Embedded Files
The Art of Picasso: War and Peace
The Art of Picasso: War and Peace
POSTED SEPTEMBER 18, 2022
"I stand for life against death. I stand for peace against war!" – Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) was one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. Associated with pioneering Cubism, alongside Georges Braque, he also invented collage and made major contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism. He saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics. With his bold shapes and characteristic angles, the Spanish artist captured everything "from the horrors of war to the boundless possibilities of the human form." Even those unfamiliar with modern art can likely identify a few of his best-known paintings.
In the next several posts, we'll examine some aspects of his work. Today we start with his "war and peace" paintings.
War
War was a defining preoccupation of the artist, whose long lifespan stretched from the Cuban War of Independence (which broke out in 1895, when he was just 14 years old) to the Vietnam War, which ended two years after the artist’s death in 1973.
Picasso’s early Cubist collages, including "A Bottle and a Newspaper" from 1912 (below left) and "Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar, and Newspaper (below right), incorporate clippings from newspapers that chronicle the accelerating tensions in the Balkans - tensions that would shortly escalate into World War I, one of the most senseless wars in human history.
One of Picasso's most famous paintings is the massive mural, Guernica. Painted to protest the Fascist bombing of the civilian population of that small town, it is perhaps the most moving and powerful antiwar painting in Western art.
On July 18, 1936, right-wing Spanish military officers in Spanish Morocco revolted against the elected leftist Republican government. The rebellion, which became the Spanish Civil War, spread quickly to mainland Spain. General Francisco Franco led the revolt of what came to be known as the Nationalist faction. The Nationalists proposed the Basque village of Guernica to the German Nazis and Italian Fascists as a target to test the concept of aerial bombardment of cities. The city was annihilated.
When the attack occurred, Picasso was struggling to create a large mural for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. The mural had been commissioned by the Republican government in Spain hoping to gain support for their cause. Picasso read an account of the bombing of Guernica and immediately abandoned his original approach for the mural. He began work on Guernica and finished the painting, which is more than 11' tall and more than 25' wide, in 35 days.
It was returned to Spain from the Museum of Modern Art in New York some years after the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco - Picasso having stipulated that the painting not be returned to Spain until democracy was re-established there. It now resides at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
You can read the full Guernica post, which includes an analysis of the famous painting, here.
In his depictions of war, Picasso could be more subtle than Guernica, as in Night Fishing at Antibes, or more blunt, as in Massacre in Korea.
In the former, the scale of the painting (nearly 7 ft high and more than 11 ft long) has suggested to some that this is more than just an idyllic beach tableau from an August night in 1939. The interspersion of black throughout the scene, the almost ritualistic killing of the fish and the strange moon that may or may not be an ancient symbol of death have suggested to some that the painting reflects the rising political tensions just prior to the outbreak of World War II.
In the latter, Picasso's stark representation of the Sinch’on massacres during the Korean War, a desperate huddle of three women and five children await imminent execution by a lock-step squad of automatons that encroaches from the right – dreary drones whose smooth cyborg skin and weird weaponry are the stuff of nightmares. Picasso's work from 1951 is drawn from Francisco Goya's painting The Third of May 1808, which shows Napoleon's soldiers executing Spanish freedom fighters in a similar tableau.
Peace
Born in Spain, Pablo Picasso lived in France - first in Paris and then on the Riviera - for more than 70 years until his death in 1973. He refused to return to Spain while Franco was alive. And, he stayed in France even after the center of the modern art world had moved from Paris to New York.*
Picasso was fiercely anti-fascist and antiwar and, especially for a Spaniard of his generation, an anti-racist. Unsurprisingly, he embarked on several projects and many works celebrating peace and freedom.**
"War and Peace" was one of Picasso's largest projects, a themed output of hundreds of paintings and preparatory drawings. The drawing below is also sometimes referred to as Head or Head of a Woman and was just one artwork from this extensive War and Peace series of the early 1950s. She looks quite a lot like someone you could have seen on the streets of Haight-Ashbury a quarter of a century later.***
Picasso also produced a series of murals, themed on War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy's novel, for a chapel in Vallauris, Southern France. His most recognizable "peace" work is, of course, "La Colombe" ("The Dove") [below]. As a symbol of peace, a dove carrying an olive branch dates back to early Christian times. Picasso's sketch was chosen as the symbol for the World Peace Council in Paris in 1949 and became a symbol of the peace movement in the post-war years.
