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The Making of a Genius 1890-1898
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Hercules with His Club
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One of the earliest surviving drawings by Picasso dates from
November 1890. The artist recalled that "Hercules with His Club"
was
copied from a painting in the parental home."' It is an awkward piece
of drawing, of course. The proportions are wrong, the limbs out of
scale, the left thigh far thicker than the right, the left arm
anatomically incorrect; and the lines are uncertain, the repeated
breaking off and resuming sure signs of inexperience. And yet it is
also a remarkable drawing. After all, it was done by a nine-year-old.
Most drawings by children of that age have the hallmarks of children's
indifference to figural fidelity. This is a child's drawing; but it is
not childish. It is no wonder that Picasso's painter father recognised
his son's talent at an early stage and encouraged the boy accordingly.
At eleven, the young Picasso was going to art school at Corunna. In
1895, aged just fourteen, he was admitted to the Academy of Art in
Barcelona. A mere year later a large canvas by the young artist,
titled "First Communion" , was shown in a public exhibition.
There is no need to follow the customary line of seeing Picasso as
a miraculous infant prodigy.
Still, the sheer wealth and quality of his youthful output are
staggering. No other artist has left us so much evidence relating to
this early period of life - and of course it is a crucial period. One
of the most fascinating sights 20th-century art can offer us is the
spectacle of the young Picasso making his steady early advance.
His family realised that he was exceptionally gifted, and preserved
the youngster's efforts carefully if they were even only slightly
distinctive. The paintings, drawings and sketches Picasso did as a boy
remained in his sister's home at Barcelona till the artist donated
them to the Museu Picasso there in 1970. The collection is impressive
for its sheer size: 213 oil paintings done on canvas, cardboard or
other surfaces; 681 drawings, pastels and watercolours on paper; 17
sketchbooks and albums; four books with drawings in the margins; one
etching; and various other artefacts. Fourteen of the paintings on
wood or canvas, and a full 504 of the sheets with drawings, have been
used on both sides (often for studies); and the sketchbooks contain
826 pages of drawings.
The juvenilia that has survived
from the years 1890 to 1904, from the boy Picasso's first attempts to
the Blue Period, runs to over 2,200 works in various formats and using
various techniques.
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First Communion
1896
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The Altar Boy
1896
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Self-Portrait
1896
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Different though the works are, they have the same quality,
whatever one looks at. An impressive example is the pencil sketch of
two cavalrymen done around 1891 to 1893 by the ten- or twelve-year-old
Picasso in a schoolbook. The horses and riders are done correctly, on
the whole, and mistakes in detail do not detract from this. True, the
horses' heads ought to be larger, and the officers' chests and arms
could be improved; but the portrayal is not at all a child's, and the
drawing shows signs of an increasing grasp of line. The boy's talent
has noticeably amplified since "Hercules with His Club" and the way is
clear to the art pupil's academic studies, done with full assurance.
Those studies display the student's technical prowess and his command
of methods deliberately deployed; the essential visual approach
remains the same.
The young Picasso's gift was a striking one, clearly different from
normal children's artistic efforts. The artist himself felt as much:
"It is quite remarkable that I never did childish drawings. Never. Not
even as a very small boy." What Picasso means is the kind of drawings
children do unprompted, without any adult suggesting a subject; such
drawings, free of influence, are nowadays considered the true sign of
a child's creative impulses. The drawings the boy Picasso scribbled in
his school books were doubtless the same kind of child's drawing; yet
it is these that show us that he always drew like an adult.
But it would be wrong to take this as infallible proof of
above-average maturity or even genius. A child's drawing derives its
shape and imaginative form from a historical process, and bears
witness to particular cultural influences.
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Of course any child who draws is entering into a fundamental
act of expression. But the nature of that expression is conditioned.
