This year marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of the world-renowned and well-known master Pablo Picasso. Picasso's artwork, along with his own, has long since been transformed into a monument to modern art. However, the public's understanding of him is likely to be only a vague symbol.
Confusion and incomprehension are the first reflections of many people facing Picasso's works. How exactly did this master artist set the threshold for viewing? And how did you single-handedly write a history of modern art? Picasso's legacy is too many paradoxes and puzzles that are still worth chewing on today.
- Editor
Picasso's 1925 painting Kiss
After Picasso's death in 1973, he left behind as many as 5,000 paintings and 1,200 sculptures at his home in Mougins, southern France, as well as 4,000 ceramics, 15,000 drawings and prints, 150 drafts and 156 illustrated picture books, plus many of the works he sold during his lifetime.
Picasso, who became famous and lived to a high age (living to the age of 92), was able to turn stones into gold in his old age: the restaurateur kept his signed check and was reluctant to exchange it, and the gypsy musician who encountered a hotel fire lost a guitar with his signature. Once, he suddenly got tired of the scene of the bullfighting competition, and he drew a picture on the cloak of the bullfighter, and the angry bullfighter turned to joy when he saw the envious eyes of his companions. There are also installers Who don't want money, he just wants Picasso's big wrench to do a good job, but the lonely painter doesn't give him a wrench, but constantly gives him paintings, and in 2010 he donated all 271 Picasso paintings worth more than 100 million euros, because Picasso said to him, You are my real friend.
Picasso sculpture "Woman in Hat"
In addition to his works, Picasso also left many photographs and moving images. His contemporaries, such as the Surrealist and Dadaist Man Rey, model and photographer Lee Miller, and fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, created his mysterious side, and his admiring junior Lucien Craig was allowed to trace his daily life. When Picasso was alive, there were films documenting his painting process, and he was either an alchemist ("In Search of Picasso") or a master of suspense ("The Secret of Picasso"). After Picasso's death, directors let go of their hands and feet, and the nonsense comedy ("Picasso's Bizarre Journey") and Anthony Hopkins's interpretation ("Crazy Love Walk") each showed its own capabilities.
As an artist who broke the circle very early, Picasso's artwork, along with him as a person, was transformed into a monument to modern art in the stormy years of the 20th century, but do people know him? Not really. Under the monument, people marvel but are skeptical, preferring to see him as a vague background of the times. An artist wrapped in too many anecdotes is unfortunately left in the market, and more people covet his fame and fortune, but ignore the source of the astonishing creativity behind the painter and the revolutionary of art.
Picasso this year made a $660 million painting, The Woman Sitting on the Edge of the Bed, created in 1932
Indeed, we are often confused in front of Picasso's work, where the contradictions and complexities are as dizzying as his analytical Cubist paintings
Countless photographs show that Picasso's torch-like eyes are simply too high-energy, and his gaze is like a black hole, and the objects he is staring at are all tied up and doomed.
When Picasso was a poor and unknown painter, the American female writer Gertrude Stein saw in his eyes the extraordinary nature of this young man and was willing to support it. In his later years, Picasso watched 27-year-old John Richardson for less than two minutes, who felt trembling and spent the rest of his life organizing exhibitions and writing biographies for the master. We do often get confused in front of Picasso's work, when you might as well look into his eyes, "Every painting I have my blood in, that's what I paint." "At this point you feel that he should be trusted.
Picasso's Cubist works
But this trust is difficult, because Picasso's contradictions and complexities are as dizzying as his analytical Cubist paintings. In 1937, while working on his most famous guernica, Marie Teresa came to the studio and saw Dora Marr, who was working as an assistant, and the two quarreled and wrestled, finally asking Picasso to decide who should stay, but the answer was "I can't decide". The Spanish man, who was spoiled by his andalusian mother as a child, is frank in that he needs a woman as a muse, and that it is a woman of very different shape and personality to stimulate inspiration, and he is even happier when these women are jealous of each other. This story is enough to condemn the "moralists", but it reminds us that Guernica, which is considered an anti-war masterpiece, is only aimed at the Spanish Civil War? Did all this bloodshed and wailing just happen on the battlefield where the swords and soldiers met? The painting does not depict a man with a gun, but instead appears as a deformed woman. The tearing of human nature will bring about the blood of the soul, and once the human psyche is out of control, the storm is tantamount to the power of bombs to destroy a city. The greatness of Guernica is enough to prove that Picasso is so good at fusing ideological propositions with personal emotional experiences, thus transcending the two.
