Picasso kept the Cubism up for the rest of his long life,
but he was an artistic chameleon, rummaging restlessly
through different genres to create some of the most
memorable art of the 20thcentury. In the early 1920s
he entered a Neoclassical phase, painting sculptural,
fleshy figures in a relatively traditional style.Yet these
representational efforts were always slotted in alongside
more radical Cubist work. Indeed,Les trois musiciens
(1921) from this period is often considered the
apotheosis of Cubism. Later in the decade, pinheaded,
large-breasted women and segmented figures
announced Picasso’s foray into Surrealism. In 1937
he painted his most famous work:Guernica, with its
clawing, screaming and broken figures, reveals Picasso’s
horror at the bombing of a Basque town in the Spanish
Civil War. In his later years Picasso painted his own
versions of established masterpieces by the likes of
Velázquez, Manet and Rembrandt. Neither his variety nor
his admirable work ethic slackened – he died, aged 91,
in 1973, leaving thousands of works of art behind.
Scrap merchant: Picasso’s sculpture
Picasso wasn’t just a painter, he was also a prolific,
significant sculptor. And, in common with his painting,
his sculptural work covered a wide range of different
styles, usually corresponding to whatever he was putting
down on canvas. So, in 1906, he was creating female
forms akin to those in the African plastic arts, while by
1909 hisTête de femme (Fernande)reflected his Cubist
direction. A few years on and he was constructing a
series of musical instrument sculptures out of metal,
wire, cardboard and other materials. In this respect he
was among the first to construct a sculpture out of other
objects (Constructivism), rather than simply building from
scratch using clay.The late 1920s brought a series of
Wire Constructions, as unadorned as they sound, before
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- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
“TO ME THERE
IS NO PAST OR
FUTURE IN ART.
IF A WORK OF
ART CANNOT
ALWAYS LIVE
IN THE PRESENT
IT MUST NOT
BE CONSIDERED
AT ALL.”
Pablo Picasso
What was Picasso trying
to achieve with Cubism?
The trouble with
conventional painting
was that, more or less,
it copied what the artist
could physically see.
Picasso asked how an
object appeared in
the mind? How is it
constructed? What bits do
you see? How is it going
to feel? Only by including
these varied viewpoints,
Picasso suggested, could
you truly represent the
subject on canvas. So he
painted a face, a violin or
a vase of flowers from
the angles that his
imagination conjured
when he thought of
those things. Using, in
particular, the example of
Cezanne, these images
were constructed of the
simplest shapes – cones,
spheres and cylinders.