It is only recently that such drawings have come to be valued in their
own right, and so very few independently created drawings by children
survive from earlier times." And most of those that do betray the
educational influence of adults. Just as children were once dressed
and brought up as little adults, so too adults' visual preconceptions
were once instilled into them. Children's drawings dating from
pre-20th century times generally look like less successful adults'
drawings. That is to say, they are not fundamentally different from
those the young Picasso did. In the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris,
for instance, there is the diary of a 17th-century doctor by the name
of Jean Heroard, which contains drawings by an eight-year-old boy.
Some of them are on the same subjects as Picasso's schoolbook
sketches. And the lad's touch is as sure as Picasso's. But this lad
did not come from an artistic family; indeed, in later life he was
better known as King Louis XIII."
In a sense, this is typical of children's drawings, in historical
terms: painting and drawing had not been part of the European
educational curriculum since antiquity, and until the 18th century
only two kinds of children were normally given any training in art -
those who were meant to become professional artists, and those who
were of aristocratic or well-to-do family. There was no such thing as
universal drawing tuition.
Children were taught the professional rules of the craft. Nor did the
introduction of drawing classes in schools change this. Even the great
Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the most
progressive of his
age, was concerned to make children adopt the adult method of
pictorial representation as early and as completely as possible. Most
educational systems in Europe and North America followed this example
in the 19th century. It was not until the end of that century that
children's own innate approach to drawing came to be valued and even
encouraged; and not till our own day that it properly came into its
own."
The drawings done by the young Picasso are not those of a prodigy,
then. But this is not to detract from his genius. Quite the contrary.
Picasso the artist was moulded by the educational and academic ideas
that then prevailed, as we can clearly see from his juvenilia: the
education he was given was the making of a genius.
Picasso started school in Malaga in 1886, aged five. None of his
drawings of that time survive. But we have a reliable witness to what
they were like: Picasso himself. In conversation with Roland Penrose,
he recalled drawing spirals at school in those days." This suggests
that art instruction at that Malaga primary school was designed along
lines laid down by Pestalozzi, developed by Friedrich Frobel, and
subsequently adapted by teachers throughout the world. In essence the
method was the same one everywhere. Linear drawing was the invariable
point of departure: children were encouraged to think and create in
geometrical terms. Then they were taught to abstract forms from the
world about them. And only then did they move on to the representation
of actual things. In this scheme of things, drawing straight or curved
lines (such as spirals) was the first, basic step. The children copied
lines and linear figures slavishly. Then they had to develop their own
motifs by highlighting or omitting lines in what was shown them.
Finally they practised free-hand drawing of geometrical figures such
as circles, ovals or spirals. It was a way of making even tiny
children see schematically. The irregularity and shakiness of
children's representation was educated out of them.
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Study
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Children (such as Picasso) who underwent this process were no
longer able to draw in a truly childish way even if they wanted to.'"
In any case, children require something to follow, something they can
grasp. Picasso's early drawings copied models; both the cavalrymen in
the schoolbook and his numerous attempts to draw bullfights were
versions done after the bright, colourful world of folksy prints and
broadsheets.
One of the ten-year-old Picasso's sheets is of special interest. It
is a sheet he used twice, to draw a bullfight and to draw pigeons .
Plainly the task of depicting Spain's national sport was beyond him,
even when he was copying a model. The bearing and movements of the
protagonists, and the spatial realization of the overall scene, is
most unsatisfactory. But the pigeons are another matter entirely; they
are far more convincing. In drawing them, the boy's approach was a
geometrical one, using linked ovals for the neck, crop and rump and
then adding the other parts of the birds' bodies. His father's work
prompted the boy to make these drawings, but did not provide a model.
What lies behind the frequent boyhood drawings of birds, and in
particular pigeons, is drawing instruction at school, with its method
of interposing geometrical schemata between the natural form and its
representation. Birds were a popular subject because they could easily
be seen in geometrical terms and were thus easy to draw.
