Picasso and Cubism

PICASSO AND CUBISM

After CUBISM the world would never look the same again: it is one of the most influential and revolutionary movements in art. The Spaniard Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque splintered the visual world not wantonly , but senuously and beautifully with their new art. They provided what we call a God’s eye view of reality : every aspect of the whole subject, sene simultaneously in a single dimension.

It is understandable that Pablo Picasso (1881 -1973 ) found Spain at the turn of the century too provincial for him. Picasso’s genius was fashioned on the largest lines, and for sheer invention no artist has bettered him- he was one of the most original and versatile artists, with an equally powerful personality. Throughout the 20th century people have been intrigued and scandalized by Picasso’s work, uncertain of its ultimate value.

Family of Saltimbanques 1905 by Pablo Picasso

THE EARLY YEARS

Picasso’s Blue Period , from 1901 -1904 , sprang from his initial years of poverty after moving to Paris and modulated into a Rose Period as he slowly began to emerge into prominence.

Although still only in his youth when he started painting , Picasso had overwhelming ambition , and his Family of Saltimbanques was, from the start , meant to be a major statement . It is a very large , enigmatic work from the Rose Period , revealing superb graphic skill and the subtle sense of poverty and sadness that marked those early years. The five itinerant acrobats are strained and solitary in the barren , featureless landscape; the lonely girl seems not to belong to their world, though she too is melancholy and belongs in the right mood. There is something foreboding about the picture, some unstated mystery. We feel that Picasso, too does not know the answer- only the question. Already art is an emotional medium for Picasso, reflecting his moods and melancholia as he seeks to find fame as an artist.

Picasso’s Phases

Picasso had several distinct phases during his long career including his Blue Period, and his later Rose Period. He began his blue paintings in 1901, reflecting his sadness at his friend’s death. Picasso felt that blue was the colour of solitude and melancholy , which certainly reflected his own bleak circumstances at that time. Directly after his Blue Period Picasso moved onto his Rose Period in 1905. Some believe that the warm tones of this period were influenced by Picasso’s habit of smoking opium. One of Picasso’s most creative phases took place between 1908 and 1912 and is known as Analytical Cubism. In this style which he developed with Georges Braque, Picasso used disintegrated and reassembled forms in shades of clack and brown.

THE FIRST CUBIST PAINTING

While still in his twenties, but finally over his self- pitying Blue and Rose Periods, Picasso fundamentally changed the mental process of reality with a work his friends called Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon after a notorious place of prostitution . These demoiselles are indeed prostitutes, but their initial viewers recoiled from their advances with horror. This is the one inevitable image with which a discussion of 20th century art must be concerned . It was the first of what would be called Cubist works , though the boiled pink colour of the hideous young women is far removed from later Cubism , with its infinite subtleties of grey and brown . It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of this picture and the profound effect it had on art subsequently.

Les Demoiselles D’Avignon 1907

The savage inhuman heads of the figures are a direct result of Picasso’s recent exposure to tribal art, but it is what he does with their heads – the wild, almost reckless freedom with which he incorporates them into his own personal vision and frees them to serve his psychic needs – that give the picture its awesome force.

Whether he did this consciously or not we do not know, since he was a supremely macho man: Les Demoiselles makes visible his intense fear of women, his need to dominate and distort them. Even today when we are confronted with these ferocious, threatening ,noisy , domineering and strong women , it is hard to restrain the frisson of compassionate fear. The result of months of preparation and revision, this painting revolutionized the art world when first seen in Picasso's studio. Its monumental size underscored the shocking incoherence resulting from the outright sabotage of conventional representation. Picasso drew on sources as diverse as Iberian sculpture, African tribal masks, and El Greco's painting to make this startling composition. In the preparatory studies, the figure at left was a sailor entering a brothel. Picasso, wanting no anecdotal detail to interfere with the sheer impact of the work, decided to eliminate it in the final painting. The only remaining allusion to the brothel lies in the title: Avignon was a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel.At first Picasso did not dare to show the painting even to his admirers, of whom there were always many.

But Georges Braque was haunted by Cubism’s savage power and eventually he and Picasso began to work out together the implications of this new kind of art. Cubism involved seeing reality simultaneously from all angles, of meshing the object in the network of its actual context. As Cezanne had indicated there were no boundary lines to truth, but a form emerging from all different aspects intuited together. The results are hard to read, even though the Cubists confined themselves mostly to unpretentious and familiar objects such as bottles and glasses of wine or musical instruments. Still Life by Georges Braque ‘ Le Jour’ 1929

Cubism was developed by Picasso and Braque around 1907 and became a major influence on Western art. The artists chose to break down the subjects they were painting into a number of facets, showing several different aspects of one objects simultaneously . The work up to 1912 concentrated on geometrical forms using subdued colours. The second phase known as Synthetic Cubism . used more decorative shapes, stencilling , collage and brighter colours. It was then that artists such as Picasso and Braque started to use pieces of cut-up newspaper in their paintings.

