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Pablo PICASSO to Cubism (1903-1907) Georges Seurat

Pablo Picasso, La Vie , May 1903, 197 X 128, Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art

This masterpiece is among the largest and most complex paintings from Picasso's Blue Period, dating from 1901 to 1904. Painted in Barcelona, La Vie remains one of the key works in the prodigious output of paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and pottery of this dominant visual artist of the twentieth century.

La Vie is set in an artist's studio, containing vague suggestions of cloistered architecture. A nude woman clings to the male figure, dressed only in a white loincloth, who points toward the heavily draped woman holding a sleeping baby. Between these groups are two canvases, stacked one on top of the other, in the beginning stages of development and only outlined. In the upper one, two clinging nudes look out hopelessly; in the other, the figure rests its head on drawn-up knees. Picasso made four preparatory sketches for this painting, changing the figures in the composition at least twice. The cloaked female figure was initially a bearded male. The male figure, which began as a self-portrait, ended as a portrait of Picasso's late friend Carlos Casagemas, who had committed suicide after being cruelly rejected by a lover.

The painting is clearly allegorical, as well as unusually complex and obscure for Picasso's early work. Scholars have not reached a consensus concerning the narrative, which has frequently been discussed in print but never explained by the artist. Picasso's painting projects a pessimistic outlook, expressed not only in the symbolism of the figures but also in its desolate, cold, blue tones. During his Blue Period, he often dealt with themes of misery and human destitution, and here his subject may allude to the responsibilities of everyday life, the incompatibility of sexual love, and the difficulties of artistic creativity.

The canvas's surface has numerous pentimenti. From X-ray photographs taken in 1976 at The Cleveland Museum of Art and through subsequent research, some of mysteries of the piece have been explained. In addition to the changes Picasso made while painting La Vie, a second painting was discovered beneath its surface that appears to be the lost work, The Last Moments (or The Moribund ). Elements identified in the radiographs--a nude female reclining on a bed, a bedside table with an open drawer supporting a lighted lamp, a priest, and a winged creature with a human body and the head of a bird--resemble the description of a large canvas that was the key painting in Picasso's first exhibition in Barcelona and at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900.

http://www.clevelandart.org/explore/viewcmacollections.asp?cid=p44

Pablo PICASSO, La Repasseuse , printemps 1904, 116,2 X 73, New York, The Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Images of labor abound in late-19th- and early 20th-century French art. From Jean-François Millet’s sowers and Gustave Courbet’s stone breakers to Berthe Morisot’s wet nurses and Edgar Degas’s dancers and milliners, workers were often idealized and portrayed as simple, robust souls who, because of their identification with the earth, with sustenance, and with survival, symbolized a state of blessed innocence. Perhaps no artist depicted the plight of the underclasses with greater poignancy than Picasso, who focused almost exclusively on the disenfranchised during his Blue Period (1901–04), known for its melancholy palette of predominantly blue tones and its gloomy themes. Living in relative poverty as a young, unknown artist during his early years in Paris, Picasso no doubt empa-thized with the laborers and beggars around him and often portrayed them with great sensitivity and pathos. Woman Ironing, painted at the end of the Blue Period in a lighter but still bleak color scheme of whites and grays, is Picasso’s quintessential image of travail and fatigue. Although rooted in the social and economic reality of turn-of-the-century Paris, the artist’s expressionistic treatment of his subject—he endowed her with attenuated proportions and angular contours—reveals a distinct stylistic debt to the delicate, elongated forms of El Greco. Never simply a chronicler of empirical facts, Picasso here imbued his subject with a poetic, almost spiritual presence, making her a metaphor for the misfortunes of the working poor.

Picasso’s attention soon shifted from the creation of social and quasi-religious allegories to an investigation of space, volume, and perception, culminating in the invention of Cubism. His portrait Fernande with a Black Mantilla is a transitional work. Still somewhat expressionistic and romantic, with its subdued tonality and lively brushstrokes, the picture depicts his mistress Fernande Olivier wearing a mantilla, which perhaps symbolizes the artist’s English origins. The iconic stylization of her face and its abbreviated features, however, foretell Picasso’s increasing interest in the abstract qualities and solidity of Iberian sculpture, which would profoundly influence his subsequent works. Though naturalistically delineated, the painting presages his imminent experiments with abstraction.

Nancy Spector

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_126_30.html

Pablo PICASSO, Famille de Saltimbanques , 1905, 212,8 X 229,6, Washington, National Gallery

From late 1904 to the beginning of 1906, Picasso's work centered on a single theme: the saltimbanque , or itinerant circus performer. The theme of the circus and the circus performer had a long tradition in art and in literature, and had become especially prominent in French art of the late nineteenth century. A more immediate inspiration for Picasso came from performances of the Cirque Médrano, a circus that the artist attended frequently near his residence and studio in Montmartre.

Circus performers were regarded as social outsiders, poor but independent. As such, they provided a telling symbol for the alienation of avant-garde artists such as Picasso. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Family of Saltimbanques serves as an autobiographical statement, a covert group portrait of Picasso and his circle.

