Which school of thought is Picasso?

Name: Pablo Picasso Gender: Male Birthday: 1881 Country: Spain

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881. His father, José Luiz Solasco, was a Basque painter and teacher. His mother, Maria Picasso, was a native of Mallorca and Genoa. While other children were still playing with glass balls, Picasso was already making paintings that could be exhibited in museums. Although Picasso participated in all the adventures of French painting for half a century, he was still a Spaniard. In his mind, in his nature, there is an extravagant, tragic and heavy Spaniard tradition. It is remarkable that he squandered it in his paintings, sculptures, prints and ceramics, but never exhausted it.

In 1900, he came to Paris and fell in love with the work of Van Gogh and the scenes of Montmartre painted by Toulouse-Lautrec. Lautrec's influence is evident in his work during this period and during the "blue period" (1901-1904). His subjects were the poor, the sick and the wretched of life. He revived Spain's most cherished subjects - poverty, loneliness, sadness - but was guided by the idea of influencing French painting with the techniques he had simplified in his contact with the Montmartre draughtsmen. He painted single or grouped figures with increasing precision, lengthening or reducing their forms to give them dramatic expression. In his almost monochromatic canvases, he used a mysterious, nocturnal orchid tone. Picasso was only twenty-three years old at this time, but his fame was no longer confined to the small circle of his friends.

From 1904 onwards, he settled in the Laundry Boat at 13 rue Lavignan, where his studio became a meeting place for painters and writers to create new aesthetic principles. Apollinaire, Marcos Jacob, André Salmon, Pierre L'Ouverture, André Derain, Van Dongen, and Juan Gris all frequented it or simply lived there.After 1907, Georges Braque was seen there again. He was introduced to Picasso by Apollinaire. Fernande Olivier left us a marvelous image of Picasso at that time: "Small, dark-skinned, short and fat, anxious and at the same time worrying. A pair of dark, deep, keen, strange eyes, almost unblinking, clumsy movements, womanly hands, ungainly and unkempt dress. A dense lock of hair, black and shiny, split the intelligent and stubborn forehead in two. Clothed half like a gypsy, half like a laborer, with too-long hair sweeping the collar of an old jacket that had been worn for who knows how many years."

Picasso's "Rose Period" (1905-1906) was mild, even tender. Nudes, itinerant comedians, clowns, circus scenes gave him the opportunity to make his technique lighter, his lines more flexible, and his distortions more emphasized. His works are reminiscent of Japanese ghost painters. They are characterized by a tenderness of feeling, by the vagueness of the brushstrokes, by the charm of the jumble and by shapes that are not placed with certainty, that are carefully calculated in terms of color, but that have almost no sense of volume. However, he soon got back to work. Seemingly influenced by the sculpture of the Negroes, he made figures, drawings and stains that strongly reflected his own stylistic concerns. How could the Spaniard not be seduced by the great deformity of the African fetish mascot found in Europe at the time? Shouldn't it be said that it was a newly invented form, full of touching power? In any case, Picasso was under the spell of these primitive works, and he must have appreciated their feeling, their power, their rich vocabulary and their bold abstraction

In 1907, when he showed his painting of the Avignon Girl to bewildered friends in the dingy studio of the Laundry Boat, it was the moment when a new page in the history of art had just been opened. The composition of this famous painting lacks unity, the colors are dull and hard, the figures with their gestures have no sense of volume. However, the lines, the angles, the scales of the painting announced a new direction in modern painting. The Cubist revolution was not far away. The Avignon Girl is no longer just a painting, it is an event, a date, a point of departure, like Van Eyck's Mystery of the Lamb, Uccello's War, or Delacroix's Dante's Boat of the past.

People abandoned Gauguin for Cézanne. They discovered a new reality, and mainly new volumes and spaces within it. Picasso, tormented by contradiction, saw in the transcendence of realism a solution to it. He opposed the sensualism of the Fauvists with the rationalism of the writers of his time, who sought explanation and encouragement. From 1908 onwards, he led this movement together with Braque. They brought the illusion of volume to a flat surface and did not use projections, shading, line perspective and other old ideas. They achieved this by breaking down the surfaces and seeing the image of the object from several angles at the same time. From then on, they did not paint what they saw, but what they imagined through analysis.

