April 8 marks the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death. As an artist, however, he is immortal.
Genius, egoist, womanizer. All these terms apply to the painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) like hardly any other man. His name became synonymous with modernity in art, and today he himself seems “like the opposite of the modern man” (“Süddeutsche Zeitung”).
This is not because Picasso celebrated the 50th anniversary of his death on April 8th, because as an artist he is immortal. For most of his life he embodied what only many years after his death became the pejorative epitome of outdated, traditionally European masculinity: he was the old white man par excellence. An undisputed patriarch on all levels.
Picasso was and is the greatest common denominator in a divergent art world: he was the most productive, most important artist of the 20th century, a co-initiator of Cubism, the richest painter of his time, the dominant macho into old age. A fascinating person with different facets that could come from a fantastic piece of literature.
The artist
He was born in Malaga. Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, his full baptismal name, was born with a predisposition. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a painter and art teacher who recognized his son’s talent early on.
At the age of nine he paints his first bullfighting-inspired oil painting “The Little Picador”. At 14 he went to the art academy in Barcelona, at 20 he signed his works with his mother’s maiden name because it sounds so beautifully Italian and he likes it much better: Picasso. In 1900 he traveled to the art metropolis Paris for the first time, where he stayed permanently from 1904 and quickly caused a stir.
Picasso is tremendously productive. The total number of his works is estimated at 50,000. As a painter, he left around 16,000 paintings and drawings. In his almost manic urge to create, he also works as a graphic artist (thousands of graphics) and sculptor (approx. 1,200 sculptures and 3,000 ceramics). He also wrote dozens of poems and the two plays “Le Désir attrapé par la queue” (1941) and “Les quatre petites” (1948), which were also translated into German.
The Multimillionaire
Through his friendship with the well-known painters Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), Picasso met the gallery owner Ambroise Vollard and the German art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler at the beginning of the 20th century. Vollard buys all the paintings from his “Pink Period” (1904-1906) from him, which makes him wealthy in one fell swoop.
Kahnweiler brokers the sale of the key work “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907). Picasso became one of the most expensive artists, especially after the gallery owners Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein took care of worldwide sales from 1918. He will remain at this level until the end of his life – as a painter prince with staff and his own chauffeur.
His fortune, which he leaves behind, is estimated at almost 700 million euros. In addition to real estate, studios and Picasso’s private art collection with pictures by Cézanne, Matisse, Miró, Modigliani and van Gogh, it also includes the Vauvenargues Castle near Aix-en-Provence and the Mas Notre-Dame de Vie mansion in Mougins near Cannes.
The French state is keeping 3,800 works of art from the estate so that the heirs, who have been at odds for years, can pay the inheritance tax. They form the basis of the Musée Picasso in Paris, the largest Picasso museum in the world. In 2015, the large Picasso painting “Les Femmes d’Alger” from 1955 will be auctioned in New York. At $179.4 million, it will be the most expensive Picasso work to date.
The doer of conviction
Picasso was a politically thinking artist. During the civil war in his native Spain (1936-1939) he supported the Republicans. On April 26, 1937, the German Nazi Legion Condor bombed the defenseless Basque city of Gernika on behalf of the allied fascists under General Franco, killing hundreds of civilians. In his Paris exile, horrified, Picasso set to work on an accusatory monumental picture that would become his best-known work and an icon of anti-fascism: “Guernica”. It was already shown on July 12, 1937 at the World Exhibition in Paris.
During the German occupation of France, the Nazis banned him from exhibiting because of his fight against Franco as a “degenerate artist.” A German occupier is said to have visited him in his studio, pointed to the picture “Guernica” and asked: “Did you do that?” Picasso’s answer: “No, you!” In 1944 he joined the French Communist Party and remained a member until the end of his life.
He angered the Americans with his oil painting “Massacre in Korea”, which was created under the impression of the Korean War (1950-53). And in response to his revealing Portrait of Stalin (1953), the Soviet Union found Comrade Picasso’s art to be decadent, even though the Communist Party had chosen Picasso’s most popular work, the Dove of Peace, for the poster of the World Peace Congress in Paris (1949).
The macho
Picasso and women – an endless chapter. As a “heartless genius” the “St. Galler Tagblatt” called himt. An original quote from Picasso seems to prove this: “There are only two categories of women: goddesses and doormats!” The NDR reports in a documentary: “Picasso celebrated women, painted them, destroyed them. Two took their own lives a few years after his death.”
As the NDR describes it, Picasso’s pictures of women not only reflect his artistic phases, but also the state of the respective relationship. “In the beginning he often paints his loved ones beautifully … When he gets bored, he paints them rather ugly, deconstructed.” He himself once said, according to “Spiegel”.: “It must be very painful for a woman to see from a picture that she is no longer in demand.”
Picasso was married twice and had countless mistresses. At the age of 71, he met the then 26-year-old ceramic saleswoman Jacqueline Roque. They married in 1961 after first wife Olga died of cancer in 1955. In total he paints 400 pictures of Jaqueline.
She is the last woman in his life – and the first who has him under control, possibly only because cardiac death puts an end to the goings-on. She is with him when he dies at his home in Mougins in 1973, aged 91. She later commits suicide.
Was Picasso obsessed with the power he held over women? Or did he rather see them as the elixir of life for his ingenious painterly imagination? The art critic Rose-Maria Gropp wrote the book “Goddesses and doormats. The women and Picasso” about this obsessive side of the artist, which was published in February. She rather believes in the thesis that he needed women for his art and says: “He shaped them, no doubt about it, and then – there’s no other way to put it – after a certain cycle, around ten years, he needed a change, he needed new fodder for his inspiration”.