Analytical Cubism -
· In The Path to Cubism, published in
1920, Kahnweiler first made the distinction between Analytical and
Synthetic Cubism that later art historians borrowed and used. Kahnweiler
used the term Analytical Cubism to characterize the work produced
by Picasso and Braque from about 1908 to 1912. The idea behind their work
of this period was an extension of Cézanne's; they wanted to paint
not the appearance of the subject (after all, a camera can do that)
but an analysis of the subject. Cubism has nothing to do with cubes;
the work of this period instead looks like a shimmering group of
facets, because appearance is fragmented into discontinuous planes.
The word "analysis" comes from a Greek word meaning "to undo," "to
loosen throughout," and so it is fitting that this style of painting
aimed at an understanding of the subject by breaking the subject
up into constituent parts. Picasso's Analytical Cubist work is mostly
in very dull colors, browns and blacks and grays, so as not to distract
the viewer's attention from the formal experiment. By comparing
Braque's "Houses at L'Estaque" with a photograph of the view that
he was painting, one can clearly see how Analytical Cubism renders a
· The best way to understand what Analytical Cubism means
is to look at the pictures; it is, after all, a visual concept.
Picasso's development of the style over time shows what he was aiming
Art Nouveau -
· People began speaking of "Art Nouveau"–which means
"New Art" in French–in the 1890s. Architects, who were now as likely to
be using iron and glass as stone, felt that different building materials
called for a new style of ornament; they were ready to draw on sources
besides the Greek and Roman, which had been very nearly the only
source of architectural inspiration since the Renaissance.
· Asian art was held up as a new model for European art. However,
Art Nouveau did not just copy Asian examples, but transformed them
into something new. The influence of the sweeping arabesques of
Asian decoration encouraged architects to try to transpose these
curves into iron. From Japanese art in particular, Europeans saw
that design could be harmonious without being symmetrical. The super-curvaceous,
asymmetrical designs of the Belgian architect Victor Horta (1861-1947)
were wildly popular in the 1890s.
· The influence of Asian art was even more profound among painters
and printmakers. Instead of aiming to present a convincing representation
of reality, artists tried to paint pleasing patterns. "Decorative"
was a word of high praise. Pictorial space was flattened and contrast
sharpened, so that outlines and shapes took on a life of their own.
The work of Aubrey Beardsley, inspired by Japanese prints, was well
· An assemblage is, simply, a sculpture that is "assembled"
instead of carved or chiseled or cast. The sculpture consists of miscellaneous
objects and materials glued or otherwise stuck together, like a
three-dimensional collage. Picasso's "Guitar" (1912) is a good example.
· "Avant-garde" is French for "advance guard." The term describes
how certain groups of artists since the mid-nineteenth century have
thought of themselves as plunging bravely into the future, ahead
of the laggards of mainstream society. It is difficult to pinpoint
the origin of the phrase; an early example of its use, in a French
essay from 1845 on the role of the artist, gives a good sense of
its meaning (the pompous tone is also quite typical):
Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring,
the most advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and therevealer.
Therefore, to know whether art worthily fulfills itsproper mission
as initiator, whether the artist is truly of theavant-garde, one
must know where Humanity is going, what the destinyof the human
Blue Period -
· Towards the end of 1901, Picasso started painting entirely
in shades of blue; his subject matter was appropriately melancholy–emaciated
vagrants and old prostitutes. He continued painting in this style
until the end of 1904, when rose tones began to dominate his palette.
· "Collage" is French for "gluing," and refers to making
pictures by pasting together scavenged scraps (like old newspapers, photographs,
pieces of cloth, whatever) instead of drawing or painting. Picasso's
"Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912) introduced the practice into
the fine arts, although, strictly speaking, he did not invent it:
the technique is found in nineteenth-century folk art. Picasso,
however, was the first to see its possibilities in a modern context.
