His style evolved as he was introduced to symbolism. In , he first visited Paris to view a Van Gogh retrospective. He would return a year later for his own one-man show at Galerie Vollard. He moved between France and Spain, but finally settled in Paris in and would spend most of the rest of his life in France. The patronage of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein led to the painting of one of his most famous works — Portrait of Gertrude Stein.
The aesthetics of traditional African sculpture were emerging as a powerful influence on European artists at this time, most notably in the work of Picasso and Matisse. This switch to a flat, two-dimensional plane was a radical departure for European art. Together, Braque and Picasso developed a style which took objects apart and analysed them in terms of shape. Following a trip to Italy in , Picasso began a period in tribute to neoclassical style that he would later integrate with his modernist concepts to create surrealist masterpieces, such as the ground-breaking Guernica.
Inspired by the Nazi bombing of the Basque city, this painting embodies the despair of war and retains the power to shock some 80 years later. Since , however, he has lived—in his comfortable, impoverished manner—in his costly mansion in the hills above Cannes. Called the Villa Californie, it is a large, tastelessly built Edwardian house, with big salons, which are perfect for studios.
It sits in a neglected garden, now ornamented with gigantic ceramic figures that he has made. His friends use them as chairs and tables. The scarce real furniture is dilapidated by use, by having frequently been moved from house to house, and by his indifference. He inherited some good Spanish cabinets from his parents, but they have failed to survive. Around his studios, there has always been a mixture of Negro sculpture, bronze statues, pottery, broken-stringed musical instruments, and paintings—like the unsorted overflow of a provincial museum.
Besides his own canvases, he has some valuable paintings by other modern artists. Rousseau with a lamp. As a rule, these pictures—as well as most of his own—are posed carefully in corners, faces to the wall. The disorder in which Picasso lives is psychologically very in formative—a special, static, organized disorder, mystifying to visitors, touching to his friends. It consists of a confusing, dusty, heteroclite accretion of objects—many of them valueless, or ephemeral and kept beyond their time—behind which he seems to immure himself in order to feel at ease and resident.
It is a disarray that he studiously protects—nobody is permitted to tidy up and destroy it—and that both stimulates and comforts him. He saves everything—half-empty boxes of Spanish matches, half-filled boxes of desiccated Spanish cigars. For years, he kept an old hatbox full of superannuated neckties. In his Rue des Grands-Augustins flat, the telephone serves as a paperweight, holding down telephone bills, invitations to art exhibitions long since past, calling cards, addresses, and stray papers inscribed with special information—all impounded together so they will be handy if he ever chooses to look at them.
The mantelpiece overflows with postcards, letters, snapshots, calendars, art-sale catalogues, maybe a box of chocolates, new writing paper, and press clippings, ranged in confused, mixed piles.
There are more piles of things on the tables and chairs. Because of his theory that anything not in sight is irretrievably lost, things merely go permanently astray. The pockets of his jackets are frayed by what he picks up in his peregrinations: pebbles of unlikely shapes, shells, bits of promising bone, pieces of deformed wood, sections of metal—discarded fragments that no longer look like whatever they were at first and so are free to look like something new, different, and stimulating to him.
Everything is always privileged to lie where he puts it down or where chance happens to place it, to mature in situ so that his glance can come to rest on the immobility of these surroundings he has brought to pass. It is a collection caused by nothing being thrown away. Change and organization he restricts to his art, in which he has spent his career ceaselessly reinventing, distorting, and altering the nature and appearance of life while immersed in the proved, commonplace reality of his surroundings.
If he walked by night, he usually took the same streets he had taken the night before, and the night before that. Picasso has always delighted in having people about him, like courtiers. He invites them in numbers, and often lets them wait in his untidy salon until they have grown into a small crowd.
Then, instead of talking to several of them at once, he may select one person for a confidence, leading him to one side, or even taking him into an adjoining room, as a mark of favor. Most of his life, he has worked at night, to assure himself of no human interruption at all, and this has led to his habit of rising late in the morning.
Picasso is a heavy cigarette smoker who does not inhale. He eats simply and without fine taste, possesses incomparably preserved good health, has always been a hypochondriac who once had a bit of liver trouble and an attack of sciatica , is still proud of his small hands and feet, hates old age, and has a horror of death.
He is always reported as shutting off his past behind him—as having no nostalgias, and living, with almost cruel determination, only in the perpetual present, on which he has seemed to construct his life.
Yet the old friends from his youth who are still alive are, in a literal manner, daily in his thoughts. To an English friend of the younger generation he lately confided that he has the habit of repeating to himself the names of these old friends every morning. When Maurice Raynal—the noted art critic, who was for some time a member of the Montmartre group during the impoverished euphoric Bateau-Lavoir days—died recently, Picasso felt great remorse, he told his English friend.
Raynal had died on the very day Picasso forgot to mention his name in the morning. Picasso is ranked as the wittiest artist and best conversationalist since Whistler, if very different.
He has become famous for his talk and what could be called his carnivorous wit, since it usually eats other people alive. He does not converse but talks solo—creatively, decisively, and fascinatingly, with wit, ideas, and odd images, his ever-present Spanish accent seasoning his phrases, which emerge in bursts.
The only attention he pays to anything that may be said in comment or reply is to change it so much, on dealing with it, as to make it unrecognizable to whoever has just said it; moreover, Picasso then holds the speaker responsible for what he has not said.
When he has nothing to say, his silence is so profound, moody, Iberian, and oppressive that nobody else has anything to say, either. His humor is sardonic, frequently cruel, always deft, never clumsy or brutal, and is usually composed of over-sharpened truth, penetrating and painful when it strikes. He rarely misses. The oldest, most quoted of his sayings was a characterization of the late Cubist painter Marcoussis, whom Picasso accused of copying his paintings as a way of picking his brains.
Some of his humorous exploits have had unexpectedly factual results. The joke was so convincing that one of the most serious of the Paris art magazines, on getting hold of a photograph of the telephoning odalisque, solemnly reproduced it as a genuine Matisse. During the nineteen-thirties, when the fabrication of counterfeit Picassos was at its height—his works being the must often falsified because he rated the highest prices—an old journalist friend took a small Picasso belonging to some poor devil of an artist to Picasso for authentication, so the impoverished artist could sell it.
The friend brought him another little Picasso, from a different source, and then a third. He then bought the first Picasso at quadruple the price that the poor artist had hoped it might fetch.
When another person brought him a counterfeit etching to sign, he signed it so many times that the man was able to sell it only as a curiosity to an autograph dealer. There is something so mordant about his humor and about what amuses him that certain macabre types of funny story that go the rounds in Paris are often introduced as having been told by the artist himself.
In the latest Picasso-type story, credited to him by the weekly Paris-Match , a cannibal mother and little cannibal child are walking in the forest when an airplane flies overhead. A handshake from your entirely devoted friend and admirer, Picasso. Years later, in , the painting was finally found in an Italian home. The welcome news was short-lived, however, as the First World War broke out a few days later.
Picasso was extremely superstitious. It was a part of his character that he carried with him since his youth, growing up in Andalusia. The artist felt, for example, that one's hair possessed something magical. And that, given into the wrong hands, even discarded hair could bring harm to the person who's head it came from. As a result, Picasso always dreaded getting his hair cut.
Picasso standing in Paris's Montmartre neighborhood. The artist was living there when he painted his revolutionary work, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon His real last name was Ruiz. Pablo's family was best known in the region as glovemakers.
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