Как пишется на английском пикассо

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Ruiz and the second or maternal family name is Picasso.

Pablo Picasso
Picasso in 1908
Born	Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso[1] 25 October 1881 Málaga, Kingdom of Spain
Died	8 April 1973 (aged 91) Mougins, France
Resting place	Château of Vauvenargues 43°33′15″N 5°36′16″E / 43.554142°N 5.604438°E
Education	José Ruiz y Blasco (father) Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
Known for	Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, stage design, writing
Notable work	La Vie (1903) Family of Saltimbanques (1905) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) Girl before a Mirror (1932) Le Rêve (1932) Guernica (1937) The Weeping Woman (1937) Massacre in Korea (1951)
Movement	Cubism, Surrealism
Spouses	Olga Khokhlova ​ ​ (m. 1918; died 1955)​ Jacqueline Roque ​ (m. 1961)​
Partners	Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927–1935) Dora Maar (1935–1943) Françoise Gilot (1943–1953)
Children	Paulo Picasso Maya Widmaier-Picasso Claude Picasso Paloma Picasso
Family	Marina Picasso (granddaughter) Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (grandson)
Patron(s)	Sergei Shchukin
Signature

Pablo Ruiz Picasso^[a][b] (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,^[8][9] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.^{[10][11][12][13]}

Picasso’s work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

Early life

Picasso was born at 23:15 on 25 October 1881, in the city of Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain.^[2] He was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.^[14] Picasso’s family was of middle-class background. His father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life, Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum.^[1] Ruiz’s ancestors were minor aristocrats.

Picasso’s birth certificate and the record of his baptism include very long names, combining those of various saints and relatives.^[a][c] Ruiz y Picasso were his paternal and maternal surnames, respectively, per Spanish custom. The surname «Picasso» comes from Liguria, a coastal region of north-western Italy; its capital is Genoa.^[16] There was a painter from the area named Matteo Picasso [it] (1794–1879), born in Recco (Genoa), of late neoclassical style portraiture,^[16] though investigations have not definitively determined his kinship with the branch of ancestors related to Pablo Picasso. The direct branch from Sori, Liguria (Genoa), can be traced back to Tommaso Picasso (1728–1813). His son Giovanni Battista, married to Isabella Musante, was Pablo’s great-great-grandfather. Of this marriage was born Tommaso (Sori, 1787–Málaga, 1851). Pablo’s maternal great-grandfather, Tommaso Picasso moved to Spain around 1807.^[16]

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were «piz, piz», a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for «pencil».^[17] From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son’s technique, an apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting,^[18] though paintings by him exist from later years.

In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria.^[19] After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.^[20] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him, at just 13. As a student, Picasso lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.^[21]

Picasso’s father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the country’s foremost art school.^[20] At age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrollment. Madrid held many other attractions. The Prado housed paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbarán. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; elements such as his elongated limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso’s later work.^[22]

Career

Before 1900

Picasso’s training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist’s beginnings.^[23] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.^[24] The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called «without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.»^[25]

In 1897, his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, for example, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favourite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.^[26]

Picasso made his first trip to Paris, then the art capital of Europe, in 1900. There, he met his first Parisian friend, journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm. During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his work Picasso.^[27] From 1898 he signed his works as «Pablo Ruiz Picasso», then as «Pablo R. Picasso» until 1901. The change does not seem to imply a rejection of the father figure. Rather, he wanted to distinguish himself from others; initiated by his Catalan friends who habitually called him by his maternal surname, much less current than the paternal Ruiz.^[28]

Blue Period: 1901–1904

Picasso’s Blue Period (1901–1904), characterized by sombre paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in Spain in early 1901 or in Paris in the second half of the year.^[29] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In his austere use of colour and sometimes doleful subject matter—prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901, he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.^[30]

The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904),^[31] which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness, a recurrent theme in Picasso’s works of this period, is also represented in The Blindman’s Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other Blue Period works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.

Rose Period: 1904–1906

The Rose Period (1904–1906)^[32] is characterised by a lighter tone and style utilising orange and pink colours and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress, in Paris in 1904.^[19] Olivier appears in many of his Rose Period paintings, many of which are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e., just prior to the Blue Period), and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.

By 1905, Picasso became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein and one of her nephew Allan Stein. Gertrude Stein became Picasso’s principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris.^[34] At one of her gatherings in 1905, he met Henri Matisse, who was to become a lifelong friend and rival. The Steins introduced him to Claribel Cone and her sister Etta, who were American art collectors; they also began to acquire Picasso’s and Matisse’s paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy. Michael and Sarah Stein became patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picassos.^[35]

In 1907, Picasso joined an art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German art historian and art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism that they jointly developed. Kahnweiler promoted burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.^[36]

African art and primitivism: 1907–1909

Picasso’s African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The three figures on the left were inspired by Iberian sculpture, but he repainted the faces of the two figures on the right after being powerfully impressed by African artefacts he saw in June 1907 in the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro.^[37] When he displayed the painting to acquaintances in his studio later that year, the nearly universal reaction was shock and revulsion; Matisse angrily dismissed the work as a hoax.^[38] Picasso did not exhibit Les Demoiselles publicly until 1916.

Other works from this period include Nude with Raised Arms (1907) and Three Women (1908). Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Analytic cubism: 1909–1912

Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and «analyzed» them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque’s paintings at this time share many similarities.

In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry and Gertrude Stein. In 1911, Picasso was arrested and questioned about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Suspicion for the crime had initially fallen upon Apollinaire due to his links to Géry Pieret, an artist with a history of thefts from the gallery. Apollinaire in turn implicated his close friend Picasso, who had also purchased stolen artworks from the artist in the past. Afraid of a conviction that could result in his deportation to Spain, Picasso denied having ever met Apollinaire. Both were later cleared of any involvement in the painting’s disappearance.^[39][40]

Synthetic cubism: 1912–1919

Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre of cubism, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage. «Hard-edged square-cut diamonds», notes art historian John Richardson, «these gems do not always have upside or downside».^[41][42] «We need a new name to designate them,» wrote Picasso to Gertrude Stein. The term «Crystal Cubism» was later used as a result of visual analogies with crystals at the time.^[43][41][44] These «little gems» may have been produced by Picasso in response to critics who had claimed his defection from the movement, through his experimentation with classicism within the so-called return to order following the war.^[41][43]

After acquiring some fame and fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva Gouel. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915.^[45]

At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon. Braque and Derain were mobilized and Apollinaire joined the French artillery, while the Spaniard Juan Gris remained from the Cubist circle. During the war, Picasso was able to continue painting uninterrupted, unlike his French comrades. His paintings became more sombre and his life changed with dramatic consequences. Kahnweiler’s contract had terminated on his exile from France. At this point Picasso’s work would be taken on by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. After the loss of Eva Gouel, Picasso had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse. During the spring of 1916, Apollinaire returned from the front wounded. They renewed their friendship, but Picasso began to frequent new social circles.^[46]

Towards the end of World War I, Picasso became involved with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris, and others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Erik Satie’s Parade, in Rome; they spent their honeymoon near Biarritz in the villa of glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz.

After returning from his honeymoon and in need of money, Picasso started his exclusive relationship with the French-Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. As part of his first duties, Rosenberg agreed to rent the couple an apartment in Paris at his own expense, which was located next to his own house. This was the start of a deep brother-like friendship between two very different men, that would last until the outbreak of World War II.

Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and other dimensions of the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo Picasso,^[47] who would grow up to be a motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova’s insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso’s bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev’s troupe, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several drawings of the composer.^[48]

In 1927, Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso’s marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova’s death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter with her, named Maya. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso’s death.

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  1909–10, Figure dans un Fauteuil (Seated Nude, Femme nue assise), oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm (36 x 28 in), Tate Modern, London. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

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  1910, Woman with Mustard Pot (La Femme au pot de moutarde), oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm (28 x 23 in), Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, Chicago, Boston 1913

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  1910–11, Guitariste, La mandoliniste (Woman playing guitar or mandolin), oil on canvas

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  1911, The Poet (Le poète), oil on linen, 131.2 × 89.5 cm (51 5/8 × 35 1/4 in), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

• 

  1911–12, Violon (Violin), oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm (39 x 28 in) (oval), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

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  1913, Bouteille, clarinet, violon, journal, verre, 55 × 45 cm (21 x 17 in). This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

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  1913, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Eva), Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair, oil on canvas, 149.9 × 99.4 cm (59 x 39 in), Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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  1913–14, L’Homme aux cartes (Card Player), oil on canvas, 108 × 89.5 cm (42 x 35 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York

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  1914–15, Nature morte au compotier (Still Life with Compote and Glass), oil on canvas, 63.5 × 78.7 cm (25 × 31 in), Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

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  1916, L’anis del mono (Bottle of Anis del Mono), oil on canvas, 46 × 54.6 cm (18 x 21 in), Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

Neoclassicism and surrealism: 1919–1929

In February 1917, Picasso made his first trip to Italy.^[49] In the period following the upheaval of World War I, Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. This «return to order» is evident in the work of many European artists in the 1920s, including André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, Gino Severini, Jean Metzinger, the artists of the New Objectivity movement and of the Novecento Italiano movement. Picasso’s paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Raphael and Ingres.

In 1925 the Surrealist writer and poet André Breton declared Picasso as ‘one of ours’ in his article Le Surréalisme et la peinture, published in Révolution surréaliste. Les Demoiselles was reproduced for the first time in Europe in the same issue. Yet Picasso exhibited Cubist works at the first Surrealist group exhibition in 1925; the concept of ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’ defined in the Manifeste du surréalisme never appealed to him entirely. He did at the time develop new imagery and formal syntax for expressing himself emotionally, «releasing the violence, the psychic fears and the eroticism that had been largely contained or sublimated since 1909», writes art historian Melissa McQuillan.^[50] Although this transition in Picasso’s work was informed by Cubism for its spatial relations, «the fusion of ritual and abandon in the imagery recalls the primitivism of the Demoiselles and the elusive psychological resonances of his Symbolist work», writes McQuillan.^[50] Surrealism revived Picasso’s attraction to primitivism and eroticism.^[50]

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  Pablo Picasso, 1918, Portrait d’Olga dans un fauteuil (Olga in an Armchair), Musée Picasso, Paris, France

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  Pablo Picasso, 1919, Sleeping Peasants, gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, 31.1 × 48.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art

The Great Depression to MoMA exhibition: 1930–1939

During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso’s Guernica. The minotaur and Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter are heavily featured in his celebrated Vollard Suite of etchings.^[51]

Arguably Picasso’s most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War – Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. Asked to explain its symbolism, Picasso said, «It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.»^[52][53] Guernica was exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, and then became the centerpiece of an exhibition of 118 works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Henri Laurens that toured Scandinavia and England. After the victory of Francisco Franco in Spain, the painting was sent to the United States to raise funds and support for Spanish refugees. Until 1981 it was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, as it was Picasso’s expressed desire that the painting should not be delivered to Spain until liberty and democracy had been established in the country.

In 1939 and 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, under its director Alfred Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major retrospective of Picasso’s principal works until that time. This exhibition lionized Picasso, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.^[54] According to Jonathan Weinberg, «Given the extraordinary quality of the show and Picasso’s enormous prestige, generally heightened by the political impact of Guernica … the critics were surprisingly ambivalent».^[55] Picasso’s «multiplicity of styles» was disturbing to one journalist; another described him as «wayward and even malicious»; Alfred Frankenstein’s review in ARTnews concluded that Picasso was both charlatan and genius.^[55]

World War II and late 1940s: 1939–1949

During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. Picasso’s artistic style did not fit the Nazi ideal of art, so he did not exhibit during this time. He was often harassed by the Gestapo. During one search of his apartment, an officer saw a photograph of the painting Guernica. «Did you do that?» the German asked Picasso. «No,» he replied, «You did.»^[58]

Retreating to his studio, he continued to paint, producing works such as the Still Life with Guitar (1942) and The Charnel House (1944–48). Although the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to him by the French Resistance.^[59]

Around this time, Picasso wrote poetry as an alternative outlet. Between 1935 and 1959 he wrote over 300 poems. Largely untitled except for a date and sometimes the location of where it was written (for example «Paris 16 May 1936»), these works were gustatory, erotic, and at times scatological, as were his two full-length plays, Desire Caught by the Tail (1941), and The Four Little Girls (1949).^[60]

In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Picasso, then 63 years old, began a romantic relationship with a young art student named Françoise Gilot. She was 40 years younger than he was. Picasso grew tired of his mistress Dora Maar; Picasso and Gilot began to live together. Eventually they had two children: Claude Picasso, born in 1947 and Paloma Picasso, born in 1949. In her 1964 book Life with Picasso,^[61] Gilot describes his abusive treatment and myriad infidelities which led her to leave him, taking the children with her. This was a severe blow to Picasso.

Picasso had affairs with women of an even greater age disparity than his and Gilot’s. While still involved with Gilot, in 1951 Picasso had a six-week affair with Geneviève Laporte, who was four years younger than Gilot. By his 70s, many paintings, ink drawings and prints have as their theme an old, grotesque dwarf as the doting lover of a beautiful young model. Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986) worked at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris on the French Riviera, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. She became his lover, and then his second wife in 1961. The two were together for the remainder of Picasso’s life.

His marriage to Roque was also a means of revenge against Gilot; with Picasso’s encouragement, Gilot had divorced her then husband, Luc Simon, with the plan to marry Picasso to secure the rights of her children as Picasso’s legitimate heirs. Picasso had already secretly married Roque, after Gilot had filed for divorce. His strained relationship with Claude and Paloma was never healed.^[62]

By this time, Picasso had constructed a huge Gothic home, and could afford large villas in the south of France, such as Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie on the outskirts of Mougins, and in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. He was an international celebrity, with often as much interest in his personal life as his art.^[63]

Later works to final years: 1949–1973

Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s, Picasso’s style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velázquez’s painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.

In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Picasso made a few film appearances, always as himself, including a cameo in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960). In 1955, he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

He was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. Picasso said the figure represented the head of an Afghan Hound named Kabul.^[64] The sculpture, one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city.

Picasso’s final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 to 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime.^[65][66] Only later, after Picasso’s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see the late works of Picasso as prefiguring Neo-Expressionism.^[67]

Death

Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from pulmonary edema and a heart attack, the morning after he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was interred at the Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.^[68] Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline killed herself by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.^[69]

Political views

Picasso remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it.^[70] He did not join the armed forces for any side or country during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, or World War II. As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either world war. In 1940, he applied for French citizenship, but it was refused on the grounds of his «extremist ideas evolving towards communism». This information was not revealed until 2003.^[71]

At the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Picasso was 54 years of age. Soon after hostilities began, the Republicans appointed him «director of the Prado, albeit in absentia», and «he took his duties very seriously», according to John Richardson, supplying the funds to evacuate the museum’s collection to Geneva.^[72] The war provided the impetus for Picasso’s first overtly political work. He expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco and fascists in The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), which was produced «specifically for propagandistic and fundraising purposes».^[73] This surreal fusion of words and images was intended to be sold as a series of postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause.^[73][74]

In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party. He attended the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government.^[75] A portrait of Joseph Stalin made by Picasso in 1953 drew Party criticism due to being insufficiently realistic, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death.^[72] His dealer, D-H. Kahnweiler, a socialist, termed Picasso’s communism «sentimental» rather than political, saying «He has never read a line of Karl Marx, nor of Engels of course.»^[72] In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso stated: «I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting. … But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics.»^[76] His commitment to communism, common among continental intellectuals and artists at the time, has long been the subject of some controversy; a notable demonstration thereof was a quote by Salvador Dalí (with whom Picasso had a rather strained relationship^[77]):

Picasso es pintor, yo también; … Picasso es español, yo también; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco.

(Picasso is a painter, so am I; … Picasso is a Spaniard, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.)^[78][79][80]

In the late 1940s, his old friend the surrealist poet, Trotskyist,^[81] and anti-Stalinist André Breton was more blunt; refusing to shake hands with Picasso, he told him: «I don’t approve of your joining the Communist Party nor with the stand you have taken concerning the purges of the intellectuals after the Liberation.»^[82]
As a communist, Picasso opposed the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War, and depicted it in Massacre in Korea.^[83][84] The art critic Kirsten Hoving Keen wrote that it was «inspired by reports of American atrocities» and considered it one of Picasso’s communist works.^[85]

On 9 January 1949, Picasso created Dove, a black and white lithograph. It was used to illustrate a poster at the 1949 World Peace Council and became an iconographic image of the period, known as «The dove of peace». Picasso’s image was used around the world as a symbol of the Peace Congresses and communism.^[86]

In 1962, he received the Lenin Peace Prize.^[87] Biographer and art critic John Berger felt his talents as an artist were «wasted» by the communists.^[88] According to Jean Cocteau’s diaries, Picasso once said to him in reference to the communists: «I have joined a family, and like all families, it’s full of shit.»^[89]

Style and technique

Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. At his death there were more than 45,000 unsold works in his estate, comprising 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 3,222 ceramics, 7,089 drawings, 150 sketchbooks, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.^[90] The most complete – but not exhaustive – catalogue of his works, the catalogue raisonné compiled by Christian Zervos, lists more than 16,000 paintings and drawings.^[91] Picasso’s output was several times more prolific than most artists of his era; by at least one account, American artist Bob Ross is the only one to rival Picasso’s volume, and Ross’s artwork was designed specifically to be easily mass-produced quickly.^[92]

The medium in which Picasso made his most important contribution was painting.^[93] In his paintings, Picasso used colour as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of colour to create form and space.^[93] He sometimes added sand to his paint to vary its texture. A nanoprobe of Picasso’s The Red Armchair (1931), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, by physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012 confirmed art historians’ belief that Picasso used common house paint in many of his paintings.^[94][95] Much of his painting was done at night by artificial light.