· Cubism was a new style of painting–often divided into
two main phases or tendencies, Analytical and Synthetic–invented
by Picasso and Braque. Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907),
which took "primitive" art as its inspiration, cleared the way for
this radical redefinition of painting. Other pieces by Picasso in
1907, such as "Mother and Child," show how the influence of African
masks moved him in a proto-Cubist direction.
· By October 1907, the poet Apollinaire had introduced Picasso
to Braque, a young painter extremely devoted to Cézanne. Together
the two developed Cubism, beginning in 1908. Their partnership and
cooperative development of Cubism was disrupted by the outbreak
of World War I in August, 1914. Picasso's last major purely Cubist
work was his "Three Musicians" of 1921; afterwards, his interests
turned towards Surrealism, politics, and the old masters. All of
Picasso's later works engaged in clear dialogue with Cubism, but
did so as they would with an already-developed, complete style–that
is, they did not try to reshape or rework Cubism, simply referencing
it and leaving it intact.
· Fascism arose in the social disorder and nationalist
discontent in Italy after World War I. The word was first used by
the political party founded by Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922
until defeat in World War II, but it is used more generally to describe right-wing
totalitarianism, such as that of Hitler's Germany and Franco's Spain.
Picasso was very involved emotionally in the Spanish Civil War and
sold work to benefit the Spanish Republic; one of his most iconic
works, "Guernica" (1937), was commissioned by the Spanish Republic
and represents the barbarity of a Fascist attack on the town of
Guernica. Picasso's embrace of Communism was probably an effort
to voice his rejection of Fascism as loudly as possible.
· In 1905 a group of young painters exhibited in Paris.
They began to be called "Les Fauves," or "the wild beasts" because
they used such savagely bright colors and free brushstrokes and disregarded
all the traditional rules of illusionistic rendering. They were
not really so very wild; their compositions aimed towards more at
decoration than at revolution. Georges Braque was a member; later,
explaining the decline of the Fauve movement, he remarked, "you
can't remain forever in a state of paroxysm." The dull colors of
Analytical Cubism were a sort of counter-movement to the wild colors
of Fauvism. Henri Matisse became the most well known of the group
and, later, perhaps the most famous artist of the century besides
· "Fin-de-siecle" means "end of the century" in French.
The term is used to describe the 1890s and a particular atmosphere
of decadence, like that palpable in Art Nouveau, especially in the work
of Aubrey Beardsley.
· A painting or drawing is illusionistic if it tries
to create the illusion of being what it represents. For example,
a painting of a landscape might look almost like a window, looking
out onto a view, or a plaster wall might be painted to look like
marble, or the shell of a lobster might be rendered in such minute
detail that it almost fools the eye. When one praises a painting
for "looking very realistic," one is praising the skill of the artist
in creating illusionistic effects.
· The Impressionists were a loose group of late-nineteenth-century French
painters who painted casual, everyday scenes of middle-class life
with bright colors laid on rapidly, almost hastily. Some of the
best known include Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro. While the
Impressionists' work became extremely popular in the twentieth century–a
museum show would be an almost guaranteed blockbuster–they were
outcasts in the art world of their own time. One critic wrote in
An exhibition has just been opened at Durand-Ruel whichallegedly
contains paintings. I enter and my horrified eyes beholdsomething
terrible. Five or six lunatics, among them a woman, have joined
together and exhibited their works. I have seen peoplerock with laughter
in front of these pictures, but my heart bled whenI saw them. These
would-be artists call themselves revolutionaries,"Impressionists."
They take a piece of canvas, color and brush, daub a few patches
of paint on it at random, and sign the whole thing with their name.
· In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a monster with
the head of a bull and body of a man, born from a mating between
the queen of Crete and a white bull. The monster was confined to
a maze built by the master craftsman Daedalus. Athens had to make
a yearly sacrifice of seven boys and seven girls for the Minotaur
to devour, until the creature was finally slain by the hero Theseus.