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Bullfight
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Doves and Rabbits
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Bullfight
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Bullfight and Doves
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Other standard exercises included the perfecting of a leaf
outline." And so it was that children in the 19th century learnt to
perceive a repertoire of stock shapes in all things, and to reduce
individual forms to variations on geometrical themes. The drawbacks of
this method are plain: individual characteristics are subordinated to
unbending principles of representation. But we must not overlook a
salient advantage. Anyone who had been schooled in this way, and (of
course) had an amount of native talent, had the lifelong ability to
register and reproduce objects and motifs quickly and precisely.
Picasso benefitted from the training of his boyhood till he was an old
man. It was that training that gave him his astounding assurance in
his craft. His debt to his school training is clearly visible in a
drawing of boats in which a handful of lines rapidly establish the
subject, in accordance with the principle he had learnt of
calligraphic construction.
It is small wonder that his school training remained so
emphatically with Picasso, since professional tuition followed the
same principles. After his family had moved to Corunna when his father
took up a new position, the boy first attended general secondary
school but then in September 1892 moved to La Guarda art school (where
his father was teaching) at the beginning of the new school year. By
1895 he had taken courses in ornamental drawing, figure, copying
plaster objects, copying plaster figures, and copying and painting
from Nature. It was a strict academic education according to the
Madrid Royal College of Art's guidelines." This meant that he once
again studied drawing and painting in terms of copying models. His
study of an acanthus, done in his first year at La Guarda, is a good
example of this. It is essentially a line drawing with little interior
work, of a kind taught in school art classes."
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Caricatures
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Other basic representational tasks were set for the pupil. We still
have a variable-profile study of the left eye which Picasso did at age
twelve. The drawing was copied from a plaster figure, according to
time-honoured custom. The method was well established in 19th-century
academies and dated back to the 15th century. Printed originals were
used for the drawing of organs, then of larger parts of the body, and
finally of whole figures. Once the copying itself no longer posed a
problem, the pupil moved on to copying from plaster models. This
served a dual purpose: it developed the pupil's eye for a subject, and
created the ability to produce three-dimensionally modelled plasticity
by means of effective contouring and proper use of light and shadow.
This dual purpose was achieved in as linear a manner as everything
else in this system, progressing from basic geometrical figures to
lightly-modelled line drawings to full three-dimensionality."
Another Picasso study of the same date showing the head of a
bearded man in two stages of profile, one of them purely linear and
the second lightly modelled, is thus not to be taken as proof of any
unusual talent on his part where both realistic drawing and
abstraction are concerned; rather, it demonstrates that he was copying
from one of the many exercise sources. The educational drill was
strictly followed in those days, and it was doubtless more of a
soulless exercise than a fit encouragement of creative powers. Still,
the constant repetition of the same task did provide the art student
with an available repertoire of representational methods.
What was more, students were also taught the essentials of art
history; the models they followed in their exercises were the
masterpieces of ages past. So it was that in his early youth Picasso
was familiar with the sculptures of antiquity. He had to copy them
over and over, from figures on the frieze of the Parthenon to the
Venus of Milo." His lifelong engagement with the art of antiquity was
thus as firmly rooted in his early training as his assured technique
and his idiosyncratic manner of approaching a subject. In the same way
that a pianist has to practise constantly, so Picasso too, throughout
his life, kept his eye and hand in top form. His sketchbooks and his
many studies contained endlessly repeated versions of the same motif,
all executed with just a few lines and often with a single, assured
stroke.
The single-line drawing was in fact a widely-used teaching method.
It brings home the specific form of a subject better than any other
technique; only if the drawer has looked very closely and has
internalized the essentials of the form he will be able to reproduce
it with a single line. A motif set down in this way remains in the
artist's memory, always available. And because the technique was so
basic, it was of central importance to Picasso. His whole life long,
he created new visual worlds by means of representational copying.
