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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 25, 1881
Malaga, Spain
145 years ago
Pablo Picasso, the Spanish painter, sculptor, and printmaker born on October 25, 1881, whose restless invention dominated the art of the twentieth century.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in the Andalusian port of Malaga on October 25, 1881. According to the story he liked to tell, the midwife took him for stillborn and left him on a table, until an uncle, a doctor, revived him with a puff of cigar smoke in the face. His father, Jose Ruiz Blasco, was a painter and drawing teacher who specialized in pigeons. The boy could draw before he could talk properly, and family legend holds that his father, seeing what his son could do at thirteen, handed over his own brushes and gave up painting.
He was admitted to the advanced classes of the Barcelona art school at fourteen, completing the entrance work in a day. By nineteen he had made his first trip to Paris, and in 1904 he settled there for good. He would live in France for the rest of his life, signing his work with his mother's less common surname.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Guernica, the mural-sized painting Picasso made in 1937 in response to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, perhaps the most famous antiwar image ever created.
His early years in Paris were poor and productive. The suicide of a close friend in 1901 ushered in the somber Blue Period, with its gaunt beggars and mothers, followed by the warmer Rose Period of acrobats and harlequins. Then, in 1907, he painted a large canvas of five nudes with faces like Iberian carvings and African masks, their bodies broken into jagged planes. Even his friends were appalled by Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and he kept it rolled up in his studio for years. It is now regarded as the starting gun of modern art. Working in daily contact with the French painter Georges Braque, he went on to develop Cubism, which abandoned the single viewpoint that had governed Western painting since the Renaissance and showed objects from several angles at once.
He never stayed put. Cubism gave way to collage, then to a monumental neoclassical manner, then to work close to Surrealism, along with sculpture, ceramics, stage design, and thousands of prints. On April 26, 1937, German and Italian aircraft supporting General Franco bombed the Basque market town of Guernica. Picasso, who had been commissioned to produce a mural for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, painted his response in about five weeks: a huge composition in black, white, and gray, more than twenty-five feet wide, of screaming figures, a gored horse, and a mother with a dead child. He refused to let it go to Spain while Franco ruled. It hung for decades in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and reached Madrid only in 1981.
Picasso spent the German occupation in Paris, joined the French Communist Party in 1944, and lived out his long later life in the south of France, wealthy, world-famous, and endlessly productive. He is thought to have made tens of thousands of works. His personal life was less admirable. He was domineering and often cruel toward the women who shared his life, several of whom suffered greatly, and that record has become a larger part of how he is discussed. He died at Mougins on April 8, 1973, at ninety-one, reportedly after a dinner with friends.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Picasso changed the basic assumptions of Western art. With Cubism he and Braque broke the link between painting and a fixed point of view. Abstract art, collage, and much of modern design follow from that step.
Guernica set the standard for art as political witness. The painting has become a universal symbol of the suffering of civilians in war. A tapestry copy hangs outside the United Nations Security Council chamber.
He defined the modern idea of the artist as celebrity. Prolific, rich, photographed, and quoted, Picasso was the first painter to become a global public figure in his own lifetime. The current reassessment of his treatment of women is part of a wider debate about how to weigh great work against private conduct.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 25, 1881, a baby in Malaga was almost given up for dead. He grew up to take painting apart and put it back together several times over, and to paint the twentieth century's most famous protest against war. He worked nearly every day until he died at ninety-one.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
— Pablo Picasso, in an interview published in The Arts, 1923
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Pablo Picasso, his Blue and Rose Periods, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the invention of Cubism, and the story behind Guernica?
