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A Juggler with Form 1925-1936
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In 1928, in the Paris studio of the Spanish sculptor Julio
Gonzales, Picasso made four constructions using iron wire and sheet
metal, three of which have survived. Gonzales had
been familiarizing his countryman with soldering technique since that
March, so that by October Picasso was able to play with some ideas he
had for a sculpture. These pieces are models towards a large-scale
work he was planning. They are thus fairly small, from 38 to 60 centimetres high, and economical in their use of iron wire of various
thicknesses. The straight wires were arranged in long parallels or at
acute or obtuse or right angles, and wires bent into arcs or ellipses
were added, the whole soldered complex creating an intricate visual
image. The impact draws as much upon the combination of linear and
spatial elements as on the interplay of straight and curved forms and
the varying thickness of the wire.
At first glance these constructions look complicated and confusing.
But on closer inspection we see two fundamental features. On the one
hand, they present a juxtaposition of geometrical shapes, rectangles,
triangles and ellipses grouped spatially into irregular stereometric
configurations - extended pyramids, squashed cubes. These figures
overlap and interpenetrate each other, so that we see new ones
depending on where we stand. On the other hand, at points there are
details - small spheres, discs, irregular tricorn ends - recalling,
however remotely, the human figure. This encourages us to read the
works entirely differently: what looked totally abstract at first now
seems to be a stylized representational figure.
The works are like picture puzzles. Picasso's remarkable and
noteworthy handling of the fundamentals of sculpture is striking. The
use of wire translates form into an issue of linear definition. This
is a principle of the draughtsman, not the sculptor. The work created
in this way is on a sheet of metal, like a plinth, yet the shapes are
in the open, challenging our sense of the tactile impressions that
should be conveyed by sculpture. Our literally tactile "grasp" of the
work is now transferred to the understanding eye. It is wholly a
matter for the intellect, and depends on association. Picasso's
approach has serious implications for three-dimensionality, which is
fundamental to all sculpture. From any angle, these works become non-spatial patterns of lines. True, we can change our
point of view by standing elsewhere, as with any genuinely volumed
sculpture; but what we see is not a new spatial shape but a new
pattern of lines. Unlike traditional sculpture, these works require an
act of the intellect to complete the spatial transfer. The plinth
helps us get our bearings. Strictly speaking, these works are
three-dimensional transfers of two-dimensional graphics. They were
given the label "spatial drawings" by Kahnweiler.
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Figures (Maquette for a Memorial to Apollinaire)
1928
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It is an apt label, as Picasso's preliminary studies show.
These possess practically the same degree of three-dimensionality. The
sculptures evolved from pure draughtsmanship. In 1924, Picasso did
well over fifty linear ink drawings in a sketchbook, using curved and
straight lines and adding solid circles at the bridge points.
As we know from statements the artist made in 1926, maps of the night
sky inspired these drawings. Picasso was fascinated by astronomical
charts, which represented stars as thick dots and joined them up with
thin lines to show constellations. The representational and the
abstract interacted. It was only an act of assertive recognition that
gave significance to the meaningless figure. Picasso took the same
approach. He used a technical method to craft concrete forms empty of
content, and then imposed meaning on them in an arbitrary act of the
maker's will.
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The ambiguity of formal meaning, the open expressive significance
of an art object, the fundamental doubts concerning images conveyed by
draughtsmanship - all these basic issues entered into Picasso's
picture puzzles, on page and plinth alike. It was a new approach to
something that had repeatedly concerned Picasso since his Rose Period:
thinking about the nature of art became itself the occasion for an
artwork and its meaning. But now, unlike in earlier periods, the
principle was foregrounded and stood alone. The genre of artwork, its
material form, was now primarily of a pragmatic nature. The nature of
Picasso's work underwent a clear change, compared with the period
immediately preceding this phase.