· When we say that something is modern, we usually mean
only that it is up-to- date, of the moment, the latest thing. The
word modern has been used in this sense for centuries and centuries, and
we still use it this way. For example, if we install new appliances
in the kitchen, we might say that we had modernized it. However–and
this is where things get tricky–artists in the early twentieth century
had such an acute sense of themselves as up-to-date, of- the-moment,
the latest thing, that the word "modern" stuck to them. And so,
strangely, "modern" has come to describe a historical period that
has passed. Sometimes museums have one curator for "modern" art,
roughly defined as that produced in the first half of the twentieth
century, and another for "contemporary" art, meaning art produced
since 1950 or so. To avoid confusing the contradictory meanings
of the word "modern," one can use the word "modernist" to describe the
art of the historical period from 1900 to 1950; this way, one can
still describe one's kitchen as "modern," and signify that one has
installed a new dishwasher–and not a Picasso print.
· In art, classicism refers to the style of Greco-Roman
antiquity–white marble sculptures of naked heroes, red-and-black
pottery, ruins with columns, etc. Since the Renaissance, the ancient
world has been a continuous source of inspiration for European art
and architecture; thus banks in American cities are often made to look
like Greek temples, for example. Art that is not in fact ancient
and Greco-Roman, but is inspired by or made to imitate it, is called
Old Masters -
· Distinguished, canonical European artists from the
period from about 1500s through the early 1700s, especially the
painters who are in every art history textbook, are called old masters.
Papier Collé -
· "Papier collé" is French for "glued paper" and refers
to collages which use not only found scraps but also invented shapes
cut from blank paper. Georges Braque invented this technique and shared
it with Picasso in 1912.
· The Salon was an annual exhibition of art works chosen
by jury and presented by the French Academy since 1737. It later
became a more generic term for a large art exhibition featuring
· Surrealism was an literary and art movement officially
founded in Paris by André Breton with his Manifeste du surréalisme in 1924.
The movement celebrated weirdness for weirdness's sake and held
that the unconscious, combined with chance, was the source of art;
thus, hypothetically, the purest Surrealism was achieved by psychic
automatism, by letting the brush wander over the paper without conscious
control. Most of the most important Surrealist writers were friends
of Picasso's, including Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Jean Cocteau.
The most famous Surrealist image, which captures the obsessive alternate
reality that the Surrealists were trying to enter, is the Spanish
painter Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" (1931.)
· Symbolism was mostly a literary movement, never officially organized–perhaps
it was actually more a contagious mood than anything else–although
certain visual artists are often associated with it. The Symbolists
sprang up first in late nineteenth-century France, rebelling against
the predominant naturalism and realism of their time. They wanted
to express by suggestion rather than by direct statement, liking
to give everything an enigmatic air. Symbolism first developed in
poetry, where it spawned free verse. Forefathers included the poets
Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud; practitioners included Laforgue, Moréas,
and Régnier. The Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin is perhaps the most
well known Symbolist painter; his pictures are like allegories without
keys, drenched in melancholy and mystery. His paintings exist more
to conjure up a certain mood than to convey any idea. Other artists
working in this vein include Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. The
Surrealists drew heavily on the Symbolists.
Synthetic Cubism -
· In "The Path to Cubism" (1920), Kahnweiler designates
as Synthetic Cubism Braque's and Picasso's work after around 1912.
Typically both more playful and more colorful than Analytical Cubism,
Synthetic Cubism was based on the new techniques of the collage
and the papier collé. Even when there were no actual pasted scraps
involved, the technique of collage, with its sharp edges and stylistic
discontinuities, still left its marks. Picasso's rather jazzy "Three
Musicians" (1921), his last major Synthetic Cubist work, is all
oil paint on canvas, but one can see that, at this point, Picasso
painted like a collage; the shapes are flat and sharp-edged, as
if they were cut paper. The pattern on the outfit of the guitar-player
in the center is flat; rather than mimicking the way in which patterned
fabric curves over the body, Picasso creates the effect of a cut-out
piece of patterned paper pasted right onto the canvas. The incongruity
of the small detail of the musical notes on the score held by the musician
to the right with the extreme simplification and lack of detail
throughout most of the painting is also typical of collage.