In 1911, Cubism ceased to be analytical, abandoning the observation of nature and slipping into arbitrary conceptualism, that is to say, placing the mastered object at the mercy of the "first" form. While their companions took other paths, Picasso and Braque continued to delve deeper into their own discoveries. Between 1908 and 1915, Picasso utilized a new style of writing to express his strong and unquestionable ideas. He created objects and did so freely. He took reality into account, but by destroying it and replacing it with a subjective, independent, absolute reality.

On the other hand, the Cubists gave drawing and form a necessary, sometimes even tyrannical, predominance. Thanks to Picasso, oil painting returned to pure line drawing, geometric shapes, accurate proportions and strong compositions. In any case, Picasso soon realized the limitations of the theory he had first proclaimed and depicted. Thus, he, who had been the most enthusiastic promoter, became the most disloyal believer. As soon as he saw that someone was following him, he took another path. The architectural painter of angles, cubes and geometrical shapes was suddenly in the school of the old painters. It was during this period that he worked for the Ballets Russes, designing the sets and costumes for The Show-off and The Three-Cornered Hat. He reused some old subjects: acrobats, clowns, dancers.

Then, influenced by Greco-Roman art, he created a large series of giants and voluptuous women in a completely classical style. By 1923, his work was characterized by a quiet, balanced and unusually healthy look. One could not believe that this was the same Picasso who, a few years earlier, had been so enthusiastically engaged in paste-up painting. However, the man who cuts out newspapers and matchboxes and concentrates them on his own paintings, the man who paints realistically because he loves realism, is bound to paint like Engel in a moment of relaxation.

On the other hand, a man so torn apart by different, if not opposing, needs, so sensitive to the currents of his own time, so completely in agreement with all the bold ideas, could not remain indifferent to the attempts of surrealism. In this movement of revolt, there is an appetite for provocation and a will to destroy that encourages his fundamental nihilism. However, the techniques used in surrealist painting were so poor, so old-fashioned, so devoid of modeling, that he could not even look at them. His attempts were only to extract the leaven that would inspire him. After a brief romantic period, in which he painted scenes of people's lives and fierce bullfights, he tried to articulate his fantasies and impulses.

While his compatriots Dali and Miró submitted themselves to the metaphysical and literary creed of André Breton, Picasso allowed his paintings to be populated by strange stony corals and demons that rose and fell in the depths of the unconscious (1926-1935). His brushes produced strange shapes that had no meaning. These are extremely generalized, thinly colored, densely packed figures that stand ridiculously erect in a space without depth. 1932 saw the disappearance of straight lines, which were replaced by long, supple curves. In 1932, straight lines disappeared, replaced by long, supple arcs. Abbreviated structures gave way to lush curves, and the colors took on a heavy, acerbic hue.

At this time, he painted a group of seaside maidens, including a particularly bold sketch showing the intoxication of the body. 1935, the tragedy of the bloodshed of the motherland angered Picasso, and his latent expressionism once again erupted, the lines twisted and swelled, and the colors emitted a glossy sheen, in a stampede, and reached the extreme point by the pathos of a piece of music called "Guernica," played with crescendo. This great composition is one of his masterpieces, if not his pinnacle. For if he expressed his distaste for war in an apocalyptic image, he achieved it with a few shapes and contrasts of light and dark.

He didn't depict war as Goya and Delacroix did, with their scenes of killing. Goya and Delacroix, no matter how talented they were, could only do so much. Picasso, on the other hand, horrified us with every success in the history of Western painting by simply stylistically labeling the events he experienced. He convinced us of this crime by combining, with conscience and passion, some of the special values of painting. We see tragedy and wit, sarcasm and pity, curses and ridicule, the tremor of life and the stillness of death, the surge of thoughts and feelings that come out of this heart-breaking painting with extreme intensity.

