ESO YEAR 4 - 20th-24th March

DUE MONDAY 20TH MARCH

CHAPTER 2 – FROM BLUE TO CUBE

This blue mood influenced Pablo Picasso from 1901 to 1904. He filled his palette with blur and blue-green and painted a sad, lonely world. The characters in the paintings were often lost people like vagabonds, prostitutes and lonely old people.

The Old Guitarist

In La Vie (Life), Picasso painted a man with the face of his friend Carlos. The background, face, clothes and setting were all blue, yet the painting was alive with colour.. By choosing to use only blue, Picasso found more power, not less.

Later, he painted Femme aux Bras Croisés (Woman with Folded Arms). In light and dark blues, a woman sits with her arms folded, thinking sad thoughts. Picasso often visited a woman’s prison-hospital called Saint-Lazare in Paris. Some say that this woman lived in Saint-Lazare.

Picasso’s most famous blue painting is The Old Guitarist. A poor, thin old man plays with his head down. The atmosphere is melancholic. You can almost hear the lonely sounds from his guitar.

By sticking to just one colour, Picasso ignored all the training of the past. He followed his own rules and used blue all day, every day.

It was dramatic. It was different. And it worked.

Then, one day, in the middle of a storm, Picasso met an artist and model named Fernande Olivier and they fell madly in love. So it was no surprise that his next colour was rose. This was the start of Picasso’s Rose Period (1904-1906).

Boy with a Pipe

Pablo Picasso was well-known as a ladie’s man. Women went crazy for him. “There was nothing particularly attractive about him, but women sensed a fire inside him,” Fernande later wrote. “He had a magnetism I was unable to resist.”

New love opened Picasso’s eyes to magnificent colours. For the next few years, Picasso put away his blues and used pink, yellow and orange in his paintings. Some call it his Circus Period as these happy paintings were of clowns, acrobats and other circus people.

One painting from this period, Garçon à la Pipe (Boy with a Pipe), is considered one of the most valuable works of art of all time. In 2004, it was sold for more than $100 million at an auction in Sotheby’s, New York.

 Picasso was becoming much more famous and much more confident, too. He spent time at a Parisian pub called Le Lapin Agile (The Agile Rabbit). There he became friends with a poet called Guillaume Apollinaire.

One day, Apollinaire was accused of stealing Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum, but he told the police that Picasso had done it! Picasso was taken to the police station for questioning. Luckily, they were both set free and this only added to Picasso’s reputation.

His experiments were succeeding, his paintings were selling and his work was admired. But this was not enough for Picasso. He knew that his greatest creations were still to come.

Picasso once said, “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.” But the question was what to steal? There was so much inspiration around him. He was fascinated by African, Greek and Spanish art, Iberian sculpture, tribal masks and primitive drawing. He also loved the paintings of Gauguin and Cézanne. So many great works! But what did they all have in common? Shapes.

Picasso began experimenting with shapes. He painted circles, squares, triangles and rectangles. Sometimes, he even cut shapes out of newspapers and pasted them onto his paintings.

The Young Ladies of Avignon

This new style was called cubism. He used sharp angles to create something totally original. He painted a cubist painting of a chair, but it didn’t look like a real chair. It was filled with crazy shapes going in all directions. “Imagine a chair put under a compressor,” Picasso explained to a reporter. “It would look just like that.”

Some say that the first real cubist painting is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon). Five women are in the picture, but they don’t look real. They are made of sharp angles and straight lines. Two of the women wear strange masks. “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” explained Picasso.

But the world was not ready for Les Demoiselles! When it was first exhibited in 1916, some critics thought Picasso was insane! Very few thought it was the greatest breakthrough in 20^th Century art.

Another oil painting from Picasso’s cubist period in Three Musicians, showing a harlequin, a pierrot and a monk making music.

Three Musicians

Can you spot the three characters in Picasso’s painting? It isn’t easy! Imagine what people thought in 1921!

With the invention of cubism, Picasso left all his old techniques behind. Now, he could paint any scene or object and transform it with his imagination. “I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else,” he explained.