Spanish Civil War -
At the time of the Spanish Civil War, Spain had been
Europe's backwards backwater for over a century. The monarchy had been
overthrown rather quietly in 1931, and Spain was governed by a liberal,
modernizing republican government. This government moved against
the privileges of the Catholic Church and did some small-scale land
reform, which was much too little to satisfy the leftists but was
enough to make the priests, landowners, and former royalists very
angry. The rightists took over the government in 1933 and were quite
brutal towards the Catalans and unionists. By the time of the general
elections of 1936, the line between left and right was clearly drawn
and tension ran high. Leftists joined together in a Popular Front against
the rightists–the priests, the landowners, the former royalists
and the Fascists, known in Spain as the Falangists. The Popular
Front won a narrow victory but the right-leaning army, led by General
Francisco Franco, decided to take over the country. Very bloody
civil war ensued, complicated by the intervention of Hitler and
Mussolini on Franco's side and of Stalin on the republicans' side,
until 1939, when Franco emerged victorious, crushing the leftists.
World War I -
World War I, 1914-18, sprung from imperialistic, territorial,
and economic rivalry among the great powers of Europe, was horribly
bloody; the suffering was further compounded because it all seemed
perfectly senseless, the product of violent nationalism and complicated,
distant diplomatic maneuvers that had nothing to do with the common
people who ended up fighting and dying. Poison gas and large-scale
trench warfare were used for the first time. The Treaty of Versailles,
signed in 1919 after an armistice in 1918, imposed harsh reparations
on Germany which led to more rancor, and, eventually, World War II.
The generation of artists active in the 1920s (including the Surrealists)
was marked by a disgust at the older generation, for having dragged
them into such disgusting brutality, similar to that which stirred
up the anti-war movement of the 1960s and '70s in the United States.
World War II -
After World War I, a defeated Germany, disappointed Italy,
and ambitious Japan all became extremely militaristic and nationalistic.
War broke out, after a long period of extreme tension, with the
German invasion of Poland in 1939. German forces swept through France
in 1940; armistice was signed on June 22 and the Vichy regime, a
Fascist government that served as the Germans' tool, was set up.
Picasso and other artists and writers managed to survive in Occupied
Paris until the city was freed by the Allies in August, 1944, after
the landing at Normandy, but it was a very dark time. Some of Picasso's friends,
such as Sartre and Aragon, worked in the resistance against the
occupying German forces. Picasso's post-war embrace of Communism
was probably all the more ardent because he had experienced the
José Ruiz Blasco
Blasco, 1838-1913, was Picasso's father and first
teacher. He eked out a living for his family by teaching at various
provincial art schools. Picasso and his father never got along very
well; while still a mere child, the son already overshadowed the
father's modest talent, a fact which Blasco probably found hard
to take. Picasso later distanced himself further from his father
by referring to himself solely by his mother's maiden name.
Apollinaire, 1880-1918, was a French poet and avant-garde
leader. Influenced by the Symbolists before him and their technique
of free verse, he worked in a casual lyricism blending modern and traditional
images. His best-known poems were published in Alcools
(1918). His play Les Mamelles de
(1918) exhibited aspects of Surrealism before Surrealism
officially existed. Good friends with both Picasso and Braque, he
gave them critical support by writing Les Peintres cubistes
1897-, was a French writer, considered one of the leaders of Surrealism
in literature, and a leader in the French resistance. His novel Le
Paysan de Paris
(1926) evoked the secret Paris, of flea markets
and forgotten streets, treasured by the Surrealists. After a trip
to the USSR in 1931, he abandoned Surrealism for Marxism and became
one of the leading spokesmen for Communism in Western Europe.