From then on, Picasso studied the road he had already traveled and kept on advancing his search, sometimes anchored in the calm river of humanism, sometimes sailing into the storm of sinister romanticism. However, from 1948 onwards, when he settled on the shores of the Middle Sea, he began to paint old legends and ancient sorceries, beasts, half-human, half-horse monsters, fairies. He reverted to his old subjects: portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, with a special emphasis on animals: pigeons, owls, toads, horses, bulls. He painted his countryside and children in turn, worked in oils and prints as well as in sculpture and ceramics, with his usual intensity and a rare love of life. Regardless of the subjects and themes, he always gave them a moral, a life similar to his own, an uncontrollable shock, a strong disappointment, a certain brutality, a bewilderment, a restlessness. He is at once curious and dissatisfied, irritating and refined, generous and stingy with his feelings, already famous and rich, but laboring like a slave.

He was at once the slave of his own impatient genius and the master of his own power, his style. He was unusually active, never resting, tireless, chasing through the world a joy that was always on the run, and all he got out of it was anxiety, doubt and rage. He doesn't look his age. He was thinking, feeling, hating, loving, like a young man of twenty.

So it is difficult to study his work without talking about his life, because the two are linked and cannot be separated. Everything in which he was an actor or a witness has been recorded in his various works. His love, his contempt, his capriciousness, his rebelliousness, his impatience, are all used by him to feed his art, which is full of complacency and determination, sometimes with an uncomfortable sense of compulsion. His personality inherited a humanist. Individualistic, racially anarchistic. His actions and reactions are unpredictable, sudden and drastic. He didn't believe in gods, only in himself. As a revolutionary, he disoriented his followers, as a denier, he proudly affirmed his individuality. In him, there is always a contradiction.

There was no unity, no continuity, no stability in his work or in his life. He had no fixed ideas, and he could be various, impassioned or frenzied, amiable or loathsome, sincere or pretentious, likeable or repulsive, he could be one way or the other, according to the temperament of the moment and the time of the day. He was, however, always faithful to one thing: freedom. In fact, he wanted total and complete freedom, to remake the world as he pleased, to exercise his power as he pleased. He doesn't want rules, he doesn't want boxes, he doesn't want prejudices.

He went from naturalism to expressionism, from expressionism to classicism, from classicism to romanticism, and then back to realism. He went to abstraction in order to return to naturalism and to resume his tireless search. The beautiful and the terrible, the elegant and the monstrous alternated, he came and went. But in spite of the vagaries, it was always a deep-rooted Baroque style. When he wanted to be a classicist, he was less impressive and less moving. He was too individualistic to be intimidating and piercing, against all constraints and all divine views of the universe, he couldn't be compromised and restricted, disciplined and humiliated. Only freedom, absolute freedom, with its peculiar, chaotic and repulsive appearance, was suitable for him.

Picasso is the Baroque in principle and in taste of his ancestry, and since one is accustomed to everything, to the exceptional, to the grotesque, to the bizarre, even to the abominable, one is bound to put a high price on his violence, his indulgence, his recklessness, the explosive force of each work, the frenzied sketches, the provocative shapes, the compositions of suppressed tensions, which all come out of this. In this, he has no equal. It is through it that he shines, shocking, mesmerizing and convincing. His lines are electrically charged, and the recesses of objects contain explosives.

No matter how extraordinary his vitality, he does not express happiness, hope and the joy of life, but tends to depict an incurable anxiety, the misery of those who fight against nature, against their own destiny, and his own tragedy. When he appeared mischievous or playful, whether he wanted to please or charm, the masquerade seldom succeeded in completely hiding the pale face of death. His laughter was rather forced, his ecstasy blasphemous, his jests mean-spirited, and there was nothing in him of wisdom, self-restraint, serenity, or naturalness.