More of Picasso's peace-themed works, accompanied by music, are in the marvelous video below from Coffey Line YouTube channel.
Notes
* Because he was a member of the French Communist party, Pablo Picasso was never allowed to visit the United States. The fascist wars of the mid-twentieth century, the Spanish Civil War and WWII, led him, like many Europeans of his generation, to become communists.
**Picasso: Peace and Freedom was the name of a major exhibition in 2010 at the Tate Liverpool. “Picasso: Peace and Freedom” looks at Picasso’s work between 1944, when he joined the French Communist Party, and his death in 1973. It shows him as an artist who recorded the brutality of war and worked through his art, and in his life, for peace.
***The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. One of several songs celebrating this was "San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)."
Sources: The Art Story - 1, CNN, BBC Culture, The Left Bank Café, The Guardian, Peace News
The Art of Picasso: Cubism
The Art of Picasso: Cubism
POSTED NOVEMBER 1, 2022
Although Pablo Picasso painted in many different styles, he is most closely associated with Cubism, a movement that he founded with Georges Braque in the early 20th century. Ground-breaking artists had already begun the move towards non-representational and "modern" art in the preceding decades, and Cezanne, in particular, was an inspiration for the Cubists. Indeed, Picasso has been credited with the line, "Cezanne is the father of us all."
Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin: The Origins of Modern Art
Cubism, as its name implies, uses geometric shapes and patterns to represent a specific form. Cubist painters rejected the notion that art should copy nature or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modelling, and foreshortening. They emphasized the two-dimensional aspect of the canvas instead of creating an illusion of depth. This was done by breaking a picture down into its geometric components; almost as if reducing its essence to a series of lines and angles. By breaking down objects into different planes, the artists showed different points of view at the same time, in the same space, suggesting their three-dimensional form while also pointing to the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas.
In his early works from his teenage years, Pablo Picasso showed a mastery of the conventional representational art of that time. As he entered his 20's, he began to embrace eclectic and revolutionary styles that would dominate his long and varied career.
The untimely death of his close friend Carlos Casagemas triggered a long-lasting depression and soon led to his "Blue Period" between 1901 and 1904. During this time, he painted essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. Gradually, intrigued by the abundance of unusual characters and the liveliness of Paris, he emerged from this depressive state. From the fall of 1904 until 1906, his Rose Period, Picasso painted a variety of different people, both beautiful and ugly, young and adult, and returned the artist to the world of slightly transformed, but real forms, dimensions and spaces; paintings were once again filled with life as opposed to the characters of the Blue Period.
The next step in Picasso's artistic development, from 1906 to 1909, was his African Period. He first encountered archaic African art at the Ethnographic Museum exhibition in Trocadero. The primitive idols, statues and masks and their generalized form embodied the mighty forces of nature, from which primitive man did not distance himself.
This African art appealed to him and the period directly preceded his Cubist phase. Picasso monumentalized and simplified these shapes, making his characters look like wooden or stone idols. Characters’ faces started to resemble ritual masks. Rough shading on the picturesque planes, reproducing the notches on the African sculptures is another borrowing from the battery of the ancient masters.
His most famous painting from the African Period and widely considered to be the first example of Cubist painting is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies from Avignon). It depicts five naked women composed of flat, splintered planes whose faces were inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space they inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards, while a slice of melon in the still life at the bottom of the composition teeters on an upturned tabletop.
