PICASSO’S W O R L D JOHN FINLAY GOODMAN Contents Introduction Introduction ............... 3 Previous Page Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust 1932 Section 1: 1881–1907 Oil on canvas, 164.4 x 132 cm (64.7 x 51.9 in). Private collection. Pigeons, Bullfights and Sacred Subjects: 1 Picasso’s Origins and Youth, 1881–98 ....... 4 This work is one of a series of paintings Modernisme at Els Quatre Gats Café and that Picasso executed in 1932, and where a plaster bust gazes upon the Picasso’s First Visit to Paris, 1899–1901 ..... 10 artist’s sleeping/dreaming lover – the “Les Blues de Barcelone”, 1902–03 ....... 18 blonde Marie-Thérèse Walter. The fruit Circus Figures and Harlequins, 1903–05 ..... 24 and the philodendron plant sprouting Tradition, Modernism and Regression: from her naked body not only suggest Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1906–07 ....... 30 fecundity and fertility – her body as a ripe vessel – but are also strongly reminiscent of the foliage and Gallery 1: Special documents, photographs and illustrations 37 iconography in Picasso’s famous sculpture Woman in a Garden of Section 2: 1908–1916 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) remains one of the most important abstractions (but never entirely abstract), biographical and 1929–30 (see Chapter 16, p. 146). Picasso, Primitivism and Magic: artists of the twentieth-century. A brilliant draughtsman, esoteric in content and nature. His imagery was sometimes 2 The Beginnings of Cubism, 1907–08 ....... 61 painter, printer, sculptor and theatrical designer, he was the androgynous, phallic, surreal, cruel, violent, destructive and, “Cézanne’s Lesson”: Picasso, creator of Cubism – along with Georges Braque (1882– as we shall see, even sadistic. Braque and Towards Cubism, 1908–10 ...... 70 1963) – and remained at the forefront of the avant-garde for Yet his art could also express deep love, philosophical or Pasting Papers: Invention of Collage, many years. Consistently upholding and defying traditional political ideas, transient, fraternal, mystical or magical themes, Papier collé and Construction, 1910–12 ...... 76 methods of representation, Picasso produced many unusual or, as was usually the case with Picasso, all of these things at “The Savage Mind”: The Bricolage of and groundbreaking works of art and, in doing so, made a once. For Picasso, the body was the definitive subject and Picasso’s Cubist Sculpture, 1913–14 ...... 82 most original contribution to twentieth-century culture. artistic mediator, and finding alternative methods to recreate Modernity and Tradition: Cubism and the War, 1915–16 . 88 Hailed and reviled at different times, Picasso has been radical forms – human or otherwise – became the ultimate seen as a prodigy, bohemian, agent provocateur, conformist, motivation behind the inventive character of his greatest Section 3: 1917–1928 classicist, primitivist, shaman, surréaliste, dissident, matador, artworks. This is evidenced by the diffuseness of his The Ballet Russes: Parade, Jean Cocteau poet, communist, counterfeiter and even a pasticher of his drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures throughout his life. 3 and the Influence of Guillaume Apollinaire, 1917 ... 94 own art. The list is almost endless, but is perhaps the most In looking at all these genres and in appraising Picasso’s Cubism, Classicism and Commedia dell’Arte, 1918–21 . 100 logical way of observing the artist’s oeuvre, as a means of artistic expression and development, we must recognize that Dreamers, Readers and Bacchantes: analyzing the apparent discontinuity of styles that exists within theatre and ballet were major catalysts of his creative Picasso and Painting in the early 1920s ...... 106 it as a whole. Picasso’s paradoxical method of challenging process. These have often been marginalized in the context of Picasso and Surrealism: La Révolution Surréaliste artistic canons and referring back to his earlier inventions may various histories and theories debating his art. Consequently, and the Crisis in the Painting, Collage and Sculpture appear incongruous to the viewer or art historian, but it such narratives have superseded what are undoubtedly of 1924–26 .............. 112 undoubtedly led the artist to interpret the world around him in sustained theatrical influences running through the artist’s Published in 2011 by Goodman Drawing and Sculpture: the Ballet Mercure and diverse ways and, as observers, we are all the richer for his work. Historians have overlooked or found difficulty in placing An imprint of the Carlton Publishing Group Picasso’s Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire, 1924–28 . 