Picasso. Victoria Charles
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Prepares a new exhibition of his most recent works for the Palais des Papes in Avignon.
1973: Exhibition of 156 engravings at Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris. 8 April: Picasso dies at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins. Buried on 10 April in the grounds of the Château de Vauvenargues.
The works of Picasso published in the present volume cover those early periods which, based on considerations of style, have been classified as Steinlenian (or Lautrecian), Stained Glass, Blue, Circus, Rose, Classic, “African”, Proto-Cubist, Cubist… From the viewpoint of the “science of man”, these periods correspond to the years 1900–1914, when Picasso was between nineteen and thirty-three, the time which saw the formation and flowering of his unique personality.
Study of a Nude seen from the Back
1895
oil on wood, 22.3 × 13.7 cm
Museo Picasso, Barcelona
But a scientific approach to Picasso’s œuvre has long been in use: his work has been divided into periods, explained both by creative contacts and reflections of biographical events. If Picasso’s work has for us the general significance of universal human experience, this is due to the fact that it expresses, with the most exhaustive completeness, man’s internal life and all the laws of its development.
Academic Study
c. 1895–1897
oil on canvas, 82 × 61 cm
Museo Picasso, Barcelona
Only by approaching his œuvre in this way can we hope to understand its rules, the logic of its evolution, the transition from one putative period to another.
Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to the artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours tracing his first pictures in the sand.
Portrait of the Artist’s Father
1896
oil on canvas and cardboard, 42.3 × 30.8 cm
Museo Picasso, Barcelona
This early self-expression held the promise of a rare gift.
Málaga must be mentioned, for it was there, on 25 October 1881, that Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born and there that he spent the first ten years of his life. Málaga was the cradle of his spirit, the land of his childhood, the soil in which many of the themes and images of his mature work are rooted.
First Communion
1896
oil on canvas, 166 × 118 cm
Museo Picasso, Barcelona
He first saw a picture of Hercules in Málaga’s municipal museum, witnessed bullfights on the Plaza de Toros, and at home watched the cooing doves that served as models for his father.
The young Pablo drew all of this and by the age of eight took up brush and oils to paint a bullfight. As for school, Pablo hated it from the first day and opposed it furiously.
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother
1896
pastel on paper, 19.5 × 12 cm
Museo Picasso, Barcelona
In 1891, financial difficulties forced the Ruiz Picasso family to move to La Coruña, where Pablo’s father was offered a position as teacher of drawing and painting in a secondary school. La Coruña had a School of Fine Arts. There the young Pablo Ruiz began his systematic studies of drawing and with prodigious speed completed (by the age of thirteen!) the academic Plaster Cast and Nature Drawing Classes.
Self-Portrait
1896
oil on canvas, 32.7 × 23.6 cm
Museo Picasso, Barcelona
What strikes one most in his works from this time is not so much the phenomenal accuracy and exactitude of execution as what the young artist introduced into this frankly boring material: a treatment of light and shade that transformed the plaster torsos, hands and feet into living images of bodily perfection overflowing with poetic mystery.
The Embrace
1900
oil on cardboard, 52 × 56 cm
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
He did not, however, limit his drawing to the classroom; he drew at home, all the time, using whatever subject matter was at hand: portraits of the family, genre scenes, romantic subjects, animals. In keeping with the times, he “published” his own journals – La Coruña and Azul y Blanco (Blue and White) – writing them by hand and illustrating them with cartoons.
Woman Reading
1900
oil on cardboard, 56 × 52 cm
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
At home, under his father’s tutelage during his last year in La Coruña, Pablo began to paint live models in oils (see Portrait of an Old Man and Beggar in a Cap).
These portraits and figures speak not only of the early maturity of the thirteen-year-old painter, but also of the purely Spanish nature of his gift: a preoccupation with human beings, whom he treated with profound seriousness and strict realism, uncovering the monolithic and “cubic” character of these images.
Le Moulin de la Galette
1900
oil on canvas, 90.2 × 117 cm
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Justin K. Thannhauser Foundation, New York
That is the way in which Picasso expressed how much his work was intertwined with his life; he also used the word “diary” with reference to his work. D.-H. Kahnweiler, who knew Picasso for over sixty-five years, wrote: “It is true that I have described his œuvre as “fanatically autobiographical”.
Frenzy
1900
pastel, 47.5 × 38.5 cm
private collection
That is the same as saying that he depended only on himself, on his Erlebnis. He was always free, owing nothing to anyone but himself.” Indeed, everything convincingly shows that if Picasso depended on anything at all in his art, it was the constant need to express his inner state with the utmost fullness.
Pierrot and a Dancer
1900
oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm
private collection
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