Spain and France have jointly declared 2023 to be the Year of Picasso. 50 years after the great artist died, Picasso Celebration 1973 to 2023 will be on many people's lists of cultural highlights. On Monday’s Arena, Seán Rocks spoke to art historian Jess Fahy to talk about Malaga’s most famous son:
"According to the family legend, his first words were, 'Piz, piz,’ which is short for pencil, pencil, so that was him, as young as he could be, his first ability to do anything was to draw."
Pablo’s father, Don José, was an artist himself – mostly known for painting birds, Jess says – but he was also a teacher, so the young master had a guiding hand for his piz from the get-go. Picasso took an exam at 13 that allowed him to go to art school in Barcelona, where he did a project that should take three months in a week. At 13. From Barcelona, Picasso goes to Madrid and his career as an artist begins – but it’s a rocky start for the young painter:
"Apparently when he goes to Paris in 1900, he becomes much more aware of photography and he has a kind of moment – apparently drug-induced – where he thinks that there’s no point in living because photography can already represent naturalism. So this is where people believe he started to try and look for a new art and gets involved in sort of following all these different ideas of the avantgarde around him."
Picasso had a long life and was a very prolific painter throughout that long life. Famously, his work is often spoken of in terms of periods – his Blue Period, his Rose Period, and so on. Seán asked Jess to give us an overview of how those periods relate to Picasso’s work, so she went through them for him. Here’s how the Blue Period came about:
"The Blue Period comes after he’s in Paris and a very good friend of his dies by suicide and then he sees his friend turning blue as he’s laid out and then he turns all his paintings blue ‘cos he can only see through that filter."
How, Seán wanted to know, did Picasso’s art go from the realistic style of his time in Spain to the much more avantgarde style of what Seán describes as, "You know, the head with all sorts of odd shapes, almost as if he cuts the head up and sticks it back together in a scrapbook type of fashion". Jess says that the non-realist style was present in Picasso’s work from quite early on:
"Already by the 1890s, some of the backgrounds of his works are less naturalistic, so they look kind of otherworldly, sort of symbolist, in a way. And then the Blue Period and the Rose Period are very much symbolist, so he uses figures and places to represent, as you said, his emotions and things like that. In 1907 he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and that’s kind of the key moment of his switch and change."
It’s said that it took Picasso nine months of work to prepare for that painting, including hundreds of preparatory studies before the final painting was made. And although it was finished in 1907, it wasn’t shown until 1916 because the initial reaction to it was, well. Not everything a young artist trying something new wants to hear:
"The small circle of people who saw it first – including Matisse – thought it was a joke and kind of laughed at him. So he had a little bit of a setback from that. But that’s always seen as the work that leads him into Cubism."
One of the few people who responded favourably to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was the French painter Georges Braque and he and Picasso worked together to create Cubism, which, Jess tells us:
"[It] essentially comes from an idea of painting in a way that we think about things rather than how we see them. So, if you want to paint a café, you don’t pick a particular café, you instead make a collage of things that remind you of cafés, but in a broken up, fragmented kind of way. So it’s so revolutionary, Cubism, because it breaks all the rules. No longer normal perspective, no longer normal modelling, you know, all the things that went before, he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that. I’m doing something new.’"
You can hear Seán’s full, fascinating conversation with Jess about Picasso, by going here.