Picasso’s early sculptures were carved from wood or modelled in wax or clay, but from 1909 to 1928 Picasso abandoned modelling and instead made sculptural constructions using diverse materials.^[93] An example is Guitar (1912), a relief construction made of sheet metal and wire that Jane Fluegel terms a «three-dimensional planar counterpart of Cubist painting» that marks a «revolutionary departure from the traditional approaches, modeling and carving».^[96]

From the beginning of his career, Picasso displayed an interest in subject matter of every kind,^[97] and demonstrated a great stylistic versatility that enabled him to work in several styles at once. For example, his paintings of 1917 included the pointillist Woman with a Mantilla, the Cubist Figure in an Armchair, and the naturalistic Harlequin (all in the Museu Picasso, Barcelona). In 1919, he made a number of drawings from postcards and photographs that reflect his interest in the stylistic conventions and static character of posed photographs.^[98] In 1921 he simultaneously painted several large neoclassical paintings and two versions of the Cubist composition Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art).^[49] In an interview published in 1923, Picasso said, «The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting … If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them.»^[49]

Although his Cubist works approach abstraction, Picasso never relinquished the objects of the real world as subject matter. Prominent in his Cubist paintings are forms easily recognized as guitars, violins, and bottles.^[99] When Picasso depicted complex narrative scenes it was usually in prints, drawings, and small-scale works; Guernica (1937) is one of his few large narrative paintings.^[98]

Picasso painted mostly from imagination or memory. According to William Rubin, Picasso «could only make great art from subjects that truly involved him … Unlike Matisse, Picasso had eschewed models virtually all his mature life, preferring to paint individuals whose lives had both impinged on, and had real significance for, his own.»^[100] The art critic Arthur Danto said Picasso’s work constitutes a «vast pictorial autobiography» that provides some basis for the popular conception that «Picasso invented a new style each time he fell in love with a new woman».^[100] The autobiographical nature of Picasso’s art is reinforced by his habit of dating his works, often to the day. He explained: «I want to leave to posterity a documentation that will be as complete as possible. That’s why I put a date on everything I do.»^[100]

Artistic legacy

Picasso’s influence was and remains immense and widely acknowledged by his admirers and detractors alike. On the occasion of his 1939 retrospective at MoMA, Life magazine wrote: «During the 25 years he has dominated modern European art, his enemies say he has been a corrupting influence. With equal violence, his friends say he is the greatest artist alive.»^[101] Picasso was the first artist to receive a special honour exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris in celebration of his 90 years.^[102] In 1998, Robert Hughes wrote of him: «To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. … No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime. … Though Marcel Duchamp, that cunning old fox of conceptual irony, has certainly had more influence on nominally vanguard art over the past 30 years than Picasso, the Spaniard was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees.»^[103]

At the time of Picasso’s death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Málaga.

The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of his early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal his firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father’s tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabartés, his close friend and personal secretary.

Guernica was on display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981, it was returned to Spain and was on exhibit at the Casón del Buen Retiro of the Museo del Prado. In 1992, the painting was put on display in the Reina Sofía Museum when it opened.

In 1985, a museum was established in Buitrago del Lozoya by Picasso’s friend Eugenio Arias Herranz.^[104]

It was announced on 22 September 2020 that the project for a new Picasso Museum due to open in Aix-en-Provence in 2021, in a former convent (Couvent des Prêcheurs), which would have held the largest collection of his paintings of any museum, had been scrapped due to the fact that Catherine Hutin-Blay, Jacqueline Picasso’s daughter, and the City Council had failed to reach an agreement.^[105]

In the 1996 movie Surviving Picasso, Picasso is portrayed by actor Anthony Hopkins.^[106] Picasso is also a character in Steve Martin’s 1993 play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway tells Gertrude Stein that he would like to have some Picassos, but cannot afford them. Later in the book, Hemingway mentions looking at one of Picasso’s paintings. He refers to it as Picasso’s nude of the girl with the basket of flowers, possibly related to Young Naked Girl with Flower Basket.
On 8 October 2010, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, an exhibition of 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, opened at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, US. The exhibition subsequently travelled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia: the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California, US.;^[107] the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;^[108] and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

As of 2015, Picasso remained the top-ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) according to the Art Market Trends report.^[109] More of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist’s;^[110] in 2012, the Art Loss Register had 1,147 of his works listed as stolen.^[111] The Picasso Administration functions as his official Estate. The US copyright representative for the Picasso Administration is the Artists Rights Society.^[112]

Picasso is played by Antonio Banderas in the 2018 season of Genius which focuses on his life and art.

The Basel vote

In the 1940s, a Swiss insurance company based in Basel had bought two paintings by Picasso to diversify its investments and serve as a guarantee for the insured risks. Following an air disaster in 1967, the company had to pay out heavy reimbursements. The company decided to part with the two paintings, which were deposited in the Kunstmuseum Basel. In 1968, a large number of Basel citizens called for a local referendum on the purchase of the Picassos by the Canton of Basel-Stadt, which was successful, making it the first time in democratic history that the population of a city voted on the purchase of works of art for a public art museum.^[113] The paintings therefore remained in the museum in Basel. Informed of this, Picasso donated three paintings and a sketch to the city and its museum and was later made an honorary citizen by the city.^[114]

Auction history

Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. Garçon à la pipe sold for US$104 million at Sotheby’s on 4 May 2004, establishing a new price record. Dora Maar au Chat sold for US$95.2 million at Sotheby’s on 3 May 2006.^[115] On 4 May 2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie’s for $106.5 million. The 1932 work, which depicts Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter reclining and as a bust, was in the personal collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November 2009.^[116] On 11 May 2015 his painting Women of Algiers set the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting when it sold for US$179.3 million at Christie’s in New York.^[117]

On 21 June 2016, a painting by Pablo Picasso titled Femme Assise (1909) sold for £43.2 million ($63.4 million) at Sotheby’s London, exceeding the estimate by nearly $20 million, setting a world record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a Cubist work.^[118][119]

On 17 May 2017, The Jerusalem Post in an article titled «Picasso Work Stolen By Nazis Sells for $45 Million at Auction» reported the sale of a portrait painted by Picasso, the 1939 Femme assise, robe bleu, which was previously misappropriated during the early years of WWII. The painting has changed hands several times since its recovery, most recently through auction in May 2017 at Christie’s in New York City.^[120]

In March 2018, his Femme au Béret et à la Robe Quadrillée (1937), a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, sold for £49.8m at Sotheby’s in London.^[121]

Personal life

Throughout his life Picasso maintained several mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women:

• Paulo (4 February 1921 – 5 June 1975, Paul Joseph Picasso) – with Olga Khokhlova
• Maya (5 September 1935 – 20 December 2022, Maria de la Concepcion Picasso) – with Marie-Thérèse Walter
• Claude (born 15 May 1947, Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot
• Paloma (born 19 April 1949, Anne Paloma Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot

Photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.

The women in Picasso’s life played an important role in the emotional and erotic aspects of his creative expression, and the tumultuous nature of these relationships has been considered vital to his artistic process. Many of these women functioned as muses for him, and their inclusion in his extensive oeuvre granted them a place in art history.^[122] A largely recurring motif in his body of work is the female form. The variations in his relationships informed and collided with his progression of style throughout his career. For example, portraits created of his first wife, Olga, were rendered in a naturalistic style during his Neoclassical period. His relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter inspired many of his surrealist pieces, as well as what is referred to as his «Year of Wonders».^[123] Reappearance of acrobats theme in 1905 put an end to his «Blue Period» and transitioned into his «Rose Period». This transition has been incorrectly attributed to the presence of Fernande Olivier in his life.^[124]: 75

Picasso has been commonly characterised as a womaniser and a misogynist, being quoted as having said to one of his mistresses, Françoise Gilot, «Women are machines for suffering.»^[125] He later told her, «For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.»^[126] In her memoir, Picasso, My Grandfather, Marina Picasso writes of his treatment of women, «He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.»^[127]

Of the several important women in his life, two, Marie-Thèrése Walter, a mistress, and Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, died by suicide. Others, notably his first wife Olga Khokhlova, and his mistress Dora Maar, succumbed to nervous breakdowns. His son, Paulo, developed a fatal alcoholism due to depression. His grandson, Pablito, also died by suicide that same year by ingesting bleach when he was barred by Jacqueline Roque from attending the artist’s funeral.^[125]

Catalogue raisonné

Picasso entrusted Christian Zervos to constitute the catalogue raisonné of his work (painted and drawn). The first volume of the catalogue, Works from 1895 to 1906, published in 1932, entailed the financial ruin of Zervos, self-publishing under the name Cahiers d’art, forcing him to sell part of his art collection at auction to avoid bankruptcy.^[128][129]

From 1932 to 1978, Zervos constituted the catalogue raisonné of the complete works of Picasso in the company of the artist who had become one of his friends in 1924. Following the death of Zervos, Mila Gagarin supervised the publication of 11 additional volumes from 1970 to 1978.^[130]

The 33 volumes cover the entire work from 1895 to 1972, with close to 16,000 black and white photographs, in accord with the will of the artist.^[131]

• 1932: tome I, Œuvres de 1895 à 1906. Introduction p. XI–[XXXXIX], 185 pages, 384 reproductions
• 1942: tome II, vol.1, Œuvres de 1906 à 1912. Introduction p. XI–[LV], 172 pages, 360 reproductions
• 1944: tome II, vol.2, Œuvres de 1912 à 1917. Introduction p. IX–[LXX–VIII], 233 p. pp. 173 to 406, 604 reproductions
• 1949: tome III, Œuvres de 1917 à 1919. Introduction p. IX–[XIII], 152 pages, 465 reproductions
• 1951: tome IV, Œuvres de 1920 à 1922. Introduction p. VII–[XIV], 192 pages, 455 reproductions
• 1952: tome V, Œuvres de 1923 à 1925. Introduction p. IX–[XIV], 188 pages, 466 reproductions
• 1954: tome VI, Supplément aux tomes I à V. Sans introduction, 176 pages, 1481 reproductions
• 1955: tome VII, Œuvres de 1926 à 1932. Introduction p. V–[VII], 184 pages, 424 reproductions

• 1978: Catalogue raisonné des œuvres de Pablo Picasso, Paris, Éditions Cahiers d’art^[132]

Further publications by Zervos

• Picasso. Œuvres de 1920 à 1926, Cahiers d’art, Paris
• Dessins de Picasso 1892–1948, Paris, Éditions Cahiers d’art, 1949
• Picasso. Dessins (1892–1948), Hazan, 199 reproductions, 1949

See also

• Picasso’s written works
• List of Picasso artworks 1889–1900
  • 1901–1910
  • 1911–1920
  • 1921–1930
  • 1931–1940
  • 1941–1950
  • 1951–1960
  • 1961–1970
  • 1971–1973
• Neoclassicism

Notes and references

Notes

References

Sources

• Becht-Jördens, Gereon; Wehmeier, Peter M. (2003). Picasso und die christliche Ikonographie: Mutterbeziehung und künstlerische Position. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. ISBN 978-3-496-01272-6.
• Berger, John (1989). The Success and Failure of Picasso. Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-679-72272-4.
• Cirlot, Juan Eduardo (1972). Picasso, Birth of a Genius. New York and Washington: Praeger.
• Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 978-1-85437-043-3.
• Daix, Pierre (1994). Picasso: Life and Art. Icon Editions. ISBN 978-0-06-430201-2.
• FitzGerald, Michael C. (1996). Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-century Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20653-3.
• Gether, Christian, ed. (2019). Beloved by Picasso: The Power of the Model. ARKEN Museum of Modern Art. 978-87-78751-34-8.
• Granell, Eugenio Fernández (1981). Picasso’s Guernica: The End of a Spanish Era. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press. ISBN 978-0-8357-1206-4.
• Jackson, Jeffrey B. (2016). «Chronology» in: The Picasso Project: Synthetic Cubism, 1912-1917. Alan Wofsy Fine Arts. ISBN 978-1-55660-332-7.
• Krauss, Rosalind E. (1999). The Picasso Papers. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-61142-8.
• Mallén, Enrique (2003). The Visual Grammar of Pablo Picasso. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-5692-8.
• Mallén, Enrique (2005). La sintaxis de la carne: Pablo Picasso y Marie-Thérèse Walter. Santiago de Chile: Red Internacional del Libro. ISBN 978-956-284-455-0.
• Mallén, Enrique (2009). A Concordance of Pablo Picasso’s Spanish Writings. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-4713-4.
• Mallén, Enrique (2010). A Concordance of Pablo Picasso’s French Writings. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-1325-2. Retrieved 8 October 2010.
• Nill, Raymond M. (1987). A Visual Guide to Pablo Picasso’s Works. New York: B&H Publishers.
• Picasso, Olivier Widmaier (2004). Picasso: The Real Family Story. Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-3149-2.
• Rubin, William (1981). Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective. Little Brown & Co. ISBN 978-0-316-70703-9.
• Wattenmaker, Richard J. (1993). Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-impressionist, and Early Modern. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-40963-2.
• Wertenbaker, Lael Tucker (1967). The World of Picasso (1881– ). Time-Life Books.

Further reading

• Alexandra Schwartz, «Painted Love: The artist Françoise Gilot was Picasso’s lover, helpmate, and muse. Then she wanted more», The New Yorker, 22 July 2019, pages 62–66. «[L]ives were trampled. Picasso died, at the age of ninety-one, in 1973. In 1977, Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself; eight years later, Jacqueline Roque, Gilot’s successor and Picasso’s second wife, shot herself in the head. Paulo, his son with Olga [Khokhlova], drank himself to death, in 1975, and Paulo’s son, Pablito, killed himself by swallowing bleach when he was barred from attending his grandfather’s funeral.» (p. 66.)

External links

• Works by or about Pablo Picasso at Internet Archive
• Works by or about Pablo Picasso in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Picasso discography at Discogs
• Picasso at IMDb
• Picasso in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
• «On-line Picasso Project».
• Picasso at the Guggenheim Museum
• Picasso at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
• Picasso at Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, New York)
• Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York City, New York)
• Musée National Picasso Archived 11 December 2017 at the Wayback Machine (Paris, France)
• Museo Picasso Málaga (Málaga, Spain)
• Museu Picasso (Barcelona, Spain)
• Museo Picasso (Buitrago de Lozoya, Spain)
• Picasso at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC)
• Picasso, L’Esprit nouveau: revue internationale d’esthétique, 1920. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
• W.H. Crain Costume and Scene Design Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Ruiz and the second or maternal family name is Picasso.

Pablo Picasso
Picasso in 1908
Born	Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso[1] 25 October 1881 Málaga, Kingdom of Spain
Died	8 April 1973 (aged 91) Mougins, France
Resting place	Château of Vauvenargues 43°33′15″N 5°36′16″E / 43.554142°N 5.604438°E
Education	José Ruiz y Blasco (father) Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
Known for	Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, stage design, writing
Notable work	La Vie (1903) Family of Saltimbanques (1905) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) Girl before a Mirror (1932) Le Rêve (1932) Guernica (1937) The Weeping Woman (1937) Massacre in Korea (1951)
Movement	Cubism, Surrealism
Spouses	Olga Khokhlova ​ ​ (m. 1918; died 1955)​ Jacqueline Roque ​ (m. 1961)​
Partners	Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927–1935) Dora Maar (1935–1943) Françoise Gilot (1943–1953)
Children	Paulo Picasso Maya Widmaier-Picasso Claude Picasso Paloma Picasso
Family	Marina Picasso (granddaughter) Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (grandson)
Patron(s)	Sergei Shchukin
Signature

Pablo Ruiz Picasso^[a][b] (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,^[8][9] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.^{[10][11][12][13]}

Picasso’s work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

Early life

Picasso was born at 23:15 on 25 October 1881, in the city of Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain.^[2] He was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.^[14] Picasso’s family was of middle-class background. His father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life, Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum.^[1] Ruiz’s ancestors were minor aristocrats.

Picasso’s birth certificate and the record of his baptism include very long names, combining those of various saints and relatives.^[a][c] Ruiz y Picasso were his paternal and maternal surnames, respectively, per Spanish custom. The surname «Picasso» comes from Liguria, a coastal region of north-western Italy; its capital is Genoa.^[16] There was a painter from the area named Matteo Picasso [it] (1794–1879), born in Recco (Genoa), of late neoclassical style portraiture,^[16] though investigations have not definitively determined his kinship with the branch of ancestors related to Pablo Picasso. The direct branch from Sori, Liguria (Genoa), can be traced back to Tommaso Picasso (1728–1813). His son Giovanni Battista, married to Isabella Musante, was Pablo’s great-great-grandfather. Of this marriage was born Tommaso (Sori, 1787–Málaga, 1851). Pablo’s maternal great-grandfather, Tommaso Picasso moved to Spain around 1807.^[16]

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were «piz, piz», a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for «pencil».^[17] From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son’s technique, an apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting,^[18] though paintings by him exist from later years.

In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria.^[19] After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.^[20] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him, at just 13. As a student, Picasso lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.^[21]

Picasso’s father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the country’s foremost art school.^[20] At age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrollment. Madrid held many other attractions. The Prado housed paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbarán. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; elements such as his elongated limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso’s later work.^[22]

Career

Before 1900

Picasso’s training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist’s beginnings.^[23] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.^[24] The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called «without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.»^[25]

In 1897, his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, for example, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favourite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.^[26]

Picasso made his first trip to Paris, then the art capital of Europe, in 1900. There, he met his first Parisian friend, journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm. During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his work Picasso.^[27] From 1898 he signed his works as «Pablo Ruiz Picasso», then as «Pablo R. Picasso» until 1901. The change does not seem to imply a rejection of the father figure. Rather, he wanted to distinguish himself from others; initiated by his Catalan friends who habitually called him by his maternal surname, much less current than the paternal Ruiz.^[28]

Blue Period: 1901–1904

Picasso’s Blue Period (1901–1904), characterized by sombre paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in Spain in early 1901 or in Paris in the second half of the year.^[29] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In his austere use of colour and sometimes doleful subject matter—prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901, he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.^[30]

The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904),^[31] which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness, a recurrent theme in Picasso’s works of this period, is also represented in The Blindman’s Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other Blue Period works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.

Rose Period: 1904–1906

The Rose Period (1904–1906)^[32] is characterised by a lighter tone and style utilising orange and pink colours and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress, in Paris in 1904.^[19] Olivier appears in many of his Rose Period paintings, many of which are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e., just prior to the Blue Period), and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.