Beyond cubism

Picasso would have scorned any thought of limiting himself to a single style. He experimented continually, his versatility and creativity always amazing his contemporaries. Whenever he seemed to have settled in a particular mode of seeing, he changed again almost overnight. Picasso soon became a wealthy man, and when the scandal of his artistic methods had died down, he revived it with his subject matter. He is an even more autobiographical artist than Rembrandt or van Gogh, and it was the women in his life who provided the changing drama. Each new relationship precipitated a new wave of creativity, with a new model and a new vision.

The Lovers 1923

The Lovers show him in a classical vein, soberly and simply giving substantial form to an almost theatrical drama. This was the period of his infatuation with Olga Kokhlova, the well bred Russian ballerina whom he rashly married and whose elegant influence on him was soon to be angrily denied as their relationship faltered. There is a balletic grace in ‘The Lovers’ and because he was pictorially thrifty , Picasso never completely discarded the styles as he did the women.

The women who inspired Picasso the most was Marie-Therese, whose rounded body shapes he loved to produce on canvas.

Nude Woman in a Red Armchair 1932 In this painting Marie- Therese seems to have a willing vulnerability in her shape. All the M-T paintings – at least until the affair began to disintegrate – are remarkably satisfying : rich , gracious, almost sweet, and yet deeply challenging. Picasso toys with both the rotundity of her body and with the powerful paradox of her extreme youth ( she was only 17 when they met) . Picasso in ’ Nude Woman in a Red Armchair ‘ paints her face both in profile and full face. This is a charming painting in which Picasso quite obviously shows his deep feeling for this woman and her warms charms.

The painting shows a woman, naked except for a bead necklace, sitting in an armchair. As we look at the picture, the woman and the chair do not face us squarel, instead they are angled to our left. Her gaze does not meet ours but looks over our left shoulder. The woman's left leg is crossed over her right. Her elbows rest on the arms of the chair and her head rests in her hands. The bottom of the canvas cuts her legs off above the knee. She fills the painting so that we see very little around her, except for a number of lines that we read as skirting boards and dado rails. In this painting the blocks of simple colours, repeated shapes and playful ambiguity show the influence of Synthetic Cubism. However, the outlines are now sinuous not geometric and they follow the contours of colours instead of being independent of them. Also, the colours complement each other. Marie-Thérèse is painted as a series of fluid curves and circles that echo the shapes of her erotic anatomy. These forms are repeated in different colours, combinations and sizes, like visual rhymes. The most striking feature is her face. Her rounded body is contrasted with the chair's straight back. Its dark brown wooden frame and hot red upholstery enhances her luminous colour. The scrolled arms of the chair encircle her in an embrace and mirror the shape of her arms. The colours in this painting create an atmosphere of sensuous intimacy. They also held particular meanings for Picasso and reflect his feelings for Marie-Thérèse. Yellow is the colour of sunlight while violet represents the evening. So it is as if she is the sun and the moon to him. Green is for fecundity and red is traditionally the colour of passion. So this painting is a powerful image of love both personal to Picasso and universal. Here he has successfully turned the cool, calculated methods of Synthetic Cubism to an emotionally charged representation of desire.

Subsequent mistresses such as Doran Maar, an intellectual, or Francois Gillet, another artist- both fiercely determined women – brought out Picasso’s cruelty, his determination not to be impressed. Even in his old age, when he was cared for by his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, Picasso still used her as ammunition in his battle against fate. Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar, ‘Weeping Woman’ , painted the same year as his great picture ‘Guernica’, has a terrible power. It is a deeply unattractive picture, the shrill acids of its yellows and greens fighting bitterly and unrelenting with the weary reds, sickly whites and sinister purples.

But it is also unattractive in the sense that it conveys Picasso’s venomous desire to mutilate his sitter. Dora Maar’s tears were almost certainly tears caused by Picasso himself. They reveal her anguished need for respect; Picasso repays her with a vicious savagery. Power was Picasso’s special gift. He had the ability to turn even the most incidental of themes into powerful works with an often overbearing force. This is a study of how much pain can be communicated by a human face. It has the features of a specific person, Dora Maar, whom Picasso described as "always weeping". She was in fact his close collaborator in the time of his life when he was most involved with politics.

Let your eyes wander over the sharp surface and you are led by the jagged black lines to the picture's centre, her mouth and chin, where the flesh seems to have been peeled away by corrosive tears to reveal hard white bone. The handkerchief she stuffs in her mouth is like a shard of glass. Her eyes are black apertures. When you are inside this picture you are inside pain; it hits you like a punch in the stomach.

