Pablo Picasso was probably the most influential modern painterof the 20th century. Born in Spain, he lived in France much of his life painting, sculpting, making ceramics, and doing graphic artwork. His style was quite avant-garde and unique, and he changed it many times during his career. Picasso was one of the artists to lay the foundations for Cubism, a style that used angular, cube-like structures to depict people and things.
He loved to shock the public with his strange, powerful paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. Picasso was among the first to make collages by pasting material onto the anvas. Before his 50th birthday, theSpaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. Picasso’s audience–meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work, at least in reproduction–was in the tens, possibly hundreds, of millions.
He and his work were the subjects of analysis, gossip, dislike, adoration and rumor. He was a superstitious, sarcastic man, sometimes rotten to his children, often mean to his women. He had contempt for women artists. His famous remark about women being “goddesses or oormats” has rendered him odious to feminists, but women tended to walk into both roles open-eyed and eagerly, for his charm was legendary. He was also politically lucky.
Though to Nazis his work was the epitome of “degenerate art,” his fame protected him during the German occupation of Paris, where he lived; and after the war, when artists and writers were thought disgraced by the slightest affiliation with Nazism or fascism, Picasso gave enthusiastic endorsement to Joseph Stalin, a mass murderer on a scale far beyond Hitler’s, and scarcely received a word of criticism for it, ven in cold war America. No painter, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime.
And it is quite possible that none ever will be again, now that the mandate to set forth social meaning. Picasso was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees. And he was the first artist to enjoy the obsessive attention of mass media. He stood at the intersection of these two worlds. If that had not been so, his restless changes of style, his constant pushing ould not have created such controversy–and thus such celebrity.
In today’s art world, a place without living culture heroes, you can’t even imagine such a protean monster arising. His output was vast. Still, Picasso’s art filled the world, and he left permanent marks on every discipline he entered. His work expanded, one image breeding new clusters of others, right up to his death. He was the artist with whom virtually every other artist had to reckon, and there was scarcely a 20th century movement that he didn’t inspire, contribute to or–in the case of Cubism, which, in one of art history’s great collaborations, he co-invented with Georges Braque–beget.
Since Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life, even there his handprints lay everywhere. Much of the story of modern sculpture is bound up with welding and assembling images from sheet metal, rather than modeling in clay, casting in bronze or carving in wood; and this tradition of the open constructed form rather than solid mass arose from one small guitar that Picasso snipped and joined out of tin in1912. If collage,the gluing of previously nrelated things and images on a flat surface–became a basic mode of modern art, that too was due to Picasso’s Cubist collaboration with Braque.
In the 1920s and ’30s he produced some of the scariest distortions of the human body and the most violently irrational, erotic images of Eros and Thanatos ever committed to canvas. He was not a realist painter, still less anyone’s official muralist, and yet Guernica remains the most powerful political image in modern art. Picasso was regarded as a boy genius, but if he had died before 1906, his 25th year, his mark on 20th century art would have been slight. It was the experience of modernity that created his modernism, and that happened in Paris.
There, mass production and reproduction had come to the forefront of ordinary life: newspapers, printed labels, the overlay of posters on walls–the dizzily intense public life of signs, simultaneous, high-speed and layered. This was the cityscape of Cubism. Picasso was not a philosopher or a mathematician (there is no “geometry” in Cubism), but the work he and Braque did between 1911 and 1918 was intuitively bound to the perceptions of thinkers like Einstein. That reality is not figure and void, it is all elationships, a twinkling field of interdependent events.
Cubism was hard to read, willfully ambiguous, and yet demotic too. It remains the most influential art dialect of the early 20th century. As if to distance himself from his imitators, Picasso then went to the opposite extreme of embracing the classical past, with his paintings of huge dropsical women dreaming Mediterranean dreams in homage to Corot and Ingres. Though the public saw him as the modernist, he was disconnected from much modern art. Picasso had no more of a Utopian streak than did his Spanish idol, Goya. The idea that art evolved, or had any kind of historical mission, struck him as ridiculous.
All I have ever made,” he once said, “was made for the present and in the hope that it will always remain in the present. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or the future. ” He also stood against the Expressionist belief that the work of art gains value by disclosing the truth, the inner being, of its author. “How can anyone enter into my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thoughts … and above all grasp from the hat I have been about–perhaps against my own will? ” he exclaimed.
In his work, everything is staked on sensation and desire. His aim was not to argue coherence but to go for the strongest level of feeling. He conveyed it with tremendous force, making you feel the weight of forms and the tension of their relationships mainly by drawing and tonal structure. He was never a great colorist, But through metaphor, he crammed layers of meaning together to produce flashes of revelation. In the process, he reversed one of the currents of modern art. Picasso died in 1973 and the art world was devastated.