1882-1963, was a French painter and, along with Picasso, the inventor
of Cubism. Before being introduced to Picasso by Apollinaire in
1907, Braque had worked with the Fauvists. A life-long devotee of
Cézanne, he realized the radical formal possibilities that lay waiting
to be unpacked inside "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," although he was
also horrified by that painting's ugly intensity. Braque was a more
careful and painstaking soul than Picasso. In 1908, he painted his
response to "Les Demoiselles," a comparatively timid piece called
"Grand Nu" ("Large Nude"). From there on out, however, he and Picasso
were "roped together like mountaineers," locked together in one
of the most productive partnerships of art history, as they together
invented Cubism. In 1911, Braque led the way by introducing stenciled
lettering onto his painting, pointing the way towards collage. Badly
injured in World War I, he afterwards shied away from the harshness
of early Cubism and painted mostly still-lifes in a curvier, more
1896-1966, was a French writer best known as the founder and chief
theorist of Surrealism. He had studied neuropsychology and was
one of the first in France to take notice of Freud. He experimented
with automatic writing, put out a batch of Surrealist manifestos
in the twenties and thirties, and founded several Surrealist journals,
His most famous work–besides
organizing the most tightly-run avant-garde of the century–was
the experimental novel Nadja
(1928). In the painting
"Rendez-vous of Friends," a gentle caricature of the group by the Surrealist
artist Max Ernst, Breton is the one with the red cloak, bestowing
his blessings with a pontifical gesture on Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon,
and the rest of the gang.
1913-1960, was a French writer born in Algiers. Like Sartre and
de Beauvoir, he joined the French resistance; often he is also called,
along with them, an Existentialist, but he always denied the validity
of the label. He was briefly a Communist. His lucid prose style
is evident in works like his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus
and his novels The Stranger
(1947). He won the Nobel Prize in 1957.
Casagemas, 1880-1901, was a Catalan painter Picasso
met when he was a teenager hanging out at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona.
The two became tight friends. Picasso was extremely upset by his suicide
in Paris in 1901, while Picasso was in Madrid, and dedicated several
paintings to his memory. In his major Blue Period painting, "La
Vie" (1903), Picasso first painted the male figure as a self-portrait
but later gave it the features of Casagemas.
1839-1906, was a key figure–perhaps the key figure–in the revolution
away from the illusionistic conventions of the Renaissance in modern
painting. He went to Paris in 1861, where he came to know the
Impressionists. In his paintings, particularly in his landscapes,
he abolished traditional perspective and painted from several viewpoints
at once, expressing a shifting, questioning gaze. Living in seclusion
in the south of France, Cézanne invented a new painting to express
the intertwining of the seeing eye and what it sees, subject and
object. His influence on Cubism was essential; it would not have
happened without him. Braque, in particular, adored and tried
to base his own work upon Cézanne's. However, it's important to
keep in mind that Cézanne, who died in 1906, did not paint as he
did in order to launch Cubism; he would not have imagined it and
he probably would not have liked it, especially when it turned
towards the more abstract. He was intensely interested in the relativity
of vision, not in abstraction; the two ideas are related, but not
equivalent. Cézanne was always firmly grounded in the physical world.
1889-1963, was a French writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. He
began to court Picasso's friendship in 1916; he was working on
a ballet, Parade,
for the Ballets Russes and wanted Picasso's
collaboration. His work is pervaded by the fantastic; during the
1920s, prime time for Surrealism, he became an avant-garde leader.
His work includes the novel Les Enfants Terribles
the plays Orphée
(1926) and La Machine
(1934), Surrealist renditions of the Orpheus
and the Oedipus myths, respectively, and the film Beauty
and the Beast
(1946)– not the animated version.
Simone de Beauvoir
De Beauvoir, 1908-, was a French philosopher and
writer and Sartre's best friend. With Sartre, de Beauvoir was
a leading exponent of Existentialist philosophy. Her most famous
work is The Second Sex,
a profound analysis of
the status of women and the genesis of modern feminism.
Diaghilev, 1872-1929, was a Russian ballet impresario
and art critic. He took a company of Russian dancers to Paris
in 1909 that became the famous Ballet Russes. His principles of
asymmetry, perpetual motion, and the unity of dance, music, and
scenery revolutionized dance. He had a terrific eye for collaborators, working
with all the best dancers, including Pavlova and Nijinsky, composers,
including Stravinsky and Strauss, and set designers, including,
of course, Picasso.