The schematic nature of the academic approach to the appropriation
of reality played a similar part in his development. First the subject
was envisaged in geometrical terms, then it was rendered in outline,
and then it was three-dimensionally modelled. This process was to
remain the heart of Picasso's artistic method. For him, drawing always
came first, irrespective of whether he was working in oil, printed
graphics, sculpture or ceramics. This is why the seemingly
rudimentary, often childlike sketches account for such a large body of
his output. But the preliminary sketches for "Guernica" or the great
sculpture "Man with Sheep" only look childlike at a first, cursory
inspection. In fact they are skilful drawings with the precise task of
recording the formal principles of new ideas. Only when a notion had
acquired contour and recognisable form in this way did Picasso
proceed. He worked in ways of such austerely rational,
quasi-scientific logic that in this respect he must surely stand alone
in modern art. It is only because his tireless labours produced such a
superabundance of work that the popular image of his creative methods
is a different and unclear one.
It need cause no surprise that Picasso's training struck such deep
roots and influenced him for so long. After all, it was an intensive
schooling: he was exposed to it not only in extreme youth, but also
repeatedly. The tuition he received at art college in Barcelona (1895
to 1897) was essentially the same again. We do well to remember that
the treadmill effect of such repetition must have been a more
significant factor than Picasso's tender years.
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In point of fact, beginning to study at an early age was by no
means so very unusual. Ary Scheffer, famed internationally as a
painter in the early 19th century, began systematic training at the
age of eleven; and the French academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner,
now totally forgotten, began professional training at twelve. At
Barcelona, the sculptor Damian Campeny began at fourteen, the earliest
possible age there. When Picasso was allowed to sit his entrance exam
in advance of the regulation date, in September 1895, his fourteenth
birthday was still a month away. For a prospective student only a
month off formal entitlement, sterner treatment would have been
small-minded.
Picasso's oils of that period treated relatively few subjects over
and over, in a fairly uniform style. There are a striking number of
human heads, of every age and walk of life and of both sexes. These
studies are done in broad, expansive pastose, using monochrome earthy
browns or ochre yellows and sparing local colour to model the light
and shadow on faces. Generous as Picasso's brushwork is, the contours
remain precise, so that the overall impression tends to be one of
draughtsmanlike clarity. We are reminded of great Spanish antecedents
such as Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Zurbaran or Bartolome Esteban
Murillo. Once again, however, the more immediate influence was of
course Picasso's academic tuition.
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Use of brush and paint followed preliminary training in drawing and
priming. As with drawing, training proceeded in stages: first copying
from existing designs, then from genuine objects, and finally the
rendering of living models. In learning how to paint a face, students
were also acquiring the basic principles of all painting from life:
modelling of light effects, the establishment of a foundation tone
using broad strokes, pale colours for the light areas and darker for
the shade (with the hair constituting a distinct area in itself) -
then a more specific distinction of light and dark through smaller
brush strokes, working through to detailed toning. Every kind of
painting, not only portraits but also (for example) landscapes, was
done in accordance with this basic procedure. Picasso's paintings,
whether interiors, studies of heads, or landscapes, followed it
precisely. That is to say, he was not yet betraying the influence of
any contemporary movements in art - even if remote similarities can at
times be identified.
A rear view of a nude woman which he painted in 1895 is interesting
in this connection. It is a copy of a work by the contemporary painter
Arcadi Mas i Fontdevilla. The latter's painting also uses loose
brushwork; but the brush strokes are not as patchy, schematic and
indeed almost mosaic in effect as those in Picasso's Corunna head
studies or the landscapes he painted on holiday at Malaga. These works
exemplify the next stage in his academic training. Light and shadow,
and colour tonality, were established in contrastively juxtaposed
brush strokes that conveyed a mosaic impression. This method was
systematic, and well-nigh guaranteed strong impact; a painter who
followed it would produce works of persuasive effect. Finally, the
tuition programme culminated in the step-by-step rendering in oil
studies of a live nude model. Picasso did good work of this kind as a
youngster, much like that of any other 19th-century painter who
underwent this kind of academic training.