From 1916 to 1924, because he was testing the visual media,
painting and drawing predominated. Autonomous art and applied art were
as polarized as cause and effect. From 1925 to 1936, Picasso tackled
sculpture, with an intense copiousness of production that can only be
called explosive. He juxtaposed all the two-and three-dimensional
forms of expression, or used them sequentially. The unceasing
alternation of media was matched by an interplay of forms. In 1928,
for instance, he did two small plaster figurines, later cast in bronze. The restless shapes, shifting sharply from thick to thin,
from open form to closed, have been made into figures largely abstract
in character yet still reminiscent of human shapes. Everything is rounded; the flux of form seems
fluid, as if a dynamic process were arrested and frozen. Legs,
breasts, heads, eyes, noses protrude in a transitional smoothness from
what seems an almost amorphous mass. These figures also took their
origins from drawings, this time of an illusionist, three-dimensional
nature rather than a purely linear character.
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Bather (Metamorphosis I)
1928
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Bather (Metamorphosis II)
1928
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Sketchbooks dating from 1927 show endless variations of a basic
figure. This is Picasso looking back; but he is doing
so in pursuit of a decided transformation of form. The subject of
bathers, of which he had already done numerous studies in 1920-1921,
is now dealt with purely in terms of formal impact. The parts of the
body are elongated or compressed or thinned out almost to lines in a
process that seems mechanical, but are also conveyed in organic
softness - the mechanical and organic loosely or tightly combined into
a whole. At last, in 1928, Picasso rigorously dissected the
structures, and on his drawing paper he worked on configurations
geometrical in leaning. They are angular and straight, flat and solid,
spheres and elliptical shapes that look as if they were made of stone. The sculptures that
resulted were organic in form - and that was how the "Metamorphoses"came
about. In paintings, though, Picasso revised the thematic function of
his abstraction, placing it in bathing scenes where the compositions
feature a veritable ballet of amorphous shapes on the beach.
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Sketchbook No. 95
1927
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Bather with Beach Ball (Sketchbook No. 96)
1928
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Bather with Beach Ball (Sketchbook No. 96)
1928
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Bather
1928
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Bather Opening a Beach Cabin
1928
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Ballplayers on the Beach
1928
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Bather
1928
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Bathers on the Beach
1928
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The Swimmer
1929
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Some years later, in 1932, this chain of variations culminated in
the oil "Bather with Beach Ball". The visual opulence of this
work at once proves it a peak achievement, a final point along a
development, the sum of a long series of studies, experiments and
insights. The composition, seemingly simple and yet subtle, is typical
Picasso in its use of correspondences and contrasts. Angular forms are
juxtaposed with rounded ones; naturalistic features appear alongside
abstract. Spheres and shapes like clubs, thick, sweeping, dense, form
a figure that has a distantly human appearance. Legs apart, arms
crossed as she leaps, the bather has just caught a ball that makes a
distinctly tiny impression beside her bulky body. The figure almost
completely fills the canvas, this, with Picasso's use of a vertical
diagonal, making the sense of movement all the more dynamic. Taken
with the clumsiness of this body, the crass pattern of the bathing
suit, the beach cabin and the blue sea, Picasso's view of life at the
seaside is distinctly humorous.
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Bather with Beach Ball
1932
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But for Picasso form in itself was devoid of content; so he
considered himself at liberty to interchange forms and substitute
other contents. A 1931/1932 set of variations on a female portrait is
almost programmatic in this respect. His starting point for a large
number of drawings, graphic works, sculptures and paintings was the
head of a woman with what is known as a Greek profile, an arc that
might have been drawn with compasses tracing the line from brow to
skull to a falling curtain of hair. The chin seems an exact reversal
of the forehead. Picasso treats these two areas as equivalent in
formal terms; he takes them apart and reassembles them into new,
capricious forms. In one sculptured bust, for
instance, he fashions the hair and brow into a solid, fleshy roll. He
leaves this in the position where we would expect to see this kind of
shape in a face, and simply scratches in a few parallel lines to
indicate a hair-do and nose. The eyes and mouth, by contrast, are in
an almost conventional albeit coarsely mimetic style. The head is a
synthesis of the mimetic and the arbitrary.
