Profile of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso

(born October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain—died April 8, 1973, Mougins, France) Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque) of Cubism.

The enormous body of Picasso's work remains, and the legend lives on—a tribute to the vitality of the “disquieting” Spaniard with the “sombre . . . piercing” eyes who superstitiously believed that work would keep him alive. For nearly 80 of his 91 years Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to and paralleled the whole development of modern art in the 20th century.

Life and career

Early years

Pablo Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of drawing, and Maria Picasso López. His unusual adeptness for drawing began to manifest itself early, around the age of 10, when he became his father's pupil in La Coruña, where the family moved in 1891. From that point his ability to experiment with what he learned and to develop new expressive means quickly allowed him to surpass his father's abilities. In La Coruña his father shifted his own ambitions to those of his son, providing him with models and support for his first exhibition there at the age of 13.

The family moved to Barcelona in the autumn of 1895, and Pablo entered the local art academy (La Llotja), where his father had assumed his last post as professor of drawing. The family hoped that their son would achieve success as an academic painter, and in 1897 his eventual fame in Spain seemed assured; in that year his painting Science and Charity, for which his father modeled for the doctor, was awarded an honorable mention in Madrid at the Fine Arts Exhibition.

The Spanish capital was the obvious next stop for the young artist intent on gaining recognition and fulfilling family expectations. Pablo Ruiz duly set off for Madrid in the autumn of 1897 and entered the Royal Academy of San Fernando. But finding the teaching there stupid, he increasingly spent his time recording life around him, in the cafés, on the streets, in the brothels, and in the Prado, where he discovered Spanish painting. He wrote: “The Museum of paintings is beautiful. Velázquez first class; from El Greco some magnificent heads, Murillo does not convince me in every one of his pictures.” Works by these and other artists would capture Picasso's imagination at different times during his long career. Goya, for instance, was an artist whose works Picasso copied in the Prado in 1898 (a portrait of the bullfighter Pepe Illo and the drawing for one of the Caprichos, Bien tirada está, which shows a Celestina [procuress] checking a young maja's stockings). These same characters reappear in his late work—Pepe Illo in a series of engravings (1957) and Celestina as a kind of voyeuristic self-portrait, especially in the series of etchings and engravings known as Suite 347(1968).

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, and originally titled The Brothel of Avignon)[2] is a large oil painting of 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). The work portrays five nude femaleprostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avinyó Street) in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two are shown with African mask-like faces and three more with faces in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, giving them a savage aura. In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. The work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both cubismand modern art. Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led to wide anger and disagreement, even amongst his closest associates and friends.

Painted in Paris during the summer of 1907, Picasso had created hundreds of sketches and studies in preparation for the final work.[3][4] He long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known today as Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and was unconsciously influenced by African and Tribal art several months before completing Demoiselles.[5][6] Some critics argue that the painting was a reaction to Henri Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre and Blue Nude.[7]

Its resemblance to Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses, Paul Gauguin's statue Oviri and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal has been widely discussed by later critics. At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. In the nine years since its creation, Picasso had always referred to it as Le Bordel d'Avignon, but art critic André Salmon, who managed its first exposition, retitled it Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to lessen its scandalous impact on the public.[2][3] Picasso never liked Salmon's title, and as an edulcoration would have preferredlas chicas de Avignon instead.[2]

Guernica
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso. It was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, Basque Country, by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of the Spanish Nationalist forces, on 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Republican government commissioned Picasso to create a largemural for the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris.

Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour helped bring the Spanish Civil War to the world's attention.

Colour Fading in Van Gogh

Quite often it is sheer luck that allows us to confirm an in­tuition by carrying out proper research in order to enlarge our knowledge of an artist's materials. In 1967, a collector brought a painting by Van Gogh to the Kunstmuseum of Basel. The author, who at that time was chief restorer of that institution, found himself confronted with a painting that suggested colour changes. The question was, were they due to a correction on the part of the artist, or to discolour­ation?