As Picasso and Braque developed the Cubist methods and features, Cubism evolved. The early period of Analytical Cubism (1908-1912) featured works that dissected the subject, viewpoint-by-viewpoint, resulting in a fragmentary image of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes. Other distinguishing features of analytical cubism were a simplified palette of colors and the density of the image at the center of the canvas.
The next period, called Synthetic Cubism, began c. 1912 when the artists started adding textures and patterns to their paintings, experimenting with collage using newspaper print and patterned paper. Analytical cubism was about breaking down an object (like a bottle) viewpoint-by-viewpoint, into a fragmentary image; whereas synthetic cubism was about flattening out the image and sweeping away the last traces of allusion to three-dimensional space.
Seated Nude (below left) is an example of Analytical Cubism from Picasso's work ; Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle (below right), of Synthetic Cubism.
Though World War I halted much of the Cubist movement in 1914, Picasso carried his distinct style into later phases of his artwork, including Three Musicians from 1921 (below left), Girl Before a Mirror (below right) from 1932, and Guernica from 1937.
Sources: PabloPicasso.Net, Artland, pablo-ruiz-picasso.net -1, pablo-ruiz-picasso.net - 2, MOMA, Tate -1, Tate -2, Artlex, Eikipedia
The Art of Picasso: the Blue Period
The Art of Picasso: the Blue Period
POSTED DECEMBER 13, 2022
No other painter has so explicitly used color to express his emotions as Pablo Picasso did during his Blue (1901-1904) and Rose (1904-1906) Periods. In this post, we examine Picasso's Blue Period.
In his Blue Period, Picasso painted essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, flattened forms, and emotional, psychological themes of human misery and alienation related to the work of such artists as Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. These somber works, inspired by Spain but painted in Paris, seemed to reflect his sympathy for the marginalized and poor as well as his own experience of poverty and instability. Depicting beggars, street urchins, the old and frail and the blind, they are now some of his most popular works.
During his Blue Period, Picasso suffered through a bout of depression that was triggered by the suicide of a close friend. While an art student in Spain, Picasso met another art student, a young Catalan named Carlos Casagemas. Sharing a studio in Barcelona, the two became the best of friends and, in the summer of 1900, they traveled together to Paris. While there, Casagemas became infatuated with a woman named Germaine, who unfortunately did not return his affections.
The painful rejection sent Casagemas into a serious depression. He drank, he used morphine, and he relied even more heavily on the support of his friend Picasso. Unable to support themselves, the two returned to Spain. Still pining over Germaine, Casagemas' behavior worsened, and, after a stopover in Barcelona, Casagemas returned to Paris without Picasso.
At the end of a dinner party at l'Hippodrome restaurant in Paris on Feb. 17, 1901, twenty-year-old Carlos Casagemas shot himself in the head. Years later Picasso recalled, "I started painting in blue when I learned of Casagemas's death."
Painted in 1903, La Vie ("Life") memorializes his friend.
The painting is complicated and puzzling. But as Picasso once told author Antonina Vallentin, "A painting, for me, speaks by itself, what good does it do, after all, to impart explanations? A painter has only one language, as for the rest ..." Picasso reportedly finished the sentence with a shrug.
The male figure represents Casagemas. His left leg taking a step forward, and his left finger is making a pointing gesture. Picasso, in other words, made his friend "active", perhaps undefeated even in death. Picasso gave him a devoted female figure leaning close against him, likely something Casagemas never experienced in life. Picasso also placed Casagemas with a family unit, the maternal love of a mother and baby.
"For all the countless works of art created over hundreds of years, only a select few have the power to thoroughly mesmerize, confound, and psychologically challenge the observer. Even fewer have the ability to temporarily divorce everyone from their firmly-held artistic preferences and transcend personal biases. They stand on their own merits, as independent artistic entities. Picasso's 1903 Blue Period masterpiece La Vie is one such rarity."
One of the most significant paintings from the Blue Period is The Disinherited Ones. It is an example of a more universal suffering, that of the downtrodden. Many of Picasso's works from the Blue Period focus on the marginalized and the poor. Many of his works are of mother and child. Picasso combines both themes in The Disinherited Ones.
