SEE 1a. 1b.
1c.
1d.
revolutionized modern man’s ways of seeing. The fragmented representation of the world that Cubism instanced, altering thereby the very modalities of perception and of visuality itself, brought home in a hitherto unknown way the complexity of the act of seeing. Although he viewed art as a game, it was a game to be taken seriously, for it could be dangerous and sometimes fatal. “Every painting,” he said, “is a drop of my blood.” Within the same picture he would juxtapose views from the front, from the side, and from overhead, and would go so far as to present certain real object in straightforward relief. x
FEELING 1l.
DRAWING 1m.
WRITE 1e. 1f.
1g.
1h.
“Writing is a remedy for the relative inadequacy of one art in relation to another.” always enthused over writing in all its aspects. He was sensitive to shapes of letters, handwriting, and would exploit all possibilities of this new plastic material by cutting, shaping and kneading this “verbal clay.” He would vary arrangements of words, compositions of phrases, collages of texts. He took an almost physical pleasure from the body of a text—its traces, lines, loops, blots, deletions—transforming his manuscripts into veritable drawings. For , painting and poetry were essentially the same. “After all,” he argued, “the arts are all the same; you can write a picture in words just as you can paint sensations in a poem.” He believed that art is a language of signs, that painting is visual poetry; also, he described himself as a “poet who went wrong,” thus a member of the club of painterpoets that included Hans Arp, Joan Miro, Jean Dubuffet.
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place,” once said, “from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”
1n.
“At age twelve, I could draw like Raphael,” he used to say, alluding to his exceptional drawing skills. Yet he also later declared that it took him a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child. Virtuosity vs spontaneity; pure, classical line versus vehement stroke: these qualities characterized the artist’s drawings, who constantly explored the countless formal possibilities of line using pencil, pen gouache and watercolor. He drew constantly, with anything that came to mind. He was very familiar with drawing on canvas; either in the form of a preparatory sketch or a finished work. This approach testified not only to his fundamental interest in draftsmanship, but also his lack of concern for art’s conventional categories, which he constantly intermixed: drawing, painting, sculpture—all means
WAR 2e. “I didn’t paint the war,” said, “because I am not the kind of painter who goes seeking a subject like a photographer. But there is no doubt that the war exists in the paintings I did at the time.” 2f. It has often been said that he depicted the horrors of war on the human face, as demonstrated by his “Woman’s Head” with its dreadful deformations. The face is contorted, the toothy mouth hangs down one side, the ear is stuck onto the cheek like a handle. Suffering and anguish are expressed through tormented facial features. x 2g. His greatest visual challenge: how to combine the expression of highly intense and complex feelings— both personal (the psychic make-up of the artist, of his sitter, of his love and hatred of women) and social (the tragedy of the Spanish Republic, the threat of war and destruction)—with the rationality of a formal language and coherent visual construction of shapes and colors, yet without resorting to abstraction, or without displacing emotion to another register of signs and images? Only by bashing the face, injecting it with the strength and dynamism of his own emotional capacities, his intellectual abilities and by creating a new figurative vocabulary that alone could reflect the scope of the artist’s aesthetic universe and the chaos of the times. Sensing the approach of World War II in September 2h. 1939, left with Dora Maar for Royan, where he remained until August 1940. The year was dominated by the theme of death, as seen in the flayed heads of sheep, or in the transformation of Dora’s head into a skull. The motif was sometimes replaced by the skull of a cow or bull, but when it appears in a canvas it is always a sign of death, violence, destruction. Here the head is shown alone, in a raw fashion, like a piece of bloody flesh.x
were valid when expressing an idea.
1.
CREATE 1i.
Reviving the old Renaissance tradition of the “complete artist,” he mastered many forms, and could paint, sculpt, draw, engrave and produce ceramics. 1 constantly engendered new forms, new materials, and new methods of visual expression over the course of his career, continually rejuvenating his formal idiom throughout the twentieth century. His papiers collé (collaged paper paintings) of diverse materials, newspapers, posters and stenciled lettering set on wood mouldings, frames and panelling reflected a palpable physicality.x
1j.
1k.
PERIOD 1m.
INTERRUPT 2a.
2b.
Others were quick to grasp his articulation of modernity. They admired him as a rebel who dared to question conventional constraints, somebody who casually cast them aside to arrive at an altogether new understanding of artistic expression. 1 With Demoiselles, he was resolved to undo the continuities of form and field which Western art had so long taken for granted. This famous stylistic rupture turned out to be merely a consummation.x
1n.
