illness of Eva, who was moved to the hospital at Auteuil in November. Picasso went through very hard times; "my life is a hell", he wrote to Gertrude Stein. Eva died on 14 December 1915.

During the war his work centered on Cubist still lifes and naturalistic portraits; Cubism, pointillism, mannerism and neoclassicism coexisted in his work from 1917. After the war, although he went on working simultaneously in these very disparate styles, Picasso gradually tended toward a neoclassical style, which appeared fully developed in 1920 and which held his interest until 1924.

The Ballets Russes

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon at the Salon d'Automne

In 1916 he had relationships with two women: Gabrielle Lespinasse, a Montparnasse chorus girl with whom he had an affair without consequences, and Elvira Paladini, sensual and pleasure-loving, whose presence stimulated a certain premonition of Italy in Picasso's work. In March, Apollinaire returned wounded from the front and Picasso made several drawings portraying him over the following three months, such as Portrait of Apollinaire (private collection), also in a realistic style. In June he began moving to number 22 Rue Victor-Hugo, in the Montrouge district. He made several portraits of Elvira Paladini and Apollinaire, in a realistic style, and several drawings of harlequins whose line recalls the Rose Period. In July came the first public exhibition of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, at the Salon d'Automne, organized by André Salmon. As had happened with Cubism, the critics were quite harsh on a work they could not manage to understand.

Parade

Portrait of Jean Cocteau (1916) by Amedeo Modigliani.

After a couple of earlier visits, Jean Cocteau, whom he had met in December of the previous year, invited him on 1 May to design the set for the company of the Ballets Russes, directed by Sergei Diaghilev, with a libretto by Cocteau himself and music by Erik Satie; during the visit he made a realistic portrait of the writer. At the end of May Cocteau brought Diaghilev to visit him in his studio, where they discussed plans for the ballet, Parade. In August 1916 he finally agreed to work on the ballet Parade. Picasso introduced several changes to the work, ideas that Satie liked more than Cocteau's. They finally came to an agreement in September, and in January 1917 he confirmed with Diaghilev the agreement to make the sets and costumes for the ballet for the sum of 5,000 francs, with an additional 1,000 francs if he had to go to Rome. Between February and March he worked on the Curtain for the ballet Parade (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris).

On 19 February he arrived in Rome with Cocteau to join Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He stayed eight weeks at the Grand Hôtel de Russie, on the corner of Via del Babuino and Piazza del Popolo, where he made many drawings of the Villa Medici from his window. He produced many sketches for the costumes and decoration of the ballet in a studio rented at 53b Via Margutta. When he was not working he socialized with Diaghilev, the work's choreographer Léonide Massine, the stage designer Léon Bakst, Cocteau and Igor Stravinsky, of whom he made quick portraits and caricatures. He also met the Italian Futurist artists and visited the famous sites of the city with them: the Sistine Chapel, the Raphael Rooms and the Vatican sculpture museums. His stay in Rome renewed his interest in the academic style of Ingres, whose influence would be reflected in his work in the following years. During this period he met the dancer Olga Khokhlova, a member of Diaghilev's company, whom he would eventually marry.

Score of Parade, music by Erik Satie. This ballet was the first of a series of collaborations by Picasso in making curtains, sets and costumes for the theatre or dance.

In March 1917, Diaghilev took Picasso, Stravinsky, Cocteau and Massine on a trip to Naples, from where they visited the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii. In those days the avant-garde literary magazine Nord-Sud appeared in Paris; during its short existence it stood out as a powerful forum for avant-garde discussion of Cubism, and tried to bring together the Parisian centers of traditional and avant-garde literature, Montmartre and Montparnasse. Its contributors included many of the writers who would give shape to Surrealism: Apollinaire (who coined the term around that time), André Breton, Louis Aragon and Tristan Tzara, among others. In April, Cocteau returned to Paris and Picasso joined the Ballets Russes company on its tour of Italy to be near Olga, passing through Florence (where he visited the Medici Chapel, with the tombs made by Michelangelo) and Venice.

After the tour of Italy, the company went to Paris at the end of April, where on 18 May 1917 the first performance of Parade took place at the Théâtre du Châtelet. The conjunction of avant-garde styles in the work's art, music and choreography, in a period marked by war in Europe, turned it into the scandal Diaghilev had hoped for, and it was branded "offensively anti-French". Apollinaire noted in his essay for the ballet's program that the synthesis of Picasso's designs and Massine's choreography achieved for the first time a kind of "surrealism, in which I see the starting point of a series of manifestations of this New Spirit". The press reviews, on the other hand, were terrible. Between May and June he made a realistic Self-Portrait (Picasso Museum, Paris) and The Artist's Eyes (Picasso Museum, Málaga)

Stay in Barcelona

In love with Olga, Picasso accompanied the Ballets Russes to Madrid, where they performed during the month of June; through Olga's influence and his contact with the company, Picasso frequented Madrid high society. On 23 June they arrived in Barcelona, where the Ballets Russes performed Las Meninas at the Liceu Theatre. At the end of the month the company left for South America, while Olga and Picasso, by now engaged, stayed four months in Barcelona, where his Catalan artist friends Miguel Utrillo, Ángel Fernández de Soto, Ramón Reventós, Pallarés, Ricardo Canals, the Vidal brothers and Francisco Iturrino gave him a welcome banquet at the Galerías Layetanes in July. He painted the naturalistic Harlequin of Barcelona (Picasso Museum, Barcelona) and Olga Khokhlova in a Mantilla (Picasso Museum, Málaga); Woman in Spanish Dress (La Salchichona) (Picasso Museum, Barcelona), with a divisionist technique; in a Cubist style, Woman Seated in an Armchair (Figure) (Picasso Museum, Barcelona) and Fruit Bowl (Picasso Museum, Barcelona). He also made numerous drawings of bullfights and portraits and drawings of Olga.

In November the Ballets Russes returned to Spain; they performed Parade in Barcelona, to a lukewarm reception; during the performance Picasso's sister Lola and her husband introduced him to the then art student Joan Miró. At the end of November Olga and Picasso prepared to return to Paris.

Duchess period

The tomb of Apollinaire in Père Lachaise Cemetery features a menhir-monument conceived by Picasso and financed by the sale of two works by Matisse and Picasso on 21 June 1924.