"Picasso’s maternity scenes from this time, as well the other figures from the Blue Period, reveal the heavy personal, social and psychological burden of the characters. The flesh of the figures in The Disinherited Ones once again humanizes achieving excellent luminosity thanks to the use of white pastel touches. This live flesh contrasts with the expressionless faces, where the striking gaze of the black round eyes charged with the enveloping indifference and resignation of the marginal world jump out. With her disproportionately large hand – fruit of an El Greco affectation present in some of his figures – the mother shields her child in protection from the harsh winter cold."
The most famous work from Picasso's Blue Period is The Old Guitarist. Not likely to be on the market anytime soon, this iconic painting, on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, is valued in the range of $100 million.
The elongated, angular figure of the blind musician also relates to Picasso’s interest in Spanish art and, in particular, the great 16th-century artist El Greco. The image reflects the twenty-two-year-old Picasso’s personal struggle and sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden; he knew what it was like to be poor, having been nearly penniless during all of 1902.
The Old Guitarist was painted in late 1903-early 1904. The painting was both a metaphor for the human condition and an advocate for marginalized people. Although Picasso uses form and color to express feelings of grief and sorrow, within the painting there is an element of hope.
A bony old man in torn clothes is sitting on the ground, cradling his guitar in a way that makes it seem sacred. Enthralled by the sound of his guitar, he may momentarily forget about his pain and hunger. The guitar gives him hope. The hope The Old Guitarist evokes is itself a thing of beauty. Laboring over this painting, the artist demonstrated his own sense of hope in a moment of darkness.
Sources: PabloPicasso.org -1, Art Institute of Chicago, Art in Context, Washington Post, PabloPicasso.org - 2
The Art of Picasso: the Rose Period
The Art of Picasso: the Rose Period
POSTED FEBRUARY 12, 2023
A depressed Pablo Picasso had been traveling between Paris and Spain during the three years following the suicide of his good friend, Carlos Casagemas. During this time, his Blue Period, Picasso painted monochromatic works of flattened forms with emotional and psychological themes of human misery and alienation in shades of blue and blue-green.
In 1904, he settled in the Montmartre district of Paris where he made the acquaintance of the bohemian artists and poets who congregated at the Bateau-Lavoir. In 1904, he also met Fernande Olivier, his first "muse" and his model for more than 60 paintings. These happy relationships helped Picasso break free from his depressed state, and he changed his style of painting. Picasso's Rose Period (1904-1906) paintings employ cheerful vivid hues of red, orange, pink and earth tones. Harlequins, circus performers and clowns appear frequently in the Rose Period and will populate Picasso's paintings at various stages through the rest of his long career.
His Rose Period style begins to lead a life of its own, in the expressionistic spirit of his time: it's not the subject and its content that matters most, but the painting itself. Picasso goes on to experiment in a style that renders his subjects anonymous, resulting in an artistic matrix of a person, rather than a person. [Seated Female Nude (1905) below left]. It was Picasso's first step in the direction of abstract art.
Even more importantly for his developing style was the fluency of line that he was beginning to achieve.
"Although the painting Family of Acrobats with Monkey (1905) [below center] is quite classical in style, its line is as suggestive as Picasso's later, more abstract work. This subtlety of line is Picasso's unique contribution to expressionism. In general one can say that there is a trade-off between subtlety and expression, and the directness of expressionism seems crude to the classicist. During his career, Picasso would continue to explore how to combine expressionism with classicism, a process for which he laid the basis in his Rose Period." [pablopicasso.org]
In May 2004, a painting from the Rose Period, "Boy with a Pipe" [below right] became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction when an anonymous buyer purchased it for $104.1 million at a Sotheby auction. The oil on canvas painting depicts a teenage Parisian boy holding a pipe in his left hand and wearing a garland or wreath of flowers. The boy apparently hung around Picasso's studio and volunteered to pose for the oil work. Picasso's own comments about the boy were that he was one of the "local types, actors, ladies, gentlemen, delinquents... He stayed there, sometimes the whole day. He watched me work. He loved that." The painting remains in private hands, but has since been surpassed many times over as the most expensive painting ever sold.