The sentimental and literary tone of the Blue Period— emaciated faces, images of loneliness and distress— turned to a world of beauty, balance and serenity during the Rose period. Following this period, he adopted ochre and grey tones, which were colors inspired by the land around Gosol. 0 At the end of his life, he increasingly favored single figures and archetypes. He concentrated on the essential: nudes, couples with the man disguised or stripped bare. It was a way for him to speak of women, of love, of the human comedy. The bodies are often disjointed, maltreated, topsy-turvy, thus harking back to the deformations of the 1930’s. Alongside such anatomical audacities, he pursued a more classical vein, with palettes of grays, ivories and whites rare in his oeuvre.
SECLUSION 2i.
2j.
Cubism’s unrealized potential or “unfinished project” was “the waning of the utopian impulse that was the broken promise of modernism, in which Cubism fleetingly holds out the idea of a collectivity.” “We felt the temptation, the hope of an anonymous art, not in its expression but in its point of departure... But as soon as we saw that the collective adventure was a lost cause, each one of us had to find an individual adventure. And the individual adventure always goes back to the one which is the archetype of our times: that is of Van Gogh’s—an essentially solitary and tragic adventure.”
2.
DEEP 3c.
RESTORE 2c.
Cubism often bordered on the line of abstraction, yet both he and Georges Braque remained firmly attached to reality, and would find other ways to reintroduce realistic elements back into his work.2
DISCOVER 2d.
’s preoccupations do not embody deep philosophical reflection; nor does he attach importance to flesh, light and pigment as had been the practice among artists of the past. Scholars agree his real strength lies in the way he utilizes and interprets the human body in its varied manifestations.
3.
“When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.”
POSSIBILITY 3d. Cubism is the ‘grey matter’ of modern art, and not only because of the austere monochromatism that characterized the Analytical period at its peak. It is high modernism, one of whose crucial components being the products and materials issuing from the lower depths of popular culture, both industrial and artisanal.
UNDERSTAND 3a.
The aesthetic and formal revolution of ’s last years was not well understood at the time. Critics were ferocious: “slapdash, senile, impotent.” Even at age 90, still continued to upset people, to challenge accepted ideas.
IDEA 3e. “An idea is a point of departure and no more,” said. “As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.” 3f. He once joked to photographer Brassai: “What’s most abstract is perhaps the height of reality.” 3g. With papiers collé (collaged paper paintings), he sought to “fool the mind” (trompe l’espirit) in the same way that trompe-l’oeil paintings “fooled the eye.”x
FRIEND 3b.
’s dominant influence on twentieth-century art was in no small part due to his close, friendly relations with the major creative figures of his day in the worlds of theatre, ballet, music, literature, cinema and photography. Such were the multiple facets of ’s protean genius. 0
CONQUER 4a.
4b.
“The great culture heroes of our time have shared two qualities;” wrote Susan Sontag in 1970, “they have all been ascetics in some exemplary way, and also great destroyers.” In the 1960’s he began a new cycle basically devoted to the subject of the artist and his model, and then to the female nude. These anatomical reductions and simplifications are typical of his lade idiom, which could be described as a language of urgency. This schematic handling called for codified graphic signs to convey the nude body. “I want to express the nude, I don’t want only to do a nude like a nude; I simply want to express breast, express foot, express hand, belly... find a way to express it and that’s enough.”
RELATIONSHIP 4c.
4d.
4e.
4f.
4g.
X
PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS AND SCULPTURE:
1d. “Seated Woman with Wrist Watch” (1932). 1k. “Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper” (1913). 1n. “Nude with Crossed Legs” (1905). 2b. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907).
In addition to the traditional categorizations of his periods by color (blue, rose) or style (Cubist, Neoclassical), it should be possible to categorize them by female companion. Indeed, each new woman corresponded to a particular style, a visual language revealing the nature of the loved one and the feelings she stirred in the artist. 2 The full, vigorous forms of ’s young mistress perfectly suited his urge to model freestanding sculpture. His paintings became reveries of plasticity, volume and modelling. She sparked the emergence of a new vocabulary of form and color that made his paintings undulate. “At no other moment of his life was his painting so wavy, so full of sinuous curves, curling arms, scrolls of hair,” his friend Brassai once said. The young Marie-Thérèse symbolized fertility and fecunity, and was often associated with foliate motifs, flowers, fruit and vegetables.x Starting in 1936, Dora’s influence was to stimulate one of the most innovative periods of his career. His personal life was in turmoil when they met: he had broken up with his wife Olga Koklova, a ballet dancer with the Ballet Russes; and Marie-Thérèse, his mistress since 1927, had given birth to their daughter, Maya. He felt incapable of painting and instead devoted his creative energy to writing poetry. 0 In 1943, met Francoise Gilot. The couple began living together in 1946, but Francoise only truly entered his art with the famous “Woman-Flower”—reflecting the theme of women blossoming into petals or the sun—in his drawings and paintings. All of his portraits displayed the same morphology: a round head, a thin stem of a body, and round, heavy breasts. All forms were curved and simplified into arabesques; a simple, spare style that featured basic geometric shapes and pure lines. x2 This work can be seen as a portrait of Jacqueline Roque, ’s last female companion. He met the young Jacqueline in 1953 at the Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris. For , everything about Jacqueline suggested an odalisque - her appearance, her temperament, her calm, her sensuality. She represented a fertile serenity that, following a stormy period, once again gave him a taste for living, loving and painting. This style is much more supple than his others, and his final period was marked by female nudes, eroticism, and the ubiquitousness of Jacqueline—all the women in these years were, directly or indirectly, Jacqueline. x
HOME 4n. The theme of family was common in his oeuvre; it was present in 1906, resurfaced in the 1920s and recurred again at the end of his life. The fundamental trinity that unites two sexes and two generations was probably the old man’s way of revitalizing his life and his fecundity, affirming the regenerative power of his art. x
4.