1918 marks the beginning of what Max Jacob identified as the duchess period, which ended around 1923. From 23 January to 15 February 1918, Picasso exhibited with Matisse at Paul Guillaume's gallery a series of proto-Cubist paintings. In a climate still hostile to Cubism, the exhibition aroused numerous comments in the press; it is possible that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was part of the exhibition. He finished a Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (Picasso Museum, Paris) in the neoclassical style of Ingres; Olga insisted that her portraits be recognizable.

Between April and May he moved with Olga to the Hotel Lutetia, a fashionable first-class hotel on Boulevard Raspail; his lifestyle changed, he frequented the circle of the Ballets Russes and moved in high society. On 12 July he married Olga, first in the required civil ceremony and then in a three-hour mass at the Russian Orthodox Church on Rue Daru in Paris. Their families did not attend, and Picasso asked Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob and Apollinaire to act as witnesses. After the wedding, Olga refused to go to Montrouge, saying she would never return to that house "that smelled of too many women". On 30 July they arrived in Biarritz on their honeymoon; they stayed at the Villa La Mimoseraie of their Chilean friend Eugenia Errázuriz. There he developed marine themes, such as The Bathers (Picasso Museum, Paris), in a mannerist style reminiscent of his elongated figures inspired by the style of El Greco. His hostess introduced him to the art dealers Georges Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg; Rosenberg, on behalf of Wildenstein, made a contract with Picasso. He made some portraits in the neoclassical style of Ingres of his wife and of the wealthy society that came to visit.

At the end of September he returned with Olga to Montrouge. Paul Rosenberg became Picasso's official dealer; Picasso accepted only a verbal agreement with him, which gave the dealer first option on the artist's work; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had been his dealer from 1907 until war broke out between Germany and France and he was forced to leave for Switzerland. On 8 October Picasso rented a large apartment on the rue La Boétie. It is likely that at that time he met Louis Aragon, and through him and Apollinaire, André Breton. Shortly afterward, on 9 November 1918, two days before the signing of the armistice of Rethondes that ended the First World War, Apollinaire died of Spanish flu in his apartment on Boulevard Saint-Germain. From then on, Picasso visited his friend's tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery on that date every year.

The Three-Cornered Hat

During 1919 he continued working on Cubist and realist works simultaneously. He made some realist works in which a certain monumentality and sculptural weight can be seen in the figures, such as Still Life with Pitcher and Apples (Picasso Museum, Paris) and The Siesta (MoMA, New York) in the robust and classical style of the late Ingres, a sculptural character and massive appearance in the figures that would manifest itself in his neoclassical works of 1920.

The arrival of the Ballets Russes in London after the war coincided with a moment when taking an interest in art, especially avant-garde art, was fashionable. Ballet made it possible to combine the prestige of great dancers with the scandal of young revolutionary artists, which pleased snobs as much as it attracted intellectuals. In May, Picasso arrived in London, where Diaghilev was preparing a new ballet with music by Manuel de Falla, The Three-Cornered Hat, based on the novel of the same name by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. Picasso was enthusiastic about the story, set in southern Italy in the 18th century, and about the opportunity to work again with Massine and for the first time with Falla. During the three months he spent in London he made numerous sketches, drawings and watercolors for the sets, costumes and curtain, which he painted personally, assisted by Vladimir Polunin and his wife Elizabeth. When they were not busy with the rehearsals and fittings for the ballet they mixed with English society, where Picasso met many artists and writers.

The premiere of The Three-Cornered Hat at the Alhambra Theatre on 22 July 1919 was an enormous success that soon led to the opening of Spanish dance schools in London. Massine had learned the rhythms of flamenco and applied them in the choreography of the dancers, whose costumes were adapted to the action. Picasso had instinctively used curves and zigzags, characteristic motifs of Spanish peasants' carts, rhythms that probably descend from Arabic calligraphic arabesques. The contrast of greens, pinks, red and black likewise evoked Spain. The critic Jean Bernier wrote: "all the costumes are, without exception, full of warmth and strength, tempered by a taste for dignity that is very Andalusian".

Along with the success of the ballet came social life; Picasso and Olga, to her delight, were invited to a series of high-society parties. Picasso ordered suits from the best tailors and appeared impeccably dressed at fashionable receptions. In August Olga and Picasso returned to Paris, and from there went to Saint-Raphaël, on the Côte d'Azur; it is likely that on the train journey Picasso observed the harvest scene he described in The Siesta. The theme of windows at Saint-Raphaël, which he worked on that summer in many watercolors and drawings, persisted in Picasso's work after his return to Paris in the autumn until the beginning of 1920.

Pulcinella

Settled in his apartment on the rue La Boétie, Picasso gradually distanced himself from the bohemian life he had led before the war; his personal life was calmer, although he could be seen elegantly dressed at cocktail parties or dining out accompanied by Olga, dressed in Chanel. His association with the Ballets Russes and with the dealers Léonce and Paul Rosenberg brought him more favorable attention from critics and greater visibility.

In December 1919 Diaghilev, back in Paris after the London season, invited him to collaborate on a new ballet inspired by the Commedia dell'arte, Pulcinella, with music by Stravinsky. Diaghilev rejected the first sketches as too modern and overloaded; Picasso later simplified them. At the beginning of 1920 he developed a large number of sketches and studies for Pulcinella.

On 23 January 1920 The Three-Cornered Hat was performed at the Théâtre National de l'Opéra in Paris, to which he invited his friend Max Jacob, whom he saw less frequently. On the way to the theater Jacob was hit by a car and hospitalized; Picasso visited him frequently in the hospital, but from then on they began to see each other less, since Jacob was seeking a less bustling and public social life.

Igor Stravinsky in 1921. The Russian musician collaborated with Picasso on several occasions, both for the Ballets Russes and for the publication of his compositions. In 1920 Picasso drew a Portrait of Igor Stravinsky (Picasso Museum, Paris).

Massine's idea for the ballet derived from the street performances they saw on their 1917 trip to Naples. Together with Diaghilev, they developed the libretto on the basis of old Neapolitan texts; Stravinsky's music is an arrangement of music by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, an Italian composer of the 18th century. Picasso's first sketches were in a pseudo-Rococo style which, after Diaghilev's initial rejection, he simplified into a style similar to Cubism with large flat surfaces in blue, gray and white, against which the costumes of the characters stood out, based on the style of the traditional characters of the Commedia dell'arte. Pulcinella premiered at the Théâtre National de l'Opéra in Paris on 15 May 1920.