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Head of a Woman
(Marie-Therese Walter)
1931
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Bust of a Woman
(Marie-Therese Walter)
1931
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In a work done on 2 January 1932 Picasso drew on the fruits of his
sculptural work and transferred those insights, with slight variations
of detail, to paint. This picture, "Reading", shows a seated
woman, her body disassembled and reconstructed. Picasso proceeded to
work variations on this process. One shows a woman seated in a red armchair,
her arms, hands, torso, breasts and head spherical or club-like
shapes, as if hewn from stone. Picasso was transferring the tactile
qualities of sculpture into his painting. In the combination of
semi-abstract, stylized forms with clear reminiscences of the human
body, such paintings continue the 1927-1928 variations on the subject
of bathers which Picasso had repeatedly drawn.
This series peaked in April 1932 in the painting "Woman with a
Flower". Two-dimensional areas of colour, boldly and
sweepingly outlined, are juxtaposed with similar areas that bear
witness to a modelling, three-dimensionalizing instinct. The head is
like a kidney, with lines for mouth, nose and eyes. The picture is
related to a sculpture done the previous year in which the
long, irregular cylinder of the stand looks like an Alice in
Wonderland neck and supports a head made of a number of smoothly
interlocking heart-shaped solids. The eyes are scratched in as flat,
pointed ovals. The mouth is a declivity walled about by a roll of
flesh. And the nose has been displaced.
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Reading
1932
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Woman with a Flower
1932
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Seated Woman in a Red Armchair
1932
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Woman in a Red Armchair
1932
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Head of a Woman
1931
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Bather
1931
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Picasso's juggling with form found support at that period in
another new movement that had emerged from Dada: Surrealism. In summer
1923 Picasso met the leader of the movement, the writer Andre Breton,
and did an etching of him. In 1924 Breton published the first
Surrealist Manifesto. In it he proposed that the subconscious was a
more valid mode of perceiving reality than rational thought and sense.
He advocated dreams and the visions of madness as an alternative to
reason. He was inspired by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic writings,
and by the poetry of Rimbaud, Mallarme, Lautreamont and Apollinaire,
from whose work the label of the new movement was indirectly derived.
Surrealism's aim was to reveal the subconscious realm of dreams by
exploring avenues opened up by psychoanalysis. It disregarded the
causal order of the perceptible world and set out to counter it with
an unlimited use of the irrational. In this way, individual life would
undergo a revolutionary transformation: feeling and expressive
potential would be infinitely enhanced and extended.
The Surrealists were opposed to all artistic procedures based on conscious reason. In its place they put chance, trivia, and a
revaluation of plain everyday sensation. Originally a literary
movement, it quickly embraced the visual arts too, and a number of new
techniques were developed. The most important of them were frottage,
which (like brass rubbing) calls for the production of visual,
textural effects by rubbing, and grattage, a kind of reverse frottage,
in which paint is thickly applied and then scraped off revealing the
layer underneath. Nor should we forget Ecriture automatique,
the Surrealists' rediscovery of automatic writing and equivalent
procedures in painting and drawing whereby what mattered was to
suspend rational control and allow the subconscious to express itself
directly via the text or image produced.
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One of their points of reference was also Picasso, as a pioneer of
art and inventor of new methods. His playful approach to the meaning
of form, his loose disdain for convention, made him appear a fellow
spirit. A sculptural construction of Picasso's was reproduced in the
first number of their periodical, "La Revolution surrealiste", in
December 1924. In the second, in January 1925, two pages of the
sketchbook of "Constellations" which
he had done in summer 1924 at Juan-les-Pins were reproduced. The
fourth issue used Picasso's painting "The Dance" and -
reproduced for the first time in France - "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon".
In 1925 Picasso exhibited at the first joint Surrealist show-in the
Galerie Pierre in Paris. He did portraits of Surrealist writers for
their books, and in 1933 one of his collages was taken for the title
page of the new magazine, "Minotaure".
