Pablo Picasso was born in Spain in 1881 and died in 1973. He worked as a painter and ceramicist, co-founded cubism. The Musee Picasso in Paris, is located in Hôtel Salé in rue de Thorigny, in the Marais district of Paris. Most of the works here hare donations as his inheritance tax from his wife Jacqueline, action known as “dation”. Currently, there is a temporary exhibition about Picasso’s sculpture on the first floor. The paintings are shown upstairs with chronological order.
A Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France.
Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of theBombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces at the behest of the Spanish nationalist government during the Spanish Civil War.
The most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), AnalyticCubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919).
SCLPTURE
In 1902, 21 years old Picasso created his first sculpture.
In 1909, which is the turning point for analytical cubism, Picasso was Influenced by Catalan culture and African sculptures. In 1912, he employed glass and motif in cubism to scuplture. In 1921, Picasso created a monument for Guillaume Apollinaire, a friend, poet and art critics.
As Jean Cocteau has described Apollinaire:
this inimitable poet who has become a constellation because the drops of ink that shook at the tip of his pen fell onto the blank pages like stars.
In 1930, Marie-Therese Walter became Picasso’s muse, for whom he created a series of female figures first only known from brassai’s photos.
In 1947, the 66 years old Picasso began encyclopaedic sculptures, which combined bronze with other materials.
In the 1950s, Picasso began to paint on 3D sculptures. He would fold the paper first and draw, and then later employed on the flat sculpture.
PAINTING
From 1901 began his blue period, affected by other post impressionist paintings.
In 1908, Paul Cézanne started the first stage of cubism. Picasso continued his interested in female body and produced works such as Demoiselles d’Avignon.
1910 began analytical cubism, Picasso aime to portray things not as they appeared to the eye but as they appeared to the mind.
After World War One, Picasso met bellerina Olga Khokhlova in 1918 and left bohemian lifestyle. He then traveled to Italy and influenced by classicism and joined the Fontainebleau.
From 1924 onwards, Picasso added strangeness into the painting, use different materials, connected to Andre Breton’s surrealism in the future.
On 1947, the artist was working on ceramics. He continued to played with the succession of removals, additions, change of scale, style or colors.
The museum also presented some other collection by Picasso, including drawings of bull flight and landscape, depiction of lascivious goat named Esmeralda in California.
On the lower level, an artist Miquel Barcelo has a temporary exhibition.
A Spanish painter, In 2004 his watercolours, illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy, were shown at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Thus, he became the youngest artist ever shown in this museum.
The artist indeed has many drafts before he created a piece, including painting and sculpture.
Jacqueline Picasso
In Pompidou Center, there is an exhibition about Picasso’s work in his last years and mostly about his last love — Jacqueline Picasso. He drew these from 82–90 years old: I could ever imagined someone older than my grandfather, who is 86, done anything like that. In that sense, all of this is remarkable.
She was 26 years old and he was 72 when they first met in 1953. As Picasso’s first wife died in 1955, They married in Vallauris on 2 March 1961. Their marriage lasted 11 years until his death, during which time he created over 400 portraits of her, more than any of Picasso’s other loves.
These portraits are characterized by an exaggerated neck and feline face, distortions of Roque’s features. Eventually her dark eyes and eyebrows, high cheekbones, and classical profile would become familiar symbols in his late paintings. It is likely that Picasso’s series of paintings derived from Eugène Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers was inspired by Roque’s beauty; the artist commented that “Delacroix had already met Jacqueline.” In 1955 he drewJacqueline as “Lola de Valence”, a reference to Édouard Manet’s painting of the Spanish dancer.
After Picasso’s death, Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s companion and mother of two of his children, Claude and Paloma, fought with Jacqueline P. over the distribution of the artist’s estate. Jacqueline prevented Claude and Paloma from attending Picasso’s funeral and they have eventually agreed to establish the Musée Picasso in Paris.
Picasso’s Lovers
Fernande Olivier (1881–1966; with Picasso 1904–1911)
After an abusive childhood and a violent teenage marriage, Olivier escaped into Paris’s bohemia, and took up with Picasso during his most revolutionary phase — though she never saw the point of cubism. Picasso failed to suppress her lively memoir Picasso et ses Amis, but paid her a small pension provided the second volume didn’t appear till after his death.
Eva Gouel (1885–1915; with Picasso 1911–1915)
Born as Marcelle Humbert, she was the girlfriend of fellow artist Louis Marcoussis when Picasso became involved with her in 1911. Little is known of the frail Eva. While Picasso later claimed he knew greater contentment with her than anyone else, he carried on an affair as Eva lay dying of tuberculosis in 1915.
Olga Khokhlova (1891–1954; with Picasso 1917–1935)
Picasso’s Ukrainian first wife, and the mother of his eldest child Paulo, was a dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and one of the few people of either sex to stand up to the artist. After their separation in 1935, she bombarded him with hate mail. But since Picasso refused to divide his assets with her, as required by French law, they never divorced.
Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909–1977; with Picasso 1927–1936)
Picasso met the blonde 17 year-old outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris in 1927, but kept their affair secret for eight years. She gave him a daughter, Maia, in 1935, at about the time she was supplanted in Picasso’s affections by Dora Maar. She hanged herself in 1977.
Dora Maar (1907–1997; with Picasso 1936–1944)
Born Henriette Theodora Markovitch, of Croatian and French descent. A talented artist and photographer, this Surrealist icon — powerfully portrayed by Man Ray — had a tragic air, caused, Picasso believed, by her inability to have children. She ended her days surrounded by dust-encrusted relics of her time with Picasso.
Françoise Gilot (b.1921; with Picasso 1944–1953)
This level-headed law student abandoned her studies in favour of art and began an affair with Picasso at 21. She gave him two children, Claude and Paloma, and recalled their nine-year relationship in the best-selling Life with Picasso. Later married to American vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, she still paints.
Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986; with Picasso 1954–1993)
A sales assistant in the Madoura Pottery Studio in Vallauris, where Picasso created his ceramics, Jacqueline met Picasso in 1954, when she was 27, and became his second wife in 1961. While she quarrelled with his children over the division of his estate, they collaborated in the creation of the Musée Picasso. She shot herself in 1986.
Overall, the museum has a clear layout and it has a human-scale. It showed not only the final product but it also presented the thought and draft process it took for Picasso to came up with the artwork.
It also remind my first Picasso encounter memory. When I was in middle school, one of the teacher told us to divide our paper into different section. He placed a guitar in the center and told us to move once finished one section of the paper. The product is pretty cool, as I have remembered. I did not know the artist’s name, but I do knew that this is a style of a famous artist. Thinking back, I love how I first drew an analycial cubist painting.
There are two introduction text on each side of the room, helping the audience to better understand the situation. However, certain text are located in the connection between two rooms, so sometimes there will be a small traffic. The alarm system also seems to work fine — preventing many children from the sculptures.
Nevertheless, I could only partially agree with Picasso’s statement:
“I am the greatest collector of Picassos in the world.”
It seems to me that there is a good explanation of the life of Picasso but many significant work is missing to form a complete picture of the man in this museum. After all, he was a man full with energy, wasn’t he?