This style of the Pulcinella sets extended to Picasso's painting, as can be seen in Pulcinella with a Guitar in Front of a Curtain (Massine Bowing); the colors are vivid but not strident, and the painted surface became completely flat. During the summer in Juan-les-Pins he continued developing this style and subject matter in a series of colorful, geometric and flat gouaches on the Commedia dell'arte, such as Pierrot and Harlequin (National Gallery of Art, Washington). In September, still in Juan-les-Pins, he produced a series of drawings and watercolors on a theme from Mediterranean antiquity, an episode of the attempted abduction of Deianira, wife of Hercules, by the centaur Nessus, inspired by the Pompeian frescoes he saw on his trip to Naples in 1917.

Cuadro flamenco

On 4 February 1921 his first son, Pablo, was born. In the spring he began the studies for Cuadro flamenco, another ballet by Diaghilev, who on this occasion hired a group of eight Andalusian dancers and singers for whom Falla arranged popular music. It had originally been commissioned from the fellow Spaniard Juan Gris, but Picasso, claiming that Gris was ill and would not have time to develop the project on such a short deadline, got ahead of him by presenting the idea he had abandoned in Pulcinella of a curtain with Rococo ornaments and proscenium boxes with couples watching the show, as can be seen in Set Design for Cuadro flamenco (Picasso Museum, Paris). The relationship with Gris cooled as a consequence, a situation that remained until his death in 1927. On 22 May the work premiered at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Lyrique. The program cover was illustrated with four nudes on the beach in a neoclassical style similar to other works of the same time. On his return to Paris, he continued with works in the monumental neoclassical style.

During the summer, avoiding the heat of the south of France, he moved with Olga and Pablo to Fontainebleau. The summer in Fontainebleau was prolific, with a majority of works in the sculptural neoclassical style. The main themes are mother and child and women at a fountain; they can be seen in Mother and Child at the Seashore (Art Institute of Chicago), and Three Women at the Fountain (Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris), with Greco-Roman dresses and hairstyles. He also created two masterpieces of the Synthetic Cubist style: Musicians with Masks (MoMA, New York) and Musicians with Masks (Three Musicians) (Philadelphia Museum of Art); the theme recalls his collaboration with the Ballets Russes, particularly some of the studies for harlequins and pierrots for Pulcinella.

Antigone

In 1922 Breton, adviser to Jacques Doucet on art matters, began to convince him of the importance of adding major works by Picasso to his collection of modern art, which would lead in 1924 to the acquisition of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. In June, during a visit to Dinard (Brittany), he painted Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race) (Picasso Museum, Paris), an idealization of the monumental figures he painted in 1921 with a new element, the treatment of movement, which later served as the model for the curtain of Diaghilev's Le Train Bleu in 1924. He also made some sketches of his son and of his wife and son together, as can be seen in Family at the Seashore (Picasso Museum, Paris). On 20 December 1922 Jean Cocteau's modernized adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone premiered at the Théâtre de l'Atelier, in Montmartre (Paris). The production had sets by Picasso, costumes by Coco Chanel and music by Arthur Honegger.

Léonide Massine, the choreographer who regularly collaborated with Picasso on the productions of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. His Mercure was the last ballet on which Picasso would work.

In 1923 Picasso continued with the theme of the harlequin; he made several portraits of Jacint Salvadó dressed as a harlequin in a less monumental and more lyrical style. He also made portraits of his son Pablo and his wife Olga; and the Portrait of Doña María (the Artist's Mother) (private collection). That summer he returned once again to the Riviera, settling in Antibes with Olga and Pablo. He made The Pipes of Pan (Picasso Museum, Paris), as well as several drawings and sketches on the same theme. In Antibes he visited many of the society people spending their vacations there, such as the painter Gerald Murphy and his wife Sarah (who appears in his drawings) and Count Étienne de Beaumont and his wife; Beaumont asked him to design the set and costumes for Mercure, which would premiere in the summer of 1924.

Mercure

The choreographer Léonide Massine had left the Ballets Russes to produce a ballet for Count Étienne de Beaumont in a series of private performances known as Les Soirées de Paris in the summer of 1924, in order to help the Russian aristocracy. With music by Erik Satie and sets and costumes by Picasso, Massine produced Mercure, the strangest and most original ballet since Parade. The angular planes and straight lines of Parade were replaced by curved and undulating lines, sinuous silhouettes in the set and costume design. The premiere of Mercure on 18 June at the Théâtre de la Cigale was poorly received by critics and the public. Some of the Surrealists criticized Picasso for becoming involved in a bourgeois project in aid of the aristocracy, but Breton came forward to defend Picasso's artistic work, proclaiming in his essay Hommage à Picasso (Homage to Picasso): "As far as I am concerned, I consider Picasso's collaboration on Mercure the most important artistic event of recent years".

Two days later Le train bleu, his last collaboration with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The curtain was painted by the scene painter Alexander Shervashidze, based on Picasso's gouache Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race). Picasso himself signed the curtain "Dedicated to Diaghilev Picasso 24".

In the summer of 1924 he settled in the Villa La Vigie, in Juan-les-Pins. In a sketchbook Picasso developed a series of pre-Surrealist drawings, constellations of lines and dots, which were used years later for an illustrated edition prepared by Ambroise Vollard of Honoré de Balzac's Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu. To celebrate his son's birthdays, Picasso made portraits of the boy every year; in 1924 he painted Paulo as Harlequin (Picasso Museum, Paris).

The controversy surrounding the Soirées de Paris grew during the summer and caused a schism among the former Dadaists, pitting Breton's group against another that revolved around Ivan Goll. In October Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto, in which he outlined the artistic consequences of Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. The term Surrealism, coined by Apollinaire in 1917, was adopted by Breton as the name of his group. Although Picasso never officially joined the Surrealist movement, his work was greatly admired by Breton, as it was by Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists. Picasso's work was reproduced in eight of the eleven issues of La Révolution surréaliste, published between 1924 and 1929.

Surrealism

Surrealist period

Since his marriage to Olga and the birth of his first son, Pablo, Picasso had enjoyed a happy family life; he led a very active social life, mixing with the Parisian aristocracy and intelligentsia; avant-garde critics praised his artistic achievements, although they focused on the formal aspects, ignoring the intuitive and psychological elements of his work. Accepted by society and the critics, Picasso was considered part of the French tradition, towering above the antics of the new generation of anti-bourgeois Dadaists, who were beginning to be supplanted by the group that would become known as the Surrealists.