By 1905, Picasso became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein and one of her nephew Allan Stein. Gertrude Stein became Picasso’s principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris.^[34] At one of her gatherings in 1905, he met Henri Matisse, who was to become a lifelong friend and rival. The Steins introduced him to Claribel Cone and her sister Etta, who were American art collectors; they also began to acquire Picasso’s and Matisse’s paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy. Michael and Sarah Stein became patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picassos.^[35]

In 1907, Picasso joined an art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German art historian and art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism that they jointly developed. Kahnweiler promoted burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.^[36]

African art and primitivism: 1907–1909

Picasso’s African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The three figures on the left were inspired by Iberian sculpture, but he repainted the faces of the two figures on the right after being powerfully impressed by African artefacts he saw in June 1907 in the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro.^[37] When he displayed the painting to acquaintances in his studio later that year, the nearly universal reaction was shock and revulsion; Matisse angrily dismissed the work as a hoax.^[38] Picasso did not exhibit Les Demoiselles publicly until 1916.

Other works from this period include Nude with Raised Arms (1907) and Three Women (1908). Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Analytic cubism: 1909–1912

Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and «analyzed» them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque’s paintings at this time share many similarities.

In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry and Gertrude Stein. In 1911, Picasso was arrested and questioned about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Suspicion for the crime had initially fallen upon Apollinaire due to his links to Géry Pieret, an artist with a history of thefts from the gallery. Apollinaire in turn implicated his close friend Picasso, who had also purchased stolen artworks from the artist in the past. Afraid of a conviction that could result in his deportation to Spain, Picasso denied having ever met Apollinaire. Both were later cleared of any involvement in the painting’s disappearance.^[39][40]

Synthetic cubism: 1912–1919

Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre of cubism, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage. «Hard-edged square-cut diamonds», notes art historian John Richardson, «these gems do not always have upside or downside».^[41][42] «We need a new name to designate them,» wrote Picasso to Gertrude Stein. The term «Crystal Cubism» was later used as a result of visual analogies with crystals at the time.^[43][41][44] These «little gems» may have been produced by Picasso in response to critics who had claimed his defection from the movement, through his experimentation with classicism within the so-called return to order following the war.^[41][43]

After acquiring some fame and fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva Gouel. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915.^[45]

At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon. Braque and Derain were mobilized and Apollinaire joined the French artillery, while the Spaniard Juan Gris remained from the Cubist circle. During the war, Picasso was able to continue painting uninterrupted, unlike his French comrades. His paintings became more sombre and his life changed with dramatic consequences. Kahnweiler’s contract had terminated on his exile from France. At this point Picasso’s work would be taken on by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. After the loss of Eva Gouel, Picasso had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse. During the spring of 1916, Apollinaire returned from the front wounded. They renewed their friendship, but Picasso began to frequent new social circles.^[46]

Towards the end of World War I, Picasso became involved with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris, and others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Erik Satie’s Parade, in Rome; they spent their honeymoon near Biarritz in the villa of glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz.

After returning from his honeymoon and in need of money, Picasso started his exclusive relationship with the French-Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. As part of his first duties, Rosenberg agreed to rent the couple an apartment in Paris at his own expense, which was located next to his own house. This was the start of a deep brother-like friendship between two very different men, that would last until the outbreak of World War II.

Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and other dimensions of the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo Picasso,^[47] who would grow up to be a motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova’s insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso’s bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev’s troupe, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several drawings of the composer.^[48]

In 1927, Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso’s marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova’s death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter with her, named Maya. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso’s death.

• 

  1909–10, Figure dans un Fauteuil (Seated Nude, Femme nue assise), oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm (36 x 28 in), Tate Modern, London. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

• 

  1910, Woman with Mustard Pot (La Femme au pot de moutarde), oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm (28 x 23 in), Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, Chicago, Boston 1913

• 

  1910–11, Guitariste, La mandoliniste (Woman playing guitar or mandolin), oil on canvas

• 

  1911, The Poet (Le poète), oil on linen, 131.2 × 89.5 cm (51 5/8 × 35 1/4 in), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

• 

  1911–12, Violon (Violin), oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm (39 x 28 in) (oval), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

• 

  1913, Bouteille, clarinet, violon, journal, verre, 55 × 45 cm (21 x 17 in). This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

• 

  1913, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Eva), Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair, oil on canvas, 149.9 × 99.4 cm (59 x 39 in), Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art

• 

  1913–14, L’Homme aux cartes (Card Player), oil on canvas, 108 × 89.5 cm (42 x 35 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York

• 

  1914–15, Nature morte au compotier (Still Life with Compote and Glass), oil on canvas, 63.5 × 78.7 cm (25 × 31 in), Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

• 

  1916, L’anis del mono (Bottle of Anis del Mono), oil on canvas, 46 × 54.6 cm (18 x 21 in), Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

Neoclassicism and surrealism: 1919–1929

In February 1917, Picasso made his first trip to Italy.^[49] In the period following the upheaval of World War I, Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. This «return to order» is evident in the work of many European artists in the 1920s, including André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, Gino Severini, Jean Metzinger, the artists of the New Objectivity movement and of the Novecento Italiano movement. Picasso’s paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Raphael and Ingres.

In 1925 the Surrealist writer and poet André Breton declared Picasso as ‘one of ours’ in his article Le Surréalisme et la peinture, published in Révolution surréaliste. Les Demoiselles was reproduced for the first time in Europe in the same issue. Yet Picasso exhibited Cubist works at the first Surrealist group exhibition in 1925; the concept of ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’ defined in the Manifeste du surréalisme never appealed to him entirely. He did at the time develop new imagery and formal syntax for expressing himself emotionally, «releasing the violence, the psychic fears and the eroticism that had been largely contained or sublimated since 1909», writes art historian Melissa McQuillan.^[50] Although this transition in Picasso’s work was informed by Cubism for its spatial relations, «the fusion of ritual and abandon in the imagery recalls the primitivism of the Demoiselles and the elusive psychological resonances of his Symbolist work», writes McQuillan.^[50] Surrealism revived Picasso’s attraction to primitivism and eroticism.^[50]

• 

  Pablo Picasso, 1918, Portrait d’Olga dans un fauteuil (Olga in an Armchair), Musée Picasso, Paris, France

• 

  Pablo Picasso, 1919, Sleeping Peasants, gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, 31.1 × 48.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art

The Great Depression to MoMA exhibition: 1930–1939

During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso’s Guernica. The minotaur and Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter are heavily featured in his celebrated Vollard Suite of etchings.^[51]

Arguably Picasso’s most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War – Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. Asked to explain its symbolism, Picasso said, «It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.»^[52][53] Guernica was exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, and then became the centerpiece of an exhibition of 118 works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Henri Laurens that toured Scandinavia and England. After the victory of Francisco Franco in Spain, the painting was sent to the United States to raise funds and support for Spanish refugees. Until 1981 it was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, as it was Picasso’s expressed desire that the painting should not be delivered to Spain until liberty and democracy had been established in the country.

In 1939 and 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, under its director Alfred Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major retrospective of Picasso’s principal works until that time. This exhibition lionized Picasso, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.^[54] According to Jonathan Weinberg, «Given the extraordinary quality of the show and Picasso’s enormous prestige, generally heightened by the political impact of Guernica … the critics were surprisingly ambivalent».^[55] Picasso’s «multiplicity of styles» was disturbing to one journalist; another described him as «wayward and even malicious»; Alfred Frankenstein’s review in ARTnews concluded that Picasso was both charlatan and genius.^[55]

World War II and late 1940s: 1939–1949

During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. Picasso’s artistic style did not fit the Nazi ideal of art, so he did not exhibit during this time. He was often harassed by the Gestapo. During one search of his apartment, an officer saw a photograph of the painting Guernica. «Did you do that?» the German asked Picasso. «No,» he replied, «You did.»^[58]

Retreating to his studio, he continued to paint, producing works such as the Still Life with Guitar (1942) and The Charnel House (1944–48). Although the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to him by the French Resistance.^[59]

Around this time, Picasso wrote poetry as an alternative outlet. Between 1935 and 1959 he wrote over 300 poems. Largely untitled except for a date and sometimes the location of where it was written (for example «Paris 16 May 1936»), these works were gustatory, erotic, and at times scatological, as were his two full-length plays, Desire Caught by the Tail (1941), and The Four Little Girls (1949).^[60]

In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Picasso, then 63 years old, began a romantic relationship with a young art student named Françoise Gilot. She was 40 years younger than he was. Picasso grew tired of his mistress Dora Maar; Picasso and Gilot began to live together. Eventually they had two children: Claude Picasso, born in 1947 and Paloma Picasso, born in 1949. In her 1964 book Life with Picasso,^[61] Gilot describes his abusive treatment and myriad infidelities which led her to leave him, taking the children with her. This was a severe blow to Picasso.

Picasso had affairs with women of an even greater age disparity than his and Gilot’s. While still involved with Gilot, in 1951 Picasso had a six-week affair with Geneviève Laporte, who was four years younger than Gilot. By his 70s, many paintings, ink drawings and prints have as their theme an old, grotesque dwarf as the doting lover of a beautiful young model. Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986) worked at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris on the French Riviera, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. She became his lover, and then his second wife in 1961. The two were together for the remainder of Picasso’s life.

His marriage to Roque was also a means of revenge against Gilot; with Picasso’s encouragement, Gilot had divorced her then husband, Luc Simon, with the plan to marry Picasso to secure the rights of her children as Picasso’s legitimate heirs. Picasso had already secretly married Roque, after Gilot had filed for divorce. His strained relationship with Claude and Paloma was never healed.^[62]

By this time, Picasso had constructed a huge Gothic home, and could afford large villas in the south of France, such as Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie on the outskirts of Mougins, and in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. He was an international celebrity, with often as much interest in his personal life as his art.^[63]

Later works to final years: 1949–1973

Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s, Picasso’s style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velázquez’s painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.

In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Picasso made a few film appearances, always as himself, including a cameo in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960). In 1955, he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

He was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. Picasso said the figure represented the head of an Afghan Hound named Kabul.^[64] The sculpture, one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city.

Picasso’s final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 to 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime.^[65][66] Only later, after Picasso’s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see the late works of Picasso as prefiguring Neo-Expressionism.^[67]

Death

Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from pulmonary edema and a heart attack, the morning after he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was interred at the Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.^[68] Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline killed herself by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.^[69]

Political views

Picasso remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it.^[70] He did not join the armed forces for any side or country during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, or World War II. As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either world war. In 1940, he applied for French citizenship, but it was refused on the grounds of his «extremist ideas evolving towards communism». This information was not revealed until 2003.^[71]

At the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Picasso was 54 years of age. Soon after hostilities began, the Republicans appointed him «director of the Prado, albeit in absentia», and «he took his duties very seriously», according to John Richardson, supplying the funds to evacuate the museum’s collection to Geneva.^[72] The war provided the impetus for Picasso’s first overtly political work. He expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco and fascists in The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), which was produced «specifically for propagandistic and fundraising purposes».^[73] This surreal fusion of words and images was intended to be sold as a series of postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause.^[73][74]

In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party. He attended the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government.^[75] A portrait of Joseph Stalin made by Picasso in 1953 drew Party criticism due to being insufficiently realistic, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death.^[72] His dealer, D-H. Kahnweiler, a socialist, termed Picasso’s communism «sentimental» rather than political, saying «He has never read a line of Karl Marx, nor of Engels of course.»^[72] In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso stated: «I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting. … But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics.»^[76] His commitment to communism, common among continental intellectuals and artists at the time, has long been the subject of some controversy; a notable demonstration thereof was a quote by Salvador Dalí (with whom Picasso had a rather strained relationship^[77]):

Picasso es pintor, yo también; … Picasso es español, yo también; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco.

(Picasso is a painter, so am I; … Picasso is a Spaniard, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.)^[78][79][80]

In the late 1940s, his old friend the surrealist poet, Trotskyist,^[81] and anti-Stalinist André Breton was more blunt; refusing to shake hands with Picasso, he told him: «I don’t approve of your joining the Communist Party nor with the stand you have taken concerning the purges of the intellectuals after the Liberation.»^[82]
As a communist, Picasso opposed the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War, and depicted it in Massacre in Korea.^[83][84] The art critic Kirsten Hoving Keen wrote that it was «inspired by reports of American atrocities» and considered it one of Picasso’s communist works.^[85]

On 9 January 1949, Picasso created Dove, a black and white lithograph. It was used to illustrate a poster at the 1949 World Peace Council and became an iconographic image of the period, known as «The dove of peace». Picasso’s image was used around the world as a symbol of the Peace Congresses and communism.^[86]

In 1962, he received the Lenin Peace Prize.^[87] Biographer and art critic John Berger felt his talents as an artist were «wasted» by the communists.^[88] According to Jean Cocteau’s diaries, Picasso once said to him in reference to the communists: «I have joined a family, and like all families, it’s full of shit.»^[89]

Style and technique

Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. At his death there were more than 45,000 unsold works in his estate, comprising 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 3,222 ceramics, 7,089 drawings, 150 sketchbooks, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.^[90] The most complete – but not exhaustive – catalogue of his works, the catalogue raisonné compiled by Christian Zervos, lists more than 16,000 paintings and drawings.^[91] Picasso’s output was several times more prolific than most artists of his era; by at least one account, American artist Bob Ross is the only one to rival Picasso’s volume, and Ross’s artwork was designed specifically to be easily mass-produced quickly.^[92]

The medium in which Picasso made his most important contribution was painting.^[93] In his paintings, Picasso used colour as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of colour to create form and space.^[93] He sometimes added sand to his paint to vary its texture. A nanoprobe of Picasso’s The Red Armchair (1931), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, by physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012 confirmed art historians’ belief that Picasso used common house paint in many of his paintings.^[94][95] Much of his painting was done at night by artificial light.

Picasso’s early sculptures were carved from wood or modelled in wax or clay, but from 1909 to 1928 Picasso abandoned modelling and instead made sculptural constructions using diverse materials.^[93] An example is Guitar (1912), a relief construction made of sheet metal and wire that Jane Fluegel terms a «three-dimensional planar counterpart of Cubist painting» that marks a «revolutionary departure from the traditional approaches, modeling and carving».^[96]

From the beginning of his career, Picasso displayed an interest in subject matter of every kind,^[97] and demonstrated a great stylistic versatility that enabled him to work in several styles at once. For example, his paintings of 1917 included the pointillist Woman with a Mantilla, the Cubist Figure in an Armchair, and the naturalistic Harlequin (all in the Museu Picasso, Barcelona). In 1919, he made a number of drawings from postcards and photographs that reflect his interest in the stylistic conventions and static character of posed photographs.^[98] In 1921 he simultaneously painted several large neoclassical paintings and two versions of the Cubist composition Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art).^[49] In an interview published in 1923, Picasso said, «The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting … If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them.»^[49]

Although his Cubist works approach abstraction, Picasso never relinquished the objects of the real world as subject matter. Prominent in his Cubist paintings are forms easily recognized as guitars, violins, and bottles.^[99] When Picasso depicted complex narrative scenes it was usually in prints, drawings, and small-scale works; Guernica (1937) is one of his few large narrative paintings.^[98]

Picasso painted mostly from imagination or memory. According to William Rubin, Picasso «could only make great art from subjects that truly involved him … Unlike Matisse, Picasso had eschewed models virtually all his mature life, preferring to paint individuals whose lives had both impinged on, and had real significance for, his own.»^[100] The art critic Arthur Danto said Picasso’s work constitutes a «vast pictorial autobiography» that provides some basis for the popular conception that «Picasso invented a new style each time he fell in love with a new woman».^[100] The autobiographical nature of Picasso’s art is reinforced by his habit of dating his works, often to the day. He explained: «I want to leave to posterity a documentation that will be as complete as possible. That’s why I put a date on everything I do.»^[100]

Artistic legacy

Picasso’s influence was and remains immense and widely acknowledged by his admirers and detractors alike. On the occasion of his 1939 retrospective at MoMA, Life magazine wrote: «During the 25 years he has dominated modern European art, his enemies say he has been a corrupting influence. With equal violence, his friends say he is the greatest artist alive.»^[101] Picasso was the first artist to receive a special honour exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris in celebration of his 90 years.^[102] In 1998, Robert Hughes wrote of him: «To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. … No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime. … Though Marcel Duchamp, that cunning old fox of conceptual irony, has certainly had more influence on nominally vanguard art over the past 30 years than Picasso, the Spaniard was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees.»^[103]

At the time of Picasso’s death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Málaga.

The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of his early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal his firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father’s tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabartés, his close friend and personal secretary.

Guernica was on display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981, it was returned to Spain and was on exhibit at the Casón del Buen Retiro of the Museo del Prado. In 1992, the painting was put on display in the Reina Sofía Museum when it opened.

In 1985, a museum was established in Buitrago del Lozoya by Picasso’s friend Eugenio Arias Herranz.^[104]

It was announced on 22 September 2020 that the project for a new Picasso Museum due to open in Aix-en-Provence in 2021, in a former convent (Couvent des Prêcheurs), which would have held the largest collection of his paintings of any museum, had been scrapped due to the fact that Catherine Hutin-Blay, Jacqueline Picasso’s daughter, and the City Council had failed to reach an agreement.^[105]

In the 1996 movie Surviving Picasso, Picasso is portrayed by actor Anthony Hopkins.^[106] Picasso is also a character in Steve Martin’s 1993 play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway tells Gertrude Stein that he would like to have some Picassos, but cannot afford them. Later in the book, Hemingway mentions looking at one of Picasso’s paintings. He refers to it as Picasso’s nude of the girl with the basket of flowers, possibly related to Young Naked Girl with Flower Basket.
On 8 October 2010, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, an exhibition of 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, opened at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, US. The exhibition subsequently travelled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia: the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California, US.;^[107] the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;^[108] and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

As of 2015, Picasso remained the top-ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) according to the Art Market Trends report.^[109] More of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist’s;^[110] in 2012, the Art Loss Register had 1,147 of his works listed as stolen.^[111] The Picasso Administration functions as his official Estate. The US copyright representative for the Picasso Administration is the Artists Rights Society.^[112]

Picasso is played by Antonio Banderas in the 2018 season of Genius which focuses on his life and art.