Greco (1541?-1614)–actually Domenikos Theotokopoulos, but El Greco
("The Greek") for short–was a painter who was born on the Greek
island of Crete and settled to work in Toledo, Spain. His work
boldly elongates figures and distorts landscapes, for maximum effect.
The result is feverish, visionary rapture. Picasso first saw
and loved his work as a teenager at the Prado in Madrid; the Catalan
modernists who he got to know in Barcelona were also big El Greco
1895-1952, was a French poet and another leading Surrealist. His
books of poetry include Mourir de ne pas mourir
and, with Breton, L'Immaculée Conception
He was an ardent leftist and a Communist Party member from 1942 on.
He was one of Picasso's closest friends from 1936 until his death,
and an important source of stability for Picasso when Picasso's
personal life, especially with the women, was in turmoil.
Franco, 1892-, was the general who led the military
to victory against the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War;
once that was done, with Hitler's and Mussolini's help, he established himself
as a Fascist dictator. Picasso's caricature of him, "The Dream and
Lie of Franco" (1937) was sold to benefit the Spanish Republic.
1856-1939, was an Austrian psychiatrist and founder of psychoanalysis.
He gave us the terms and concepts of oral fixation, the Oedipal
complex, anal- retentiveness, penis envy, defense mechanisms, castration
anxiety, the unconscious, the ego, the id, the superego, and so
forth. His emphasis on the workings of the unconscious as revealed
in dreams, as well as his analyses of Greek myths which make them
relevant in the modern world, was a major influence on the Surrealists.
Gilot, 1921-, was a young painter Picasso met and
seduced in 1943. The two began living together in 1946; they had
two children, Claude (b. May 15, 1947) and Paloma (b. April 19, 1949).
Picasso was most active in the Communist Party during the span
of this relationship. Gilot, ambitious and sick of living in Picasso's
shadow, left him and took the children in 1953. Picasso, although
he had several artist-mistresses–as well as Gilot, there was Olivier
and Maar–was always dismissive of women artists. For him, women
were, as he famously remarked, either "goddesses or doormats."
Gilot, it seems, preferred leaving him to becoming a "doormat"
met González, 1876-1942, in 1902. Like Picasso, the Spanish sculptor
González settled in Paris at around the turn of the century. When
they met up to work together in 1928, González's metalworking expertise
allowed Picasso to realize large-scale sculptures for the first
time; González became Picasso's most important collaborator besides
Braque. González was an important sculptor in his own right, a
maker of ingenious semi-abstractions based on the human figure.
Some of his work is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
struck up a liaison with Eva Gouel in the autumn of 1911 and commemorated
her presence in his life by putting the words "ma jolie" ("my pretty"),
taken from a popular song, in his canvases. Picasso was devastated
by her death in 1915.
Grünewald, a German painter of the early sixteenth
century, is a complete mystery; we have no biographical information
on him whatsoever, only some wonderful paintings. The altarpiece
that he made for the Alsatian village of Isenheim in 1515 is an outstanding
work; its central panel, "The Crucifixion," a moving rendering
of the Man of Sorrows, inspired Picasso to do a radical re- make,
the precursor of the old-master remixes which he turned out at such
a tremendous rate in his old age.
1876-1944, was a French novelist, poet, and painter and a dear friend
of Picasso's during the early, hungry years at the Bateau-Lavoir.
His dreamy work was related to both Symbolism and Surrealism.
Born into a Jewish family, Jacob converted to Roman Catholicism
in 1914 and became a monk in a Benedictine monastery in 1921.
Some have suggested that the monkish figure on the right in "Three
Musicians" represents him (and that the Harlequin in the middle
stands for Picasso, and that the Pierrot on the left is Apollinaire).
Jacob died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.