André Breton was a great admirer of Picasso's art, whom he considered an exponent of Surrealism, even though he never officially joined the movement.

In 1925 he painted, for his son's fourth birthday, Paulo as Pierrot (The Artist's Son) (Picasso Museum, Paris), in a naturalistic style similar to the harlequin portrait he had painted the previous year. He also painted The Dance (Tate Modern, London). It was a crucial moment in Picasso's development, after a period in which he had worked both in a decorative form of Synthetic Cubism and in a figurative neoclassical style. The Dance is indebted to both styles, but its importance lies in the fact that it marks a break with a serene and classical phase and the beginning of a new period of emotional violence and expressionist distortion.

The Dance marked the beginning of Picasso's Surrealist period, between 1925 and 1938. The antithesis of his classical drawings of dance, the expressionist character of the painting symbolized Picasso's growing irritation with Olga and women in general; hurt by the death of his friend Ramón Pichot, he believed that Pichot's wife Germaine, who had been the cause of Casagemas' death, had destroyed his friend just as Olga was destroying him. To the grief over Pichot's death was added that of the musician Erik Satie in July. In the summer he painted, in Juan-les-Pins, The Kiss (Picasso Museum, Paris), of an even more aggressive spirit than The Dance. The motif of superimposed heads, which appears in the figure of the woman and not in the sculpture, would find continuity in his later work. The irrational qualities of this series of works, as well as those of the first Cubist works, were what Breton found analogous to the theory of automatism practiced by the Surrealist artists.

In the essay "Surrealism and Painting", published in July 1925 in issue 4 of La Révolution surréaliste, Breton declared Picasso a model painter and claimed him as a Surrealist, while noting the impossibility of applying a label that would constrain his work: "The 'Cubist' label has made that mistake a great deal." In November the "Exposition: La Peinture Surréaliste" was held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris, where two of Picasso's early Cubist paintings were shown, as well as works by Hans Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, André Masson, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Pierre Roy; Breton and Robert Desnos wrote the preface to the catalogue. Maurice Raynal's review of the exhibition in L'Intransigeant said: "The 'father of Cubism' has become the adopted son of the Surrealists!" In November Picasso accompanied his mother, who had spent the vacation with them on the coast, to Barcelona. There he met Dalí, and visited his first solo exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery.

Curvilinear Cubism

In 1926 he worked in a style that has been identified as curvilinear Cubism, in which the sinuous surfaces of decorative Cubism, the superimposition of heads in the figures and the curved deformations explored in the constellation drawings were combined and applied to a Cubist grid. It can be seen in The Milliners (The Milliner's Workshop) (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and The Painter and His Model (Picasso Museum, Paris), monochrome works painted in gray, black, white and cinnamon ochre. He also made several portraits bearing a certain resemblance to Marie-Thérèse Walter, a young adolescent whom, according to some authors, he presumably first met at the beginning of 1925 at the Paris Saint-Lazare station. He likewise continued working on the motif of superimposed heads.

In April Dalí visited him in his studio; despite their mutual admiration, the two artists never became great friends. His recommendation to Diaghilev to have Miró and Max Ernst design the sets and costumes for his Romeo and Juliet led to the latter being threatened with expulsion from the Surrealist group, which opposed collaboration with "a bourgeois production for high society".

Biomorphic bathers

In January 1927 he met Marie-Thérèse Walter, a seventeen-year-old blonde, in front of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris (although some authors place the date two years earlier). Within six months they had become lovers. Although they kept their relationship secret until the birth of their daughter Maya in 1935, references to Marie-Thérèse appeared in his work shortly after he met her. Marital tension with Olga grew, and his life became very complicated as he tried to keep his relationship secret. He spent an unhappy summer in Cannes longing for Marie-Thérèse, while Olga resented that Picasso was never present at the social gatherings she organized.

At the end of the summer he made an album of drawings, Carnet des Métamorphoses, in which he gave biomorphic bathers elephantine sculptural forms, with sexual attributes reaching monumental proportions, as can be seen in Bather at the Beach Hut (Female Figure) (Picasso Museum, Paris). Although they are probably studies for a monument to Apollinaire, Christian Zervos wrote in 1929 that Picasso proposed them as monuments for the Croisette, the elegant promenade separating the beach from the grand hotels in Cannes. At the end of 1927, back in Paris, he worked with the printer Louis Fort on a series of thirteen engravings, commissioned by Vollard, on the theme of the "artist and model" for the book Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, which he would publish in 1931.

La petite faucille, by Julio González (1876–1942).
Picasso returned to sculpture in 1928 thanks to González, with whom he learned to work metal. The son of a family of Catalan goldsmiths, González learned to forge and weld in his family's workshop, but he wanted to be a painter and went to Paris in 1900. He was already fifty when he decided to devote himself to sculpture, coinciding with his collaboration with Picasso on the Monument to Apollinaire (1928), but despite the lateness of his vocation, he became a point of reference for contemporary sculpture, the "undisputed father" of 20th-century iron sculpture. His sculptural language, based on the assemblage of linear elements and empty planes that draw in space, was dominant between the 1930s and the 1950s.

Iron sculpture

In January 1928 he made a large collage called The Minotaur (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). Consisting of two legs coming out of a bull's head, it is the first appearance in his work of the mythological theme of the Minotaur, half man, half bull, which culminated in Guernica in 1937. He also continued working on the theme of biomorphic bathers and the painter and his model.

In March 1928 he renewed his friendship with the sculptor Julio González, whose studio on the rue de Médéah he visited frequently to continue learning welding techniques. In June he made his first three-dimensional sculpture since 1914, the bronze Metamorphosis I (Bather) [Female Figure] (Picasso Museum, Paris), based on drawings of Marie-Thérèse completed in 1927.

In the summer he settled with Olga and Pablo in Dinard, in French Brittany; in secret, he lodged Marie-Thérèse at a nearby children's summer camp, and initiated her into his preferred sadomasochistic sexual practices. He continued working on the theme of biomorphic bathers in paintings and drawings, such as Bather and Beach Hut (MoMA, New York), and a series of studies for welded metal constructions, in the line of the constellations of dots joined by a network of lines, with a view to a future monument to Apollinaire. Back in Paris, in the autumn he worked with González on this project in a series of models made with iron rods, which Kahnweiler described as "drawings in space". The models were rejected by the committee in charge of the monument, which considered them too radical and inappropriate.