The Basel vote

In the 1940s, a Swiss insurance company based in Basel had bought two paintings by Picasso to diversify its investments and serve as a guarantee for the insured risks. Following an air disaster in 1967, the company had to pay out heavy reimbursements. The company decided to part with the two paintings, which were deposited in the Kunstmuseum Basel. In 1968, a large number of Basel citizens called for a local referendum on the purchase of the Picassos by the Canton of Basel-Stadt, which was successful, making it the first time in democratic history that the population of a city voted on the purchase of works of art for a public art museum.^[113] The paintings therefore remained in the museum in Basel. Informed of this, Picasso donated three paintings and a sketch to the city and its museum and was later made an honorary citizen by the city.^[114]

Auction history

Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. Garçon à la pipe sold for US$104 million at Sotheby’s on 4 May 2004, establishing a new price record. Dora Maar au Chat sold for US$95.2 million at Sotheby’s on 3 May 2006.^[115] On 4 May 2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie’s for $106.5 million. The 1932 work, which depicts Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter reclining and as a bust, was in the personal collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November 2009.^[116] On 11 May 2015 his painting Women of Algiers set the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting when it sold for US$179.3 million at Christie’s in New York.^[117]

On 21 June 2016, a painting by Pablo Picasso titled Femme Assise (1909) sold for £43.2 million ($63.4 million) at Sotheby’s London, exceeding the estimate by nearly $20 million, setting a world record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a Cubist work.^[118][119]

On 17 May 2017, The Jerusalem Post in an article titled «Picasso Work Stolen By Nazis Sells for $45 Million at Auction» reported the sale of a portrait painted by Picasso, the 1939 Femme assise, robe bleu, which was previously misappropriated during the early years of WWII. The painting has changed hands several times since its recovery, most recently through auction in May 2017 at Christie’s in New York City.^[120]

In March 2018, his Femme au Béret et à la Robe Quadrillée (1937), a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, sold for £49.8m at Sotheby’s in London.^[121]

Personal life

Throughout his life Picasso maintained several mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women:

• Paulo (4 February 1921 – 5 June 1975, Paul Joseph Picasso) – with Olga Khokhlova
• Maya (5 September 1935 – 20 December 2022, Maria de la Concepcion Picasso) – with Marie-Thérèse Walter
• Claude (born 15 May 1947, Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot
• Paloma (born 19 April 1949, Anne Paloma Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot

Photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.

The women in Picasso’s life played an important role in the emotional and erotic aspects of his creative expression, and the tumultuous nature of these relationships has been considered vital to his artistic process. Many of these women functioned as muses for him, and their inclusion in his extensive oeuvre granted them a place in art history.^[122] A largely recurring motif in his body of work is the female form. The variations in his relationships informed and collided with his progression of style throughout his career. For example, portraits created of his first wife, Olga, were rendered in a naturalistic style during his Neoclassical period. His relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter inspired many of his surrealist pieces, as well as what is referred to as his «Year of Wonders».^[123] Reappearance of acrobats theme in 1905 put an end to his «Blue Period» and transitioned into his «Rose Period». This transition has been incorrectly attributed to the presence of Fernande Olivier in his life.^[124]: 75

Picasso has been commonly characterised as a womaniser and a misogynist, being quoted as having said to one of his mistresses, Françoise Gilot, «Women are machines for suffering.»^[125] He later told her, «For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.»^[126] In her memoir, Picasso, My Grandfather, Marina Picasso writes of his treatment of women, «He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.»^[127]

Of the several important women in his life, two, Marie-Thèrése Walter, a mistress, and Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, died by suicide. Others, notably his first wife Olga Khokhlova, and his mistress Dora Maar, succumbed to nervous breakdowns. His son, Paulo, developed a fatal alcoholism due to depression. His grandson, Pablito, also died by suicide that same year by ingesting bleach when he was barred by Jacqueline Roque from attending the artist’s funeral.^[125]

Catalogue raisonné

Picasso entrusted Christian Zervos to constitute the catalogue raisonné of his work (painted and drawn). The first volume of the catalogue, Works from 1895 to 1906, published in 1932, entailed the financial ruin of Zervos, self-publishing under the name Cahiers d’art, forcing him to sell part of his art collection at auction to avoid bankruptcy.^[128][129]

From 1932 to 1978, Zervos constituted the catalogue raisonné of the complete works of Picasso in the company of the artist who had become one of his friends in 1924. Following the death of Zervos, Mila Gagarin supervised the publication of 11 additional volumes from 1970 to 1978.^[130]

The 33 volumes cover the entire work from 1895 to 1972, with close to 16,000 black and white photographs, in accord with the will of the artist.^[131]

• 1932: tome I, Œuvres de 1895 à 1906. Introduction p. XI–[XXXXIX], 185 pages, 384 reproductions
• 1942: tome II, vol.1, Œuvres de 1906 à 1912. Introduction p. XI–[LV], 172 pages, 360 reproductions
• 1944: tome II, vol.2, Œuvres de 1912 à 1917. Introduction p. IX–[LXX–VIII], 233 p. pp. 173 to 406, 604 reproductions
• 1949: tome III, Œuvres de 1917 à 1919. Introduction p. IX–[XIII], 152 pages, 465 reproductions
• 1951: tome IV, Œuvres de 1920 à 1922. Introduction p. VII–[XIV], 192 pages, 455 reproductions
• 1952: tome V, Œuvres de 1923 à 1925. Introduction p. IX–[XIV], 188 pages, 466 reproductions
• 1954: tome VI, Supplément aux tomes I à V. Sans introduction, 176 pages, 1481 reproductions
• 1955: tome VII, Œuvres de 1926 à 1932. Introduction p. V–[VII], 184 pages, 424 reproductions

• 1978: Catalogue raisonné des œuvres de Pablo Picasso, Paris, Éditions Cahiers d’art^[132]

Further publications by Zervos

• Picasso. Œuvres de 1920 à 1926, Cahiers d’art, Paris
• Dessins de Picasso 1892–1948, Paris, Éditions Cahiers d’art, 1949
• Picasso. Dessins (1892–1948), Hazan, 199 reproductions, 1949

See also

• Picasso’s written works
• List of Picasso artworks 1889–1900
  • 1901–1910
  • 1911–1920
  • 1921–1930
  • 1931–1940
  • 1941–1950
  • 1951–1960
  • 1961–1970
  • 1971–1973
• Neoclassicism

Notes and references

Notes

References

Sources

• Becht-Jördens, Gereon; Wehmeier, Peter M. (2003). Picasso und die christliche Ikonographie: Mutterbeziehung und künstlerische Position. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. ISBN 978-3-496-01272-6.
• Berger, John (1989). The Success and Failure of Picasso. Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-679-72272-4.
• Cirlot, Juan Eduardo (1972). Picasso, Birth of a Genius. New York and Washington: Praeger.
• Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 978-1-85437-043-3.
• Daix, Pierre (1994). Picasso: Life and Art. Icon Editions. ISBN 978-0-06-430201-2.
• FitzGerald, Michael C. (1996). Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-century Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20653-3.
• Gether, Christian, ed. (2019). Beloved by Picasso: The Power of the Model. ARKEN Museum of Modern Art. 978-87-78751-34-8.
• Granell, Eugenio Fernández (1981). Picasso’s Guernica: The End of a Spanish Era. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press. ISBN 978-0-8357-1206-4.
• Jackson, Jeffrey B. (2016). «Chronology» in: The Picasso Project: Synthetic Cubism, 1912-1917. Alan Wofsy Fine Arts. ISBN 978-1-55660-332-7.
• Krauss, Rosalind E. (1999). The Picasso Papers. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-61142-8.
• Mallén, Enrique (2003). The Visual Grammar of Pablo Picasso. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-5692-8.
• Mallén, Enrique (2005). La sintaxis de la carne: Pablo Picasso y Marie-Thérèse Walter. Santiago de Chile: Red Internacional del Libro. ISBN 978-956-284-455-0.
• Mallén, Enrique (2009). A Concordance of Pablo Picasso’s Spanish Writings. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-4713-4.
• Mallén, Enrique (2010). A Concordance of Pablo Picasso’s French Writings. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-1325-2. Retrieved 8 October 2010.
• Nill, Raymond M. (1987). A Visual Guide to Pablo Picasso’s Works. New York: B&H Publishers.
• Picasso, Olivier Widmaier (2004). Picasso: The Real Family Story. Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-3149-2.
• Rubin, William (1981). Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective. Little Brown & Co. ISBN 978-0-316-70703-9.
• Wattenmaker, Richard J. (1993). Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-impressionist, and Early Modern. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-40963-2.
• Wertenbaker, Lael Tucker (1967). The World of Picasso (1881– ). Time-Life Books.

Further reading

• Alexandra Schwartz, «Painted Love: The artist Françoise Gilot was Picasso’s lover, helpmate, and muse. Then she wanted more», The New Yorker, 22 July 2019, pages 62–66. «[L]ives were trampled. Picasso died, at the age of ninety-one, in 1973. In 1977, Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself; eight years later, Jacqueline Roque, Gilot’s successor and Picasso’s second wife, shot herself in the head. Paulo, his son with Olga [Khokhlova], drank himself to death, in 1975, and Paulo’s son, Pablito, killed himself by swallowing bleach when he was barred from attending his grandfather’s funeral.» (p. 66.)

External links

• Works by or about Pablo Picasso at Internet Archive
• Works by or about Pablo Picasso in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Picasso discography at Discogs
• Picasso at IMDb
• Picasso in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
• «On-line Picasso Project».
• Picasso at the Guggenheim Museum
• Picasso at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
• Picasso at Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, New York)
• Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York City, New York)
• Musée National Picasso Archived 11 December 2017 at the Wayback Machine (Paris, France)
• Museo Picasso Málaga (Málaga, Spain)
• Museu Picasso (Barcelona, Spain)
• Museo Picasso (Buitrago de Lozoya, Spain)
• Picasso at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC)
• Picasso, L’Esprit nouveau: revue internationale d’esthétique, 1920. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
• W.H. Crain Costume and Scene Design Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Ruiz and the second or maternal family name is Picasso.

Pablo Picasso
Picasso in 1908
Born	Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso[1] 25 October 1881 Málaga, Kingdom of Spain
Died	8 April 1973 (aged 91) Mougins, France
Resting place	Château of Vauvenargues 43°33′15″N 5°36′16″E / 43.554142°N 5.604438°E
Education	José Ruiz y Blasco (father) Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
Known for	Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, stage design, writing
Notable work	La Vie (1903) Family of Saltimbanques (1905) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) Girl before a Mirror (1932) Le Rêve (1932) Guernica (1937) The Weeping Woman (1937) Massacre in Korea (1951)
Movement	Cubism, Surrealism
Spouses	Olga Khokhlova ​ ​ (m. 1918; died 1955)​ Jacqueline Roque ​ (m. 1961)​
Partners	Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927–1935) Dora Maar (1935–1943) Françoise Gilot (1943–1953)
Children	Paulo Picasso Maya Widmaier-Picasso Claude Picasso Paloma Picasso
Family	Marina Picasso (granddaughter) Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (grandson)
Patron(s)	Sergei Shchukin
Signature

Pablo Ruiz Picasso^[a][b] (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,^[8][9] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.^{[10][11][12][13]}

Picasso’s work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

Early life

Picasso was born at 23:15 on 25 October 1881, in the city of Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain.^[2] He was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.^[14] Picasso’s family was of middle-class background. His father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life, Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum.^[1] Ruiz’s ancestors were minor aristocrats.

Picasso’s birth certificate and the record of his baptism include very long names, combining those of various saints and relatives.^[a][c] Ruiz y Picasso were his paternal and maternal surnames, respectively, per Spanish custom. The surname «Picasso» comes from Liguria, a coastal region of north-western Italy; its capital is Genoa.^[16] There was a painter from the area named Matteo Picasso [it] (1794–1879), born in Recco (Genoa), of late neoclassical style portraiture,^[16] though investigations have not definitively determined his kinship with the branch of ancestors related to Pablo Picasso. The direct branch from Sori, Liguria (Genoa), can be traced back to Tommaso Picasso (1728–1813). His son Giovanni Battista, married to Isabella Musante, was Pablo’s great-great-grandfather. Of this marriage was born Tommaso (Sori, 1787–Málaga, 1851). Pablo’s maternal great-grandfather, Tommaso Picasso moved to Spain around 1807.^[16]

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were «piz, piz», a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for «pencil».^[17] From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son’s technique, an apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting,^[18] though paintings by him exist from later years.

In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria.^[19] After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.^[20] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him, at just 13. As a student, Picasso lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.^[21]

Picasso’s father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the country’s foremost art school.^[20] At age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrollment. Madrid held many other attractions. The Prado housed paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbarán. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; elements such as his elongated limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso’s later work.^[22]

Career

Before 1900

Picasso’s training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist’s beginnings.^[23] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.^[24] The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called «without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.»^[25]

In 1897, his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, for example, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favourite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.^[26]

Picasso made his first trip to Paris, then the art capital of Europe, in 1900. There, he met his first Parisian friend, journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm. During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his work Picasso.^[27] From 1898 he signed his works as «Pablo Ruiz Picasso», then as «Pablo R. Picasso» until 1901. The change does not seem to imply a rejection of the father figure. Rather, he wanted to distinguish himself from others; initiated by his Catalan friends who habitually called him by his maternal surname, much less current than the paternal Ruiz.^[28]

Blue Period: 1901–1904

Picasso’s Blue Period (1901–1904), characterized by sombre paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in Spain in early 1901 or in Paris in the second half of the year.^[29] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In his austere use of colour and sometimes doleful subject matter—prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901, he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.^[30]

The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904),^[31] which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness, a recurrent theme in Picasso’s works of this period, is also represented in The Blindman’s Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other Blue Period works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.

Rose Period: 1904–1906

The Rose Period (1904–1906)^[32] is characterised by a lighter tone and style utilising orange and pink colours and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress, in Paris in 1904.^[19] Olivier appears in many of his Rose Period paintings, many of which are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e., just prior to the Blue Period), and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.

By 1905, Picasso became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein and one of her nephew Allan Stein. Gertrude Stein became Picasso’s principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris.^[34] At one of her gatherings in 1905, he met Henri Matisse, who was to become a lifelong friend and rival. The Steins introduced him to Claribel Cone and her sister Etta, who were American art collectors; they also began to acquire Picasso’s and Matisse’s paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy. Michael and Sarah Stein became patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picassos.^[35]

In 1907, Picasso joined an art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German art historian and art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism that they jointly developed. Kahnweiler promoted burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.^[36]

African art and primitivism: 1907–1909

Picasso’s African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The three figures on the left were inspired by Iberian sculpture, but he repainted the faces of the two figures on the right after being powerfully impressed by African artefacts he saw in June 1907 in the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro.^[37] When he displayed the painting to acquaintances in his studio later that year, the nearly universal reaction was shock and revulsion; Matisse angrily dismissed the work as a hoax.^[38] Picasso did not exhibit Les Demoiselles publicly until 1916.

Other works from this period include Nude with Raised Arms (1907) and Three Women (1908). Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Analytic cubism: 1909–1912

Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and «analyzed» them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque’s paintings at this time share many similarities.

In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry and Gertrude Stein. In 1911, Picasso was arrested and questioned about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Suspicion for the crime had initially fallen upon Apollinaire due to his links to Géry Pieret, an artist with a history of thefts from the gallery. Apollinaire in turn implicated his close friend Picasso, who had also purchased stolen artworks from the artist in the past. Afraid of a conviction that could result in his deportation to Spain, Picasso denied having ever met Apollinaire. Both were later cleared of any involvement in the painting’s disappearance.^[39][40]

Synthetic cubism: 1912–1919

Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre of cubism, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage. «Hard-edged square-cut diamonds», notes art historian John Richardson, «these gems do not always have upside or downside».^[41][42] «We need a new name to designate them,» wrote Picasso to Gertrude Stein. The term «Crystal Cubism» was later used as a result of visual analogies with crystals at the time.^[43][41][44] These «little gems» may have been produced by Picasso in response to critics who had claimed his defection from the movement, through his experimentation with classicism within the so-called return to order following the war.^[41][43]

After acquiring some fame and fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva Gouel. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915.^[45]

At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon. Braque and Derain were mobilized and Apollinaire joined the French artillery, while the Spaniard Juan Gris remained from the Cubist circle. During the war, Picasso was able to continue painting uninterrupted, unlike his French comrades. His paintings became more sombre and his life changed with dramatic consequences. Kahnweiler’s contract had terminated on his exile from France. At this point Picasso’s work would be taken on by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. After the loss of Eva Gouel, Picasso had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse. During the spring of 1916, Apollinaire returned from the front wounded. They renewed their friendship, but Picasso began to frequent new social circles.^[46]

Towards the end of World War I, Picasso became involved with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris, and others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Erik Satie’s Parade, in Rome; they spent their honeymoon near Biarritz in the villa of glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz.

After returning from his honeymoon and in need of money, Picasso started his exclusive relationship with the French-Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. As part of his first duties, Rosenberg agreed to rent the couple an apartment in Paris at his own expense, which was located next to his own house. This was the start of a deep brother-like friendship between two very different men, that would last until the outbreak of World War II.

Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and other dimensions of the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo Picasso,^[47] who would grow up to be a motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova’s insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso’s bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev’s troupe, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several drawings of the composer.^[48]

In 1927, Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso’s marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova’s death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter with her, named Maya. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso’s death.

• 

  1909–10, Figure dans un Fauteuil (Seated Nude, Femme nue assise), oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm (36 x 28 in), Tate Modern, London. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

• 

  1910, Woman with Mustard Pot (La Femme au pot de moutarde), oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm (28 x 23 in), Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, Chicago, Boston 1913

• 

  1910–11, Guitariste, La mandoliniste (Woman playing guitar or mandolin), oil on canvas

• 

  1911, The Poet (Le poète), oil on linen, 131.2 × 89.5 cm (51 5/8 × 35 1/4 in), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

• 

  1911–12, Violon (Violin), oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm (39 x 28 in) (oval), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

• 

  1913, Bouteille, clarinet, violon, journal, verre, 55 × 45 cm (21 x 17 in). This painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1921

• 

  1913, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Eva), Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair, oil on canvas, 149.9 × 99.4 cm (59 x 39 in), Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art

• 

  1913–14, L’Homme aux cartes (Card Player), oil on canvas, 108 × 89.5 cm (42 x 35 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York

• 

  1914–15, Nature morte au compotier (Still Life with Compote and Glass), oil on canvas, 63.5 × 78.7 cm (25 × 31 in), Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

• 

  1916, L’anis del mono (Bottle of Anis del Mono), oil on canvas, 46 × 54.6 cm (18 x 21 in), Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

Neoclassicism and surrealism: 1919–1929

In February 1917, Picasso made his first trip to Italy.^[49] In the period following the upheaval of World War I, Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. This «return to order» is evident in the work of many European artists in the 1920s, including André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, Gino Severini, Jean Metzinger, the artists of the New Objectivity movement and of the Novecento Italiano movement. Picasso’s paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Raphael and Ingres.

