Word: picasso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great painters are precocious, but Picasso was. In a technical way, he was as much a prodigy as Mozart, and his precocity seems to have fixed his peculiar sense of vocation. He was born in Málaga in 1881, the son of a painter named José Ruiz Blasco (a fine-boned inglés face, nothing like Pablo's simian mask; that came from his mother), and by 13 he was so good at drawing that his father is said to have handed over his own brushes and paints to the boy and given up painting. If the story is true...
...point is not that Picasso, as an art student in Barcelona and, after the autumn of 1900, a young artist in Paris, was markedly better at imitating Steinlen or Toulouse-Lautrec than other Spanish artists were, but that he could run through the influences so quickly, with such nimble digestion. What he needed, he kept. He had no use for the tendril-like, decorative line of Spanish art nouveau, for instance, but he retained its liking for large, silhouetted masses, and they, grafted onto the pervasive influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, keep appearing in his Parisian cabaret scenes of 1901. Some...
...young artist in Paris at the turn of the century, such material could not last forever, and not all Picasso's experiences were gaslight and garters. Living in poverty in the little Spanish artists' colony in Montparnasse, he identified himself in a sentimental way with the wretched and down-and-out of Paris, the waifs and strays. This wistful misérabilisme, verging on allegory, was the keynote of his so-called Blue Period. Late in 1901 he had painted some Gauguin-like figures, using the characteristic flat silhouettes and solid blue boundary lines that Gauguin, in his turn, had extracted...
...artist dominates the Blue Period. He was Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), a painter of pale, chalky allegories, figure compositions with gravely flattened and somewhat elongated bodies, whose work was admired by Van Gogh, Gauguin and the symbolists of the 1890s, as well as young Turks like Picasso. He had studied Puvis's frescoes in the Pantheon, and their upright, formalized mien gave the measure to his big allegory of young love and despair, La Vie, 1903. (Originally the young man in the painting was a self-portrait, but Picasso turned it into the face of Carlos Casagemas, the friend...
Today one is not apt to think of allegory as a "modern" form, since it contradicts the abstraction of modernist painting. But it mattered a great deal to Picasso, and he resorted to it at some of his intense moments?not only the death of Casagemas, but in the construction of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which began as an allegory of venereal disease, a subject of great interest to the energetic Pablo), of Guernica, and on into his "Mediterranean" subjects of the 1930s, with their bulls and horses, virgins and Minotaurs, caves, ruins and nymphs. Allegory was the conscious, intelligible...