Picasso's masterpiece Guernica
Picasso deserves to be trusted. Not all geniuses start and end well, and in fact the odds of Western history are low. A large number of geniuses who died in the middle of the way due to suicide due to poverty, such as Raphael, Mozart, Schubert, and near such as Van Gogh, and Picasso contributed a perfect sample from a child prodigy to a master. He experienced the unnatural deaths of many close friends: fellow countryman Casa Guimas committed suicide with the German painter Vigle, the poet Apollinaire died of the Spanish flu, the painter Frendrich died in World War I, the poet Jacob died in World War II... Picasso was devastated by the passing of these young talents many times, but fortunately he was nourished from the process of communication, and was able to stay away from the disasters and specialize in creation, experiencing as many as 12 transformations in his life (according to Roland Penrose's periodization), which is the limit that an artist can reach in the 20th century, and probably the limit that an artist in the history of human art can reach.
Picasso's early 20th-century painting The Spanish Couple in Front of the Hotel
Therefore, in his later years, Picasso was already such a being, he was a benchmark, and his views represented the weight of art. He said that Chagall was the most color-savvy painter after Matisse, that he could not paint self-portraits like Frida's, and that O'Keefer's refusal to see him was testament to how arrogant the American female painter was. Picasso praised Chinese art very much: "In Europe and the United States, I can't see art, but there is real art in China, and the last thing I understand is why you Chinese why did you come to Paris to study art." He especially praised Qi Baishi's painting of the fish, "There is no water in the picture, but it seems that you can see the river and smell its breath." After that, he copied Qi Baishi's ink paintings and painted a lot of grass worms. Interestingly, in 1952, before this, his well-known "peace pigeon" in Asia, Africa and Latin America attracted the attention of Qi Baishi, who was nearly ninety years old and personally raised pigeons to paint pigeons, and confidently said: "He (Picasso) drew wings to vibrate when he painted pigeons, and the wings of the pigeons I painted did not vibrate, but the vibrations should be seen in the non-vibration." ”
Picasso's 1918 painting Bath
A person is a modern art history, and a certain condensation of Western classical art, which is the artistic height reached by Picasso in the 20th century
Picasso left us with many paradoxes and puzzles.
One of the most difficult to understand is Cubism. After the invention of photography, the talented painters of Europe at the end of the 19th century wanted to get rid of the shackles of classical realism, but they could not do it, and Picasso was the first to establish geometry as a new grammar of plastic arts. In 2001, Arthur M. Thompson, professor of philosophy of science at the University of London, said that he would like to work on the philosophy of science. I. Miller published a book that equates Picasso's Cubism with Einstein's theory of relativity, pointing out that these are two of the most far-reaching major originals of art and physics of the 20th century, and that both have "breathtaking beauty" in their revelations of space and time. The next question is, if that's the case, why does The Girl of Avignon look so ugly? The painting shocked friends when it was born in 1907 and was not publicly exhibited until 1937. Jean Cocteau, a close friend of Bi's and versatile, said: "Picasso runs faster than the United States, which is why his work looks ugly. "People may not find the painting crude today (and it's not surprising that there are already too many works more gruff than it), but to really understand it is similar to how difficult it is for people to really understand relativity, and perhaps it is easier for people in physics and mathematics." According to Professor Miller's research, Picasso was inspired by the French mathematician Poincaré's concept of the "fourth dimension", and wanted to draw the front, back and sides of the object at the same time, creating multidimensional objects on a two-dimensional canvas.
Importantly, Picasso himself realized that such paintings representing multidimensional objects must achieve "deeper similarities, more realistic than reality, until they become surreal". Did he do it? Cocteau said, "At first glance, the gap between his still life and the physical object is like the gap between the clown and our clothing and language, and once gazed, the authenticity is revealed, shaking and unexpected." Admittedly, it is not easy for a person with a rough culture to gaze at Bee's paintings.