In 1925 the Surrealist writer and poet André Breton declared Picasso as ‘one of ours’ in his article Le Surréalisme et la peinture, published in Révolution surréaliste. Les Demoiselles was reproduced for the first time in Europe in the same issue. Yet Picasso exhibited Cubist works at the first Surrealist group exhibition in 1925; the concept of ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’ defined in the Manifeste du surréalisme never appealed to him entirely. He did at the time develop new imagery and formal syntax for expressing himself emotionally, «releasing the violence, the psychic fears and the eroticism that had been largely contained or sublimated since 1909», writes art historian Melissa McQuillan.^[50] Although this transition in Picasso’s work was informed by Cubism for its spatial relations, «the fusion of ritual and abandon in the imagery recalls the primitivism of the Demoiselles and the elusive psychological resonances of his Symbolist work», writes McQuillan.^[50] Surrealism revived Picasso’s attraction to primitivism and eroticism.^[50]

• 

  Pablo Picasso, 1918, Portrait d’Olga dans un fauteuil (Olga in an Armchair), Musée Picasso, Paris, France

• 

  Pablo Picasso, 1919, Sleeping Peasants, gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, 31.1 × 48.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art

The Great Depression to MoMA exhibition: 1930–1939

During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso’s Guernica. The minotaur and Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter are heavily featured in his celebrated Vollard Suite of etchings.^[51]

Arguably Picasso’s most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War – Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. Asked to explain its symbolism, Picasso said, «It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.»^[52][53] Guernica was exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, and then became the centerpiece of an exhibition of 118 works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Henri Laurens that toured Scandinavia and England. After the victory of Francisco Franco in Spain, the painting was sent to the United States to raise funds and support for Spanish refugees. Until 1981 it was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, as it was Picasso’s expressed desire that the painting should not be delivered to Spain until liberty and democracy had been established in the country.

In 1939 and 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, under its director Alfred Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major retrospective of Picasso’s principal works until that time. This exhibition lionized Picasso, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.^[54] According to Jonathan Weinberg, «Given the extraordinary quality of the show and Picasso’s enormous prestige, generally heightened by the political impact of Guernica … the critics were surprisingly ambivalent».^[55] Picasso’s «multiplicity of styles» was disturbing to one journalist; another described him as «wayward and even malicious»; Alfred Frankenstein’s review in ARTnews concluded that Picasso was both charlatan and genius.^[55]

World War II and late 1940s: 1939–1949

During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. Picasso’s artistic style did not fit the Nazi ideal of art, so he did not exhibit during this time. He was often harassed by the Gestapo. During one search of his apartment, an officer saw a photograph of the painting Guernica. «Did you do that?» the German asked Picasso. «No,» he replied, «You did.»^[58]

Retreating to his studio, he continued to paint, producing works such as the Still Life with Guitar (1942) and The Charnel House (1944–48). Although the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to him by the French Resistance.^[59]

Around this time, Picasso wrote poetry as an alternative outlet. Between 1935 and 1959 he wrote over 300 poems. Largely untitled except for a date and sometimes the location of where it was written (for example «Paris 16 May 1936»), these works were gustatory, erotic, and at times scatological, as were his two full-length plays, Desire Caught by the Tail (1941), and The Four Little Girls (1949).^[60]

In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Picasso, then 63 years old, began a romantic relationship with a young art student named Françoise Gilot. She was 40 years younger than he was. Picasso grew tired of his mistress Dora Maar; Picasso and Gilot began to live together. Eventually they had two children: Claude Picasso, born in 1947 and Paloma Picasso, born in 1949. In her 1964 book Life with Picasso,^[61] Gilot describes his abusive treatment and myriad infidelities which led her to leave him, taking the children with her. This was a severe blow to Picasso.

Picasso had affairs with women of an even greater age disparity than his and Gilot’s. While still involved with Gilot, in 1951 Picasso had a six-week affair with Geneviève Laporte, who was four years younger than Gilot. By his 70s, many paintings, ink drawings and prints have as their theme an old, grotesque dwarf as the doting lover of a beautiful young model. Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986) worked at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris on the French Riviera, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. She became his lover, and then his second wife in 1961. The two were together for the remainder of Picasso’s life.

His marriage to Roque was also a means of revenge against Gilot; with Picasso’s encouragement, Gilot had divorced her then husband, Luc Simon, with the plan to marry Picasso to secure the rights of her children as Picasso’s legitimate heirs. Picasso had already secretly married Roque, after Gilot had filed for divorce. His strained relationship with Claude and Paloma was never healed.^[62]

By this time, Picasso had constructed a huge Gothic home, and could afford large villas in the south of France, such as Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie on the outskirts of Mougins, and in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. He was an international celebrity, with often as much interest in his personal life as his art.^[63]

Later works to final years: 1949–1973

Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s, Picasso’s style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velázquez’s painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.

In addition to his artistic accomplishments, Picasso made a few film appearances, always as himself, including a cameo in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960). In 1955, he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

He was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. Picasso said the figure represented the head of an Afghan Hound named Kabul.^[64] The sculpture, one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city.

Picasso’s final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 to 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime.^[65][66] Only later, after Picasso’s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see the late works of Picasso as prefiguring Neo-Expressionism.^[67]

Death

Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from pulmonary edema and a heart attack, the morning after he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was interred at the Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.^[68] Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline killed herself by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.^[69]

Political views

Picasso remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it.^[70] He did not join the armed forces for any side or country during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, or World War II. As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either world war. In 1940, he applied for French citizenship, but it was refused on the grounds of his «extremist ideas evolving towards communism». This information was not revealed until 2003.^[71]

At the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Picasso was 54 years of age. Soon after hostilities began, the Republicans appointed him «director of the Prado, albeit in absentia», and «he took his duties very seriously», according to John Richardson, supplying the funds to evacuate the museum’s collection to Geneva.^[72] The war provided the impetus for Picasso’s first overtly political work. He expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco and fascists in The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), which was produced «specifically for propagandistic and fundraising purposes».^[73] This surreal fusion of words and images was intended to be sold as a series of postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause.^[73][74]

In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party. He attended the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government.^[75] A portrait of Joseph Stalin made by Picasso in 1953 drew Party criticism due to being insufficiently realistic, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death.^[72] His dealer, D-H. Kahnweiler, a socialist, termed Picasso’s communism «sentimental» rather than political, saying «He has never read a line of Karl Marx, nor of Engels of course.»^[72] In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso stated: «I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting. … But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics.»^[76] His commitment to communism, common among continental intellectuals and artists at the time, has long been the subject of some controversy; a notable demonstration thereof was a quote by Salvador Dalí (with whom Picasso had a rather strained relationship^[77]):

Picasso es pintor, yo también; … Picasso es español, yo también; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco.

(Picasso is a painter, so am I; … Picasso is a Spaniard, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.)^[78][79][80]

In the late 1940s, his old friend the surrealist poet, Trotskyist,^[81] and anti-Stalinist André Breton was more blunt; refusing to shake hands with Picasso, he told him: «I don’t approve of your joining the Communist Party nor with the stand you have taken concerning the purges of the intellectuals after the Liberation.»^[82]
As a communist, Picasso opposed the intervention of the United Nations and the United States in the Korean War, and depicted it in Massacre in Korea.^[83][84] The art critic Kirsten Hoving Keen wrote that it was «inspired by reports of American atrocities» and considered it one of Picasso’s communist works.^[85]

On 9 January 1949, Picasso created Dove, a black and white lithograph. It was used to illustrate a poster at the 1949 World Peace Council and became an iconographic image of the period, known as «The dove of peace». Picasso’s image was used around the world as a symbol of the Peace Congresses and communism.^[86]

In 1962, he received the Lenin Peace Prize.^[87] Biographer and art critic John Berger felt his talents as an artist were «wasted» by the communists.^[88] According to Jean Cocteau’s diaries, Picasso once said to him in reference to the communists: «I have joined a family, and like all families, it’s full of shit.»^[89]

Style and technique

Picasso was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. At his death there were more than 45,000 unsold works in his estate, comprising 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 3,222 ceramics, 7,089 drawings, 150 sketchbooks, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.^[90] The most complete – but not exhaustive – catalogue of his works, the catalogue raisonné compiled by Christian Zervos, lists more than 16,000 paintings and drawings.^[91] Picasso’s output was several times more prolific than most artists of his era; by at least one account, American artist Bob Ross is the only one to rival Picasso’s volume, and Ross’s artwork was designed specifically to be easily mass-produced quickly.^[92]

The medium in which Picasso made his most important contribution was painting.^[93] In his paintings, Picasso used colour as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of colour to create form and space.^[93] He sometimes added sand to his paint to vary its texture. A nanoprobe of Picasso’s The Red Armchair (1931), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, by physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012 confirmed art historians’ belief that Picasso used common house paint in many of his paintings.^[94][95] Much of his painting was done at night by artificial light.

Picasso’s early sculptures were carved from wood or modelled in wax or clay, but from 1909 to 1928 Picasso abandoned modelling and instead made sculptural constructions using diverse materials.^[93] An example is Guitar (1912), a relief construction made of sheet metal and wire that Jane Fluegel terms a «three-dimensional planar counterpart of Cubist painting» that marks a «revolutionary departure from the traditional approaches, modeling and carving».^[96]

From the beginning of his career, Picasso displayed an interest in subject matter of every kind,^[97] and demonstrated a great stylistic versatility that enabled him to work in several styles at once. For example, his paintings of 1917 included the pointillist Woman with a Mantilla, the Cubist Figure in an Armchair, and the naturalistic Harlequin (all in the Museu Picasso, Barcelona). In 1919, he made a number of drawings from postcards and photographs that reflect his interest in the stylistic conventions and static character of posed photographs.^[98] In 1921 he simultaneously painted several large neoclassical paintings and two versions of the Cubist composition Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art).^[49] In an interview published in 1923, Picasso said, «The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting … If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them.»^[49]

Although his Cubist works approach abstraction, Picasso never relinquished the objects of the real world as subject matter. Prominent in his Cubist paintings are forms easily recognized as guitars, violins, and bottles.^[99] When Picasso depicted complex narrative scenes it was usually in prints, drawings, and small-scale works; Guernica (1937) is one of his few large narrative paintings.^[98]

Picasso painted mostly from imagination or memory. According to William Rubin, Picasso «could only make great art from subjects that truly involved him … Unlike Matisse, Picasso had eschewed models virtually all his mature life, preferring to paint individuals whose lives had both impinged on, and had real significance for, his own.»^[100] The art critic Arthur Danto said Picasso’s work constitutes a «vast pictorial autobiography» that provides some basis for the popular conception that «Picasso invented a new style each time he fell in love with a new woman».^[100] The autobiographical nature of Picasso’s art is reinforced by his habit of dating his works, often to the day. He explained: «I want to leave to posterity a documentation that will be as complete as possible. That’s why I put a date on everything I do.»^[100]

Artistic legacy

Picasso’s influence was and remains immense and widely acknowledged by his admirers and detractors alike. On the occasion of his 1939 retrospective at MoMA, Life magazine wrote: «During the 25 years he has dominated modern European art, his enemies say he has been a corrupting influence. With equal violence, his friends say he is the greatest artist alive.»^[101] Picasso was the first artist to receive a special honour exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris in celebration of his 90 years.^[102] In 1998, Robert Hughes wrote of him: «To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. … No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime. … Though Marcel Duchamp, that cunning old fox of conceptual irony, has certainly had more influence on nominally vanguard art over the past 30 years than Picasso, the Spaniard was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees.»^[103]

At the time of Picasso’s death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Málaga.

The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of his early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal his firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father’s tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabartés, his close friend and personal secretary.

Guernica was on display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981, it was returned to Spain and was on exhibit at the Casón del Buen Retiro of the Museo del Prado. In 1992, the painting was put on display in the Reina Sofía Museum when it opened.

In 1985, a museum was established in Buitrago del Lozoya by Picasso’s friend Eugenio Arias Herranz.^[104]

It was announced on 22 September 2020 that the project for a new Picasso Museum due to open in Aix-en-Provence in 2021, in a former convent (Couvent des Prêcheurs), which would have held the largest collection of his paintings of any museum, had been scrapped due to the fact that Catherine Hutin-Blay, Jacqueline Picasso’s daughter, and the City Council had failed to reach an agreement.^[105]

In the 1996 movie Surviving Picasso, Picasso is portrayed by actor Anthony Hopkins.^[106] Picasso is also a character in Steve Martin’s 1993 play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway tells Gertrude Stein that he would like to have some Picassos, but cannot afford them. Later in the book, Hemingway mentions looking at one of Picasso’s paintings. He refers to it as Picasso’s nude of the girl with the basket of flowers, possibly related to Young Naked Girl with Flower Basket.
On 8 October 2010, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, an exhibition of 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, opened at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, US. The exhibition subsequently travelled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia: the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California, US.;^[107] the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;^[108] and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

As of 2015, Picasso remained the top-ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) according to the Art Market Trends report.^[109] More of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist’s;^[110] in 2012, the Art Loss Register had 1,147 of his works listed as stolen.^[111] The Picasso Administration functions as his official Estate. The US copyright representative for the Picasso Administration is the Artists Rights Society.^[112]

Picasso is played by Antonio Banderas in the 2018 season of Genius which focuses on his life and art.

The Basel vote

In the 1940s, a Swiss insurance company based in Basel had bought two paintings by Picasso to diversify its investments and serve as a guarantee for the insured risks. Following an air disaster in 1967, the company had to pay out heavy reimbursements. The company decided to part with the two paintings, which were deposited in the Kunstmuseum Basel. In 1968, a large number of Basel citizens called for a local referendum on the purchase of the Picassos by the Canton of Basel-Stadt, which was successful, making it the first time in democratic history that the population of a city voted on the purchase of works of art for a public art museum.^[113] The paintings therefore remained in the museum in Basel. Informed of this, Picasso donated three paintings and a sketch to the city and its museum and was later made an honorary citizen by the city.^[114]

Auction history

Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. Garçon à la pipe sold for US$104 million at Sotheby’s on 4 May 2004, establishing a new price record. Dora Maar au Chat sold for US$95.2 million at Sotheby’s on 3 May 2006.^[115] On 4 May 2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie’s for $106.5 million. The 1932 work, which depicts Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter reclining and as a bust, was in the personal collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November 2009.^[116] On 11 May 2015 his painting Women of Algiers set the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting when it sold for US$179.3 million at Christie’s in New York.^[117]

On 21 June 2016, a painting by Pablo Picasso titled Femme Assise (1909) sold for £43.2 million ($63.4 million) at Sotheby’s London, exceeding the estimate by nearly $20 million, setting a world record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a Cubist work.^[118][119]

On 17 May 2017, The Jerusalem Post in an article titled «Picasso Work Stolen By Nazis Sells for $45 Million at Auction» reported the sale of a portrait painted by Picasso, the 1939 Femme assise, robe bleu, which was previously misappropriated during the early years of WWII. The painting has changed hands several times since its recovery, most recently through auction in May 2017 at Christie’s in New York City.^[120]

In March 2018, his Femme au Béret et à la Robe Quadrillée (1937), a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, sold for £49.8m at Sotheby’s in London.^[121]

Personal life

Throughout his life Picasso maintained several mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women:

• Paulo (4 February 1921 – 5 June 1975, Paul Joseph Picasso) – with Olga Khokhlova
• Maya (5 September 1935 – 20 December 2022, Maria de la Concepcion Picasso) – with Marie-Thérèse Walter
• Claude (born 15 May 1947, Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot
• Paloma (born 19 April 1949, Anne Paloma Picasso) – with Françoise Gilot

Photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.

