Like an avenging angel invading the capital of high culture, Pablo Picasso came to Paris to confront the establishment and write himself across the face of modernity. He viewed art as a way of recreating himself, and invented -- only to...
[more]Like an avenging angel invading the capital of high culture, Pablo Picasso came to Paris to confront the establishment and write himself across the face of modernity. He viewed art as a way of recreating himself, and invented -- only to later shed -- any number of artistic styles.
The young Picasso was first drawn to Barcelona, where he hung out with a crowd of anarchists and Symbolists. His melancholic Blue period began there, lasting until around 1904, when he moved permanently to Paris and changed his palette to rose. Although these early paintings show scenes of desolation and vulnerability, the artist himself adeptly worked the system without much sign of insecurity, making contacts with wealthy collectors such as Gertrude Stein. He was also assembling ideas, with Georges Braque and others, for the great breakthrough of his life -- Cubism.
The shocking and earth-shattering painting that announced Cubism's arrival was "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907), in which five female nudes are arranged for the viewer's inspection. Each is depicted in the massive, geometric mode of Cubism, and three bear the faces of African masks. The work challenged classical notions of beauty, bourgeois sexuality, and progress in one fell swoop.
As Cubism evolved, Picasso remained the dynamo at its center. Diego Rivera described meeting him in 1913: "Will and energy blazed from his round black eyes. His black, glossy hair was cut short like the hair of a circus strong man...My friends and I were absorbed for hours, looking at his paintings." The advent of war, however, dispersed the avant-garde circle. Left in a void, Picasso exchanged Cubism for a kind of neo-classical Surrealism, a language of personal symbols drawn from mythology; foremost among these symbols was the minotaur. Half man, half beast, emblem of erotic violence, and an obvious link to the bull in Spanish culture, this figure points to the destructive potential of Picasso's machismo -- a theme that reverberates in his paintings of visually dissected women.
Picasso's prolific output extended into every medium and idiom, from the prehistoric to the Dadaist. For some, his talent became diffuse, and even his "Guernica" (1937), a memorial to the victims of the Spanish Civil War, has been critiqued as impersonal. Yet his feverish output of work made him the Vulcan of modern art, constantly at the forge creating new weapons.
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