The painting was one of the two versions of Two Children, which Van Gogh painted at Auvers-sur-Oise in June 1890. The problem was as follows. The original painted canvas had been folded over the right and left edges of the stretcher and attached with tacks in the same way as the unpainted tacking edges of the canvas at the top and bottom of the stretcher. As a result, the width of the painting had been reduced by approximately 2,5 cm on each side.

The background colour was mainly of different tonalities of blue in the upper part, and of shades of white in the low­er area; whereas the two painted strips folded over the edge of the stretcher were of a violet colour at the top and pink at the bottom. Was this change caused by discolouration, or the result of an overpaint applied by the artist? A closer examination with a binocular microscope showed a continuity in the ridges left by the brushstrokes that passed over the edge of the stretcher, even where they systematically changed from light-blue to violet and from white to pink immediately after passing over the angle of the stretcher. This ruled out the possibility of an overpaint.

A few minute particles of the paint layer could be taken at the losses and cracks that had occurred on the angle of the stretcher and near the tacks," Microscopic examination of cross-sections of these samples confirmed the presumption that discolouration had occurred. Near the surface, where the pink layer had been exposed to light, the colour had faded; whereas in the depth of the same layer, the colour still had its original brightness. And where the pink had not been exposed to light, i.e. on the edges of the stretcher or under a layer of another colour, it had re­tained all its original intensity, right up to the top.

Chemical analysis by Dr Muhlethaler revealed that the colour in question was an eosine-based lake." Eosine is a colour first made in Paris in 1871 and prepared as an artist's pigment some years later. One of the many names it had been given was 'geranium lake'. It is known from Van Gogh's letters that he used this colour quite frequently?

The findings of the technical analysis of the Two Children confirm that the painting originally had a pink component in its background which has since faded. More precisely, the lower area of the background was pink, and the thatched cottages above were violet. This observation seemed to be of some considerable significance for our knowledge of Van Gogh's oeuvre, but because the fading had only been demonstrated in a single painting, the author confined himself to an oral communication during the 1967 meeting in Brussels of the lCOM Committee for Conservation.

Many years later, this assertion was confirmed by obser­vations made at an exhibition in May 1988 organised by the Kunstmuseum of Olten, Switzerland, on the influence of Van Gogh on Swiss art," Among the exhibits were three copies of our version of the Two Children: one in water­colour on paper (23 x 22.5 cm) by Giovanni Giacometti, and two others in oil on canvas (51 x 46 cm, and 52 x 46 cm) by Cuno Amiet. Both artists, who were born in the same year (1868), were enthusiastic about avant­garde art, and about Van Gogh in particular, whom they considered a leader. The extraordinary opportunity to ex­amine an original by the great master was given to them in 1907 by their friend Richard Kisling, the art collector and hardware dealer from Zurich. Perhaps acting on the advice of his painter friends, Kisling had just acquired the Two Children for 2,000 francs. This was the first painting by Van Gogh to be exhibited in Switzerland. It was left on loan at the studio of the two artists for one year to enable them to study it closely. In their shared studio at Oschwand near Bern, they not only studied it, but also made several copies, including those that were shown at the Olten exhibition.

Both copies by Amiet are the same size as the Van Gogh original was when it was brought to the Basel Kunst­museum in 1967 Amiet's copies measure 51 x 46 cm and 52 x 46 cm, Van Gogh's painting 51.5 x 46.5 cm. The latter was obviously the model for the copies. It was therefore perfectly logical to deduce that the Van Gogh painting had been mounted onto a smaller stretcher before 1907, the date of its purchase by Richard Kisling. By the time Amiet made his copy, the pink in The Two Children had already begun 

its fading process. The nuances Amiet so faithfully copied can tell us about on the state of Van Gogh picture at the time. It is very likely that Amiet did not use geranium lake but another colour that was more resistant to light.