The women in Picasso’s life played an important role in the emotional and erotic aspects of his creative expression, and the tumultuous nature of these relationships has been considered vital to his artistic process. Many of these women functioned as muses for him, and their inclusion in his extensive oeuvre granted them a place in art history.^[122] A largely recurring motif in his body of work is the female form. The variations in his relationships informed and collided with his progression of style throughout his career. For example, portraits created of his first wife, Olga, were rendered in a naturalistic style during his Neoclassical period. His relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter inspired many of his surrealist pieces, as well as what is referred to as his «Year of Wonders».^[123] Reappearance of acrobats theme in 1905 put an end to his «Blue Period» and transitioned into his «Rose Period». This transition has been incorrectly attributed to the presence of Fernande Olivier in his life.^[124]: 75

Picasso has been commonly characterised as a womaniser and a misogynist, being quoted as having said to one of his mistresses, Françoise Gilot, «Women are machines for suffering.»^[125] He later told her, «For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.»^[126] In her memoir, Picasso, My Grandfather, Marina Picasso writes of his treatment of women, «He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.»^[127]

Of the several important women in his life, two, Marie-Thèrése Walter, a mistress, and Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, died by suicide. Others, notably his first wife Olga Khokhlova, and his mistress Dora Maar, succumbed to nervous breakdowns. His son, Paulo, developed a fatal alcoholism due to depression. His grandson, Pablito, also died by suicide that same year by ingesting bleach when he was barred by Jacqueline Roque from attending the artist’s funeral.^[125]

Catalogue raisonné

Picasso entrusted Christian Zervos to constitute the catalogue raisonné of his work (painted and drawn). The first volume of the catalogue, Works from 1895 to 1906, published in 1932, entailed the financial ruin of Zervos, self-publishing under the name Cahiers d’art, forcing him to sell part of his art collection at auction to avoid bankruptcy.^[128][129]

From 1932 to 1978, Zervos constituted the catalogue raisonné of the complete works of Picasso in the company of the artist who had become one of his friends in 1924. Following the death of Zervos, Mila Gagarin supervised the publication of 11 additional volumes from 1970 to 1978.^[130]

The 33 volumes cover the entire work from 1895 to 1972, with close to 16,000 black and white photographs, in accord with the will of the artist.^[131]

• 1932: tome I, Œuvres de 1895 à 1906. Introduction p. XI–[XXXXIX], 185 pages, 384 reproductions
• 1942: tome II, vol.1, Œuvres de 1906 à 1912. Introduction p. XI–[LV], 172 pages, 360 reproductions
• 1944: tome II, vol.2, Œuvres de 1912 à 1917. Introduction p. IX–[LXX–VIII], 233 p. pp. 173 to 406, 604 reproductions
• 1949: tome III, Œuvres de 1917 à 1919. Introduction p. IX–[XIII], 152 pages, 465 reproductions
• 1951: tome IV, Œuvres de 1920 à 1922. Introduction p. VII–[XIV], 192 pages, 455 reproductions
• 1952: tome V, Œuvres de 1923 à 1925. Introduction p. IX–[XIV], 188 pages, 466 reproductions
• 1954: tome VI, Supplément aux tomes I à V. Sans introduction, 176 pages, 1481 reproductions
• 1955: tome VII, Œuvres de 1926 à 1932. Introduction p. V–[VII], 184 pages, 424 reproductions

• 1978: Catalogue raisonné des œuvres de Pablo Picasso, Paris, Éditions Cahiers d’art^[132]

Further publications by Zervos

• Picasso. Œuvres de 1920 à 1926, Cahiers d’art, Paris
• Dessins de Picasso 1892–1948, Paris, Éditions Cahiers d’art, 1949
• Picasso. Dessins (1892–1948), Hazan, 199 reproductions, 1949

See also

• Picasso’s written works
• List of Picasso artworks 1889–1900
  • 1901–1910
  • 1911–1920
  • 1921–1930
  • 1931–1940
  • 1941–1950
  • 1951–1960
  • 1961–1970
  • 1971–1973
• Neoclassicism

Notes and references

Notes

References

Sources

• Becht-Jördens, Gereon; Wehmeier, Peter M. (2003). Picasso und die christliche Ikonographie: Mutterbeziehung und künstlerische Position. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. ISBN 978-3-496-01272-6.
• Berger, John (1989). The Success and Failure of Picasso. Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-679-72272-4.
• Cirlot, Juan Eduardo (1972). Picasso, Birth of a Genius. New York and Washington: Praeger.
• Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 978-1-85437-043-3.
• Daix, Pierre (1994). Picasso: Life and Art. Icon Editions. ISBN 978-0-06-430201-2.
• FitzGerald, Michael C. (1996). Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-century Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20653-3.
• Gether, Christian, ed. (2019). Beloved by Picasso: The Power of the Model. ARKEN Museum of Modern Art. 978-87-78751-34-8.
• Granell, Eugenio Fernández (1981). Picasso’s Guernica: The End of a Spanish Era. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press. ISBN 978-0-8357-1206-4.
• Jackson, Jeffrey B. (2016). «Chronology» in: The Picasso Project: Synthetic Cubism, 1912-1917. Alan Wofsy Fine Arts. ISBN 978-1-55660-332-7.
• Krauss, Rosalind E. (1999). The Picasso Papers. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-61142-8.
• Mallén, Enrique (2003). The Visual Grammar of Pablo Picasso. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-5692-8.
• Mallén, Enrique (2005). La sintaxis de la carne: Pablo Picasso y Marie-Thérèse Walter. Santiago de Chile: Red Internacional del Libro. ISBN 978-956-284-455-0.
• Mallén, Enrique (2009). A Concordance of Pablo Picasso’s Spanish Writings. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-4713-4.
• Mallén, Enrique (2010). A Concordance of Pablo Picasso’s French Writings. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-1325-2. Retrieved 8 October 2010.
• Nill, Raymond M. (1987). A Visual Guide to Pablo Picasso’s Works. New York: B&H Publishers.
• Picasso, Olivier Widmaier (2004). Picasso: The Real Family Story. Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-3149-2.
• Rubin, William (1981). Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective. Little Brown & Co. ISBN 978-0-316-70703-9.
• Wattenmaker, Richard J. (1993). Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-impressionist, and Early Modern. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-40963-2.
• Wertenbaker, Lael Tucker (1967). The World of Picasso (1881– ). Time-Life Books.

Further reading

• Alexandra Schwartz, «Painted Love: The artist Françoise Gilot was Picasso’s lover, helpmate, and muse. Then she wanted more», The New Yorker, 22 July 2019, pages 62–66. «[L]ives were trampled. Picasso died, at the age of ninety-one, in 1973. In 1977, Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself; eight years later, Jacqueline Roque, Gilot’s successor and Picasso’s second wife, shot herself in the head. Paulo, his son with Olga [Khokhlova], drank himself to death, in 1975, and Paulo’s son, Pablito, killed himself by swallowing bleach when he was barred from attending his grandfather’s funeral.» (p. 66.)

External links

• Works by or about Pablo Picasso at Internet Archive
• Works by or about Pablo Picasso in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Picasso discography at Discogs
• Picasso at IMDb
• Picasso in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
• «On-line Picasso Project».
• Picasso at the Guggenheim Museum
• Picasso at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
• Picasso at Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, New York)
• Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York City, New York)
• Musée National Picasso Archived 11 December 2017 at the Wayback Machine (Paris, France)
• Museo Picasso Málaga (Málaga, Spain)
• Museu Picasso (Barcelona, Spain)
• Museo Picasso (Buitrago de Lozoya, Spain)
• Picasso at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC)
• Picasso, L’Esprit nouveau: revue internationale d’esthétique, 1920. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
• W.H. Crain Costume and Scene Design Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

Пикассо, Пабло

Пабло Пикассо
Pablo Picasso
Имя при рождении:	Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Ruíz y Picasso
Дата рождения:	25 октября 1881
Место рождения:	Малага
Дата смерти:	8 апреля 1973 (91 год)
Место смерти:	Мужен
Жанр:	художник, скульптор, график, керамист и дизайнер
Награды:

Па́бло Дие́го Хосе́ Франси́ско де Па́ула Хуа́н Непомусе́но Мари́я де лос Реме́диос Сиприа́но де ла Санти́сима Тринида́д Марти́р Патри́сио Руи́с и Пика́ссо (исп. Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Ruíz y Picasso; 25 октября 1881, Малага, Испания — 8 апреля 1973, Мужен, Франция) — испанский художник, скульптор, график, керамист и дизайнер.

Основоположник кубизма (совместно с Жоржем Браком), в котором трёхплоскостное тело в оригинальной манере рисовалось как ряд совмещённых воедино плоскостей. Пикассо много работал как график, скульптор, керамист, и т. д. Вызвал к жизни массу подражателей и оказал исключительное влияние на развитие изобразительного искусства в XX веке.

Эксперты назвали Пикассо самым «дорогим» художником — в 2008 году объём только официальных продаж его работ составил 262 млн долл.^[1] 4 мая 2010 года картина Пикассо «Обнажённая, зелёные листья и бюст», проданная на аукционе Кристис за 106,482 миллиона долларов стала самым дорогим произведением искусства когда-либо проданным в мире. ^[2].

По результатам опроса 1,4 млн читателей, проведённого газетой The Times в 2009 году, Пикассо был признан лучшим художником среди живших за последние 100 лет. Его полотна стоят на первом месте по «популярности» среди похитителей.^[3]

Детство и годы обучения

Роды были тяжелыми, и ребенок родился настолько слабым, что акушерка посчитала его мертворожденным. Она оставила его на столе и пошла сообщить матери плохую новость. Спасло ребенка везение — его дядя, Don Salvador, курил сигары, и увидев младенца, лежащего на столе, пустил дым ему в лицо. Новорожденный скорчил гримасу и зашелся в плаче. Если бы не курение дяди, Пабло Пикассо мог бы вообще не появиться на свет.

Согласно испанской традиции, его назвали последними именами родителей: отца — Руис и матери — Пикассо. Полное имя, которое будущий художник получил при крещении — Па́бло Дие́го Хосе́ Франси́ско де Па́ула Хуа́н Непомусе́но Мари́я де лос Реме́диос Сиприа́но де ла Санти́сима Тринида́д Марти́р Патри́сио Руи́с и Пика́ссо. Согласно одной из версий, первое слово, которое он произнес, было PIZ, сокращенное от LAPIZ (карандаш по-испански).

Пикассо начал рисовать с самого детства, первые уроки художественного мастерства он получил у своего отца — учителя рисования Хосе Руиса, а вскоре владел им в совершенстве. В 8 лет он пишет свою первую серьёзную картину маслом, Пикадор, с которой он не расставался в течение всей жизни.

В 1891 году дон Хосе получает должность преподавателя рисования в Ла-Корунье, и юный Пабло вместе с семьей переезжает на север Испании. Здесь он учится в местной школе искусств (1894—1895).

Потом семья переезжает в Барселону, и в 1895 год Пикассо поступает в школу изящных искусств Ла-Лонха. Пабло исполнилось только четырнадцать, поэтому он был слишком молод для поступления в Ла-Лонху. Но по настоянию отца он был допущен к сдаче вступительных экзаменов на конкурсной основе. Пикассо с блеском сдает все экзамены и поступает в Ла-Лонху. Сначала он подписывается своим именем по отцу Ruiz Blasco, но затем выбирает фамилию матери — Picasso.

Без сомнения, Пикассо был талантливейшим учеником, намного превосходящим своих одноклассников, которые были на 5-6 лет его старше. Но он очень раздражался, когда преподаватели указывали ему, что делать, и в результате часто находился «под арестом». В школе, где он учился, Пабло часто помещали в особый изолятор — «calaboose». Это была комната с белыми стенами и скамейкой, чтобы сидеть и размышлять о своем поведении. Будущий художник использовал такое «заточение» для рисования, где его никто не отвлекал. По словам художника, он хотел бы никогда не выходить из этой комнаты и рисовать, рисовать…

В начале октября 1897 года Пикассо уезжает в Мадрид, где поступает в Королевскую Академию изобразительных искусств Сан-Фернандо.

В Барселону Пикассо возвращается в июне 1898 года, там он входит в художественное общество «Els Quatre Gats», по названию богемного кафе с круглыми столами. В этом кафе пройдет его первая выставка. В Барселоне он сблизился со своими будущими друзьями Карлосом Касахемасом и Жаиме Субартесом, впоследствии ставшими персонажами его знаменитых полотен.

«Голубой» и «розовый» периоды

В 1900 году Пикассо со своим другом, художником Касахемасом уезжает в Париж. Именно там Пабло Пикассо познакомился с творчеством импрессионистов. Его жизнь в это время была сопряжена со многими трудностями, а самоубийство Карлоса Касахемаса глубоко подействовало на молодого Пикассо.

При этих обстоятельствах в начале 1902 года он начал делать работы в стиле, впоследствии названном «голубым периодом». Стиль этот Пикассо разрабатывает по возвращении в Барселону в 1903—1904 годах. В работах этого периода ярко выражены темы старости и смерти, характерны образы нищеты, меланхолии и печали (Пикассо считал — «кто грустен, тот искренен»); движения людей замедлены, они словно вслушиваются в себя («Любительница абсента», 1901; «Женщина с шиньоном», 1901 г; «Свидание», 1902; «Нищий старик с мальчиком», 1903; «Трагедия», 1903). В палитре мастера преобладают голубые оттенки. Отображая человеческие страдания, Пикассо в этот период рисовал слепых, нищих, алкоголиков и проституток. Их бледные, отчасти удлиненные тела на картинах напоминают работы испанского художника Эль Греко.

Произведение переходного периода — от «голубого» к «розовому» — «Девочка на шаре» (1905, Музей изобразительных искусств, Москва).

В 1904 году Пикассо поселяется в Париже, где находит пристанище в знаменитом монмартрском общежитии для бедных художников Бато-Лавуар: начинается так называемый «розовый период», в котором печаль и нищета «голубого периода» сменилась образами из более живого мира театра и цирка. Художник отдавал предпочтение розово-золотистому и розово-серому тонам, а персонажами стали в основном бродячие артисты — клоуны, танцовщики и акробаты; картины этого периода проникнуты духом трагического одиночества обездоленных, романтической жизни странствующих комедиантов («Семья акробата с обезьяной», 1905).

Любовные приключения Пикассо

Известность и талант манили к художнику множество красивых женщин. Их у него было действительно много. Ниже приведен только короткий список известных жен и любовниц Пикассо.

• Fernande Olivier — первая любовь, ей было 18, ему 23,
• Marcelle Humbert или Eva Gouel (ей 27, ему 31),
• Gaby Lespinasse — известно, что она была очень юной особой, Пабло к тому времени исполнилось 34
• Ольга Хохлова — первая жена, ей было 26, ему 36 лет,
• Marie-Thérèse Walter (ей 17, ему 46 лет),
• Dora Maar (ей 29, ему 55),
• Françoise Gilot (21-61),
• Geneviève Laporte — одна из последних его любовниц, ей было чуть более 20 лет, ему в то время — более 70,
• Jacqueline Roque, вторая жена художника, ей было 34, ему 80 лет.

Ни у одного из великих художников не было столько романов и возлюбленных, сколько у Пабло Пикассо. Однажды он сказал: «К несчастью, а может, и к счастью, я смотрю на вещи через призму любви». Женщины были нужны ему как воздух, они поддерживали огонь его таланта. А потом, как поленья, сами сгорали до угольков, становясь жертвами гения. Первой в этом ряду стала Фернанда Оливье, молодая женщина с весьма пышной фигурой, вдохновившей мастера на создание образа женщины-гитары. Да он, собственно, никогда и не относился к женщинам как к живым существам.

Фернанда стала музой его «розового периода», но ненадолго — вскоре он счел ее слишком скучной, да и внеш­ность поднадоела. Фернанду сменила Ева Гуэль, невеста польского художника Маркуссиса, полная противоположность своей предшественницы — тонкая, хрупкая. Пикассо много рисовал ее, любовался миниатюрностью, которую то и дело подчеркивал. Картина «Женщина, сидящая в кресле» — Ева Гуэль, но какой же маленькой она кажется в этом огромном кресле!

В 1917 году Сергей Дягилев, поражавший Старый Свет своими «Русскими сезонами», пригласил Пикассо оформить балет «Парад». Тогда же художник и познакомился с одной из балерин Дягилева — Ольгой Хохловой. И увлекся. Столь страст­но, что Дягилев даже счел своим долгом предупредить: «Будь осторожен, она русская, а с русскими не шутят, на них женятся!» Пикассо принял правила игры и женился. В этом было столько нового для жадного до ощущений художника — жениться, да еще на русской балерине, на дочери царского генерала! Венчаться с ней по православному обычаю! Эту свадьбу посетило немало знаменитостей: Сергей Дягилев, Гийом Аполлинер, Анри Матисс, Жан Кокто… Став прекрасной моделью и музой для Пикассо, Ольга Хохлова так и не смогла стать ему хорошей женой. Брак Ольги и Пабло не спасло даже рождение сына Поля. Формально Ольга оставалась женой Пикассо до самой своей смерти в 1955 году. До последних дней она атаковала его письмами с упреками в том, что он ее бросил. Ни одного ответа Ольга не дождалась. Не дождалась она от мужа и последнего «прощай» — Пикассо заканчивал картину «Алжирские женщины» и на похороны не приехал…

Художнику было 46 лет, когда дождливым днем он увидел выбегавшую из метро семнадцатилетнюю красотку Мари-Терез Вальтер. Она понравилась ему сразу своей свежестью, юностью. Девушка тут же была приглашена поработать моделью мастера, а всего через три дня стала его любовницей. Удивительно, но их связь, в основе которой лежала только страсть, продержалась почти десять лет.

Marie-Thérèse Walter была моделью для написания картины Le Rêve.

«Если я живу с юной, это помогает и мне оставаться юным…» — любил повторять Пикассо. Очередная его подруга была младше его уже на 40 лет. И стала единственной женщиной, которая бросила его сама. Франсуаза Жило отличалась от прежних любовниц Пикассо еще и тем, что их отношения развивались медленно и тягуче, без напора, присущего гению. Пикассо не только не умел быть верным — он обожал причинять боль прежде любимым женщинам. Желая посмотреть, как преобразится Франсуаза после рождения ребенка, он буквально принудил ее к этому. Сначала родился сын Клод, затем дочь Палома. Но… Изменившая­ся Франсуаза не понравилась художнику. Он стал писать ее, нарочито подчеркивая физические недостатки. Этого Франсуаза стерпеть уже не могла и, забрав детей, ушла от Пикассо. Тот был в шоке: «Ни одна женщина не покидает таких мужчин, как я!»

Ему постоянно была нужна «свежая кровь». И он ее нашел — женщину, которая вознесла его на пьедестал, сделала из него кумира, называла «мой господин» и целовала руки. Разница в возрасте на этот раз достигала 52 года. Ему — 79, ей — 27… Ее звали Жаклин Рок, и ей суждено было стать второй и последней женой Пабло Пикассо, последней музой. Свадьба была сыграна в марте 1961 года и отличалась скромностью — пили только воду, ели суп и курицу, оставшуюся со вчерашнего дня. Разумеется, он и писал ее, и лепил. Как и всех своих женщин, эту, последнюю, он старался запечатлеть как можно в большем количестве произведений искусства. Может, понимая, что ему недолго осталось творить… Его не стало 8 апреля 1973 года. Он скончался в возрасте 92 года, оставив после себя более пятидесяти тысяч картин, рисунков, гравюр, скульптур, произведений керамики.

20 октября 1977 года в средиземноморском городке Жюан-ле-Пэн в гараже собственного дома повесилась Мари-Терез Вальтер. Ее дочь Майя погибла в автокатастрофе вскоре после смерти матери.

15 октября 1986 года в три часа утра застрелилась в своей постели вдова Пикассо Жаклин. Это произошло накануне открытия выставки художника в Мадриде.

Кубизм

От экспериментов с цветом и передачи настроения Пикассо обратился к анализу формы: сознательная деформация натуры («Авиньонские девицы», 1907), односторонняя интерпретация системы Сезанна и увлечение африканской скульптурой приводят его к абсолютно новому жанру. Вместе с Жоржем Браком, которого встретил в 1907 году, Пикассо становится родоначальником кубизма — художественного направления, отвергавшего традиции натурализма и изобразительно-познавательную функцию искусства.