Picasso reworked the Family of Saltimbanques several times, adding figures and altering the composition. The figures occupy a desolate landscape and although Picasso has knit them together in a carefully balanced composition, each figure is psychologically isolated from the others, and from the viewer. In his rose, or circus period, Picasso moved away from the extreme pathos of his earlier blue period, but in the Family of Saltimbanques , the masterpiece of the circus period, a mood of introspection and sad contemplation prevails.

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This scene of fairground performers was Picasso's most significant work to date. The name of the painting comes from the Italian words saltare, meaning "to leap," and banco, "bench," which refers to the stage on which the acrobats usually performed. Saltimbanques were the lowest order of acrobats; Picasso pictured them as vagabonds with simple props in an empty, desertlike landscape. He was familiar with earlier representations of clowns and harlequins from eighteenth-century art, which frequently included figures from the commedia dell'arte, a popular theatrical form featuring stock characters and their antics. These characters played significant roles in the paintings of such artists as Tiepolo, the Le Nain, and Watteau.

Picasso's painting was inspired by a group of performers he and his colleagues befriended at the Cirque Medrano, which had quarters near the artist's Paris studio in Montmartre. Picasso was particularly drawn to the circus people, many of whom were his English countrymen. Their agility and pursuit of the art of illusion delighted him, and their gypsylike lives touched the artist, who himself searched for new horizons.

Picasso identified most closely with the clowns, those performers who masked their true selves with costumes and makeup. In fact, Picasso portrayed himself as the harlequin in a diamond-patterned costume in Family of Saltimbanques . The jester and the acrobats are lost in their own thoughts and glance toward the woman, who sits alone, while the harlequin reaches out to the child behind his back. In his deft representations of the various figures, Picasso manages to portray not only the lifestyle of the real saltimbanques but also the apparent melancholy mood of his friends and the collective alienation of this group.

Picasso's huge canvas was a considerable investment for the struggling artist and may explain why he repainted the subject at least four times, one on top of the other. X-radiography reveals the figures positioned differently in earlier versions. Some of Picasso's changes, including the woman's shoulders and hat, the color of the child's ballet slippers, the red jester's missing leg, and the harlequin's top hat, emerge as ghostlike outlines ( pentimenti ) in the final painting.

http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=46382+0+none

Pablo PICASSO, La Toilette , Gosol, été 1906, 151 X 66, Buffalo, Albright-Knox Museum

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein , summer 1906, 100 X 81.3, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

was in 1907. Gertrude Stein was trying to supervise the printing of Three Lives, which she made out a trade edition, and at the same time she was immersed in writing The Making of Americans, his great novel than a thousand pages. Picasso had just finished a portrait of Gertrude Stein, but nobody loved him so do not except the artist and model, now is a famous painting. Picasso was also starting his strange and complicated picture of three women. Matisse had just finished his Bonheur de vivre, his first large painting, which dubbed him a "beast". It was the time that Max Jacob was named for the heroic age of Cubism. I remember hearing recently Picasso and Gertrude Stein to talk about various things that had happened then, one of them said: "But all this could not happen in one year. - Oh, "replied the other, you forget we were young then and we did masses of things in one year."

Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , 1933

http://www.fondationlaposte.org/article.php3?id_article = 788

http://www.fondationlaposte.org/article.php3?id_article=786

Pablo PICASSO Self Portrait, 1907, 50 X 46, Prague , Narodni Gallery

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or The Bordel philosophique ou Le Bordel d'Avignon , juin-juillet 1907, 243,9 X 233,7, New York, Museum of Modern Art

The result of months of preparation and revision, this painting revolutionized the art world when first seen in Picasso's studio. Its monumental size underscored the shocking incoherence resulting from the outright sabotage of conventional representation. Picasso drew on sources as diverse as Iberian sculpture, African tribal masks, and El Greco's painting to make this startling composition. In the preparatory studies, the figure at left was a sailor entering a brothel. Picasso, wanting no anecdotal detail to interfere with the sheer impact of the work, decided to eliminate it in the final painting. The only remaining allusion to the brothel lies in the title: Avignon was a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel.

Gallery label text
2006

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L es Demoiselles d'Avignon is one of the most important works in the genesis of modern art. The painting depicts five naked prostitutes in a brothel; two of them push aside curtains around the space where the other women strike seductive and erotic poses—but their figures are composed of flat, splintered planes rather than rounded volumes, their eyes are lopsided or staring or asymmetrical, and the two women at the right have threatening masks for heads. The space, too, which should recede, comes forward in jagged shards, like broken glass. In the still life at the bottom, a piece of melon slices the air like a scythe.

The faces of the figures at the right are influenced by African masks, which Picasso assumed had functioned as magical protectors against dangerous spirits : this work, he said later, was his "first exorcism painting." A specific danger he had in mind was life-threatening sexual disease, a source of considerable anxiety in Paris at the time ; earlier sketches for the painting more clearly link sexual pleasure to mortality. In its brutal treatment of the body and its clashes of color and style (other sources for this work include ancient Iberian statuary and the work of Paul Cézanne), Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective.

Publication excerpt

The Museum of Modern Art. MoMA Highlights. New York. The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004

http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=79766

http://www.rfi.fr/culturefr/articles/092/article_55313.asp

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6DF153EF93BA35751C0A96E948260

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=341&issue=115