Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso's widely reported lifestyle, his wealth and womanizing, and his meticulously documented method of working are legendary; his face has become a mythic symbol of the artist for millions around the world. Likewise, his immediately recognizable paintings, readymades, sculptures, and ceramics virtually stand for modern art. Reproductions of Picasso and his works decorate everything from college dormitory walls to neck ties, coffee cups, flatware, and umbrellas. Protean, bold, a daring experimentalist, and technical master, Picasso stands as the indisputable genius of twentieth-century art.

The process that transforms artworks into commodities reaches its most dizzying heights in the case of Picasso. His paintings, etchings, pottery, sketches, indeed, anything he scribbled upon brought small fortunes even as he produced them. For those who could not afford the real thing, there existed an endless supply of reproductions and imitations long before museum bookshops began covering all variety of consumer items with his images. Art writer and novelist John Berger has written that by the early 1950s Picasso transcended the need for money because "whatever he wished to own, he could acquire by drawing it." The explanation for this incredible reality lay in the technological advances of the era's developing mass media—and the ability of the creative genius Picasso to harness them for an unprecedented experiment in self-promotion. In this, as in so much of his work, Picasso created the model that would generate endless variations. Celebrities of all sorts continue to take cues from his life. He invited expert photographer friends into his studio to capture his eccentric and expansive lifestyle. He constantly reworked stories of his creative influences and accomplishments for sympathetic writers. He painted with specially designed inks before a film crew for the popular 1955 movie The Mystery of Picasso, a setting tailor-made to showcase his particular artistic style. The film presents Picasso in all his glory: not meticulous or painterly, but dynamic and mercurial, as if he were a channel through which the Absolute Spirit delivered messages from on high. In fact, his story is one of his masterpieces. His biography has become the archetypal tale of modern genius, inspiring countless fictional and real-life imitations.

Born Pablo Ruiz Picasso in Málaga, Spain, Picasso was accepted into the senior course at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona when he was 14 years old. He exhibited his works at the Els Quatre Gats gallery five years later. He moved from Barcelona to Paris in 1904 and spent the decade or so thereafter living as an impoverished émigré on the crooked streets of Montmartre, meeting interesting women and enjoying the easy camaraderie of the so-called Picasso Gang of soon-to-be-great men. In 1906 collectors Gertrude and Henri Stein and art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler began to buy Picasso's paintings. In 1919 Picasso moved forever away from his famously bohemian lodgings to a lavish apartment in one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris. Soon he was a millionaire and one of the first super-star celebrities of the modern era. He was hounded by the press, which he courted and castigated in ritual fashion. He was the subject of tell-all bestsellers written by his beautiful ex-lovers Fernande Olivier and Francoise Gilot. His family and friends made a cottage industry of his life. In the face of all this, he hid behind the curtain of his wealth, retreating to a series of fenced-off villas in the south of France. Estranged from his family and surrounded finally by more sycophants and curiosity-seekers than friends, Picasso nevertheless remained vital and prolific to the end.

It is a testament to the extraordinary power of the modern celebrity-making industry that Picasso's persona came to overshadow his art, for Picasso created unrivalled masterpieces in several of Modernism's widely diverse and rapidly changing styles. The sentimental works of the Blue and Rose periods remain popular favorites, perhaps in part because they seem to conform to reality. Later distorted figures are less immediately appealing, with their characteristic sideways noses, uneven torsos, and twisted limbs. Yet these works, inspired in part by African sculpture, effectively questioned European ways of seeing, freeing Picasso from traditional vanishing-point perspective and naturalistic figuration. After the great masterwork of that era, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso, together with Georges Braques, turned toward Cubism, where many angles of a figure are portrayed at once, where the constantly varying perspectives of reality constitute the actual subject of the painting. Picasso's anti-war works also represent the standard of the genre. In 1937 Picasso completed Guernica (1937), an enormous painting depicting in ferocious allegory the aerial bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. Guernica contains many of the images that mark Picasso's body of work, including a gored and dying horse, an ominous monster bull, and the upraised arms of a powerless victim.

—John Tomasic

Further Reading:

Berger, John. The Success and Failure of Picasso. New York, Penguin, 1965.

Gilot, Francoise, and Carlton Lake. Life with Picasso. New York, Doubleday, 1989.

Malraux, André. Picasso's Mask. New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976.

O'Brian, Patrick. Picasso: A Biography. New York, Putnam, 1976.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso. Vols. 1 and 2. New York, Random House, 1991, 1996.

Rubin, William, editor. Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective. New York, MoMA, 1980.

Stassinopoulos, Arianna. Picasso: Creator and Destroyer. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Stein, Gertrude. Picasso. New York, Dover, 1959.