The castrating woman

In the spring of 1929 he made the welded and painted iron sculpture Woman in the Garden (Picasso Museum, Paris), in González's workshop. He also began the first studies for The Crucifixion (Picasso Museum, Paris), which he would complete in 1930. The tension of his marriage to Olga was reflected in works such as Bust of a Woman and Self-Portrait (private collection), in which a savage female head with gaping jaws looms over a classical profile of himself. Also in Large Nude in a Red Armchair (Picasso Museum, Paris), where the female figure contorts in a scream, revealing disturbing elements in the artist's subconscious. The surreal nature of this painting can also be seen in many other works.

In January 1930 he painted Bather Seated by the Sea (MoMA, New York), a woman conceived as a bony structure, a threatening creature contrasting with the serene atmosphere of the beach, whose head resembles that of a mantis, one of the Surrealists' favorite symbols (the mantis devours its mate during the sexual act). Several earlier and later works by Picasso have the same type of head, and some also have what is known as vagina dentata, evoking the "fear of psychosexual castration" that the Surrealists symbolized through the praying mantis.

Boisgeloup

Between Marie-Thérèse and Olga

His works were exhibited for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, founded the previous year, as part of the exhibition "Painting in Paris". In June he acquired the Château de Boisgeloup, seventy kilometers northwest of Paris. Boisgeloup would become a refuge to which he could escape with Marie-Thérèse; he converted the stables into a sculpture studio in which his desire to return to modeling in clay or plaster and the inspiration of his young lover stimulated him to create large plaster busts, some of them of an unmistakably sexual nature. In the autumn of 1930 he made a series of sculptures, most of them carved in wood and later cast in bronze, small in size and highly stylized. Around that time, Marie-Thérèse moved to number 44 Rue La Boétie, opposite the apartment where Picasso lived with Olga. During these first years of the 1930s Picasso felt torn between his reluctance to break off his relationship with Olga and his obsession with Marie-Thérèse, who was the main inspiration for the sensual and suggestive female figures in his work.

In September 1930 he began the series of one hundred engravings that would make up the Vollard Suite; Picasso worked on this series from 1930 to 1937, although the bulk of the work was done in 1933 (sixty-one engravings) and 1934 (twenty-four engravings). Hans Bollinger distinguished seven thematic groups in the Vollard Suite: (i) various subjects [twenty-four separate sheets]; (ii) portraits of Vollard [three sheets]; (iii) battle of love [five sheets]; (iv) the sculptor's studio [forty-six sheets]; (v) Rembrandt [four sheets]; (vi) the Minotaur [eleven sheets]; and (vii) the blind Minotaur [four sheets]. "The artist and the model" is a general theme found in the engravings of the Vollard Suite, especially in those devoted to the sculptor's studio. Picasso could thus "innocently" depict himself with Marie-Thérèse, often nude. It is a theme Picasso returned to throughout the 1930s; it disappeared from his work during the Spanish Civil War and the German occupation of France, although he took it up again in his last years.

In January 1931 he completed Figures by the Sea (Picasso Museum, Paris), a love scene on the beach in which the bodies, reduced to rounded, sculptural forms, intertwine in the embrace in such a way that one cannot tell which part of the body belongs to the man or the woman, the figure on the right being identifiable as Marie-Thérèse by the shape of the head. Picasso thus emphasized the dual nature of human sexuality, through the contradiction between the apparent tenderness of the embrace and the stony presence of the figures and their sharp, aggressive tongues. The heads of the figures recall The Kiss (Two Heads) (Picasso Museum, Paris), of the same date, where the two heads devouring each other reflect the conflict with Olga. In parallel with the paintings of monolithic forms, he made a series of still lifes in a decorative, brightly colored curvilinear Cubist style; one can highlight Large Still Life with Pedestal Table (Picasso Museum, Paris), where, in one of his most lyrical and sexually symbolic still lifes, the organic forms suggest the torso of Marie-Thérèse. The painting remained in Picasso's personal collection until his death, when it was donated to the Picasso Museum in Paris along with hundreds of other works, in lieu of inheritance taxes.

In April, the London gallery Alex Reid & Lefevre organized a retrospective with thirty-seven paintings, Thirty Years of Pablo Picasso. In May he finally took possession of the Château de Boisgeloup, where he continued working metal with González, incorporating real objects into his sculptural work. His 1930 sculptures, assemblages of cut and welded metal elements, such as Woman in the Garden (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), can be understood as "poetic objects, at times of a Surrealist flavor". He also returned to modeling in clay or plaster. He made several busts and reliefs portraying Marie-Thérèse, such as Bust of a Woman (Marie-Thérèse) (Picasso Museum, Paris). The rounded forms and reliefs have a certain sexual quality, and the facial features at times resemble genital organs (the nose as phallus, the mouth as vagina), recalling Neolithic and African sculpture. During the summer vacation in Juan-les-Pins, he completed a series of lyrical and erotic drawings and engravings that formed the basis for the etchings of the section titled "The Sculptor's Studio" of the Vollard Suite. He also painted several small-format oils of the Villa Chêne-Roc, where he was staying. In the autumn he returned to his sculptural work.

The artist and the model

Political polarization was spreading across Europe; in Spain, the Second Republic was declared, whose constitution, despite the freedoms gained, failed to reach agreement in key areas with the conservative right, deeply rooted in rural areas, and with the Catholic Church, which was stripped of schools and public subsidies; in the rest of Europe there was the rise of totalitarian governments, especially fascism in Germany and Italy and Stalinism in the Soviet Union. All of this within the framework of a worldwide economic depression.

On 25 October 1931 Picasso turned fifty, and published Ovid's Metamorphoses for Albert Skira, in Lausanne, a total of fifteen full-page etchings and another fifteen half-page ones that he had been working on since the previous year. In this series of engravings Picasso returns to the simplicity of classical drawing, clearly describing objects and beings, as he would do in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, published in 1934. On 12 November Ambroise Vollard published Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, with thirteen etchings by Picasso in which he dwells on the theme of the artist and the model. In the novel, Balzac poses the artist's conflict between completing the work and achieving perfection, which is reflected in the etching from the series titled Painter and Knitting Model, in which the painter transforms the prosaic motif into an elegant curvilinear calligraphy.