Kahnweiler was an art dealer who backed Braque and
Picasso during the development of Cubism. The Path to
a book he wrote in 1920, publicizing his discoveries,
continues to affect how we think about Cubism; Kahnweiler invented
the terms Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, which are still in common
Picasso married the dancer Koklova, of the Ballet
Russes, in July, 1918. She had social ambitions; it was during
their marriage that Picasso first started living in swell apartments
and going to fashionable resorts. The two had a son, Paulo (b.
February 4, 1921). Unfortunately, the marriage soon began to crumble;
the two considered and rejected divorce in 1935 and decided to separate.
Koklova's behavior later became extreme. She died in 1955.
María Picasso Lopez
Picasso was very fond of his mother and chose to
go by her name instead of his father's. However, we know very
little about her; it seems she was physically delicate, with a
Maar, 1909-, was a Surrealist painter and photographer and Picasso's
mistress. Their affair began in 1936, overlapping with his liaison
with Marie- Thérese Walter. Since she was brought up in Argentina,
the two could speak Spanish to each other. She photographed the
progress of "Guernica" (1937), showing the different stages of
the work, and participated in the private reading of Picasso's
play Desire Caught by the Tail.
With the end of
the war came the end of their relationship; later, she had a nervous
1869-1954, a French painter, sculptor, and lithographer is perhaps
Picasso's main rival for most lauded artist of the twentieth century.
It is no wonder that Picasso, when introduced to Matisse by Gertrude
Stein in 1906, was originally mistrustful of and competitive with
the older artist. Towards the end of Matisse's life, however,
the two became friends. Matisse began painting in 1890; studying
under the Symbolist Gustave Moreau, he met many painters who would
later become his fellow Fauvists. In 1905, he exhibited with the
Fauvists at the Salon d'Automne. One Fauvist remarked that "One
can talk about the Impressionist school, because they held certain
principles. For us there was nothing like that; we merely thought
their colors were a bit dull"–Matisse would continue with the bright
colors and total lack of interest in the political, ideological,
and theoretical aspects of art that characterized the Fauves throughout
his life. He was interested in pattern and ornament, and accordingly
flattened out his paintings to highlight this aspect. Singularly
serene, Matisse seemed to be the embodiment of Mediterranean joie
He called one of his early pieces "Luxe, Calme
et Volopté" (French for "Luxury, Calm, and Pleasure"), and indeed,
this phrase seems to fit his life and work.
1893-, was a Spanish Surrealist painter. He studied in Barcelona
and then moved to Paris in 1919, where he fell in with the Surrealists.
His paintings use pure colors and shapes derived from the free
forms of psychic automatism.
1863-1944, was a Norwegian Symbolist painter and print-maker and
one of the most angst-ridden artists of all time; he said that
he heard all around him and wanted to express "the scream of nature."
His most famous work is, indeed, "The Scream" (1895).
Once Picasso settled into Paris, in 1904, he struck
up an affair with another young artist, Fernande Olivier. When
his career began to pick up speed, the couple was able to move
out of the Bateau-Lavoir into an apartment with a maid near the
Place Pigalle, where they held an open house every Sunday. In 1911,
they split up and Picasso fell in love with Eva Gouel.
Picasso became friends with Pallarés when he was
a teenager studying at La Lonja in Barcelona, and the two shared
a studio. In June 1898, the friends set out to Pallarés's hometown,
the village of Horta de Ebro. Staying there for eight months,
Picasso liked to paint local scenes. He would go there again in
the summer of 1909 with Fernande; there, inspired by Cézanne, his
painting took a decisive turn in the development towards what would
become Cubism. Later, Picasso would often repeat, "Everything
I know, I learned in Pallarés's village."
Poussin, 1594-1665, was a French painter who settled
in Rome to soak up the dignity and harmony of ancient Roman art.
After making paraphrases and variations of Poussin's "Bacchanale"
in 1944–picking up again on what he had done to Grünewald's "Crucifixion"
in 1930–Picasso worked for much of the rest of his life working
with the old masters.
1866-1944, was a French novelist, playwright, and biographer who
established his reputation with the 10-volume novel Jean-Christophe
(1904-12). A committed pacifist, he chose to spend much of his
life in Switzerland.
