Changes in pictorial technique in an aca demically trained art ist
In 1904 Picasso settled in Paris, a decision he had been pondering for four years and that entailed physically leaving Catalonia and, more importantly, the definitive break with his academic training which he had begun to abandon in 1898. This marked the end of his first creative period, the start of a journey of no return that has come to be known as his Blue Period (1901–04). The young man who had first visited the French capital in October 1900, four years earlier, was now a painter with a solid technical background but was not yet a complete artist characterised by a uniquely creative independence. The routine initiated in 1896 which entailed taking part in the annual National Expositions[1] continued with his participation in the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, at which he displayed Last Moments, a religious painting dedicated to the subject of death and still indebted to the aesthetics of Modernisme. The canvas had previously hung in the rooms of the Quatre Gats in February of that year.
What did Picasso think of Last Moments once he had discovered Paris? If we knew we would perhaps learn why he hid the work and reused the canvas to paint La Vie,[2] instead of keeping it in his own private collection as he did with many other canvases.[3] How did Paris bring about this transformation in his oeuvre? The reasons behind the change have been explored in depth: his encounter with the Parisian art world and his mood following Casagemas’s death were powerful triggers. The city opened up a new dimension to him, quite different from that of Barcelona, granting him the possibility of being thoroughly contemporary.[4]
[1] At which Picasso had presented First Communion in 1896, Science and Charity in 1897 and Woman in Blue in 1901.
[2] See the essay by William Robinson in this catalogue.
[3] Barcelona Rooftops among them, as well as other key compositions such as the portraits of the deceased Casagemas.
[4] ‘Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.’ Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the contemporary?’, in David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (trans.), ‘What Is An Apparatus’ and Other Essays. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 40.
3 / 18
Summary