Picasso

Paul Eluard and Pablo Picasso shared a close friendship up until the poet's death in 1952. Since they met in the mid-1930s until the end of the poet's life, Eluard could be considered the painter's best friend.

Nothing predisposed Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to become one of the most iconic art dealers of the 20th century, other than his wide culture and his early interest in painting.

He was born into an affluent German family, whose wealth enabled him to receive an allowance for a year while he tried his luck at running an avant-garde gallery.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso's death, Spain and France have created a bi-national commission to organize the commemoration. A program including close to fifty exhibitions and a large number of events will be held in Europe and the United States as part of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023.

Pablo Picasso, the painter of Guernica and portraitist of Djamila Boupacha, was an icon for the Arab art scene. Born in Andalusia, a foreigner in Paris, a Communist Party fellow traveler, and a supporter of nations struggling for independence, Picasso was considered by many Arab artists as one of their own, and, more importantly, as the promise of a universal art without a hierarchy of periods, places, or styles.

Picasso's relationship to politics has usually been analyzed in terms of his most spectacular undertakings: his "political" works from 1937—especially, Guernica—and his affiliation to the French Communist Party from 1944 onward.

Much though these two episodes are landmarks within the artist's personal and artistic career, they can overshadow its overall development.

Since the 1930s, Prévert and Picasso have nurtured a long friendship and participated in all the artistic moments of the Parisian scene. Without melancholy, the painter and the poet were both serenely aware of their duty: to convey what life had taught them, through language, through words, and through painting or images.

Picasso and Jacques Prévert on the beach in Antibes, in 1963.
Photo Robert Doisneau/Gamma-Rapho

During his vacation with Françoise Gilot on the Côte d’Azur, in late July, 1946, Picasso visited the Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris, run by Suzanne and Georges Ramié. In late July 1947, Picasso returned to the Madoura studio and began an intense creative process with the Ramié couple’s team.

Picasso spanned the 20th century, knew its currents of thought and its main actors, and witnessed the major or tragic events that punctuated it. Eloquent in his paintings, the artist was also marked by his country's history. His practice was transformed through his questioning of art and its relationship to reality. After all, what first drew him to France was curiosity; having moved there for pleasure, he finally stayed out of obligation. Franco's ascent to power cast him out of his native Spain forever: his exile and his political commitment exerted both evident and subtle influences on his life and work.

This essay is the transcription of a conference given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York on April 29th 2016. This research is part of a larger project on the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s sequestration sales, which took place after the First World War. In order to shed new light on the history and organization of the sales, I’m trying to identify all works by Braque, Gris, Léger and Picasso, as well as their buyers. I also aim to locate them today and to create a catalog raisonné of the Cubist works that were part of these sales as a tool for researchers. 

“A lot of what we would do as kids happened outside the studio. We would play art-related games, for example. We would make galleries, invitations to openings, copy gallery doors, and obviously make the paintings for the show…”, Claude Picasso in this Ojo 33 tells us about his family life and games with his father.

In this new issue of Ojo, you will discover Picasso’s final works. Between December 31, 1970 and February 4, 1971, the artist produced a series of fifty-seven drawings, which he then donated to the Musée Réattu—and specifically to his friend Jean-Maurice Rouquette, who had been appointed as director of the museum on October 1, 1956.

Within the cubism of the years 1909-1912, Picasso adopted a “dark”, hermetic style in his works. These attest to his meeting with the artists and writers from intellectual circles, and particularly that of philosophical thought. Successively inspiring and inspired by cubism, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein, Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, and the writers associated with the journals La Voce and Leonardo (Ardengo Soffici, Giovanni Papini, and Giuseppe Prampolini) each played a determining role in the configuration of Picasso's new style. It was through these gatherings that the artist encountered Henri Bergson, the philosopher of duration.

In the Margins of a Thesis: Picasso and Bergson, a Historiographic Digression and an Analysis of Picasso's Analytical Cubism (1909-1912). From Knowledge to Experience.

When art historians were confronted with pasted paper, they viewed it as a new form of expression that posed the problem of cubism in general : that of its interpretation. How was one supposed to read a piece for which culture had not yet established a reading convention ? The discipline of semiotics seems to be well equipped for approaching a phenomenon of this sort.

In the early 1920s, the Kahnweilers began holding their « Sundays in Boulogne ». It was there that Michel Leiris met the woman who would become his wife, but also a man who would remain his friend for a half a century : Pablo Picasso.