DIFFICULTY
TWO 4i.
4h.
PHYSICAL This is in fact a coded portrait of young Marie-Thérèse Walter, aged 17, whom had met by chance on the boulevards of Paris. She soon became his muse and lover for ten years, invading his paintings, sculpture and drawings. Here, the initials M and T are easily recognized; the T planted between the legs of the M. The erotic monogram recurred in many drawings and letters, and sometimes a P for was inscribed like a sword in the hollow of the M. x
4j.
In 1936, a new woman entered ’s life. She was Dora Markovitch, a young photographer linked to the Surrealist group. For the next several years, his paintings would alternate between two Muses, the fair Marie-Thérèse and the dark Dora. Whereas the visual language used for Dora often favored angular shapes and contrasts of black and red, the one employed for Marie-Thérèse retained the rounded forms and the blue and yellow colors of her eyes and hair. Yet in these two profile portraits—showing the women in the same pose, hand on cheek—it seems as though he was trying to mix the two idioms, trying to superimpose each woman’s image on the other. x Between 1937 and 1938, led two love lives, often depicting his two lovers in similar poses on the same day. Here, both faces are simultaneously seen frontally and in profile, a distortion inherited from Cubism.
2f. “Woman’s Head” (1909). 2j. “Flayed Head of Sheep” (1939). 3g. “Still Life with Chair Caning” (1912). 4d. “Woman Reading” (1932). 4f. “Woman in an Armchair” (1947). 4g. “Nude in Turkish Hat” (1955). 4h. “Guitar” (1927). 4i. “Portrait of Dora Maar” (1937), “Painting of Marie-Thérèse” (1937). 4n. “The Family” (1970). 4o. “Murder” (1934). 4p. “Woman in an Armchair (1947). 4q. “Cat and Cock” (1955).
TEXT TAKEN FROM: Metamorphoses: 1900 - 1972, The National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. (Translated from the French by Marie-Laure Bernadac) 0
Gilot, Francoise. Life with Picasso. Mcgraw Hill Inc.,1964.
¹ Wikipedia. “Pablo Picasso” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso>
OLD
4o. The 1930s were marked by his marital crisis and separation from Olga, by the birth of Maya, and by the rise of fascism in Europe. They were also the terrible years of civil war in Spain, and the years when Dora Maar entered his life. “Murder” conveys the violent, passionate feelings experienced by the artist at the time. A shrewish woman—Olga, can be seen holding a knife, preparing to murder the gentle figure of MarieThérèse. “This is the worst period of my life,” said in that year of estrangement. The tension and domestic difficulties were such that he stopped painting for several months.x 4p. Her nose is a phallic appendage, her eye and mouth are handled in a similar way (slits with teeth), her breasts are just two round balls. Her body merges not only with the furniture but also with the decorative patterns in the background, becoming part frame, part painting, part wallpaper. The body is set against a ground of sharp angles, one of which is pointed like a church steeple.x1 4q. This demonic depiction of a woman should be viewed in the context of his violent relationship with Olga.x By 1953, peace had returned and had just finished his panels on War and Peace for the chapel in Vallauris. Domestically, however, marital tension was in the air since his companion, Francoise Gilot, had just left him. In a painting, had depicted a furious Francoise as an angry cat slaying a dog. Here, there is already a knife set on a bowl of already full blood; the cat has therefore come to devour an already dead victim. In the Christian religion, a sacrificial cock symbolizes Christ; often identified with victims.x
4k. “Youth has no age,” said , age 91 when he died. 4l. Inevitably, the depredations of age made for sadness of flesh, but desire appeared to be relentless and teeming still, if those paroxysmal images of cravings and couplings, those urgent, brutal “obscene” summonings and summations of Eros that late offers in such unprecedented measure are anything to go by. 4m. A pronounced taste for old, majestic residences was clear from his choice of studio spaces during his lifetime.2
² Muller, Markus. Pablo Picasso: The Time with Francoise Gilot. Kerber, 2003.
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