Pablo Picasso (Oct 25, 1881 - Apr 8, 1973) is probably the most famous painter of the 20th Century. His diverse styles in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramics exteriorized his relationships and changed, like his houses, with the women who inspired him. His art chronicled these women and his life. He was born in Malaga, Andalusia Spain the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco, an art instructor, and María Picasso y López. The family moved to Barcelona after the death of his sister when he was seven years old. Later he would deconstruct the female form to abstraction. He would have two wives, but many mistresses, and he both adored and abused women.
Picasso at age sixteen moved to Madrid to study,
then at nineteen to Paris with his friend Carlos Casagemas.
The suicide of Casagemas in 1901
over Picasso’s model Germaine Florentin Pichot
began Picasso’s Blue Period (1901-1904).
La Vie. (Life)
It is said that his model Madeline
relieved his depression, and
inspired his Rose Period (1904-1906).
Madeleine.
It is rumored she aborted his child.
Mother and child.
In 1904, Picasso meets Amelie Lang (Fernande Olivier),
his muse for seven years. Her likeness appears in
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
One of Picasso’s most famous
african influenced paintings
--perhaps his first cubist painting--
it shocked his contemporaries
by its style, scale and subject matter (prostitutes in a bordello),
but it transformed modern art.
In 1907 he and Georges Braque define and proliferate
Cubism.
Girl with mandolin.
Beginning an affair with Eva Gouel in 1909,
he leaves Fernande and Paris in 1912,
joining Braque in Sorgues.
Braque is conscripted in WW I,
and Eva died of tuberculosis in 1915.
Eva and Picasso.
In 1917, while designing a ballet set with friend Jean Cocteau, Picasso meets his first wife ballerina Olga Khokhlova. She introduces him to the glitterati of the day, Chanel and Stravinsky, and others. They marry in 1918, and though she refuses to divorce him, he leaves her and their son Paulo. She had been his model and muse throughout his neoclassical period.
His family had been transformed into giants.
In 1927 he began an affair with seventeen year old Maria-Therese Walter. Happy, he brings new colors to his work. In 1930 Picasso purchases Chateau de Boisegeloup for sculpting Maria-Therese. He brought Olga there to live in 1932. Maria-Therese gives birth in 1935 to Maya (Maria de la Concepcion) named after Picasso’s dead sister.
Maria-Therese would kill herself four years after Picasso’s death.
After Maya’s birth, Picasso began an affair with photographer Dora Maar in Paris. Fascism is on the rise. The tragedies of the Spanish Civil War compel Picasso to paint his most famous bombing of Guernica in 1937. It is a black and white painting of despair.
Dora remained his muse in the dark days of occupied Paris.
In 1946 Picasso moves to the south of France with Francoise Gilot, an art student forty years younger than he, and is happy again. 
La Joie de Vivre.
He purchases La Galloise, and he sculpts and paints at the Factory (La Furnace). He creates ceramics at Madoura’s. Francoise gives birth to Claude in 1947, then Paloma (she is named for Picasso's work with the global peace symbol, the dove of peace) in 1949. Francoise tolerated his wife and former mistresses until she left him in 1953 (and later married American physician-researcher Jonas Salk).
Picasso met Jacqueline Roque in 1953 at the Madoura. After the death of Olga, she would become his second wife in 1961. Picasso was 79. He portrayed Jacqueline in his work more than any other woman in his life, painting seventy portraits of her in one year.
Picasso died April 8, 1973. They were together all total twenty years. After arranging an homage to his work, Jacqueline killed herself in 1986.
[Please forgive that I call all the women by their first names, while Picasso is denoted by his mother's name].
No comments:
Post a Comment