Titans of History

Art today would not be the same without the genius of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. In a career spanning nearly eighty years, Picasso—ever vigorous, ever full of joie de vivre—showed himself to be the most versatile and inventive artist not just of the 20th century but perhaps of all time, a master of painting and drawing as well as other media, such as collage, set design, pottery and sculpture. But his talent was not simply aesthetic. His most famous painting, Guernica, captured the total horror of war, while in his simple etching of the dove of peace he pointed the way for a happier future.

Picasso was born in Malaga to an artistic but conventional family. Inspired by his father, he showed exceptional talent for painting from a very young age. By the age of fourteen he had his own studio and was already exhibiting in public and receiving praise from the critics. Before he was out of his teens, he was in Paris, mixing with the European avant-garde.

In 1901 Picasso embarked on a phase known as his Blue Period, in which his paintings—still relatively naturalistic—were dominated by shades of blue. The paintings from this time are mainly melancholy, lonely portraits, often depicting extreme poverty. Much of Picasso’s dark mood was influenced by the suicide of a close friend, Casagemas. In a brilliant but gloomy self-portrait from this period, Picasso looks haggard and intense, far older than his twenty years. Soon, though, the mood lifted and Picasso moved into his Rose Period, in which his subjects—often circus people or acrobats—were depicted mainly in shades of pink.

In 1907 Picasso struck out in a bold new direction, influenced by Cézanne and African masks, and produced one of the first masterpieces of modernism, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is a striking and wildly angular and distorted depiction of five aggressively sexual women in a brothel. Thus, along with George Braque, who was producing strikingly original compositions of his own, Picasso gave birth to cubism, a completely new mode of capturing the essence of the subject on the canvas. Traditional perspective is abandoned in favor of multiple perspectives, as if the subject is seen from a number of different angles simultaneously. It was a revolutionary way of seeing. “I paint objects as I think them,” Picasso said, “not as I see them.”

After his cubist phase, Picasso moved on to a neo-classical period, in which he painted monumental human figures in Mediterranean settings, influenced in part by Ingres and Renoir, and then, in the 1920s and 1930s, he became loosely associated with the surrealist movement, experimenting further with distortions of the human face and figure, exploring the depiction of sexuality, and letting his imagination conjure up strange monsters.

Despite his excursions into surrealist painting, Picasso remained very engaged with the world around him He supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, his painting Guernica expressing his outrage at the violence of fascism. Guernica is Picasso’s best-known work, created in the aftermath of the horrific bombing of the Spanish town of the same name in 1937 by forces acting on behalf of Franco’s Nationalist forces. The vast canvas presents a twisted mass of dark colors, contorted bodies, screaming heads and terrified animals—a vision of wartime apocalypse. The masterpiece is both a memorial to the helpless people killed in this action during the brutal Spanish Civil War (1936–9) and a warning of the wider horrors that war brings, then and now.

Picasso remained so enraged with Franco’s regime that he refused to allow the painting to be taken to Spain while the dictator was still alive. It finally reached Madrid in 1981, where it remains, too fragile to be removed to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, despite Basque requests.

In 1944 he joined the French Communist Party. Around this time he wrote: “What do you think an artist is? An imbecile that only has eyes, if he is a painter; ears, if he is a musician; or a lyre in the deepest strata of his heart, if he is a poet? Quite the opposite, he is at the same time a political being.” In 1949 he somewhat absurdly contributed his famous design of the dove of peace to the communist-sponsored World Peace Congress held in Stalinist Poland. Picasso always had sympathy with the sufferings of the oppressed, even if his flirtations with Stalinist tyranny were misguided.

In the decades that followed, Picasso continued to produce large quantities of work in a great variety of media, often exploring and reinventing great works of art from the past, such as Velasquez’s Las Meninas or Delacroix’s Women of Algiers. By now he was the most famous living artist in the world, his pictures purchased for large sums by galleries and rich private collectors. Sometimes Picasso would pay for an expensive meal in a restaurant by drawing a few lines on a napkin.