Пикассо уделяет особое внимание превращению форм в геометрические блоки («Фабрика в Хорта де Эбро», 1909), увеличивает и ломает объёмы («Портрет Фернанды Оливье», 1909), рассекает их на плоскости и грани, продолжающиеся в пространстве, которое сам он считает твердым телом, неизбежно ограниченным плоскостью картины («Портрет Канвейлера», 1910). Перспектива исчезает, палитра тяготеет к монохромности, и хотя первоначальная цель кубизма состояла в том, чтобы более убедительно, чем с помощью традиционных приемов, воспроизвести ощущение пространства и тяжести масс, картины Пикассо зачастую сводятся к непонятным ребусам. Чтобы вернуть связь с реальностью, Пикассо и Жорж Брак вводят в свои картины типографский шрифт, элементы «обманок» и грубые материалы — обои, куски газет, спичечные коробки. Начинают преобладать натюрморты, преимущественно с музыкальными инструментами, трубками и коробками из-под табака, нотами, бутылками с вином и т. п. — атрибуты, присущие образу жизни художественной богемы начала века. В композициях появляется «кубистическая тайнопись»: зашифрованные номера телефонов, домов, обрывки имен возлюбленных, названий улиц, кабачков. Техника коллажа соединяет грани кубистической призмы в большие плоскости («Гитара и скрипка», 1913) или передает в спокойной и юмористической манере открытия, сделанные в 1910—1913 («Портрет девушки», 1914). В «синтетический» период появляется также стремление к гармонизации колорита, уравновешенным композициями, которые временами вписываются в овал. Собственно кубистический период в творчестве Пикассо заканчивается вскоре после начала Первой мировой войны, разделившей его с Жоржем Браком. Хотя в своих значительных произведениях художник использует некоторые кубистические приемы вплоть до 1921 («Три музыканта», 1921).

Русский балет

В сентябре 1916 года писатель-сценарист Жан Кокто и композитор Эрик Сати уговаривают Пикассо соучаствовать в постановке новаторского «сюрреалистического» балета «Парад» для «Русского балета» Сергея Дягилева. Пикассо не на шутку увлекается идеей этого балета, втягивается в работу, и в содружестве с Сати полностью переделывает и сценарий, и сценографию. Месяцем позднее он уезжает вместе со всей труппой Русских балетов на два месяца в Рим, где выполняет декорации, костюмы, знакомится с балетмейстером «Парада» Леонидом Мясиным и многими балетными артистами русской труппы. Вступительный манифест к спектаклю «Парад», «…более правдивому, чем сама правда», весной 1917 года написал Гийом Аполлинер, заранее объявив его провозвестником «Нового духа» в искусстве. Дягилев сознательно делал ставку на большую провокацию и готовил её всеми доступными средствами. Произошло именно так, как он намечал. Грандиозный скандал 18 мая 1917 года, состоявшийся на премьере (и единственном представлении) этого балета в театре Шатле немало способствовал подъёму популярности Пикассо в широких кругах парижского бомонда. Публика в зале едва не сорвала спектакль криками «Русские боши, долой русских, Сати и Пикассо боши!» Дело дошло даже до потасовки. Печать неистовствовала, критики объявили «Русский балет» едва ли не предателями, деморализующими французское общество в тылу во время тяжёлой и неудачной войны. Вот только одна из показательных по своему тону рецензий, вышедших на следующий день после премьеры «Парада». Между прочим, автором этой статьи был вовсе не какой-то маргинальный критик, а вполне респектабельный Лео Польдес, владелец картинной галереи «Клуб де Фобур»…

Дягилев остался чрезвычайно доволен произведённым эффектом. Сотрудничество Пикассо с Русскими балетами активно продолжилось и после «Парада» (декорации и костюмы для «Треуголки» Мануэля де Фальи, 1919). Новая форма деятельности, яркие сценические образы и крупные объекты воскрешают в нём интерес к декоративизму и театральности сюжетов.

Во время римской подготовки «Парада» Пикассо познакомился с балериной Ольгой Хохловой, которая стала его первой женой. 12 февраля 1918 года они заключают брак в русской церкви в Париже, свидетелями на их свадьбе были Жан Кокто, Макс Жакоб и Гийом Аполлинер. У них рождается сын Поль (4 февраля 1921 года).

Эйфорическая и консервативная атмосфера послевоенного Парижа, женитьба Пикассо на Ольге Хохловой, успех художника в обществе — все это отчасти объясняет этот возврат к фигуративности, временный и притом относительный, поскольку Пикассо продолжает писать в то время ярко выраженные кубистические натюрморты («Мандолина и гитара», 1924). Наряду с циклом великанш и купальщиц, картины, вдохновленные «помпейским» стилем («Женщина в белом», 1923), многочисленные портреты жены («Портрет Ольги», пастель, 1923) и сына («Поль в костюме Пьеро») являют собой одни из самых пленительных произведений, когда-либо написанных художником, даже при том, что своей слегка классической направленностью и пародийностью они несколько озадачили авангард того времени.

Сюрреализм

В 1925 году начинается один из самых сложных и неровных периодов в творчестве Пикассо. После эпикурейского изящества 1920-х («Танец») Пикассо создает атмосферу конвульсий и истерии, ирреальный мир галлюцинаций, что можно объяснить, отчасти, влиянием поэтов-сюрреалистов, проявившимся в некоторых рисунках, стихотворениях, написанных в 1935, и театральной пьесе, созданной во время войны. На протяжении нескольких лет воображение Пикассо, казалось, могло создавать только монстров, неких разорванных на части существ («Сидящая купальщица», 1929), орущих («Женщина в кресле», 1929), раздутых до абсурда и бесформенных («Купальщица», рисунок, 1927) или воплощающих метаморфические и агрессивно-эротические образы («Фигуры на берегу моря», 1931). Несмотря на несколько более спокойных произведений, которые являются в живописном плане наиболее значительными, стилистически это был весьма переменчивый период («Девушка перед зеркалом», 1932). Женщины остаются главными жертвами его жестоких бессознательных причуд, возможно, потому что сам Пикассо плохо ладил со своей собственной женой или потому что простая красота Марии-Терезы Вальтер, с которой он познакомился в марте 1932 года, вдохновляла его на откровенную чувственность («Зеркало», 1932). Она стала также моделью для нескольких безмятежных и величественных скульптурных бюстов, исполненных в 1932 году в замке Буажелу, который он приобрел в 1930 году. В 1930—1934 годах именно в скульптуре выражается вся жизненная сила Пикассо: бюсты и женские ню, в которых иногда заметно влияние Матисса («Лежащая женщина», 1932), животные, маленькие фигуры в духе сюрреализма («Мужчина с букетом», 1934) и особенно металлические конструкции, имеющие полуабстрактные, полуреальные формы и исполненные порой из грубых материалов (он создает их с помощью своего друга, испанского скульптора Хулио Гонсалеса — «Конструкция», 1931). Наряду с этими странными и острыми формами, гравюры Пикассо к «Метаморфозам» Овидия (1930) свидетельствуют о постоянстве его классического вдохновения.

«Герника» и пацифизм

В 1937 году симпатии Пикассо — на стороне республиканцев, борющихся в Испании (серия акватинт «Мечты и ложь генерала Франко», отпечатанная в виде открыток, разбрасывалась с самолетов над позициями франкистов). В апреле 1937 года немецкая и итальянская авиация бомбила и разрушила небольшой городок басков Герника — культурный и политический центр жизни этого свободолюбивого народа. За два месяца Пикассо создает свою «Гернику» — громадное полотно, которое было выставлено в республиканском павильоне Испании на Всемирной выставке в Париже. Светлые и темные монохромные краски словно передают ощущение от всполохов пожара. В центре композиции, наподобие фриза, в комбинаторике кубистическо-сюрреалистических элементов показаны павший воин, подбегающая к нему женщина и раненая лошадь. Основной теме сопутствуют изображения плачущей женщины с мертвым ребенком и быком за её спиной и женской фигуры в пламени с воздетыми вверх руками. В темноту маленькой площади, над которой висит фонарь, протягивается длинная рука со светильником — символом надежды.

Ужас, охвативший Пикассо перед угрозой варварства, нависшего над Европой, его страх перед войной и фашизмом, художник не выразил прямо, но придал своим картинам тревожную тональность и мрачность («Рыбная ловля ночью на Антибах», 1939), сарказм, горечь, которые не коснулись только лишь детских портретов («Майя и ее кукла», 1938). И вновь женщины стали главными жертвами этого общего мрачного настроения. Среди них — Дора Маар, с которой художник сблизился в 1936 году и красивое лицо которой он деформировал и искажал гримасами («Плачущая женщина», 1937). Никогда ещё женоненавистничество художника не выражалось с такой ожесточенностью; увенчанные нелепыми шляпами, лица, изображенные в фас и в профиль, дикие, раздробленные, рассеченные потом тела, раздутые до чудовищных размеров, а их части соединены в бурлескные формы («Утренняя серенада», 1942). Немецкая оккупация не могла, понятно, испугать Пикассо, который оставался в Париже с 1940 по 1944 год. Она также нисколько не ослабила его деятельности: портреты, скульптуры («Человек с агнцем»), скудные натюрморты, которые порой с глубоким трагизмом выражают всю безысходность эпохи («Натюрморт с бычьим черепом», 1942).

В 1944 году Пикассо становится членом Французской коммунистической партии. Гуманистические воззрения Пикассо проявляются в его работах: в 1950 году он рисует знаменитого «Голубя мира».

После войны

Послевоенное творчество Пикассо можно назвать счастливым; он сближается с молодой Франсуазой Жило, с которой познакомился в 1945 году и которая подарит ему двоих детей, дав таким образом темы его многочисленных очаровательных семейных картин. Он уезжает из Парижа на юг Франции, открывает для себя радость солнца, пляжа, моря. Произведения, созданные в 1945—1955 годах, очень среднеземноморские по духу, характерны своей атмосферой языческой идиллии и возвращением античных настроений, которые находят свое выражение в картинах и рисунках, созданных в конце 1946 года в залах музея Антиб, ставшего впоследствии музеем Пикассо («Радость жизни»).

Осенью 1947 года Пикассо начинает работать на фабрике «Мадура» в Валлорисе; увлеченный проблемами ремесла и ручного труда, он сам выполняет множество блюд, декоративных тарелок, антропоморфных кувшинов и статуэток в виде животных («Кентавр», 1958), иногда несколько архаичных по манере, но всегда полных очарования и остроумия. Особенно важны в тот период скульптуры («Беременная женщина», 1950). Некоторые из них («Коза», 1950; «Обезьяна с малышом», 1952) сделаны из случайных материалов (брюхо козы выполнено из старой корзины) и относятся к шедеврам техники ассамбляжа. В 1953 году Франсуаза Жило и Пикассо расходятся. Это было для художника началом тяжелого морального кризиса, который эхом отдается в замечательной серии рисунков, исполненных между концом 1953 и концом зимы 1954 года; в них Пикассо, по-своему, в озадачивающей и ироничной манере, выразил горечь старости и свой скептицизм по отношению к самой живописи. В 1954 году он встречается с Жаклин Рок, которая в 1958 году станет его женой и вдохновит его на серию статуарных портретов. В 1956 году на французские экраны вышла документальная лента о художнике, «Таинство Пикассо».

Произведения последних пятнадцати лет творчества художника очень разнообразны и не ровны по качеству («Мастерская в Каннах», 1956). Можно, однако, выделить испанский источник вдохновения («Портрет художника, в подражание Эль Греко», 1950) и элементы тавромахии (возможно, потому, что Пикассо был страстным поклонником популярной на юге Франции корриды), выраженные в рисунках и акварелях в духе Гойи (1959—1968). Чувством неудовлетворения собственным творчеством отмечена серия интерпретаций и вариаций на темы знаменитых картин «Девушки на берегу Сены. По Курбе»,1950; «Алжирские женщины. По Делакруа» (1955); «Менины. По Веласкесу» (1957); «Завтрак на траве. По Мане» (1960). Никто из критиков не смог дать удовлетворительного объяснения этим странным, дерзким композициям, даже если они находили свое завершение в действительно превосходных картинах.

Наследие

Пикассо умер 8 апреля 1973 года в Мужене (Франция) на своей вилле Notre-Dame-de-Vie. Похоронен возле принадлежавшего ему замка Вовенарт. Прямо перед самой смертью он сказал фамилию человека, которого сильно уважал: Модильяни.

Музей Пикассо был открыт в Барселоне. В 1960 году близкий друг и помощник Пикассо Хайме Сабартес и Гуаль принимает решение пожертвовать свою коллекцию работ Пикассо и организовать музей Пикассо в городе Барселона. 9 мая 1963 года в готическом дворце Беренгер де Агилар (Berenguer de Aguilar) открылся музей под названием «Коллекция Сабартеса». В настоящее время музей Пикассо (Museu Picasso), занимает пять особняков на улице Монткада — Мека, Беренгер-д’Агилар, Маури, Финестрес и Баро-де-Кастельет. В основе музея, открывшегося в 1968 году, была коллекция друга Пикассо Хайме Сабартеса. После смерти Сабартеса, Пикассо в знак своей любви к городу и в дополнении к огромному завещанию Сабартеса, в 1970 году отдал в музей около 2450 работ (полотен, гравюр и рисунков), 141 работу из керамики. Более 3500 работ Пикассо составляют постоянную коллекцию музея.

В 1985 году музей Пикассо был открыт и в Париже (отель Сале); сюда вошли работы, переданные наследниками художника, — более 200 картин, 158 скульптур, коллажи и тысячи рисунков, эстампов и документов, а также личная коллекция Пикассо. Новые дары наследников (1990) обогатили парижский музей Пикассо, Городской музей современного искусства в Париже и несколько провинциальных музеев (картины, рисунки, скульптуры, керамика, гравюры и литографии). В 2003 году Музей Пикассо был открыт в его родном городе Малаге.

Лауреат Международной Ленинской премии «За укрепление мира между народами» (1962).

Пикассо оказал громадное влияние на художников всех стран, став одним из самых известных мастеров в искусстве XX века.

Цитаты

• Я могу рисовать как Рафаэль, но мне понадобится вся жизнь, чтобы научиться рисовать так, как рисует ребенок.^[4]

• Если хочешь сохранить глянец на крыльях бабочки, не касайся их.

• Бог — такой же художник, как другие художники.

• И среди людей больше копий, чем оригиналов.

• Дайте мне музей, и я заполню его.

• Художественное течение побеждает только тогда, когда его берут на вооружение декораторы витрин.

• Художник — это человек, который пишет то, что можно продать. А хороший художник — это человек, который продает то, что пишет.

Интересные факты

В 2006 году владелец казино Steve Wynn согласился продать полотно Le Rêve за 139 миллионов долларов, но по неосторожности продавил полотно локтем до того, как сделка была завершена.

Периодизация

Перечень картин, написанных Пикассо, соответственно периодам его творчества

Ранний период

«Пикадор», 1889 г
«Первое причастие», 1895—1896 г
«Босоногая девочка. Фрагмент», 1895 г
«Автопортрет», 1896 г
«Портрет матери художника», 1896 г
«Знание и милосердие», 1897 г
«Матадор Луис Мигель Доминген», 1897 г
«Лола, сестра Пикассо», 1899 г
«Испанская пара перед гостиницей», 1900 г

«Голубой» период

«Любительница абсента», 1901 г
«Склонившийся Арлекин», 1901 г
«Женщина с шиньоном», 1901 г
«Смерть Касагемаса», 1901 г
«Автопортрет в голубой период», 1901 г
«Портрет торговца картинами Педро Манача», 1901 г
«Любительница абсента», 1901 г
«Женщина в голубой шляпе», 1901 г
«Женщина с сигаретой», 1901 г
«Гурман», 1901 г
«Абсент», 1901 г
«Свидание (Две сестры)», 1902 г
«Голова женщины», 1902—1903 г
«Старый гитарист», 1903 г
«Завтрак слепого», 1903 г
«Жизнь», 1903 г
«Трагедия», 1903 г
«Портрет Солера», 1903 г
«Нищий старик с мальчиком», 1903 г
«Аскет», 1903 г
«Женщина с вороной», 1904 г
«Каталонский скульптор Маноло (Мануэль Хуго)», 1904 г
«Гладильщица», 1904 г

«Розовый» период

«Девочка на шаре», 1905 г
«В кабаре Лапин Агиль или Арлекин с бокалом», 1905 г
«Сидящий на красной скамье Арлекин», 1905 г
«Акробаты (Мать и сын)», 1905 г
«Девушка в сорочке», 1905 г
«Семейство комедиантов», 1905 г
«Два брата», 1905 г
«Два юноши», 1905 г
«Акробат и молодой Арлекин», 1905 г
«Фокусник и натюрморт», 1905 г
«Дама с веером», 1905 г
«Девочка с козлом», 1906 г
«Крестьяне. Композиция», 1906 г
«Обнаженный юноша», 1906 г
«Стеклянная посуда», 1906 г
«Мальчик, ведущий лошадь», 1906 г
«Туалет», 1906 г
«Стрижка», 1906 г
«Автопортрет с палитрой», 1906 г

«Африканский» период

«Портрет Гертруды Стайн», 1906 г
«Авиньонские девицы», 1907 г
«Автопортрет», 1907 г
«Обнаженная женщина (погрудное изображение)», 1907 г
«Танец с покрывалами», 1907 г
«Голова женщины», 1907 г
«Голова мужчины», 1907 г

Кубизм

«Сидящая женщина», 1908 г
«Дружба», 1908 г
«Зелёная миска и чёрная бутылка», 1908 г
«Горшок, бокал и книга», 1908 г
«Бидон и миски», 1908 г
«Цветы в сером кувшине и бокал с ложкой», 1908 г
«Фермерша», 1908 г
«Дриада», 1908 г
«Три женщины», 1908 г
«Женщина с веером», 1908 г
«Две обнажённые фигуры», 1908 г
«Купание», 1908 г
«Букет цветов в сером кувшине», 1908 г
«Портрет Фернарды Оливье», 1909 г
«Хлеб и ваза с фруктами на столе», 1909 г
«Женщина с мандолиной», 1909 г
«Мужчина со скрещенными руками», 1909 г
«Женщина с веером», 1909 г
«Обнаженная», 1909 г
«Ваза, фрукты и бокал», 1909 г
«Молодая дама», 1909 г
«Завод в Хорта де Сан Хуан», 1909 г
«Обнаженная», 1910 г
«Портрет Даниэла-Генри Кавейлера», 1910 г
«Натюрморт с плетеным стулом», 1911—1912 г
«Скрипка», 1912 г
«Обнажённая, Я люблю Еву», 1912 г
«Ресторан: Индейка с трюфелями и вином», 1912 г
«Бутылка перно (столик в кафе)», 1912 г
«Музыкальные инструменты», 1912 г
«Харчевня (Ветчина)», 1912 г
«Скрипка и гитара», 1913 г
«Кларнет и скрипка», 1913 г
«Гитара», 1913 г
«Картёжник», 1913—1914 г
«Композиция. Ваза фруктов и разрезанная груша», 1913—1914 г
«Ваза для фруктов и гроздь винограда», 1914 г
«Портрет Амбруаза Воллара», 1915 г
«Арлекин», 1915 г
«Полишенель с гитарой перед занавесом», 1919 г
«Три музыканта или музыканты в масках», 1921 г
«Три музыканта», 1921 г
«Натюрморт с гитарой», 1921 г