Roque was Picasso's last love. He met Jacqueline,
a young divorcée with a small daughter, in 1953, the year that
Françoise left him. In 1955 they moved together to a villa called
La Californie, at Cannes; then, looking for someplace quieter,
they moved in 1958 to the Château de Vauvenargues. When Olga died
in 1955, Picasso was left free to marry again; Jacqueline and Picasso
had a quiet ceremony in 1961 and stayed together until his death
in 1973. Later she committed suicide.
Catalan poet Sabartés (1881-1968) was part of the group that met
at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona and quickly became good friends
with the teenage Picasso. Decades later, in 1935, confronting
personal and artistic crises, Picasso invited his old friend Sabartés
to stay with him as his secretary and business manager. Sabartés
was happy to accept; the friendship between the two was true and
Sartre, 1905-, was a French philosopher, playwright,
novelist, leader of the resistance against the occupying German
forces during World War II, famously tight friends with Simone
de Beauvoir and the leading exponent of Existentialism. Some of
his best-known works include his first novel, Nausea,
play No Exit,
and the absolutely gigantic philosophical
treatise, Being and Nothingness.
1866-1925, was a completely and wonderfully bizarre French composer
who worked in a restrained, abstract, deceptively simple style.
He often worked with Cocteau.
Stalin's (1879-1953) real name was Dzhugashvili, but he called himself
Stalin, meaning "man of steel." He was the leader of the USSR
from the time of Lenin's death in 1924 until his own. Seeking
to consolidate socialism in Russia, he made the Communist state
extremely repressive and his own dictatorship absolute. (See the
SparkNote Biography onStalin
1874-1946, was an American writer and extremely influential patron
of the arts. Leo Stein was her brother and fellow patron. From
1903 on she lived chiefly in Paris. Her best-known work is her Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas
(1933), which is her own autobiographical
work presented as that of her secretary-lover Toklas. She encouraged
and bought the works of Picasso and Matisse; she felt that she
understood Picasso very well. As she wrote in her book about him,
called simply Picasso
and published in 1938, "I
was alone at this time in understanding him, perhaps because I
was expressing the same thing in literature, perhaps because I
was an American and...Spaniards and Americans have a kind of understanding
of things which is the same." Inspired by Picasso's example to
try to do for literature what he had done for painting, she called
her book of poetry, Tender Buttons
(1914) a series
of "cubist" verbal portraits.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864-1901, was a cripple who left
the aristocracy to record the decadent cabaret life of 1890s Paris.
Inspired by the Japanese–by their colors, their simplification
of form, their asymmetry, their sophistication–he made brilliant lithographic
posters for dance-hall acts as well as painted studies of the loose
Velázquez, 1599-1660, was the painter for the Spanish
court in Madrid. Picasso saw his work hanging in the Prado when
he was very young and turned back to it when he was much older,
in his series based around Velázquez's wonderfully complex masterpiece,
"Las Meninas" ("The Maids of Honor").
Walter was a young girl when
Picasso introduced himself to her in 1927. It must have been love
at first sight for him; as she tells the story, "When I met Picasso,
I was seventeen. I was an innocent child. I knew nothing–about
life, about Picasso. Nothing. I had been shopping in the Galeries
Lafayette, and Picasso saw me coming out of the metro. He just
took me by the arm and said: 'I am Picasso! You and I are going
to do great things together.'" The two fell very much in love
and her presence permeated his art during the time of their liaison.
As one of Picasso's friends said, "At no other moment in his life
was his painting so undulating, all sinuous curves, rolling arms,
and swirling hair." Two portraits of Marie-Thérese dozing, both
filled with bright, pure colors, smooth lines, and an atmosphere
of serene sensuality more typical of Matisse than of Picasso, typify
his work under her museship. She gave birth to a daughter, Maïa,
in 1935. However, the relationship was not as untroubled as it
may appear in these paintings; Picasso met Dora Maar in 1936 and
so the liaisons overlapped and Picasso shuttled back and forth.
Later, Marie- Thérese killed herself.