In December 1931 he painted The Sculptor (Picasso Museum, Paris), on the theme of the artist and the model, revealing the nature of the relationship between Picasso and Marie-Thérèse; the sculptor contemplates the bust he has created, with its characteristic classical profile, while the model sits in the background, subordinate to the artist and the created work. He also began a series of portraits of Marie-Thérèse on a sofa, where his young lover emerges from the margins to occupy a central position, of "imperturbable grandeur and assurance". He also painted Woman with a Stiletto (Death of Marat), which behind the historical source reflects his growing resentment of Olga's jealousy and possessiveness.

In March 1932 he culminated the series of sleeping women with Girl before a Mirror (MoMA, New York), which combined the black outlining and organic forms of the large still lifes of 1931 in one of the most symbolic and "multi-evocative" images of Marie-Thérèse created by Picasso.

In June a retrospective was presented at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris, with two hundred twenty-five paintings, seven sculptures and six illustrated books selected by Picasso himself, ranging from the Blue Period to his latest portraits of 1932. The critical reaction was not positive, ranging between caution and negativity. It seems that during this exhibition Olga discovered the existence of Marie-Thérèse, which provoked "incandescent scenes" of jealousy on her part, although the confrontation between the two women that Picasso feared did not occur. The exhibition was repeated in September at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

While Olga and Pablo spent the summer in Juan-les-Pins, Picasso spent it in Boisgeloup with Marie-Thérèse, where he continued working on sleeping nudes, beach scenes and some small sculptures. He also made several drawings from Grünewald's The Crucifixion series. On his return to Paris in the autumn he continued with the portraits of Marie-Thérèse on a sofa and the drawings on Grünewald's Crucifixion. In October, Christian Zervos began publishing a catalogue raisonné (Paris: Cahiers d'Art) of Picasso's work; between 1932 and 1974 twenty-eight volumes appeared, comprising more than 16,000 works.

The Minotaur

Although Picasso had already dealt with the theme in a collage of 1928, Picasso's Minotaur Period is placed between 1933 and 1938, in which this mythical figure appears repeatedly in his work, along with other classical themes. Picasso found in the woman bullfighter a pictorial way of reflecting his conflicts with Marie-Thérèse and Olga, and in the Minotaur, the beast aware of its bestiality, a personification of his own conflict over that situation, his split between desire and moral responsibility. The first issue of Minotaure, with a cover by Picasso, appeared in May 1933. He spent the summer vacation of 1933 in Cannes with Olga and Pablo. In September, he painted The Death of a Bullfighter in Boisgeloup.

From June to September 1934 he made a series of bulls, painted, drawn and engraved. In August he traveled to Spain with Olga and Pablo, and went to the bullfights in Burgos and Madrid. He visited the Museum of Catalan Art in Barcelona. He made the sculptures Femme au feuillage and Femme à l'orange. In the spring of 1935, the Galerie Pierre exhibited the papiers collés. He engraved the Minotauromachy. He separated from Olga in June, and in October Maya Picasso, his daughter with Marie-Thérèse Walter, was born.

He made the water drawings and others on the theme of the Minotaur. That same year, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, he was appointed director of the Museo del Prado in Madrid. At the beginning of August, Picasso left for Mougins and joined Dora Maar.

Guernica and pacifism

In January 1937 the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert asked him to collaborate with a large mural for the pavilion of the Second Spanish Republic at the Paris International Exposition. The country's elected government faced possible defeat during the Spanish Civil War by Franco's rebel military, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Republic hoped to show the world that it was they who represented the Spanish people and their achievements. Picasso, who in 1936 had accepted the invitation of the then President of the Republic Manuel Azaña to become honorary director of the Museo del Prado in Madrid, was reluctant at first, both because of the size of the project and because he had never before accepted a commission of a propagandistic nature. In February Dora Maar found a very large studio at no. 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, where Picasso could carry out the project.

That same year he made The Dream and Lie of Franco, two prints in a format similar to the comic strip or the Spanish aleluyas, with a total of eighteen scenes, intended to be reproduced as prints or postcards, in which he denounced the fascist coup d'état and pointed out the crimes of the war, depicting Franco as an evil and grotesque figure. Picasso began engraving these images on 8 January, so he may have conceived them on his own initiative, before receiving the commission for Guernica. He would finish the plates in June, and the set was published for the benefit of the Republic, together with a poem he wrote (Fandango of Owls).

Plaque on the hôtel on the Rue des Grands-Augustins (Paris). "Pablo Picasso lived in this building from 1936 to 1955. In this studio he painted 'Guernica' in 1937.
Here too Balzac sets the action of his novel 'Le Chef d'Oeuvre inconnu'".

On 26 April 1937 the bombing of Guernica was carried out by the German Condor Legion at Franco's request. Picasso, who until then had not been very clear about the subject of the painting, was inspired by this event to develop the mural for the Second Republic's pavilion, and on 1 May he embarked on the creation of one of his most famous works: Guernica (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), which was finally exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition. Dora Maar photographed the process and the different stages of the painting, which Picasso would finish at the beginning of June. The painting symbolizes all the horror of war and the tragedy of the death of many innocent victims.

Also against war, on the occasion of his joining the World Peace Council, he painted the famous The Dove of Peace in 1949. He received the International Peace Prize in 1955.

From October to December 1937 he painted The Weeping Woman (Paris, Picasso Museum). Then in 1938 he made a large collage, Les Femmes à leur toilette (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne). In July 1938 he went to Mougins with Dora Maar. In July 1939 he went with Dora Maar to stay with Man Ray in Antibes, where he made Pêche de nuit à Antibes (Museum of Modern Art in New York). From September 1939 to the beginning of 1940 he painted in Royan the picture Séquence de femmes au chapeau.

In 1941 he wrote a surrealist-style play, Desire Caught by the Tail, of which he held a reading in March 1944 at the home of Michel Leiris with his friends Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Louise Leiris and Pierre Reverdy, among others. The play finally premiered in July 1967. He also wrote two other literary works: The Four Little Girls and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.

Between 1942 and 1943 he made the assemblage Bull's Head (Paris, Picasso Museum), L'Aubade (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne), and L'Homme au mouton (Paris, Picasso Museum). He met Françoise Gilot in May 1943.