«Классический» период

«Портрет Ольги в кресле», 1917 г
«Эскиз постановки для балета „Парад“», 1917 г
«Арлекин с гитарой», 1917 г
«Пьеро», 1918 г
«Купальщицы», 1918 г
«Натюрморт», 1918 г
«Натюрморт с кувшином и яблоками», 1919 г
«Натюрморт», 1919 г
«Спящие крестьяне», 1919 г
«Гитара, бутылка, ваза с фруктами и бокал на столе», 1919 г
«Три танцовщицы», 1919—1920 г
«Группа танцовщиц. Ольга Хохлова лежит на переднем плане», 1919—1920 г
«Хуан-ле-Пэн», 1920 г
«Портрет Игоря Стравинского», 1920 г
«Чтение письма», 1921 г
«Мать и ребенок», 1922 г
«Женщины, бегущие по пляжу», 1922 г
«Классическая голова», 1922 г
«Портрет Ольги Пикассо», 1922—1923 г
«Деревенский танец», 1922—1923 г
«Детский портрет Поля Пикассо», 1923 г
«Любовники», 1923 г
«Свирель Пана», 1923 г
«Сидящий Арлекин», 1923 г
«Мадам Ольга Пикассо», 1923 г
«Мать Пикассо», 1923 г
«Ольга Хохлова, первая жена Пикассо», 1923 г
«Поль в костюме Арлекина», 1924 г
«Поль в костюме Пьеро», 1925 г
«Три грации», 1925 г

Сюрреализм

«Танец», 1925 г
«Купальщица, открывающая кабинку», 1928 г
«Обнажённая на пляже», 1929 г
«Обнажённая на пляже», 1929 г
«Обнажённая на пляже», 1929 г
«Обнаженная в кресле», 1929 г
«Акробат», 1930 г
«Распятие», 1930 г
«Фигуры на пляже», 1931 г
«Девушка, бросающая камень», 1931 г
«Обнажённая и натюрморт», 1931 г
«Обнажённая в кресле», 1932 г
«Натюрморт — бюст, чаша и палитра», 1932 г
«Женщина с цветком», 1932 г

Война. Герника

«Герника», 1937 г
«Плачущая женщина», 1937 г
«Раненая птица и кот», 1938 г
«Ночная рыбалка на Антибах», 1939 г
«Натюрморт с бычьим черепом», 1942 г
«Склеп», 1944—1945 г
«Натюрморт», 1945 г

После войны

«Портрет Франсуазы», 1946 г
«Женщина в кресле I», 1948 г
«Клод, сын Пикассо», 1948 г
«Женщина с зелеными волосами», 1949 г
«Палома и Клод, дети Пикассо», 1950 г
«Палома с целлулоидной рыбой», 1950 г
«Франсуаза Жило с Клодом и Паломой», 1951 г
«Франсуаза, Клод и Палома», 1951 г
«Рыцарь, паж и монах», 1951 г
«Портрет Сильветт», 1954 г

Поздние работы

«Жаклин Рок», 1954 г
«Жаклин Рок», 1955 г
«Палома Пикассо», 1956 г
«Мастерская „Калифорнии“ в Каннах», 1956 г
«Жаклин в студии», 1956 г
«Голуби», 1957 г
«Менины. По Веласкесу», 1957 г
«Жаклин Рок», 1957 г
«Король Минотавров», 1958 г
«Монолитная обнаженная», 1958 г
«Обнаженная в кресле», 1959 г
«Обнаженная в кресле с бутылкой воды Эвиан, стаканом и туфлями», 1959 г
«Жаклин де Вовенарг», 1959 г
«Вовенарг в дождь», 1959 г
«El Bobo», 1959 г
«Обнаженная королева амазонок со служанкой», 1960 г
«Жаклин», 1960 г
«Портрет сидящей женщины», 1960 г
«Завтрак на траве. По Мане», 1960 г
«Завтрак на траве. По Мане», 1961 г
«Женщина», 1961 г
«Насилие над Сабинианками», 1962—1963 г
«Художник и модель», 1963 г
«Обнаженная, сидящая в кресле 2», 1965 г
«Обнаженные мужчина и женщина», 1965 г
«Серенада», 1965 г
«Писающая», 1965 г
«Мужчина, мать и ребенок II», 1965 г
«Портрет Жаклин», 1965 г
«Сидящий мужчина (Автопортет)», 1965 г
«Спящая», 1965 г
«Художник и модель», 1965 г
«Рисующая обнаженная в кресле», 1965 г
«Бюст бородатого мужчины», 1965 г
«Серенада», 1965 г
«Голова мужчины», 1965 г
«Обнаженная, сидящая в кресле 1», 1965 г
«Кошка и омар», 1965 г
«Пейзаж. Мужен. 1», 1965 г
«Модель в ателье 3», 1965 г
«Сидящая обнаженнная женщина», 1965 г
«Голова женщины», 1965 г
«Художник в шляпе», 1965 г
«Модель в ателье 1», 1965 г
«Голова бородатого мужчины», 1965 г
«Бюст мужчины», 1965 г
«Подруги», 1965 г
«Голова женщины», 1965 г
«Модель в ателье 3», 1965 г
«Голова женщины», 1965 г
«Омар и кошка», 1965 г
«Два обнаженных мужчины и сидящий ребенок», 1965 г
«Бюст матадора 1», 1970 г
«Бюст женщины 1», 1970 г
«Мужчина с усами», 1970 г
«Бюст женщины 2», 1970 г
«Голова мужчины 2», 1970 г
«Персонаж», 1970 г
«Мужчина и женщина с букетом», 1970 г
«Объятия», 1970 г
«Портрет мужчины в серой шляпе», 1970 г
«Двое», 1973 г

Галерея

Примечания

Литература

• Костеневич А. «Дриада». Генезис и смысл картины Пикассо // Вестник истории, литературы, искусства. Отд-ние ист.-филол. наук РАН. М.: Собрание; Наука. Т. 1. 2005. C. 118—131.

Ссылки

• Музей Пикассо (Париж)
• Музей Пикассо в Малаге

• Русскоязычный сайт о Пабло Пикассо
• Интересные статьи про Пабло Пикассо, а так же его картины
• Пабло Пикассо. Картины и биография
• Биография Пикассо на peoples.ru
• 3600 картин и рисунков Пабло Пикассо на gallerix.ru
• Картины Пикассо
• Галерея картин Пабло Пикассо
• Pablo Picasso: A Virtual Art Gallery
• Pablo Picasso — Zoomable Paintings
• Пабло Пикассо Сайт

Pablo Picasso: biography

Pablo Picasso is a Spanish painter, the founder of cubism. In 2009 The Times named him the most famous artist of the 20th century.

The future genius was born on October 25, 1881, in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region. Father José Ruiz was a painter. Ruiz did not become famous for his work, so he had to get a job of a curator at the local museum of fine art. Mother María Picasso y López belonged to the wealthy family of grape plantation owners, but from childhood, she felt the need, because her father left the family and moved to America.

When José and María had their first child, he was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, a series of names honoring various saints and relatives. Later, two more girls, Dolores and Conchita, were born in the family. But the mother loved them less than her son.

The boy was very handsome and talented. At the age of 7, he began to help his father in drawing. At age 13, José allowed his son to paint an unfinished sketch and was very surprised by Pablo’s skills. Later, his father gave the boy all his materials and gave up painting.

Study

The same year, the young man entered the Barcelona Academy of Art. It was difficult for Pablo to persuade the officials at the academy that he would be a worthy professional student. Three years later, the young student gained enough experience to transfer to Madrid’s prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where he studied the techniques of Spanish artists Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and El Greco for six months. There, Picasso created the painting The First Communion, Self-portrait, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.

The young painter failed to study at the institution due to his restive nature and frivolous life, so, having given up studies, Pablo began to live on his own. At that time, his close friend was also an obstinate American student, Carlos Casagemas. They often visited Paris.

Their first trips were devoted to the study of the painting by Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin, as well as ancient Phoenician, Egyptian frescoes, Japanese engravings. The young people made acquaintance not only with Bohemians but also with wealthy collectors.

Career

At that time, Pablo began to sign his works with the pseudonym of Picasso, his mother’s maiden name. In 1901, a tragedy happened that left an imprint on the artist’s work. His friend Carlos committed suicide because of unrequited love. In memory of this event, Pablo created a series of paintings that usually belong to the first Blue Period.

The blue and grey colors of the pictures can be explained not only by the depressed state of the young man but also by the lack of money for the oil painting with other shades. Picasso created the works Portrait of the Poet Sabartes, The Meeting, The Tragedy, Old Jew and a Boy. All pictures are permeated with a sense of anxiety, despair, fear, and grief. The drawing technique had angular and frayed brushes, and the perspective drawing is replaced by flat figures that took on thickness and weight.

In 1904, despite the lack of money, Pablo Picasso decided to move to the capital of France, where new experiences and events awaited him. The move gave impetus to the second period of the artist’s work, which is usually called «Rose.» The place of Pablo Picasso’s residence influenced the optimistic mood of the paintings and their storyline greatly.

Many performers of Circus Medrano, located at the edge of Montmartre, were the artist’s models. For two years, he created a whole series of paintings The Actor, Seated Female Nude, Young Woman in a Shirt, Mother and Child, Acrobats, Family of Saltimbanques. In 1905, he painted the most significant canvas of this period Acrobat on a Ball. Eight years later, the Russian philanthropist, I. A. Morozov, acquired the painting and brought it to Russia. In 1948, he exhibited Acrobat on a Ball in the Pushkin Museum, where it is located nowadays.

The artist gradually changed the ordinary depiction of nature, developing modernism in his works using basic geometric shapes that showed the depicted object. Picasso developed a new direction intuitively when he created a portrait of his admirer and patron Gertrude Stein.

At the age of 28, Picasso created the picture Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a proto-Cubist work. The portrait, which depicted beautiful nude women, received a massive wave of criticism, but Pablo Picasso continued to develop this direction.

Since 1908, he painted Cans and Bowls, Three Women, Woman with a Fan, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, Factory in Horta de Sant Joan, Portrait of Fernande Olivier, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Still Life with Chair Caning, Bottle of Pernod, Violin and guitar. New works are characterized by the increase of the image size, approaching abstractionism. Finally, despite the notoriety, Pablo Picasso began to earn well because the new style pictures made a profit.

In 1917, Pablo Picasso had the opportunity to cooperate with the Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Jean Cocteau offered the master of ballet to take the Spanish artist as a scene painter and costume designer. To work there, Picasso moved to Rome, where he met his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballerina and the daughter of an expatriate officer.

The light period of life was reflected in the artist’s work. For a while, Picasso moved from cubism and created some canvases in classical realism style. First of all, this is Portrait of Olga in the Armchair, Bathers, Two Women Running on the Beach, Portrait of Paul Picasso as a Child.

Surrealism

Pablo Picasso was tired of the life of a wealthy bourgeois, and later returned to his former bohemian lifestyle. The turning point was marked by the creation in 1925 of the first picture in a surrealistic style The Dance. Distorted figures of dancers, the feeling of pain were the artist’s painting characteristics for a long time.

Dissatisfaction with personal life was reflected in Picasso’s misogynistic paintings The Mirror, Girl before a Mirror. In the 1930s, Pablo was interested in making sculptures. He created such works as Seated Woman, Man with a Lamb. One of the artist’s experiments was the illustrations and engravings for the books by Ovid and Aristophanes.

War period

Pablo Picasso lived in Paris during the Spanish revolution and World War II. In 1937 the artist painted the picture Guernica in black and white on the order of the Spanish Government for the Paris International Exposition. A small town in northern Spain was utterly wiped out in the spring of 1937 by the Germans. The people’s tragedy was reflected in the generalized characters of a deceased warrior, a bereft mother, the people who were cut to pieces. Picasso’s symbol of the war was a bull, Minotaur, with large indifferent eyes. Since 1992, the canvas has been exhibited in the Museum of Madrid.

In the late 1930s, he created the pictures Night Fishing at Antibes, The Weeping Woman. During the war, Picasso did not emigrate from Paris occupied by the German army. The artist continued to work even in poor living conditions. He depicted death and war in his paintings Still Life with Bull’s Skull, The Serenade», Massacre and the sculpture Man with a Lamb.

Post-war period

The paintings of the postwar period depict the joy of life again. The colorful and bright images were rendered in the cycle of life-affirming pictures that Picasso created for a private collection in collaboration with artists Paloma and Claude.

Picasso’s favorite theme of this period was ancient Greek mythology. Not only the paintings of the master but also ceramics, his new passion, embodied it. In 1949, the artist painted the picture Dove of Peace for the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace. The master also created works in the style of cubism based on the pictures by Velázquez, Goya, Manet.

Personal life

From a young age, Picasso was always in love with anyone. In his youth, the models and dancers became the girlfriends and muses of the beginning artist. Young Pablo Picasso was in love for the first time while studying in Barcelona. The girl’s name was Rosita del Oro, and she worked in a cabaret. In Madrid, the artist met Fernande, who was his faithful friend for several years. In Paris, the young man met slim Marcelle Humbert, known as Eva, but her sudden death separated the lovers.

When he worked in Rome with a Russian ballet troupe, Pablo Picasso met Olga Khokhlova. They married in a Russian church on the outskirts of Paris and then moved to a mansion on the beach. The woman’s fortune, as well as Picasso’s income, allowed the family to live like the wealthy bourgeois. Three years after the wedding, Olga gave birth to their first son, Paulo.

Soon Picasso satiated of the good life and became a free artist again. He began living separately from his wife and dating a young girl, Marie-Thérèse Walter. In 1935, they had a daughter, Maya, but Picasso did not illegitimate her.

During the war, a Yugoslav citizen and photographer, Dora Maar, became the next muse of the master. She helped the artist to find new forms and content. Dora is known as the owner of an extensive collection of paintings by Picasso, which she kept until her death. It was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.

After the war, the artist met Françoise Gilot, who brought joy in his work. They had children: son Claude and daughter Paloma. But in the early 1960s, Jacqueline left the master because of his constant betrayals. An ordinary saleswoman, Jacqueline Roque, who idolized Pablo and had a significant influence on his social circle, became the last muse and second official wife of the 80-year-old artist. 13 years after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline could not stand the separation and committed suicide.

Death

In the 1960s, Picasso devoted his time to the creation of female portraits. The last wife, Jacqueline Roque, was the artist’s model. By the end of his life, Pablo Picasso already had a multi-million fortune and several mansions.

Three years before the death of the genius, the museum was opened and named after him in Barcelona, and 12 years after his death, the museum was founded in Paris. For his long creative biography, Picasso created 80 000 paintings, more than 1000 sculptures, collages, drawings, gravures.

On April 8, 1973, the heart of the 92-year-old genius stopped beating because of pulmonary edema.

Artworks

• The First Communion, 1895—1896
• Acrobat on a Ball, 1905
• Harlequin Sitting on a Red Couch, 1905
• Young Woman in a Shirt, 1905
• Family of Saltimbanques, 1905
• Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906
• Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
• Young Woman, 1909
• Mother and Child, 1922
• Guernica, 1937
• The Weeping Woman, 1937
• Francoise, Claude and Paloma, 1951
• Man and Woman in Bouquet, 1970
• The Embrace, 1970
• Man and Woman, 1973

Photo

пикассо — перевод на английский

Показать ещё примеры для «picasso»…

I

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— [in limited contexts] the most advanced [NP];

— everything in place X is state-of-the-art.

♦ Снимок с последней вещи Пикассо. Его лишь недавно привезла из Парижа Экстер. Последнее слово французской живописи (Лившиц 1). It’s a photograph of Picasso’s latest painting. Exter had just brought it from Paris. The last word in French painting (1a).

II

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— the final word (say).

♦ Получается впечатление, что упрямый Чернышевский как бы желает иметь последнее слово в споре… (Набоков 1). One gets the impression that the stubborn Chernyshevski wants to have the last word in the quarrel. (1a).

♦…В отношении самого Мансурова… — последнее слово было за ней [Ириной Викторовной], а не за ним: ехать ли ему на курорт или не ехать, а если ехать -то когда; надевать тот или этот костюм на официальный прием; идти к врачу или не ходить… (Залыгин 1)….In anything concerning Mansurov, she [Irina Viktorovna] always had the final say: whether he should go to a health resort or not, and if so, when; which suit he should wear for the coming official function; whether or not he should see a doctor… (1a).

2. the defendant’s statement made directly prior to the pronouncement of the verdict:

— final plea.

♦…Я твердо знал, что не только следствие от меня ничего не услышит, легче умру; что не только суда не признаю, отвод ему дам в начале, весь суд промолчу, лишь в последнем слове их прокляну; — но уверен я был, что и низменному тюремному положению наших политических не подчинюсь (Солженицын 2). I…knew for certain that not only would the interrogators get nothing at all out of me (I would die first), not only would I refuse to recognize the court, ignore it from the start, remain silent throughout (except for the curse I would put on them in my concluding statement)-I was quite sure, too, that in jail I would not accept the humiliations to which Soviet political prisoners are subjected (2a).

♦ В последнем слове я сказал [суду], что испытываю чувство безнадежности, тем, что я говорю, просто пренебрегают, — если меня осуждают за слова, то должны принимать мои слова всерьез (Амальрик 1). In my final plea, I told the court I was nearly overcome by a feeling of hopelessness when I realized that everything I said was simply ignored, that if I was to be judged by what I said, then what I said should be taken seriously (1a).