"Picasso, who painted before he learned to read, seems to have been charged with the mission of using his paintbrush to express everything that exists." Charles Morice, 1902, catalogue, Mercure de France

The history of the Hôtel Salé on which this text is based was described in detail by Jean-Pierre Babelon in a booklet published for the museum's opening in 1985, currently held in the museum's archives.

This article is an attempt to study in depth the creative process of the seminal years in Picasso’s oeuvre, before he settled in Paris, when he was still travelling back and forth between Barcelona and Paris. The parallels between the pictorial technique and the life of an artist such as Picasso cannot be overlooked. as well as familiarising ourselves with his work and making it known, it is essential that we examine his life extensively, without dividing lines, in order to learn how and in what circumstances he produced his creations.

Why doesn't fashion follow, step by step, the discoveries and suggestions of our modern visual artists? Couldn't our interiors be like resonance chambers for all the concerns and aspirations of our times? [...] The existence of an "honest human being" should be one of them. For one's apartment, one's clothing, or one's choice of art objects and paintings.

Marie Cuttoli. Excerpt from an advertisement for Myrbor, Cahiers d’art, June 1926.

On June 6, Sotheby's Paris sold two works by Picasso from the collection of the painter's granddaughter, Marina Picasso. These two paintings, which originally belonged to the Pablo Picasso estate, had not left the painter's studio up until his death in 1973. We have chosen to tell the stories of these two works in one article, as both bear witness to Picasso's political and humanistic concerns right before the war and during the Occupation.

Although the place of the theater in the work of Picasso has certainly been studied¹, the part played by the artist’s first wife Olga Khokhlova (1891--1955), a dancer in the Ballets Russes, remains little known.² It therefore seems appropriate to recount for the first time the course of Olga’s own artistic career as dancer, from her early training in Russia to her roles in Serge Diaghilev’s ballets and her meeting with Picasso in 1917. The study of the young Olga’s interpretations, which the artist is likely to have seen in rehearsals or in actual performances on stage, viewed together with analyses of his paintings devoted to the theme of dance, then makes it possible to reconsider the importance of “Olga the ballerina” in Picasso’s work, both as subject and as muse. This examination leads us, moreover, to broaden our field of study, till now essentially pictorial, to include the influences in which the artist immersed himself beginning in 1914 and which appear more explicitly in the works dating from his first meeting with Olga and the early years of their marriage. Fostered by the Italian context, the artist’s dialogue with antiquity and classicism opened a new chapter of his life involving the arts of dance and music, which Picasso discovered through his collaboration with the Ballets Russes and his love for Olga.

1 See, for example, Douglas Cooper, Picasso Theatre, London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1968 ; Picasso and the Theater, exh. cat. (Olivier Berggruen ed.), Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, 2007.

2 The only article devoted to this specific subject is Anne Baldassari, “Olga Koklova and Dance,” in Picasso. 1917-1924: The Italian Journey, exh. cat. (Jean Clair ed.), Milan: Bompiani, 1998, pp. 96--99. Besides the Olga Picasso archives at FABA, this study relies for many details on the programs of Ballets Russes productions between 1911 and 1917. Research on these, however, remains to be completed, and the chronology may therefore be subject to revision.

Among the films that show artists at work, Le Mystère Picasso, shot in 1955 by Henri-Georges Clouzot, stands out as one of the greatest achievements in the genre. We are well acquainted with the "prehistory" of this work, a joint venture between two virtuosos in their respective fields: the filmmaker Clouzot and the painter Picasso.

Each of these two men contributed equally to the initial conception of the film, though at certain moments the filmmaker played the role traditionally attributed to the director and the painter became an actor, embodying the character of Picasso, the modern artist par excellence.

The weakly-supported theories that prevail regarding Picasso’s highly fertile period dating from 1905 to 1907 have hindered a proper understanding of the artist’s work, and, to some extent, of part of his later production. In my research on the subject, I have reviewed these theories and analyzed the pieces based on a new series of parameters of interpretation.¹ In this paper I will attempt to provide a general notion of the matter, which I believe can offer a new contribution to the historiography of Picasso’s oeuvre.

1    C. Boncompte Coll, Iconografía picassiana entre 1905 y 1907. Influencia de la pintura pompeyana, doctoral thesis directed by Dr. Lourdes Cirlot and defended on November 9, 2009 at the University of Barcelona (see http://www.tesisenxarxa.net/TDX-1120109-093323/).

André Level (1863-1946), was a collector, businessman and financier, but above all an enlightened amateur. He did not imagine, when he founded with a few friends the Association La Peau de l’Ours in 1904, that he would, ten years later, be at the origin of an unprecedented speculative operation which was to place modern art at the forefront of the artistic scene and to offer Picasso his first great public success.