The Picasso myth

Also known as: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso, Pablo Ruiz, Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Quick Facts
In full:
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso
Also called (before 1901):
Pablo Ruiz or Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Born:
October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain
Died:
April 8, 1973, Mougins, France (aged 91)

After World War II an aura of myth grew up around the name of Picasso, and in the last decades of his life his work had, in a sense, moved beyond criticism. Although there were few critics able to keep pace with his latest work, there were few who attacked him. One exception was the British critic John Berger (The Success and Failure of Picasso [1965]), who raised questions about Picasso’s economic motives and speculated about his inflated public reputation. Picasso’s enormous output (especially in printing and drawing) kept his name before the public, even though his work seemed at the time to be far-from-mainstream nonfigurative imagery. For example, in the series that characterized the working methods of his late years, he used figurative imagery to weave a kind of narrative within each series’ numerous variations.

In 1953 Françoise Gilot with their two children left Picasso, and he spent several years as a bachelor, dividing his time between Paris and his home at La Californie, near Cannes (from 1955). In 1953 he met Jacqueline Roque, who worked in the pottery shop in Vallauris, and from 1954 (they married in 1961) she not only became his steadfast companion, but also, as his muse, she became the principal image and source of inspiration for practically all of the late work. They are both buried in the castle at Vauvenargues, which Picasso purchased in 1958. But the years from their marriage to Picasso’s death they spent in the villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie at Mougins.

History of art

In his late work Picasso repeatedly turned toward the history of art for his themes. He seemed at times obsessed with the need to create variations on the works of earlier artists; thus, in his many prints, drawings, and paintings of that period, reference is made to artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer, Édouard Manet, Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, and Gustave Courbet. Repeatedly Picasso did a complete series of variations on one particular work, the most famous being perhaps the series on Las Meninas of Velázquez consisting of 58 discrete pictures. At times Picasso reworked a specific work because he identified personally with it. For example, he was attracted to Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger because the figure on the right bore resemblance to Jacqueline. More often he seemed moved by the challenge to rework in his own way the complex pictorial and narrative problems the older artists had originally posed for themselves. In a sense Picasso was writing himself into the history of art by virtue of such an association with a number of his predecessors.

There is a renewed sense of play in the work of Picasso’s later years. He transformed paper cutouts into monumental sculptures, and in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film Le Mystère Picasso (1956), the artist, the sole star, behaves like a conjurer, performing tricks with his brush. And finally, just as he turned to the paintings of earlier masters, redoing their works in many variations, so he turned to his own earlier oeuvre, prompted by the same impulse. The circus and the artist’s studio became once again the stage for his characters, among whom he often placed himself portrayed as an old acrobat or king.

Legacy

Because Picasso’s art from the time of the Demoiselles was radical in nature, virtually no 20th-century artist could escape his influence. Moreover, whereas other masters such as Henri Matisse or Braque tended to keep within certain stylistic boundaries, Picasso continued to be an innovator into the last decade of his life. That led to misunderstanding and criticism both in his lifetime and since, and it was only in the 1980s that his last paintings began to be appreciated both in themselves and for their profound influence on the rising generation of young painters. Since Picasso was able from the 1920s to sell works at very high prices, he could keep most of his oeuvre in his own collection. At the time of his death he owned some 50,000 works in various media from every period of his career, a selection of which passed into possession of the French state and the rest to his heirs. Their exhibition and publication served to reinforce the highest estimates of Picasso’s astonishing powers of invention and execution over a span of more than 80 years.

Marilyn McCully The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Quick Facts
Date:
1920 - 1939
Significant Works:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Top Questions

What was Surrealism and its goal?

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How are Surrealism and Dada related?

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Who first used the word Surrealism?

Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Characteristics

In the poetry of Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, and others, Surrealism manifested itself in a juxtaposition of words that was startling because it was determined not by logical but by psychological—that is, unconscious—thought processes. Surrealism’s major achievements, however, were in the field of painting. Surrealist painting was influenced not only by Dadaism but also by the fantastic and grotesque images of such earlier painters as Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya and of closer contemporaries such as Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico, and Marc Chagall. The practice of Surrealist art strongly emphasized methodological research and experimentation, stressing the work of art as a means for prompting personal psychic investigation and revelation. Breton, however, demanded firm doctrinal allegiance. Thus, although the Surrealists held a group show in Paris in 1925, the history of the movement is full of expulsions, defections, and personal attacks.

Surrealist artists

With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content. The work of major Surrealist painters is too diverse to be summarized categorically. Each artist sought his or her own means of self-exploration. Some single-mindedly pursued a spontaneous revelation of the unconscious, freed from the controls of the conscious mind, while others, notably the Catalan painter Joan Miró (though he never officially joined the group), used Surrealism as a liberating starting point for an exploration of personal fantasies, conscious or unconscious, often through formal means of great beauty.

A range of possibilities falling between the two extremes can be distinguished. At one pole, exemplified at its purest by the works of the French artist Jean Arp, the viewer is confronted with images, usually biomorphic, that are suggestive but indefinite. As the viewer’s mind works with the provocative image, unconscious associations are liberated, and the creative imagination asserts itself in a totally open-ended investigative process. To a greater or lesser extent, the German artist Max Ernst, French painter André Masson, and Miró also followed this approach, variously called organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism.

At the other pole the viewer is confronted by a world that is completely defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: fully recognizable, realistically painted images are removed from their normal contexts and reassembled within an ambiguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework. The work aims to provoke a sympathetic response, forcing the viewer to acknowledge the inherent “sense” of the irrational and logically inexplicable. The most direct form of this approach was taken by Belgian artist René Magritte in simple but powerful paintings such as that portraying a normal table setting that includes a plate holding a slice of ham, from the center of which stares a human eye. Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, French painter Pierre Roy, and Belgian artist Paul Delvaux rendered similar but more complex alien worlds that resemble compelling dreamlike scenes.

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Britannica Quiz
Ultimate Art Quiz

French-born American painter Yves Tanguy’s style was somewhere between the two poles. He often painted with painstaking detail ambiguous forms, which resemble marine invertebrates or sculpturesque rock formations, and set them in barren, brightly lit landscapes that have an infinite horizon.