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Minotaur and Horse
1935
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This contact, though continuing for several years, was not without
conflict. When the ballet "Mercure" was first performed in 1924, with
Picasso's set design and costume, several Surrealists protested at his
involvement, claiming the event was merely a benefit show for the
international aristocracy. It is true that Etienne Comte de Beaumont
was involved in producing the ballet. But Breton, Louis Aragon and
other Surrealists, impressed by the fertility of Picasso's
imagination, published an apology in the "Paris Journal" headed "Hommage
a Picasso". Picasso, for his part, accused the Surrealists of not
having understood him, in a lengthy statement on the aims and
intentions of his art published in 1926. To prove his point, he
referred to the interpretations the Surrealists had written to
accompany the sketchbook drawings printed in their magazine in 1924. In the 1950s, he observed that his work before
1933 had been free of Surrealist influences.
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We might reply by pointing to the publication of his work in
Surrealist periodicals, and to his close personal relations with
certain members of the group, such as Paul Eluard, a lifelong friend.
The fact is that Surrealist influences in his art are many and
various. From de Chirico to Joan Miro, he registered Surrealist
painting precisely, taking it as a model, and was particulary inspired
by Surrealist sculpture, especially works by Alberto Giacometti.
Not that the borrowings were ever isolated occurrences. Picasso
adapted what he took to his own purposes, and combined it with
borrowings from altogether different kinds of art. Thus his 1931/32
sculptures of women's heads are related to Matisse's bust "Jeannette
V", made between 1910 and 1913, and also to the mask-like "Portrait of
Professor Gosset" done by Raymond Duchamp-Villon in 1918, in which
Cubist and Futurist elements are combined.. Picasso was also inspired
by designs for female busts and full-length figures the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz was doing
after 1930. The latter's broken-form sculptures, called "transparents",
alongside Picasso's own sketches of "constellations", were the most
important source for the wire constructions of 1928.
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Bullfight: Death of the Toreador
1933
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Like the Surrealists, Picasso too explored the visual potential of
tactile qualities. There are a number of affinities in technical
methods, the use of montage, and the further development of collage
and assemblage. Yet still the tensions that existed between Picasso
and the Surrealists were the product of deep-seated differences. It is
no exaggeration to say that their respective aims and intentions were
in fact diametrically opposed. For that very reason there were
superficial overlaps in the approach to artistic experiment and the
transformation of conventional techniques and modes of expression. The
assemblages Picasso did in spring 1926, which were published that
summer in "La Revolution surrealiste", point up the differences of
creative method nicely. The assemblages consist of just a few, simple,
everyday things. Scraps of linen and tulle, nails, string, buttons and newspaper are put together to make almost
abstract images.
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In "Guitar", for instance, Picasso has arranged a
piece of sackcloth, a scrap of newspaper, two long nails and some
string in such a way that what looks like a random collection of
objects takes on the appearance of a "picture". By referring to the
title we can read this picture as representational. The cut-out circle
in the middle of the cloth echoes the hole in a guitar's soundboard,
and the two nails loosely suggest the strings. The yellowed newspaper
denotes the side and bottom of the instrument, and the string must
presumably represent the (oddly angled) neck. The image is wholly
non-naturalistic, and the form contrasts with that of an actual
guitar. But in its details there are enough similarities to establish
the concept of a guitar. Picasso is continuing the line of Synthetic
Cubism here, seeing the picture as a system of signs, the arbitrary
nature of which leaves the imagination leeway for untrammelled
invention. The possibility of recognition is anchored in concepts and
definitions, and happens entirely in the intellect.
Surrealism does exactly the opposite. It too primarily operates
with a conceptual system, but its techniques and aims alike depend on
the irrational. Scarcely controlled creative acts may produce random
results, or logical and meticulous labour may produce images beyond rational interpretation; that is not the point. In the
former case, form expresses the artist's subconscious and appeals to
the beholder's emotions. In the latter, the beholder's subconscious is
activated via feeling even though he has no rational access to the
work. In terms of form and the meaning of form, however, emotion plays
no part at all in Picasso's work.