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Female Nude
1895
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Academic Nude
1895
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A Quarry
Malaga, summer 1896
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Farmhouse
1893
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House in a Wheatfield
1898
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Head of a Boy
1896
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Bust of a Young Man
1895
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This training was rigorously formal and designed to drive out the
spontaneity in an artist, and inevitably had considerable
disadvantages. Autonomous values of colour, so important to new
movements such as Impressionism, were played down. The expressive
potential that is in the manner in which an artist applies the paint
to the surface, important to great 17th-century artists and much later
to Impressionists and Expressionists alike, was altogether out.
Academic painting aimed to produce a final work in which the
preliminaries were absorbed into a smooth overall finish.
But the disadvantages were worth putting up with for a signal
advantage. Colour established form, confirming the contour established
by the drawn line. This sense of colour stayed with Picasso till the
end of his career: colour was intimately connected with form, and
could be used to intensify or defamiliarize it. Still, Picasso's
academic training alone could never have made him what he became, much
as he owed it in later life.
A schoolbook in which the ten-year-old Picasso scribbled sketches
has survived from 1891. On one of the sheets he drew a frontal view of
a cat. The head is so outsize that at first we do not notice the few
lines that indicate the body. Those lines are randomly placed and
uncertain, while the head, somewhat clumsy though it may be, shows a
clear attempt to render the animal precisely. If the study were one
done from nature, this would be remarkable, since it would signify an
inconsistency; and it would be all the more remarkable if we bear in
mind that the cat would have had to be caught in motion, a task that
even professional artists are not necessarily equal to. But in fact if
we take a look at the drawings in Picasso's schoolbooks we find that
most of them were copies of other work, mainly of folksy graphic art;
so probably the cat too was copied from someone else's model drawing,
not from nature.
In point of fact, art-college textbooks were full of schematic
nature studies for copying purposes, many of them showing cats. They
looked much like Picasso's hasty sketch, with the difference that the
head and body, united in Picasso's drawing, were separate.
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The Barefoot Girl
1895
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The inconsistency in his drawing resulted from an attempt to make a
whole out of parts before he had the skill to do so. This is most
instructive. It does not imply lack of ability; but it does point to a
specific shortfall in his capacity at that stage. The boy will
doubtless have known of these textbooks of model drawings through his
father, who would have used them for teaching purposes himself. His
father will have prompted the boy to copy the drawings in them. Having
seen his son's gift at work, he will have offered guidance - of a
subtle and effective kind. If we look through the young Picasso's
sketches, we see that his studies from academic originals were
invariably done earlier than we might expect, given the stage he was
at in his own training. At school he was already copying college work;
at college he copied the next year's material in advance. His father
enrolled the boy in courses ahead of normal schedules - though he also
encouraged a free artistic imagination in the lad. The young Picasso's
work includes not only studies of an academic nature but also an
abundance of very different material, mostly caricatures and other
studies of the home milieu, of parents and siblings, relations,
friends. Caricatures were fun to do; but the pleasure Picasso
presumably took in them must have afforded a safety valve for any
irritation at his strict training, too. They also tell us that he had
a sure hand at registering form with a constructive, creative
imagination. No wonder he remained fond of caricature throughout his
life.
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The Artist's Father
1896
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The Artist's Father
1896
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The Artist's Mother
1896
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The Artist's Mother
1896
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Free work (of the student's own choice) was also a part of academic
training. Students were encouraged to do their own studies outside
studio requirements, to develop an ability to solve unusual problems.
They were expected to have a sketchbook with them at all times, to
record striking motifs. Picasso's parents gave him his first album in
early 1894, and that autumn gave him a second. They were the first of
a great many sketchbooks which served Picasso as his most direct and
personal tool. The importance of these sketchbooks has only become
evident in recent years. Of course modern artists use sketchbooks; but
to use them on Picasso's scale was more of a feature of art in older
times. In this respect, again, Picasso was a creature of tradition.
Picasso's father was unremitting in moulding his son along his own
lines. He wanted him to be the academic painter par excellence.
