Pablo Picasso – A Life of Art

Picasso from the beginning had oodles of talent, rebelliousness and genius; his art- teacher father copped it from the off and nurtured the young Pablo until he surpassed him when barely in his teens. Soon after, his family moved to Barcelona, the city would forever be Picasso’s real home in his heart. His father persuaded the School of Fine Arts to allow his son to sit their entrance examination; this process normally took a number of months, Picasso did it in a week, he was accepted – he was still only thirteen. At sixteen, he went to study in Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, but he detested the didactic nature of the institution and began mitching classes, spending his days in the Prado admiring the works of Velazquez, Goya, Zurbaran and in particular El Greco. He moved to Paris in 1900, moving in with the poet Max Jacob who taught him French and French literature. Picasso ate up the works of Manet, Courbet and Toulouse-Lautrec; his own work was changing from use of a variable range of brilliant colours to a single dark and oppressive blue. It revealed a change in the way he viewed his subjects, no longer ruthlessly and satirically but with sympathy and melancholy. They were paintings of the dispossessed of Paris, those existing in the void, their spiritual smattering evoked powerfully by angular lines and the blue, the blue, the never-ending blue! El Greco is all over Picasso’s Blue Period, the lost hours wandering the lost corridors of the Prado were not so lost after all.

From 1904, his work began to regain its romantic quality, the tin of blue paint had ran out and Pablo bought warmer colours and began to develop a style that would so dominate the twentieth century. He still concentrated on social misfits, concentrating on those outcasts who decide to go the whole hog, no longer bothering with any convention, where did he find such cutaways? Why, the circus of course! Harlequins, acrobats and clowns dominate his work during this period. Picasso painted them and they influenced him, he too would soon abandon all convention, ripping up the form book and defining things on his own merits and in so doing or by so doing he entered his African period. His Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art) was pure abandonment! The traditional female nude debased, denuded and deconstructed – even the reckless artists of the time were horrified, Matisse accused Picasso of pissing over the whole modernist movement by churning out stuff like it – wonderfully Picasso knew better than the rest. Like any new visual language, the masses would have to go to class and learn to speak it. The Cubist painters rejected the oft repeated axiom that art should copy nature or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modelling and foreshortening. Instead they wanted to emphasise the two-dimensional quality of the canvas. Figures and objects were dissected and re-assembled into hideous but compelling figures, for awhile the original subject was evoked but then that small comfort was blown to kingdom come.

Instead they wanted to emphasise the two-dimensional quality of the canvas. Figures and objects were dissected and re-assembled into hideous but compelling figures, for a while the original subject was evoked but then that small comfort was blown to kingdom come. Then Picasso exploded the whole shebang, he began pasting coloured pieces of paper on his compositions, three dimensional perspective was erased and now the real world was penetrating art. Following the hell of World War I, Picasso followed the rest of Europe and tip-toed away from the precipice, stopped contemplating flinging himself into the abyss – he began to produce work in a neo-classical style. At this stage Picasso could have shat on a canvas and the world would have applauded, Picasso detested his fame, seeing as the curse of the artist. He began sculpting work, perhaps hoping that the world would leave him alone, that they would not be interested in his novel attempts at a different medium, of course this was not to be. His work was now being influenced by the burgeoning Surrealist movement but conversely they viewed their work as hereditary of Picasso. His final works were a mish-mash of styles, he churned out work in a mind-boggling amount of styles. The majority dismissed his late work, deriding him as an old geezer who was way past his prime. How could they dismiss him? Had they learnt nothing? Had they not being watching him for decades and decades? Only after his death, when the rest of the world had moved on from abstract expressionism did the wishy-washy art community realise that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism, as usual way ahead of his time, again they would have to go to class to learn the new visual language.