Commitment to the Communist Party

After the end of the Second World War, his paintings became more optimistic and more cheerful, showing, like the title of a 1946 series, the Joy of Living that was felt at the time. Picasso lived with Marie-Thérèse during the Paris insurrection in August 1944. In October he joined the French Communist Party, and also in October the Salon d'Automne opened with the Picasso retrospective. He painted The Charnel House (New York, Museum of Modern Art) in April and May 1945, based on the memory of the discovery in December 1944 of the body of his executed friend, the young Surrealist poet Robert Rius.

Picasso left with Dora Maar for Cap d'Antibes in July, and on 26 November Françoise moved back in with Picasso. After the war, Picasso's circle of friends was made up of Communist artists and intellectuals, which in a certain sense marked at least part of his work between 1946 and 1953.

Vallauris period

Vallauris and ceramics

Picasso in 1962, with (from left to right) Soshana, André Verdet and Édouard Pignon, during the opening of the Austrian painter's exhibition at the Grimaldi Palace in Antibes.

Grimaldi Palace in Antibes, home of the city's Picasso Museum.

In 1946, Picasso and Françoise went to live in Golfe-Juan; he visited Matisse in Nice. At the beginning of July he went to Ménerbes (Vaucluse) with Françoise, to the house he had given to Dora Maar. He received letters daily from Marie-Thérèse. Françoise was unhappy and after three weeks she left, hitchhiking to Marseille with some friends; Picasso found her on the road and asked her to come back, suggesting that they have a child. They visited Vallauris, where he modeled three ceramic pieces in Georges Ramié's Madoura pottery workshop. On their return to Golfe-Juan in August, Françoise was pregnant. Picasso had met Romuald Dor de la Souchère, curator of the Antibes Museum, at the Grimaldi Palace, but he preferred to decorate the museum; between September and October he painted twenty-two panels for the palace, which would later become the Picasso Museum of Antibes, with marine themes and mythological compositions. The studies of fauns and classical figures culminated in the triptych La joie de vivre (Pastorale) (Musée Picasso, Antibes), a title he borrowed from his friend Matisse, for a painting that reflects the happiness he shared at that time with Françoise. In October, during the first Cannes Film Festival, he coincided with Breton, recently returned from exile in the United States. Breton, who in August had refused to greet him when they ran into each other in Golfe-Juan, snubbed Picasso again for his membership in the Communist Party; they never saw each other again. This gesture was the prelude to the violent break between the Surrealists and Communism from 1947.

Birth of Claude

In 1947 he worked on still lifes on the theme owl on a chair, and engravings of fauns, centaurs and bacchantes, following the subject matter of the summer in Antibes; at the end of January he finished the oil Monument to the Spaniards Who Died for France (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), which he had begun at the end of 1945. In February he began the series of forty-one etchings and aquatints for the edition of Luis de Góngora y Argote: Vingt Poèmes (Twenty Poems), published in Paris by Les Grands in 1949. At the end of March he made several lithographs on David and Bathsheba by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). On 15 May his son Claude was born in Paris, a name Françoise chose in honor of Claude Gillot, the teacher of Watteau. The couple spent less and less time in the Paris studio and more in Golfe-Juan, where they moved with the child at the end of June; in August he again visited Georges Ramié's ceramics workshop in Vallauris and began an intense production, some two thousand pieces between October 1947 and 1948, introducing formal, technical and color innovations that led to a revitalization of the town's ceramics industry, which had been declining since the First World War. In painting and engraving he made only a few works until the end of the year; he continued work on the engravings for Góngora's Vingt Poèmes, some portraits of Françoise and still lifes. In December he made the sets for Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, directed by Pierre Blanchar.

Female head by Picasso in Halmstad, Sweden.

La Galloise, Vallauris

In the spring of 1948 Picasso and Françoise left the apartment they occupied in Golfe-Juan, and in May Picasso began a series of thirty-eight engravings and four aquatints to illustrate Prosper Mérimée's Carmen (Paris, La Bibliothèque Française), which he would finish in November. In the summer they moved to a small house called La Galloise, in the hills surrounding Vallauris. Françoise established an open artistic dialogue with Matisse, through correspondence and the visits they paid to the artist. Picasso finished the six-act poem Les Quatre Petites Filles, which he had begun writing in November 1947. On 25 August Picasso went to the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocław, returning to Vallauris in mid-September. In October he returned to his studio in Paris, with Françoise pregnant again. He began working on the theme of the woman-flower and several still lifes. He painted two versions of La Cuisine (The Kitchen), one in the Picasso Museum in Paris and the other in the MoMA in New York, linear compositions built through rhythms and lines of force, with sparse use of color. In December he made several portraits of his son Claude, and printed twenty-seven states of Femme assise dans un fauteuil, a series in which Françoise wears a coat that Picasso had brought her from Poland, and which he continued into January 1949. He also continued working on still lifes with crustaceans: Nature morte au poron (Still Life with Porrón, Galerie Fabien Boulakia), Le grand homard rouge (The Large Red Lobster, private collection).

Paloma

Picasso in Milan in 1953. Photo by Paolo Monti.

In February 1949 Louis Aragon came to Picasso's Paris studio to select a drawing for the poster of the World Congress of Partisans of Peace, to be held in Paris in April of the same year. La colombe, a blue pencil drawing on paper, was the motif chosen by Aragon, and the image quickly became known as The Dove of Peace.

In March he began a series of paintings of Françoise seated, with the title Femme assise (Seated Woman). In the spring he returned briefly to Vallauris and bought an abandoned perfume factory to use as a studio, and used some rooms to store his ceramic work. He also began collecting objects and odds and ends, which he would later reuse in various pieces. He intensified his work in sculpture, which he had resumed the previous year: Femme enceinte (Pregnant Woman) depicts a female form based on a long metal rod, to which he added two arms above and two legs below, and a swollen belly with two small breasts in the center. He again made a series of works inspired by paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder: the lithographs Vénus et l'Amour (Cranach) (Venus and Cupid (Cranach)); Jeune fille inspirée par Cranach (Girl Inspired by Cranach), owned by Christie's, and David et Bethsabée (Cranach) VII (David and Bathsheba (Cranach) VII), in the Picasso Museum in Paris. Picasso's variations on Cranach's David and Bathsheba originated in a black-and-white reproduction from the catalogue of a 1937 exhibition on the artist held in Berlin, which Kahnweiler had given him.