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Guitar
1926
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This is not to say that no feeling is involved in the impact of his
work. But it is different. For the Surrealists, form is the trigger of
a chain of associations which are suggestive of emotional states and
linked to the spiritual condition of instinctual mankind. In Picasso,
form is free, autonomous. He appeals to the emotions to prompt
conflict or even shock, starting an intellectual process in the course
of which we reflect not on ourselves but on art. That was the aim of
the picture-puzzle line-and-point sketches of summer 1924 which led to
the wire sculptures of autumn 1928. These works avowedly play off the abstract against the
representational, the spatial against the graphic. But Picasso had a
particular reason, drawn from the theory of art, for using linear
studies to make constructions. Their form reveals his purpose.
Linearity and space are dialectically juxtaposed. The iron rods
stand for tactile, material volume. But they also look like lines, and
seem two-dimensional. Since we interpret them as denoting outlines,
they establish figures. But the material they outline is air -neither
visible nor palpable. Paradoxically, these sculptures use a substance
the spatial content of which is literally immaterial. What
Picasso has sculpted is nothing-ness. This was what he was
after.
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The maquettes were done in response to a commission. The
Association of Friends of Apollinaire planned to erect a memorial to
the poet on the tenth anniversary of his death, and approached
Picasso, who aptly tackled the project in the spirit of a phrase
Apollinaire had written: "the statue made of nothing, of vacancy".
Apollinaire was thinking of a monument to a poet; so it seemed doubly
appropriate to Picasso to borrow this thought from his friend. The
evident relation to the human figure derives its meaning from this
consideration too: Picasso evolved his idea in order to put the 19th
century's outmoded notions of memorials aside, for good. The
representational, figural echo alludes to the tradition of monuments,
but in a radical form that departs conspicuously from the tradition.
Unfortunately Picasso's idea was too daring and progressive for his
contemporaries. The committee turned it down.
Not till much later did the artist have the chance to realize his
ideas, at least in part. In 1962 he himself had two large-scale
versions of the four maquettes made, one 115 centimetres high, the
other 200, intended as intermediate stages towards a finished version
on a monumental scale. In 1973, shortly before his death, one version
over four metres high was put up in the Museum of Modern Art, New
York. No longer able to see it for himself, Picasso followed the
progress of the work through reports and photographs. Finally, in 1985, when the Picasso Museum was opened in
Paris, another version almost five metres high was put up there.
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Man and Woman
1927
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The basic idea remained alive in Picasso's oeuvre. In 1931 he used
16 of the 1924 sketches to illustrate a bibliophile edition of Honore
de Balzac's tale "Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu". Again the line-and-point
constructs, neutral in themselves, were placed in a theoretical
context. Balzac's story of the unknown masterpiece is about
translating the absolute into art. It tells of a 17th-century painter
whose ambition is to express an ideal, perfect illusion of life,
beyond all specifics of form, colour and perspective. When he has been
at work on his masterpiece for ten years, friends - among them the
French painter Poussin - persuade him to let them see it. What the
shocked group see, instead of the portrait of a lady they have been
led to expect, is a chaotic jumble of colours and lines.
At that time, Picasso was particularly interested in the applied
art of book illustration. The subjects he searched out were closely
connected with his own work towards self-reflexive art. He employed a
variety of etching processes (cold needle, line etching and aquatint)
for this work, which included thirteen classicist etchings also for
Balzac's novella, thirty etchings done in 1930 for publisher Albert
Skira for an edition of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" which appeared the
following year, and one hundred plates done between 1930 and 1937 which became the "Suite Vollard" in 1939. The same
familiar repertoire of subjects recurred: painter and model,
bullfight, bathers, nudes, acrobats. The works have titles such as
"Sculptor Resting with Model in his Arms" or "Sculptor with Model at a
Window". Sculptors or painters with models account for the greatest
part of these works. Painters and sculptors, themselves drawn
naturalistically, can make abstract figures from real originals,
Picasso is saying - or naturalistic images from abstract models. These
sequences of graphics, deconstructed twofold, bring home the work of
the artist. This applies to the return to antiquity too, a constant in
Picasso's work since his youth. It was not only the classical style
that provided a point of reference for formal matters, but also the
subject matter of myths illustrated.