Picasso's insistence that we imagine ourselves into the excoriated face of this woman, into her dark eyes, was part of his response to seeing newspaper photographs of the Luftwaffe's bombing of Guernica on behalf of Franco in the Spanish civil war on April 26, 1937. This painting came at the end of the series of paintings, prints and drawings that Picasso made in protest. It has very personal, Spanish sources. In May 1937 Picasso's mother wrote to him from Barcelona that smoke from the burning city during the fighting made her eyes water. The Mater Dolorosa, the weeping Virgin, is a traditional image in Spanish art, often represented in lurid baroque sculptures with glass tears, like the very solid one that flows towards this woman's right ear. Picasso's father, an artist, made one for the family home.

This painting takes such associations and chews them to pulp. It is about the violence that we feel when we look at it, about translating the rawest human emotion into paint. Its origins lie in the tortured figures of Picasso's Guernica (1937), whose suffering is calculated to convey you beyond the photographs of the bombing to sense momentarily what it was to be there. In Guernica there is a screaming woman holding her dead baby, her tongue a dagger pointing at heaven. The baby's face is a cartoon of death. Picasso followed Guernica with his series of Weeping Woman paintings in which the woman's mourning continues, without end. She cries and cries. In different versions the Weeping Woman's face is crushed to an abject lump, twisted out of recognition.

Guernica 1937

On April 26th 1937, a massive air raid by the German Luftwaffe on the Basque town of Guernica in Northern Spain shocked the world. Hundreds of civilians were killed in the raid which became a major incident of the Spanish Civil War.

The bombing prompted Picasso to begin painting his greatest masterpiece... Guernica.The painting became a timely and prophetic vision of the Second World War and is now recognised as an international icon for peace.

Despite the enormous interest the painting generated in his lifetime, Picasso obstinately refused to explain Guernica's imagery. Guernica has been the subject of more books than any other work in modern art and it is often described as..."the most important work of art of the twentieth century", yet its meanings have to this day eluded some of the most renowned scholars.

Guernica's "Secret" Harlequins

"Experts," now agree that Picasso practised a form of art-magic, linked to this was Picasso's Harlequin.

In 1932 another famous twentieth century magician, C.G.Jung... recognised Picasso's Harlequin as an underworld character, a master of disguise associated with the occult. Picasso identified with Harlequin whom he also associated with Christ due to the character's mystical power over death. In Picasso's "secret" Guernica, he has invoked a number of unseen Harlequins to overcome the forces of death represented in the painting.

This is the largest Harlequin, which is cleverly hidden behind the surface imagery. The outline of the face can be seen in the lines and background tones of the composition, the eyes and the tuft of hair to the right of the face are clearly visible.

The Harlequin appears to be crying a diamond tear for the victims of the bombing. The diamond is one of the Harlequin's symbols and in Picasso's work it is a personal signature.

Painters often rotate or invert paintings to check balance and stability in the composition.

Picasso knew from this and from his Cubist experiments that sideways or inverted imagery could have a powerful subliminal effect on the viewer and give a work hidden meanings and magical secrecy.

The next Harlequin is easily recognisable as the painting is rotated 90 degrees to the right.

From this viewpoint, Harlequin's hat becomes obvious as the figure appears to look upwards at the sky as if in reference to the bombing.

This is another Harlequin, seen by rotating the painting 90 degrees to the left.

The outline of the face and traditional hat and mask make him identifiable. Picasso hid many magical images in his work by incorporating them sideways or upside down. Sometimes, as in this case, he placed other images over the top as camouflage.

This fourth Harlequin has been concealed by inversion, which is a common technique of encryption in Hermetic magic.

This Harlequin is identifiable by his triangular hat and serrated collar. He is constructed from components of Punch and Judy theatre. The hat is peaked with a crocodile's jaw and his square mouth and face when viewed the right way up takes on the form of a traditional puppeteer's theatre.

The Crocodile and the Harlequin are common characters in Punch and Judy shows, their inclusion in Guernica stems from Picasso's love of puppetry which began before the turn of the century in Barcelona where he saw many such shows and even helped produce them with Pere Romeu at Els Quatre Ghats . The figure falling across the Harlequin's face which is often assumed to be a woman, in fact bears a strong resemblance to Picasso, who appears to be identifying with the victims of the bombing.

The next Harlequin image is again inverted and can be seen to the right of the previous Harlequin.

He is identifiable from his patchwork costume and triangular hat and appears to be kneeling on the ground as if watching the puppet show taking place opposite. Guernica's Hidden Images of Death

The preoccupying theme of Guernica is of course death; reinforcing this, in the centre of the painting is a hidden skull which dominates the viewer's subliminal impressions.

The skull is shown sideways and has been ingeniously overlaid onto the body of the horse, which is also a death symbol. The skull's mechanical appearance seems appropriate to the modern weaponry used in the 1937 bombing. Picasso often hid one or more related symbols within a particular image as seen here.

Below the dying horse in the centre of the painting is a concealed bull's head contained in the outline of the horse's buckled front leg. Its location infers that that it is plunging its horns into the horse's belly from below... the goring of the horse in the bullfight was a favourite subject for Picasso and has strong sexual overtones.