On 19 April 1949, the opening day of the Peace Congress, his second daughter was born, and he decided to name her Paloma in honor of the symbol he had created for the posters that appeared on every street in Paris. After the birth, Françoise resumed her work as a painter, and Kahnweiler offered her a contract to be her exclusive dealer. Picasso turned his interest to painting, setting ceramics somewhat aside and focusing his inspiration on his children Claude and Paloma. The family returned to Vallauris in the autumn, and Picasso, having lost some of his interest in ceramics, returned to painting and sculpture in a more concentrated way, making several bronzes, some with African motifs. During the following year sculpture occupied most of his time.

The location of the Picasso Museum (Paris) in the Hôtel Salé was decided in 1974. Its collection was drawn mainly from the donation made on the artist's death by his heirs, in exchange for the taxes arising from the inheritance. The museum opened to the public in 1985.

On 6 August 1950 Laurent Casanova inaugurated the exhibition L'Homme au mouton in Vallauris. Picasso made The Goat, Woman with a Pram and Girl Jumping Rope. On 15 January 1951 he painted Massacre in Korea. In 1952 he drew War and Peace to decorate the chapel at Vallauris, and wrote a second play: Les Quatre Petites Filles.

In April 1954 he made the portraits of Sylvette David. In December he began the series of variations on The Women of Algiers by Delacroix. In May 1955 he settled with Jacqueline Roque in the villa La Californie in Cannes. In June a retrospective was held at the Museum of Decorative Arts. During the summer he worked with Henri-Georges Clouzot on the film Picasso Mystère.

In 1956 he made The Bathers, wooden sculptures (Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie) that were later cast in bronze. He painted The Studio at La Californie. On 17 August 1957 he began working on a series of 58 interpretations of Las Meninas (Barcelona, Picasso Museum). On 29 March 1958 his decoration for UNESCO, The Fall of Icarus, was presented. In September Picasso bought the Château de Vauvenargues and painted The Bay of Cannes.

He married Jacqueline in Vallauris on 2 March 1961, and in June moved to Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins (near Cannes). He made La Femme aux bras écartés, The Chair, The Woman and the Children, The Footballers. In November 1962 he painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, a version of which is in the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The opening of the retrospective at the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais took place on 19 November 1966.

In January 1970 the Picasso Museum of Barcelona received the donation of the works kept by his family. An exhibition of his work took place at the Palace of the Popes in Avignon from May to October. In April 1971 the Galerie Louise Leiris exhibited 194 drawings made between 15 December 1969 and 12 January 1971. A new exhibition at the Galerie Louise Leiris in January 1973 showed the 156 etchings made between the end of 1970 and March 1972.

Death

In 1973, at the age of ninety-one, he died of a pulmonary edema at his home in Mougins, France. However, the local authorities did not allow him to be buried at the mansion, and his wife Jacqueline decided to bury him at the Château de Vauvenargues, also owned by Picasso, where she too would be buried years later.

See also

• Picasso museums around the world
• Works by Pablo Picasso
• Sleeping Young Woman

Bibliography

• Daix, Pierre (1995). Dictionnaire Picasso (in français). Paris: éditions Robert Laffont. ISBN 2-221-07443-2.
• Fermigier, André (1969). Picasso (in français). Le Livre de Poche, Série Art. Paris, Librairie Génerale Française. ISBN 2-253-02455-4.
• Carl Gustav Jung, Picasso (1932), book 9 of Volume 15 of the Collected Works: Sobre el fenómeno del espíritu en el arte y en la ciencia (Madrid: Trotta, 1999 [3rd edition 2007]. ISBN 978-84-8164-300-8)
• Élisabeth Lièvre-Crosson, Du cubisme au surréalisme, coll. Les essentiels no. 20, Milan, 1995 ISBN 2-84113-272-2
• Santiago Sebastián López El Guernica y otras obras de Picasso: Contextos iconográficos, Editum: Ediciones de la Universidad de Murcia 1984 ISBN 84-86031-49-4
• Enrique Mallen (ed.). "On-line Picasso Project".
• Manuel Moreno, José Manuel (2009). La recuperación progresiva. Málaga a Picasso (1953-1973) (in español). Málaga: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Telmo. ISBN 978-8461312641.
• Palau i Fabre, Josep (1990). Picasso: Cubismo, 1907-1917 (in español). Ediciones Polígrafa. p. 532. ISBN 9788434306226.
• Penrose, Roland (1981). Picasso, his life and work. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520042070.
• Léo Steinberg, Trois études sur Picasso, coll. Arts et Esthétiques no. 9, Éditions Carré, 1996 ISBN 2-908393-44-1
• Picasso by Ingo F. Walther, published by Taschen, 2000, ISBN 3822861731.
• Christian Zervos, Catalogue raisonné des œuvres de Pablo Picasso, Paris, éditions Cahiers d'art, 1932-1978.
• Picasso, Form und Graphik/Sammlung Ludwig Köln, VG Bild Kunst, Bonn, 1996, ISBN 3-930054-24-8
• Catalogue Musée Picasso de Barcelone, Editorial Escudo de Oro, ISBN 84-378-0925-8

External links

Museums and exhibitions

• Fundación Picasso, Museo Casa Natal
• Fundació Palau, which houses an important collection of works by Picasso collected by Josep Palau i Fabre.

Other links of interest

• Official site of the Picasso estate (in Spanish)
• Biography in videos (interview, painting...)
• Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (in English)
• Pablo Picasso at Artcyclopedia, with links to museums and exhibitions around the world (in English)
• Works by Picasso (in English)
• Galleryofart: Pablo Picasso (in English)
• Rey Picasso An excellent image bank of the artist's work.
• Pablo Picasso: Biografía
• Pablo Picasso: Toros dibujados con luz
• Pablo Picasso: el artista que hizo del siglo XX una obra propia
• El desnudo en la obra de Picasso
• El Picasso salvaje, pistolero y ladrón
• Pablo Picasso at the Museo Picasso Málaga
• Biografías Pablo Picasso (YouTube video)
• Picasso y los animales. Bulletin "Ciencia veterinaria". Year XVII. Madrid, Spain, December 1, 1956, pp. 398-400.