http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjlq85R_mcQ
Modern Masters: Pablo Picasso
07’ 36’’ Age of 12
Age of 16
.... draw like this
Madrid Academy of Fine Arts
... deeply unhappy at Arts School
Barcelona
Bohemian artists
Carlos Casagemas
Suicide in Paris 1001
10’28’’ Blue Period
.... studied the greats
... depicted outcasts, isolation, despair
first distinct style ... known as his BLUE PERIOD ... relatively classical style
blue to express profound emotion rather than just copying reality
11’24’’ (stop)
12’30’’ Blue period lasted 3 years It came to an end when he found a new home and love in Montmartre,
the Bohemian enclave of Paris (1904)
13’44’’ Picasso’s new love ....... breakthrough after breakthrough as an artist
.... shifting away from morose blues to serene pinks ... known as his ROSE PERIOD
Like the blue period, this style wasn’t particularly revolutionary. But the Rose paintings have become
some of Picasso’s most popular and valuable works.
... beautiful haunting image of a young boy holding a pipe, his hair garlanded. (Auctioned in 2004 at
104 million dollars)
14’40’’ Working class Tavern, Le lapin agile. New subjects to paint. Like him, the circus performers living on
the outskirts of Paris were marginal figures, mainly a group of foreigners who were itinerant. Picasso
had a natural sympathy for them and started painted them.
The figure of the Harlequin would appear again and again, particularly in the Rose Period, but for
the rest of his life.
15’30’’ The mysterious delicate Rose Period paintings proved popular with collectors then, just as they are
today, and their commercial success ended Picasso’s life of poverty.
16’00’’ Ever restless, Picasso would shift again, his subjects changing from circus performers to nudes
BOY LEADING A HORSE (1906) ... monumental .....timeless ....ancient sense of myth
we don’t know what this landscape is, where this boy’s going and why hasn’t he got any reins to lead
the horse ........ still in a way quite traditional ..... but somehow—just within a year—Picasso went
from this to this (Cubism)
16’40
LES DAMOISELLES D’AVIGNON .... prostitutes in a brothel. These women are ugly and angular
rising from jagged fragments of shattered glass
It has been described as the rupture moment between the Art of the Past and the Art of the Future.
..... cataclysmic transformation
(1906 he visited the Louvre: Display of Iberian carved heads found in Southern Spain. His own
cultural inheritance)
... this offered Picasso an alternative and quite exciting new way to represent the world afresh in
contrast to the Age of academic tradition of simply imitating Nature. .... the chance to experiment
18’20
PORTRAIT OF GERTRUDE STEIN (writer and art collector) .... face as a smooth mask, the
forehead protruding, the eyes chiselled. ..... Radical by the standards of the day.
(Probably in the summer of 1907 ..... collection of African masks in a museum in Paris, .... tribal
objects, ..... primitive power)
19’18’’ Picasso wanted to convey the lurid carnal harshness of the Brothels that he knew only too well.
To do this, he abandoned 600 years of artistic refinement.
..... he shut himself in a studio for months, finally emerging with this:
19’40’’ LES DAMOISELLES D’AVIGNON (1907) ..... Breakthrough of Picasso’s life.
The foundation stone on which his whole reputation rests.
Part of the reason it’s so powerful is that Picasso believed that painting and Art should never be
polite...
All of a sudden it’s as if you’ve wandered into the Brothel and here it is: these 5 prostitutes.
.... one of them has that Gorgon stare. They’re like monsters.... with dark eyes...
It’s got this frenzied, almost diabolical energy ad there’s something raw about this
... there’s something dark and demonic flickering round.
It was shocking in 1907... and is still incredibly shocking now.
21’16’’ Early 1900’s Picasso was living through an unprecedented technological revolution: .... electric
lights, airplanes, photography and movies. Painting seen as simply creating an illusion of reality
seemed obsolete. Picasso believed that Art now had to do something much more: he wanted it to
communicate everything you know and feel about an object, not just show us how it looks...
He started collaborating with another radical painter: GEORGES BAQUE, comparing themselves to
the aviation pioneers, the Wright Brothers.
They took a sledge hammer to conventional Victorian Art and what they pieced together from the
fragments is called Cubism.
22’18’’ CUBISM: said to be the most momentous revolution in Art since the development of Perspective.
WOMAN PLAYING A MANDOLIN (1910) In terms of subject matter, it is rather conventional
... such a radical departure from what he was doing even 2 years before ... and it represents all the
hallmarks of his new Cubist style.
The picture is really flattened, perspective doesn’t seem to exist. And look at the way he is
fractioning and fragmenting the forms, so it looks as a painted shattered glass....
... Picasso’s trying to create these multiple viewpoints all at once.
22’06’’ Over the next few years, Braque and Picasso pushed the deconstruction of reality further and
further.
WOMAN WITH A GUITAR ... the woman has dissolved into the surface altogether, she’s hidden...
... it was like capturing the essence of a perfume, something that was in front of you, behind you, to
the side all at once.
With Cubism, Picasso threw open the doors to Abstract Art.
24’20’’ Cubism was a hit with many powerful dealers and collectors, making Picasso increasingly wealthy.
24.30 (Stop)
38’50’’ The full emotive power of Picasso’s technique will be realized in 1936. That was the year his beloved
home country of Spain was ripped apart by a brutal Civil War. One of the war’s worst atrocities took
the horror of modern warfare to a new extreme. In April 1937 a squadron of German Aircraft, who
was supporting the Spanish fascists, flattened the Communist opposition-held town of Guernica with
5,000 bombs, massacring more than 1600 civilians...
Picasso’s response was to create the most important painting of his life and some think the most
important painting of the 20th century: GUERNICA
40’00’’ As soon as he heard the news, he was inspired to this frenzy of energy and creativity and in less
than six weeks he managed to cover this enormous canvas measuring 30 square meters.
... it isn’t specifically about Guernica. Picasso isn’t commemorating just one catastrophe: he’s
encapsulating a whole century of suffering
... by creating this massive mess of mangled dismembered limbs, as if the bomb had just gone off as
we come in. .... Light bulb with its jagged flare. .... pitiful horrendous picture of a woman carrying
the corpse of her dead child. ... the most effective detail is the way Picasso is painting her face.... in
her grief her whole identity is dissolved. ... her mouth with her piercing tongue... This is a reminder
of the barbaric depths that we can reach
41’58’’ GUERNICA was first shown at the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair, a regular
International Exhibition of Industry, Culture and Art. But Picasso’s pacifist outcry went almost
unnoticed because the event was overshadowed by the antagonistic postering of Nazi Germany on
one side and the Soviet Union on the other
But Guernica’s timing was critical to its later success. As the world teeted on the edge of the Second
World war, the painting was sent on a global tour in support of the fight against fascism in Spain.
And when the world did descend into war, the painting came to symbolize the unprecedented
carnage and horror that was inflicted on the innocent.
The painting was moved more than 50 times before it was eventually returned here to Madrid....
43’56’’ (Stop)