The Rose Period marked an important turning point in Picasso's art. It was the last period in which his paintings are predominantly representational, and it was during the Rose Period that Picasso would begin to develop the unique style that made him the greatest painter of the 20th century.
Sources: Pablo Picasso's Rose Period, Picasso's Rose Period - Wikipedia
The art of Picasso: the African Period
The art of Picasso: the African Period
POSTED MARCH 28, 2023
In the spring of 1907, Pablo Picasso's visit to a rundown Paris museum with poorly displayed artifacts taken from the continent of Africa would change Western art forever.
The museum's depressed state almost caused him to leave, but the artifacts there ignited something deep inside 25 year old Pablo Picasso.
“I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all those objects that people had created with a sacred and magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown and hostile forces that surrounded them, thereby trying to overcome their fears, giving them color and shape. And then I understood what painting really meant. It is not an aesthetic process, it is a form of magic that stands between us and the hostile universe, a means of taking power, imposing a form on our terrors as well as our wishes. The day I understood that, I found my way.”
Emerging from his Rose Period, Pablo Picasso had been looking for something to inspire his growth as an artist. He found it that day at the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology. The experience would not only put an end to Picasso's representational artwork but would lead directly to Cubism, the art movement founded by Picasso and Georges Braque.
With Picasso leading the way, African art aesthetics became a source of inspiration for the School of Paris*, which had been searching for new and radical ways of representation. Picasso saw in African figuration a religious depth and ritual purpose that both startled and moved him. Its sophisticated use of flat planes and bold contouring was unlike anything the artist had encountered before. Unlike Western art, these objects had been created with function, rather than art in mind. While their function varied depending on region and religion, they played (and in many cases, continue to play) an important role in ceremonies and rituals celebrating religion, social status, and rite of passage.
The masterwork that was the culmination of Picasso's African Period, Les Demoiselles d' Avignon, is considered to be the work that inspired the Cubist movement. Before Picasso started his African Period, he came into the possession of some ancient Iberian sculptures. In Les Demoiselles d'Avignon the faces of the three women on the left are based on the Iberian sculptures. So as to avoid compositional monotony, Picasso based the faces of the two women on the right on the African totem art, that he had also collected.
The final oil painting, which stands nearly two and a half meters high and just over two meters wide, depicts five women, possibly brothel workers, with faceted, angular bodies. [below left]
Below right are details of the faces of two of the women's faces side-by-side with a Wooden Dan face mask and with a Mbanga mask, Central Pende, Bandundu, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Picasso continued to develop a style derived from African art before beginning the Cubism phase of his painting in 1910. Other works of Picasso's African Period include the Bust of a Woman (1907, in the National Gallery, Prague); Mother and Child (Summer 1907, in the Musée Picasso, Paris); Nude with Raised Arms (1907, in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain); and Three Women (Summer 1908, in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg).
For more about the relationship between African ast and Picasso's famous works, see the post from The Collector website in the sidebar.
Painted the year after Les Demoiselles, Picasso's Trois Femmes (Three Women) [below left] takes another major step towards Cubism. The painting shows both a simplification of the human body to basic geometric forms and a novel approach to representing the figure in space. Rather than depicting the figures as independent forms in an open spatial environment, Picasso’s women form an interlocking whole, fitting together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. It is just a short hop from Trois Femmes to Picasso's clearly Cubist painting of a Girl with a Mandolin [below center]
Note: *Before World War I, a group of expatriates in Paris created art in the styles of Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism. The group included artists like Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Piet Mondrian. Associated French artists included Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. Picasso and Matisse have been described as the twin leaders of the so-called School of Paris before the war.
Sources: Smart History, The Collector, PabloPicasso.org, Liquisearch, Wikipedia
Google Sites
Report abuse