PABLO PICASSO AND CUBISM, 1907 term paper

In 1907 Pablo Picasso painted one of his most famous paintings, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Although the painting was not widely appreciated at the time or even seen by that many people before Picasso rolled up the canvas and put it away, it nonetheless marked the beginnings of Cubism, a seminal form of modern art. It also marked a new stage in the career of the man who became the twentieth century’s best-known artist.

Picasso was born in Spain in 1881. He studied first with his father, a professor of drawing. In the 1890s he studied in Barcelona, but in 1899 broke with his art school training. The following year Picasso came to Paris to see the 1900 World’s Fair and to become acquainted with what was then regarded as the center of the art world.

Over the next several years, Picasso often returned to Spain, but he began to regard Paris as his home. He went through a Blue Period between 1901 and 1904, so called because of the colors he used in his paintings and also because of his response to the suicide of a good friend. The next period, the Rose Period from 1904 to 1905, corresponded with his involvement with Fernande Olivier and the use of entirely different colors.

In the meantime, Picasso had become the center of a circle of friends including the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the American writer Gertrude Stein. Also, like many painters at this time, he increasingly was influenced by the paintings of Paul Cézanne.He remained, however, deeply influenced by Iberian art, particularly the great Spanish painter El Greco and primitive Iberian sculptures. Picasso’s Portrait de Gertrude Stein (1906) marked the rapid progress he had made in his first few years in Paris. At the end of 1906, Picasso began working on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which he finished the next year. It was a radical departure in style. He no longer attempted to provide an illusion of depth. Instead, he used harsh, angular planes in his composition. The faces of the women in the painting took on a masklike quality. The painting marked the beginnings of Cubism, which emphasized the use of geometric forms and often presented subjects from several angles at once. Over the next several years, Picasso and Georges Braque experimented with different forms of Cubism. Their work was probably the most radical of several efforts to break with ideas about art from the late nineteenth century. Picasso himself enjoyed a long and amazingly productive career, reinventing himself again and again and establishing his reputation as the artistic genius of the century.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. Investigate Picasso’s activities in Barcelona before he visited Paris for the first time in 1900.
2. Trace Picasso’s activities in his Blue Period and his Rose Period. How significant were these periods for his artistic development?
3. Why had Cézanne become such a compelling influence early in the twentieth century not only for Picasso but for virtually all artists working in Paris? Begin with H. W. Janson’s History of Art (see Suggested Sources).
4. Write a paper on Henri Matisse, a painter who was also emerging as a major figure in the art world in this period. Begin with H. W. Janson’s History of Art (see Suggested Sources).
5. Read Gertrude Stein’s study of Picasso (see Suggested Sources) and comment on her approach to his art.
6. What did Georges Braque contribute to the development of Cubism as an artistic movement? Begin with H. W. Janson’s History of Art (see Suggested Sources).

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, search under Paul Gauguin, Post-Impressionists, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, The Fauvres, and the 1905 Salon d’Automne.

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

McCully, Marilyn, ed. A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. A very useful collection of material.

Stein, Gertrude. Picasso. London: B. T. Batsford, 1938. Stein was a good friend, and she and her brother bought many of Picasso’s paintings. The book contains her reflections on him and his work.

Secondary Sources

Daix, Pierre, and Georges Boudaille, with the collaboration of Joan Rosselet. Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods; A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1900–1906. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1967. A revision of the original French version. An exhaustive and beautifully illustrated examination of Picasso’s early career.

Faerna, Jose Maria, ed. Picasso. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Part of the Great Modern Masters series. An introduction to Picasso’s work by way of more than sixty plates.

Fitzgerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Fitzgerald examines Picasso as a businessman, focusing on the interwar period. He contends that Picasso was always pragmatic about making money.

Gardner, Howard. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi. New York: Basic Books, 1994. A fascinating attempt to analyze creativity by examining a number of extraordinary figures from the twentieth century, including Picasso.

Janson, H. W., and Anthony F. Janson, History of Art, 5th ed., rev. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Widely regarded as the best single-volume history. A good place to begin a research project.
McCully, Marilyn, ed. Picasso: The Early Years, 1892–1906. Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1997. A useful collection of essays on various aspects of Picasso’s early career and a large assortment of illustrations of his works.

O’Brian, Patrick. Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976. A readable, dependable single-volume biography.

Richardson, John. “Picasso’s Apocalyptic Whorehouse.” New York Review of Books 34, no. 2 (23 April 1987): 40–47. Richardson stresses the Spanish roots of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Cubism, especially the influence of El Greco.

Richardson, John, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. A Life of Picasso, 1881–1906. Vol. 1. New York: Random House, 1991. Now the best biography of Picasso available. Vol. 1 covers Picasso’s life up to the point where he begins work on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

———. A Life of Picasso, 1907–1917: The Painter of Modern Life. Vol. 2. New York: Random House, 1996. Vol. 2 covers the painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Picasso’s Cubist period.

Rubin, William S., Helene Seckel, and Judith Cousins. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994. The definitive study of Picasso’s famous painting.

World Wide Web

“Museo Picasso Virtual.” http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso. A very fine Web site with an extensive biography, bibliography, and many other features.