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Ovid's "Metamorphoses", the most illustrated of all books after the
Bible, deals with the entirety of the ancient world's mythology. Its
presence in European art has been a long and signal one. On a
political level, it moves from the beginning of the world to the new
Golden Age under Emperor Augustus (Ovid's contemporary). In a sense the "Metamorphoses" are sublime propaganda. The book, true to
its title, tells of heroes and heroines transformed into animals,
plants, streams, stars and so forth. Metamorphoses of this order are
the proper province of the creative artist. If he wishes he can use
the aesthetic norms and subjects of antiquity; but he can also make a
faun into an artist, transform a stone into organic substance, and
then metamorphose it back to a stone.
As always, Picasso did not observe the bounds of one artistic
genre. He combined elements from various sources, and transferred his
figurations and motifs from drawings to printed graphics, from
etchings to paintings. Thus in the 1933 "Silenus Dancing in Company" we have a gouache and India ink variation on a baroque theme.
In late 1931, in "The Sculptor", Picasso transferred to an
oil painting the 1931/32 female busts from the painter-and-model
theme, and transposed the formal puzzle component to both figures, the
artist and the statue created by him. The motifs are repeated in a
distinctly different 1933 treatment in ink, India ink, watercolour and
gouache which again shows the sculptor and his work.
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Silenus Dancing in Company
1933
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The Sculptor
1931
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The Sculptor and His Statue
1933
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Sculptor and Kneeling Model
1933
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Table of Etchings
1931
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A large number of Picasso's etchings are responses to Rembrandt. In
three, the Dutch baroque painter appears with his model, but many
other plates in the "Suite Vollard" document Picasso's approach to
Rembrandt. One unfinished Rembrandt etching shows the artist and his
model. Picasso not only played numerous variations on the theme of a
female nude seen from the rear together with an artist seen frontally.
He was also interested in formal aspects of the Rembrandt work. He
adopted the contrast of richly cross-hatched areas with plain outline
drawing, using it elsewhere with different subjects. Both types of
quotation - of form and of motif - acted as an analysis of the artist
himself. Picasso was placing himself on a par with Rembrandt - a high
ambition indeed, for Rembrandt is widely seen as the master of
etching, and in Picasso's time was considered the greatest artist of
all time. Picasso was asserting that he himself was Rembrandt's
legitimate successor, that he himself was the most important
20th-century artist.
There is a contrast to Surrealist intentions and techniques.
Picasso transfers a clearly definable content to his pictures, his
system of signs directly related to the message to be conveyed. In
Surrealism, the visual sign is an enigma, an instrument of encodement;
deep and inward meditation is required to decode the image. For
Picasso, form and content are mutually determinant, in a way that is
ultimately perfectly traditional. They serve either the exploration of
visual problems or the analysis of a subject. Picasso's titles define
the content; Surrealist titles add a layer of obfuscation.
In summer 1925, in his painting "The Dance", Picasso
reworked studies drawn that spring when visiting the Ballets Russes in
Monte Carlo, purely representational ones playing off linear effects against economical three-dimensionality. He now
combined this interplay with what he had learnt from the papiers
colles, finding a way of heightening the ecstatic dynamism of the
action in the most evocative of styles. But there is far more to the
picture. In a gap towards the top right, silhouetted against the blue
sky, we see the profile of Ramon Pichot, a friend of Picasso's who had
recently died. The painting is dedicated to him. What looks like a
pure celebration of joie de vivre turns out to portray the old
Spanish custom of dancing around the dead when they are laid out. This
redefinition of the subject is perfectly matched to the redefinition
of form; as in the later maquettes for the Apollinaire memorial, the
picture-puzzle component has a distinct function.
