Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [103]
Matisse, “Les Bêtes de la Mer,” 1950, NG, Washington, DC. In Matisse’s collaged paper cutouts, his characteristic elements of suggestive forms and dazzling color for emotional impact are evident.
PICASSO: THE KING OF MODERN ART. “When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope,’” Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) told his mistress Françoise Gilot. “Instead,” he added, “I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
For half a century, Picasso led the forces of artistic innovation, shocking the world by introducing a new style and then moving on as soon as his unorthodoxy became accepted. His most significant contribution — aided by Braque — was inventing Cubism, the major revolution of twentieth-century art. Until the age of 91 Picasso remained vital and versatile. Probably the most prolific Western artist ever, Picasso produced an estimated 50,000 works.
Picasso could draw before he could talk. His first words at age two were “pencil, pencil,” as he beggged for a drawing tool. Born in Spain the son of a mediocre painter, by his mid-teens Picasso had mastered the art of drawing with photographic accuracy. When he visited an exhibit of children’s art in 1946, he remarked at that age he could draw like Raphael, but “it took me many years to learn how to draw like these children.”
Picasso, “The Blindman’s Meal,” 1903, MMA, NY. Picasso’s melancholy “Blue Period” paintings portray thin, suffering beggars and tramps.
Although Picasso worked in a number of distinctive styles, his art was always autobiographical. “The paintings,” he said, “are the pages of my diary.” Walking through the chronological sequence of work in Paris’s Musée Picasso is like wandering the corridors of his love life. Women were his chief source of inspiration.
BLUE PERIOD. Picasso’s first original style grew out of his down-and-out years as an impoverished artist. The Blue Period of 1901-4 is so called because of the cool indigo and cobalt blue shades Picasso used. The paintings, obsessed with scrawny blind beggars and derelicts, literally project the “blues” that seized Picasso during this period, when he had to burn his sketches for fuel. Working without recognition, he elongated the limbs of his bony figures until they looked like starved El Grecos.
ROSE PERIOD. As soon as Picasso settled full-time in Paris (he spent his working career in France) and met his first love, Fernande Olivier, his depression vanished. He began to use delicate pinks and earth colors to paint circus performers like harlequins and acrobats. The paintings of this Rose, or Circus, Period (1905-6) are sentimental and romantic.
Picasso, “Portrait of Ambroise Vollard,” 1915, MMA, NY.
Picasso, “Portrait of Ambroise Vollard,” 1910, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
VOLLARD CUBED. “I have no idea whether I’m a great painter, ”Picasso said “but I am a great draftsman. ” Although he could draw likenesses as precisely as Ingres, he chose to invent new forms rather than perpetuate the old. In the Analytic Cubist portrait of Vollard, Picasso broke the subject into a crystallike structure of interlocking facets in subdued colors.
ANATOMY OF A MASTERPIECE
During the Spanish Civil War, fascist dictator Francisco Franco hired the Nazi Lüftwaffe to destroy the small Basque town of Guernica. For three hours warplanes dropped bombs, slaughtering 2,000 civilians, wounding thousands more, and razing the undefended town. The Spaniard Picasso, filled with patriotic rage, created the 25-foot-wide by 11-foot-high mural in one month. It is considered the most powerful indictment ever of the horrors of war. “Painting is not done to decorate apartments, ” Picasso said. “It is on instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.”
Picasso incorporated certain design elements to create a powerful effect of anguish. He used a black-white-gray palette to emphasize