Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881 - 1973) Pablo Picasso is considered to be the greatest artist of the 20th century, the Grand Master primo assoluto of Modernism, and a singular force whose work and discoveries in the realm of the visual have informed and influenced nearly every artist of the 20th century. It has often been said that an artist of Picasso’s genius only comes along every 500 years, and that he is the only artist of our time who stands up to comparison with da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael – the grand triumvirate of the Italian Renaissance. Given Picasso’s forays into Symbolism, Primitivism, neo-Classicism, Surrealism, sculpture, collage, found-object art, printmaking, and post-WWII contemporary art, art history generally regards his pioneering of Cubism to have been his landmark achievement in visual phenomenology. With Cubism, we have, for the first time, pictorial art on a two-dimensional surface (paper or canvas) which obtains to the fourth dimension – namely the passage of Time emanating from a pictorial art. If Picasso is the ‘big man on campus’ of 20th century Modernism, it’s because his analysis of subjects like figures and portraits could be ‘shattered’ cubistically and re-arranged into ‘facets’ that visually revolved around themselves, giving the viewer the experience of seeing a painting in the round – all 360º – as if a flat work of art were a sculpture, around which one walks to see its every side. Inherent in sculpture, it was miraculous at the time that Picasso could create this same in-the-round effect in painting and drawing, a revolution in visual arts and optics. SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS Musée Picasso, Paris, France Museo Picasso, Málaga, Spain Museu Picasso, Barcelona, Spain Museum of Modern Art, NYC Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia Metropolitan Museum, NYC National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Tate Museum, London, England Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Art Institute of Chicago, IL Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan National Art Museum of China, Beijing ART MARKET “Women of Algiers,” US$179.3, Christie's New York, 11 May 2015 (record price for a painting) “Garçon à la pipe,” US$104 million, Sotheby's, 4 May 2004 “Dora Maar au Chat,” US$95.2 million, Sotheby's, 3 May 2006 “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” US$106.5 million, Christie's, 4 May 2010 “La Minotauromachie,” US$1.9 million, Sotheby’s, London, December 2015 (highest price ever paid for a print at auction) PRIZES, HONORS & AWARDS Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts èts Lettres, 1985, Legion of Honor, Paris, France Stalin-Lenin Peace Prize, 1950, 1962, Moscow, Russia ‘Honorable Mention,’ Madrid Exhibition of Fine Arts, 1897, Spain ‘Gold Medal, Málaga Provincial Exhibition, 1897, Spain ‘Carnegie Prize,’ 1930, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA ‘Honorary Curator,’ 1936, Prado Museum, Madrid ‘Silver Medal of French Gratitude,’ 1948, Paris Order of Polish Renascence, ‘Commander's Cross,’ 1948, Warsaw, Poland ‘Pennell Memorial Medal,’ 1949, Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (for the lithograph "The Dove of Peace") UNESCO, ‘Picasso Medal,’ initiated in 1975 for distinction in the arts, NYC Guinness Book of World Records, ‘Most Prolific Artist of All Time,’ London, England PICASSO, PABLO (1881 – 1973) Pablo Picasso has long been considered the greatest artist of the 20th century, the Grand Master primo assoluto of Modernism, and a singular force whose work and discoveries in the realm of the visual have informed and influenced nearly every artist of the 20th century. It has often been said that an artist of Picasso’s import only comes along every 500 years, and that he is the only artist of our time who stands up to comparison with da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael – the grand triumvirate of the Italian Renaissance. The story is told that in the 1950s even Amazonian Indians, who had no knowledge of Queen Elizabeth II, knew of Picasso the artist! Given Picasso’s forays into Symbolism, Primitivism, neo-Classicism, Surrealism, sculpture, collage, found-object art, printmaking, and post-WWII contemporary art, art history generally regards his pioneering of Cubism to have been Picasso’s landmark achievement in visual phenomenology. With Cubism, we have, for the first time, pictorial art on a two-dimensional surface (paper or canvas) which gains into the fourth dimension – namely the passage of time emanating from ‘static’ art. If Picasso is the ‘big man on campus’ of 20th century Modernism, then it’s due to Cubism’s ability to comprise four dimensions unto itself, rather than the two or three of traditional art. In Cubism, Picasso found a way to fracture imagery and multiply points of view of that imagery, so that a painted figure or portrait, for example, could be seen in the round – that is, in 360º, as if one were walking around a sculpture! – not looking at a painting. Before the advent of Cubism, ‘flat art’ had only attained to the 3rd dimension. A canvas, for example, inherently contains the two dimensions of ‘up and down’ and ‘side to side.’ With the advent of pictorial perspective in Antiquity, ‘in and out’ was also achieved, for a sum total of three dimensions. Consider a sculpture on a turntable. While the sculpture sits ‘still,’ it obtains of three dimensions: height, width, and depth. By turning the sculpture on a pedestal, it gains the fourth dimension, namely the passage of Time. But to project four dimensions onto a two- dimensional painterly ‘ground’ – a piece of paper or canvas – had never been accomplished in pictorial art before Picasso’s groundbreaking Cubism. The implications of this achievement went beyond fine art, even into the realms of science (optics) and mathematics (integrated differential equations), since a Cubist work by Picasso suggests a complicated set of algorithms needed to describe its internal dynamism. But perhaps most importantly, humanity itself was invited to realize, for the first time in history, that the human eye and mind are indeed capable of comprehending the passage of time from two-dimensionality. To understand this, imagine a traditional painting. No matter how much the eye scans its various details and areas of content, it is the eye that is moving over the picture, which is essentially still. In Cubism, the eye may remain fixed on one detail or area of the work of art, but then it and its component parts suddenly begin to shift and revolve around each other of their own accord! The other aspect of Picasso’s primary status in the last 500 years is that almost no modernist, save Matisse, who followed him escaped the wide net of his discoveries, often to their frustration at being thus eclipsed, even emasculated. From those who imitated him to those whose art reacted against or paralleled beside Picasso’s (Miró, Kandinsky, Mondrian, etc.), no other artist has monopolized as many discoveries and ‘made’ so many artists as Pablo Picasso. Nonetheless, enough time has now passed that we also understand Picasso’s limitations as a formalist artist – that is, an artist involved in composition and form (visual aesthetic order) within the plastic arts of painting and sculpting. With the mid- to late-20th-century rise of alternative art modalities such as happenings, conceptualism, celebritism, land art, video art, Pop art, installation art, etc. the art world acknowledges that, along with Picasso, the great name of the DaDa-Surrealist master Marcel Duchamp must also be added, in order to account for the entire body of origins of Modern and Contemporary art of the 20th century. Pablo Picasso, born in a poor family in southern Spain in 1881, started as a child prodigy and ended as the acknowledged greatest painter of his century. After some early training with his father, a provincial drawing teacher, Picasso showed that he had thoroughly grasped naturalistic conventions–the ways that artists make a picture look "realistic"–at a very young age. After some incomplete sessions of art school in Barcelona and Madrid, Picasso spent his adolescence associating with the group of Catalan modernists who gathered at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. From there he moved to Paris, where he quickly found like-minded poets and painters. His work began to attract serious critical attention and praise by the time he was twenty. His first mature work, dating from this time, around 1901, is classified as his Blue Period. He painted anecdotal scenes of clowns, vagrants, and prostitutes, all in tones of blue. Important early works include his "Self- Portrait" (1901) and "La Vie" (1903). As Picasso spent more time in Paris, as his painting developed, and as he began to meet the right people, his mood lifted. His subject matter remained much the same, but his tones were warmer, or rosier, and the atmosphere of his paintings was gayer. This is sometimes called Picasso's Rose Period, but really there was no marked technical change between this and the Blue Period; this phase of the development of his work is more like a cheerful coda to his Blue Period than a separate period. He began also to acquire mistress-muses; the women in his life would be his most consistent inspiration, as he reshaped their bodies in the boldest formal experiments. He always saw painting as a kind of sexual activity; he would trace back new styles in his painting to the inspiring appearance of a new mistress. Unfortunately, while his girlfriends were such a valuable impetus to his art, they seldom emerged from their museships unscathed. Jacqueline Roque and Marie-Thérese Walter committed suicide, and Olga Koklova and Dora Maar became somewhat insane.