He wanted to replace the eternal world with his own source, his own personal world. He started out, vulnerable of course, under constant threat, a man who endeavors to take one step back and two steps forward in the realm of his dominion. He wants to devour everything, no doubt because he needs to be devoured himself. Here we have touched upon the anomaly contained in the art of this strange man.

Is he not, then, today a painter who revolutionizes even more y, more resolutely abandoning all the fictions and forms of the past? Who could be more courageous than he in attacking the flatterers of tradition, those who labor on methods, secrets, formulas?

The weapon he wielded was the one forged by his enemies: the defunct humanism of destruction, the humanism that took extreme form in Picasso's stubbornness and madness. Picasso is, in fact, the last, most fervent and terrible representative of the Greco-Latin tradition. He was the prodigal son after Goya, Velázquez, Michelangelo, Uccello. In this way, we understand that this anomaly resonates in a single work with an agonizing echo unmatched by any other.

His art, again, is vast, and it should be accepted as it is, with its lacks and glories, imperfections and greatness. One can list many rough, inconclusive experiences, but also passionate confessions, irrefutable achievements. Are we going to stop using the word masterpiece because Picasso never wanted to create an eternal masterpiece?

He really didn't care about the tools he used, painting on anything, on everything at hand: cardboard, boxes, white wood or plywood, asbestos cement. He doesn't care about the preparation of the canvas, the quality of the colors, the sharpness of the tools. As a sculptor, he used clay, wood, silk fabrics, household metalwork waste, often painting them with large brushes. Some of his vast body of work is scrap, but what does that matter?

Because he was already able to produce such Cubist masterpieces as My Beauty, The Girl Playing the Mandolin, and The Woman in Green, and to bring Expressionism to incredible perfection with Guernica and War and Peace. In the Still Life with an Ancient Human Head and Still Life with an Enamel Pot in the Museum of Modern Art and in the great works in the Antibes Museum, Picasso not only gave full play to his creativity, but also, exceptionally, showed diligence, patience and thought. Technique was never the ultimate goal for him, although he was able to use it with ease.

He never replaced his love of research with technical mastery, so that his audacity never gave way to technical mastery. He did not disdain the effect, but, in order to obtain it, he invested everything he had: sincerity and subterfuge, determination and suspicion, confession and cunning sophistication, his discoveries and forgeries. In this way, in the end, he is still him, and that is why he casts a poisonous shadow over his art.

Since his discoveries are so frequently used by the new generation, will they deny it? Despite fascinating so many young painters, it didn't really influence them. In modern painting, it is surely easy to find here and there features, shapes, methods that bear his mark. But these are superficial borrowings and fragmentary, incoherent imitations.

Because art, like Picasso's personality, is independent, cannot be conventional, transferred, is a closed world." I am not looking, but I am finding", he cooed one day, a man who could not be taken as a model because his life could not serve as an example, his work could not serve as a teaching. Picasso doesn't come along in every century, but who can't feel that ours would be a flatter, darker, less meaningful century without him?

But it would be a delusion of systematization to try to single out in his work, vocabulary, style, and subject matter this mixed, luxurious Spain, raised on the myths and forms of Oriental civilization, on the primitive methods, and on the vague influences of the Bunyan. The Spain that played the most important role in the formation of its talent was the Spain of Góngora and Goya, the Spain of Gaudí's baroque architecture, the anarchism and revolt of Catalu?a, the Spain of the most extraordinary, passionate, destructive, violent, fanaticism. In any case, no foreign painter who lived and worked in France was more absorbed in the spirit of French customs than he was, and none proved himself more faithful to his roots. In Picasso, everything is a contradiction: his life, his character, his work.

For him, the object became itself. He was not interested in light, but in the expression of the altered form. Letting it appear to the viewer as something different from the world outside. For a while, however, the Cubist lost the power he had drawn from the indulgence of the Fauvists in his own indulgence. It became a captive of the still life, of the closed room, not open to life. The brushstrokes are impersonal, the colors are poor, the subject matter is sad and bleak.