116 rather obscure approach to making and documenting art. the theatre and the performative character of his work within 20 Mortimer Street London W1T 3JW Another way of interpreting Picasso’s life and work would the wider context of his oeuvre. So theatre remains something Gallery 2: Special documents, photographs and illustrations 121 be to follow the development of his art chronologically and to of an uncultivated area within Picasso scholarship, especially 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Text © Carlton Books Limited 2011 investigate the artists, characters, friends and collaborators in the context of the artist’s Cubism. Design © Carlton Books Limited 2011 Section 4: 1929–1973 who profoundly shaped his art. Picasso’s work can also be This book will follow Picasso, the man and his artistic All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the Comparative Anatomies: Woman in a Garden, 1929–32 . 145 situated within the context of the various idioms or art experiments, discoveries and achievements, bringing them condition that it may not be reproduced, stored in 4 The Spectacle of Violence: movements, as well as the social and political conditions that under one umbrella and presenting his work in a more a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by Guernica and the Spanish Corridas, 1933–37 .... 150 shaped the different strands of Modernism of the twentieth cohesive, intelligible and new way. Picasso was a man who any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the publisher’s Classicism, Death and Magical Transformations, 1938–48 156 century: Post-Impressionism, Primitivism, Cubism, Futurism, believed in the power of magic to transform the imagination, prior consent. Picasso’s Late Sculpture, 1942–61 ....... 164 Classicism and Surrealism. and it is to be hoped that Picasso’s World will also inspire A CIP catalogue record for this book is available Painting the Old Masters: War and Peace, One of the other defining characteristics of Picasso’s art readers’ imaginations, by giving a fresh insight into the from the British Library. Life and Death, 1951–73 .......... 170 was that of rendering and expressing the human condition by creativity, mythology and mystery of a truly unique artist, ISBN 978 1 84796 017 7 means of multitudinous forms, guises, rituals and highly whose work was as boundless as it was beguiling. Index ................. 178 theatrical gestures. His work could be imaginative, humorous, Printed in China Credits ................ 180 erotic, the stuff of dreams or nightmares, full of apparent INTRODUCTION PICASSO 3 By the late 1890s, Picasso had mastered many of the nineteenth recalled: “I must have been ten years old when my acquired skills and precocious talent impressed his therefore harnessing his sexuality to the painting. century’s realist and modernist styles of art, which the artist father took me to see El Lagartijo fight”.4 classmates, including his lifelong friend Manuel The diagonal line joining both adolescent figures, Surprisingly little work survives from Picasso’s Pallarès. As he later recalled, Picasso appeared to be the flowers and strewn petals, as well as the two encountered in Spain and Paris, where he settled permanently in 1904. early youth, although family members always claimed way ahead of the other students. Pallarès also snuffed-out candles, which intimate the transience of Between 1901 and 1905, Picasso’s work evolved from phases of that he drew endlessly. The artist’s talents extended suggests that the young Spaniard had an air of life and a loss of innocence, could be an anecdotal to creating papiers découpes, cut-out silhouettes of superiority about him, but he never got carried away suggestion that the altar-boy has a future connection Spanish Symbolism and French Impressionism through to the flowers, animals and groups of people, using his aunt with his own self-importance, nor had the “character with the young and virtuous bride of Christ. so-called Blue and Rose Periods. Picasso’s powerful sense of visual Eloísa’s embroidery scissors, as a form of [and] the behaviour of a boy of his age”.7 John Richardson, on the other hand, claims that entertainment to please his mother and his sister Don José may have been a mediocre and rather the candles and rose petals are symbolic of two expression and restless imagination also led him to explore primitive Conchita. “Do us a portrait of Tola Calderon’s unsuccessful painter, but he was determined to learn deaths in the Ruiz Blasco family – souls who died in art, culminating in his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Newfoundland dog,” they would insist.5 It is well from his own disappointments and did everything he innocence. Two of the candles are aflame but two known that Picasso loved animals and he was hardly could to steer Picasso’s artistic career in a way that have been snuffed out, and something that perhaps which proved something of an epiphany in twentieth century modern ever without a pet throughout