The first obstacle to be overcome is how to get over the "trap" that Picasso himself set. He said that he painted in a diary, and that three or four women might appear in a portrait, so it was impossible to look at his paintings without understanding his life, so people often fell into the vortex of gossip and ignored the essence of the painting. The "truth" of Picasso's paintings comes from his autobiographicality, but it is also confusing, as he says, "Art is a lie, teaching us to know the truth." "The artist is not perfect and may lie, although perhaps he did not mean it. Another widely circulated phrase is also confusing: "I drew as well as Raphael when I was 14 years old, but spent my life learning to draw like a child." It should be noted that Picasso's method of deformation and deconstruction is a precocious realist master's re-understanding and expression of things after time participates in space, not a child's scribble. He said that like a child, it was he who wanted to regain the innocence of humanity, and that black sculpting in Africa had this factor, so Picasso loved all the primitive art.
Picasso ceramics
Secondly, it should be noted that Picasso has a pair of extremely dexterous and agile hands, super omnipotent, in addition to oil painting, sculpture, printmaking, line drawing, pottery and so on. After the age of 69, Picasso immersed himself in the study of the previous masters, Rembrandt, Hals, El Greco, Van Gogh were among them, and paid tribute to the masters in various ways. He often combines multiple people in a single painting, such as Goya and Manet in "The Massacre of Korea" and David and Poussin in "The Robbery of Sabine Women". He was also keen to recreate famous paintings, such as Courbet's The Maiden of the Seine, most notably Velázquez's The Lady of the Palace, Manet's Lunch on the Grass, and Delacroix's The Woman of Algiers, each with as many as 15 to 45 paintings. British art historian John Berg believes that these series show that Picasso lost inspiration in his later years, but in terms of art appreciation, looking at Picasso's "famous painting series" can force today's viewers to review the Western classical masters in advance, just as the more allusions we read Tang and Song poems, the more allusions, the better, not a bad thing.
Picasso's work in the 1940s
It should not be overlooked that although modern painting is against literary, Picasso is a lover of literature, he has participated in puppet shows, worked on stage sets and costume designs for the Russian Ballet, and is a fan of silent films. From the Four Cats café in Barcelona to the laundry boats in Paris, the Picasso Gang has never been short of poets, writers and directors. He wrote poetry and also wrote two plays, one of which was directed by Camus in 1944 and starred De Beauvoir, in which he starred with Sartre. The bullfighter from Andalusia transformed into a musketeer in Paris, playing various face changes in his self-portrait, suddenly a minotaur with a human head, and suddenly a swordsman with a pipe, the master himself was handy, but it increased the difficulty for the viewer.
Picasso's work in 1949
A person is a modern art history, and a certain condensation of Western classical art, which is the artistic height reached by Picasso in the 20th century. In addition, Picasso was often the target of criticism for his sociological touches, for the first time in Françoise Girault's 1964 book Living with Picasso. Picasso spent his life searching for love and beauty, but death and violence were mixed in between. Fascinated by the subject of the relationship between artists and models, he laments that the answers to his life are chilling. Why did the women who had been cared for by him die after leaving him? Why does he love and destroy women at the same time? What kind of enlightenment does Picasso, the master who brought art from the 19th century to the 20th century, have for human beings in the 21st century? The above puzzles are not without interpretation in the picasso by the authoritative scholar Roland Penrose, but they are far from enough.
Picasso's 1950s work
John Richardson died in March 2019 at the age of 95, shortly after the launch of the Chinese edition of the third volume of his Biography of Picasso, the most detailed and credible biography of Picasso. The first volume of the biography, published in 1991, begins with an expression of the author's love for the Master: "Picasso possesses a Spanish magic that is deep, gloomy, and rushes out with the lightning of the apocalypse to become a Mediterranean brilliant light, a paradox that is characteristic of the Andalusian phenomenon." Each volume of Richardson's biography is written for only 11 to 25 years, and the details in the book are quite rich, and it is not difficult to imagine that the author defended Picasso. Richardson has been polishing the manuscript of the last volume of the book in recent years, but unfortunately he has not waited for the publication of the book, and it is said that the English version is available this year, and how he will describe Picasso in the conclusion of the book is very much worth looking forward to.
Picasso's later works
Author: Yan Liu (Doctor of Art History, Beijing Municipal Federation of Literature and Literature 2021 Contract Critic)
Editor: Fan Xin
Planner: Fan Xin
Editor-in-Charge: Li Ting
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.