He himself painted animal scenes and genre paintings, the kind of work
traditionally considered of secondary value; and he wanted his son to
paint figure and history paintings, which were then valued above all
else. And so Picasso's freely chosen studies turn out to be mainly
figure and portrait studies. And his father's oppressive influence
shows again in the fact that he himself was his talented son's
preferred subject.
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Portrait of Aunt Pepa
1896
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This process culminated in two paintings the father prompted the
son to do in 1896 and 1897, "First Communion" and
"Science and Charity". Picasso's father sat for the doctor whose
skill and knowledge will determine the patient's fate. And his father
also influenced the reception of the pictures by using his contacts
with newspaper critics." He was omnipresent in the young Picasso's
life. The boy's whole education took place in schools and colleges
where his father was on the staff.
Deliberately though Picasso's training was steered by his father,
and intelligent though it was, it was also outdated. Elsewhere in
Europe, this academic method had been superseded. Compared with other
countries, the art scene in Spain when Picasso was a youngster was
decidedly on the conservative side. From 1860 to 1890 the history
paintings of Eduardo Rosales, Mariano Fortuny and Francisco Pradilla
dominated Spanish art; their work was comparable with that of a Thomas
Couture in France, a Gustaaf Wapper in Belgium, or a Carl Friedrich
Lessing in Germany - all of them artists clinging to a training
acquired in the first half of the century, and to views on art that
had peaked in mid-century.
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Science and Charity
1897
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So a crisis was inevitable in Picasso's life. In 1897, when his
father sent the sixteen-year-old to the Royal Academy in Madrid, it
was a great mistake. The legend-makers have tended to claim that
Picasso attended none of his courses at all - but he did in fact go to
those of Moreno Carbonero. Still, he was profoundly disappointed by
studies at the Academy, and concentrated on copying the old masters in
the Prado. In June 1898 he gave up his Madrid studies for good.
It was the first evidence of his unusual personality. He could not
learn anything new or better in Madrid because the tuition methods
were the same as in Corunna or Barcelona. He could see all the
shortcomings clearly, his own as well as the Academy's. It was not as
if he no longer needed guidance. His copy of Velazquez's portrait of
King Philip IV of Spain, for instance, is a decidedly mediocre piece
of work. His whole life long he had certain fundamental weaknesses,
such as a tendency to apply his concentration one-sidedly. If a
subject made a variety of demands on him, Picasso would prefer to
tackle the one he thought important. His early academic studies were
accomplished enough, but often they were sloppy in one way or another;
later, he would still often make crucial mistakes. For instance, in
his portraits he often positions the eyes wrongly, a typical result of
an inadequate grasp of the overall relation of parts to the whole.
A letter he wrote to a friend on 3 November 1897 shows how much he
craved good instruction in Madrid. In it he complains bitterly of the
backwardness and incompetence of his teachers and says he would rather
go to Paris or Munich, where the art tuition was the best in Europe.
Munich would even be best, he said -although he was going to go to
Paris - because in Munich people didn't bother with fashionable stuff
such as pointillism! In other words, Picasso was longing for the kind
of academic training a Franz von Stuck gave; but he was not interested
in the methods and ideas that were currently considered avant-garde.
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Portrait of Philip IV (after Velazquez)
1897
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Self-Portrait as an 18th-Century Gentleman
1897
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Self-Portrait
1896
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Head of a Man in the Style of El Greco
1899
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Though it may seem astonishing or paradoxical, the fact is that
Picasso did not become Picasso under the influence of progressive
ideas but because an old-fashioned milieu was imposing superannuated
notions on him. He found it impossible to make do with routine and
mediocrity. Fully aware that the decision to quit the Academy would
seriously damage relations with his father, for whom Madrid still
represented the gateway to desired success, Picasso made a radical
break - despite the total uncertainty of his new future. Not yet
seventeen, he set about achieving his independence in every respect.
And from now on he went his own way.
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