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The Dance
1925
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That year, Picasso created another masterpiece of formal
metamorphosis, "The Kiss", a truly awful picture - but
wonderful too! A manifesto of new ways of expression, it presents the
aggressive, violent and primitive aspects of the act of love with a
brutality scarcely ever attempted before. It makes demands on us. We
have to disentangle what we see, gradually discovering at the top, amidst the seeming chaos of loud colours and contrasts, mouths
locked in a devouring kiss; a figure at left, holding another in an
embrace; an exploded backbone atop straddled legs. But what looks like
a mouth or eye, soulfully intimate, is in fact a vagina about to be
"eaten", and at the bottom of the picture we are provocatively
confronted with an anus - balancing the composition in ribald parody
of classical laws of composition. Not until late work done in the
1960s did Picasso again treat sexuality thus.
A picture as aggressive as "The Kiss" was of course not merely
the articulation of an artistic programme. It came out of personal
experience. Picasso's marriage to Olga was not a happy one. They
shared few interests, neither communicating nor enriching each other's
lives. Art here mirrors reality, expresses it vividly.
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The Kiss (The Embrace)
1925
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A similar process is at work in the female bust that recurs
frequently in the sculptures, drawings, graphics and paintings from
1931 on. The features are those of Marie-Therese Walter, Picasso's
young lover. In January 1927, aged 45, he had met the girl, then aged
just 17, outside Lafayette's, a Paris department store. The story goes that he used the corniest approach in the book: "You
have an interesting face, Mademoiselle. I should like to paint you. My
name is Picasso." The name meant nothing to her, but she agreed.
Within months she was his lover. But he was still married, and had to
keep the relationship secret. In the years that followed there was
many an undignified scene and incident. It was not till 1935 that
Picasso finally left his wife, when Marie-Therese gave birth to their
daughter Maja. The artist called it the worst time of his life. But it
was also the climax of a fraught situation that had been affecting the
subjects and formal approaches of his art for years. We need only look
at the 1932 painting "Girl Before a Mirror". The girl is
Marie-Therese. Picasso preferred this picture of his lover to all the
others. In the paradoxical tension between the motif of tranquil
contemplation and the agitated style in which it is painted, Picasso
has conveyed far more than an everyday moment. Marie Therese is
studying her reflected image closely; but this simple attitude is transformed by the wild colours
and assertive lines. It is as if we were seeing her at once clothed,
naked, and revealed in X-ray image. The picture is full of sexual
symbolism. In other works of the period, distress and violent feeling
are apparent in the visible tension.
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Girl Before a Mirror (Marie-Therese Walter)
1932
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From 1930 on, we frequently find
the Christian motif of the crucifixion, partly using historical
originals such as Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece, of which
Picasso did a small paintingand a 1932 series of India-ink
variations. Above all, he dealt with relations between the sexes, in
numerous variations on his artist-and-model subject but also in a new
version of his bullfight pictures: the motif of the Minotaur. Picasso
approached the mythical subject in characteristic fashion. In Greek
myth, the Minotaur was the son of Pasiphae - wife of Minos, King of
Crete - by a white bull. The king had the half-human, half-animal
creature confined to a labyrinth, and every ninth year (at the close
of every Great Year) seven Athenian youths and seven Athenian maidens were offered up to the Minotaur - till
finally Theseus, with Ariadne's help, slew the beast. In the 19th
century the Minotaur was increasingly divorced from its mythic
context, and the Surrealists took it as a symbolic figure. Andre
Masson portrayed it, and a Surrealist magazine started in 1933, to
which Picasso contributed, had its name for a title. Picasso used the
subject as a vehicle for personal and historical material.
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The Crucifixion
1930
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The Crucifixion (after Grunewald)
1932
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