Picasso’s artistic career effectively started in the year 1900, when he first displayed his works in a Barcelona tavern named Els Quatre Gats. The fact that a defining figure of twentieth century art should start his dialogue with the rest of the world at the turn of the century is very symbolic. The beginning was a remarkable affair, for Picasso was still only nineteen and has proven his talent for drawing as a vehicle for ideas. After this initial success, Picasso grew in confidence and questioned orthodox views of education and social conduct. Adopting a radically different lifestyle, Picasso showed that behind his art was a profound caring for humanity and civil society. For example,
“He had rejected academic study and had joined a group of young Barcelona avant-garde artists who espoused social causes, among them the plight of the urban poor. The disenfranchised, such as syphilitic prostitutes, beggars, vagabonds, fellow artists and writers and circus performers, would be the subjects for his Blue and Rose periods, the high points of the National Gallery exhibit.” (Shaw-Eagle, 1997)
It is important to note that his art during the early period indicated signs of things to come. His first cubist painting “The Young Ladies of Avignon” was painted in 1907. Just the previous year, he had painted one of his self-portrait masterpieces “Self-Portrait with Palette”, which was done in his early style. It would be inaccurate to infer that with Cubism, Picasso has made a decisive break from the past. As a matter of fact, when The Young Ladies of Avignon was exhibited in 1907, it wasn’t referred to as Cubism. The term Cubism was assigned retrospectively to an emerging new trend seen in the works of artists such as Picasso and Braque. While Picasso is most famous for his Cubist works, he was also inspired by the works of such artists as Toulouse-Lautrec, Diego Velasquez and El Greco. For instance, his early painting “Lady in Blue,” has elements that are unmistakably that of Velasquez, and is almost satiric impasto portraiture of a Spanish courtesan. So, the range of styles and forms adopted by Picasso is very comprehensive and Cubism is just one chapter in the artist’s body of work (Danto, 1996).
Cubism can be concisely defined as an improvisation on realism, made by manipulating three dimensional objects into flat-sided geometric forms that revealed very little depth. Early pioneers of this form also held the view that showing only one perspective of an object didn’t completely explain it, and hence they showed painted objects from more than one perspective. Further,
“Cubist artists were not trying to imitate appearances, however. Georges Braque explained that the goal of Cubist art was in the reality of the mind, not the senses. For these reasons, Cubist artists did not try to paint realistically. The original Cubist artists were active until the start of World War I, when most artistic activity in Europe came to an end. At the beginning of the movement, Cubist painters used only dull, dark colors, but later they began to work with brighter colors”. (Danto, 1996)
It was noted earlier how the ‘notion of self’ was at the core of Picasso’s works. This is seen in Picasso’s “lifelong preoccupation with portraiture, especially self-portraiture. The portraits of himself mirror perfectly his restless search for a stylistic and psychic identity. Here, especially, we see how he projected a sense of self that was larger than life and how he saw his art as an extension of himself”. Even in such a painting as “The Family of Saltimbanques”, irrespective of the fact that the object being painted is the harlequin the artist is essentially looking at himself as if to say, “Who am I?” (Shaw-Eagle, 1997)
If one single individual is to be associated with encouraging Picasso to experiment with new styles, including Cubism, it would have to be Gertrude Stein. It is very difficult to define the relationship between Stein and Picasso, for she was more than a patroness to Picasso; she was also her intimate companion and friend. It is no coincidence that The Young Ladies of Avignon was produced the year after Stein first commissioned Picasso to paint her portrait. By the time Picasso started working on Gertrude Stein’s portrait he had become a consummate artist. Indeed, Picasso had traveled a long way from his early, realistic portraiture, through the “idealized sadness of his Blue and Rose periods, to classicizing and modeling his figures” (Hubbard, 2001). He had started to conceive the portrait as a subjective document, breaking away from the tradition of realistic and objective portraits. This inducement of subjectivity is essential to his Cubist works that were to come later. It is apt to say that the Portrait of Gertrude Stein is as much a modernist painting as it is a pre-Cubist one. But, the process of creating this landmark work in the career of the genius in discussion was not without its share of obstacles and delays. For example, it took Picasso close to three months and nearly a hundred sittings in the winter and spring of 1906 to complete this work. But the end result was worth the wait:
“After a summer break at the Spanish village of Gosol, he returned to paint in her face in a single day, giving it the mask-like appearance it holds today…The mask in `Gertrude Stein’ elicits different associations: obscurity, remoteness, obdurateness, implacability. Picasso had captured her essence through a dislocation of her features – her hooded eyes are at different levels, and the right eye is larger than the recessive, smaller left one. Through the distortions and dislocations, the artist created a disturbing and vital psychological presence. It would be just a few more steps into dissolving the figure completely and into cubism.” (Hubbard, 2001)
Another recurring theme in Picasso’s works is the concept of alienation. Along with such contemporaries of his as Paul Gauguin, Picasso surpassed the tradition of “the fin-de-siecle and symbolist questioning of life’s values and directions” (Hubbard, 2001). The remarkable thing about Picasso’s paintings is that they cause our minds to expand and explore in search of the implicit meaning in it. Arthur Danto compares the genius of Picasso with that of Bertrand Russell. At first, this might seem inappropriate. After all, one is a master of the arts and the other an intellectual and a mathematician. But in the minds of these two men, there is no such dichotomy. For instance, Russell compared his magnum opus Principia Mathematica to mellifluous music. Likewise, Picasso’s Cubist paintings could be compared with an intricate puzzle, the solution of which would require exercising of the intellect. The similarities between the two men do not stop there. In the lives of both these geniuses, women played an important role. More importantly, the relationships they had were not confined to the private realm. To the contrary, their professional lives were as much dictated and influenced by the romantic and mystic aspects of their lives. The following passage illustrates this point:
“Cubism has become less a tool of visual analysis than a Modernist mannerism in the legions influenced by Picasso, for whom it may have had a subjective urgency peculiarly his own. Why would someone, bent upon discovering a universal visual language, address and readdress the face form and figure of those to whom he was emotionally attached? It would be as if Bertrand Russell’s strategy for overcoming seeming contradictions by logical analysis were motivated by the personal dilemma of being greatly attached to two women at once”. (Hubbard, 2001)
Although there were other exponents of Cubist art, Picasso developed his unique style. While Braque’s was l’esprit de geometrie, to use Pascal’s famous expression, Picasso’s was l’esprit de finesse. The former was driven by a “sense of order, reduction and simplification, for which geometry is a natural metaphor”, the latter was driven by “intuitive and visceral feelings of an almost uncontainable intensity” (Danto, 1989). Even after many decades of exercising the Cubist craft, Picasso was still experimenting and evolving his skill. Having said so, there were some common elements through all his Cubist paintings. For example, elements of primitive Iberian images, the works of Gauguin, American comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids have all contributed to Picasso’s notion of Cubist art. But the most interesting and intriguing influence on Picasso’s Cubism is aspects of Negro and Oceanic art, the exhibits of which he had seen in the Ethnographic Museum of the Palais de Trocadero. This assortment of creative inputs that went into Picasso’s Cubist works is best illustrated by the example of Les Demoiselles, in which,
“The females lie at the intersection of the primitive, the flat and the violent. Two of the demoiselles’ faces were modified into fierce and mask-like apparitions with, one feels, ritual strips of paint or symbolic scarifications. One gets the sense in the paintings that come afterward that Picasso is painting in an Africanistic mode–even the still lifes have heavy outlines and irregular shapes, as if given form under conditions too primitive for the potter’s wheel”. (Danto, 1989)
References:
Danto, A. C. (1989, November 6)., Braque, Picasso and Early Cubism., The Nation, 249, 540+.
Danto, A. C. (1996, August 26). Picasso and the Portrait, The Nation, 263, 31+.
Hubbard, G. (2001, October)., Cubism, Arts & Activities, 130, 33.
Shaw-Eagle, J. (1997, March 30). Picasso: A Detailed Portrait of a Legendary Artist as a Young Man. The Washington Times, p. 1.