9. Picasso and His Pictures

Attitudes towards life vary from person to person. Artists show their feelings about life by different means—musicians through music, painters through pictures. What are Picasso's views towards life? How are his views shown through his pictures?

Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, a pleasant, quiet town. His father was a painter and art teacher who gave his son his first lessons in drawing.

Young Pablo did badly at school. He was lazy and didn't listen to what the teachers were saying. He refused to accept criticism from anyone. He had confidence in himself from the beginning. But it was soon clear that the boy was an artist and deserved the best training he could get. Not even his earliest drawings look like the work of a child.

There was never any doubt about what he would do in life. If ever anyone was born to be a painter, Picasso was. He won a prize for his first important painting, Science and Charity, when he was only fifteen. He studied art in several cities in Spain. But there was no one to teach him all he wanted to know. When he was nineteen he visited Paris.

Paris was then the centre of the world for artists. Most painters went there sooner or later to study, to see pictures and to make friends with other painters. Everything that was new and exciting in the world of painting seemed to happen there. When he was twenty-three Picasso returned there to live and stayed in France for the rest of his life.

He was already a fine painter. He painted scenes of town life—people in the streets and in restaurants, at horse races, bull fights and circuses. They were painted in bright colours, lovely to look at.

But life was not easy for an unknown painter. The struggle began to show in a new choice of subjects. For several years he painted people from the poorer parts of the city. He painted men and women who were thin, hungry, tired, sick and blind. His colours got darker. Most of these pictures were painted in shades of blue and showed very clearly what the artist saw and felt. The paintings of this "blue period" are full of pity and despair.

Picasso did not have to wait long for success. As he began to sell his pictures and to become recognised as a painter, his pictures took on a warmer look. At the same time he began to paint with more and more freedom and independence. He began to see people and places in terms of simple forms and shapes. He no longer tried to make his pictures true-to-life.

The results at first seemed strange and unreal. The pictures were difficult to understand. He painted human heads, scenes from nature, or common objects all in the same way: as if their shape were the one important thing about them. This style of painting, which spread to many other artists, was known as cubism, from the shape of the cube.

Picasso was often attacked for this new, sometimes frightening, style. It produced pictures like some of our worst dreams. In this century the camera has made it unnecessary for painters to make exact representation of what they see. A camera can reflect real life more exactly. What great paintings give us is a view of life through one man's eyes, and every man's view is different.

Some of Picasso's paintings are rich, soft-coloured and beautiful. Others are ugly and cruel, strange with sharp, black outlines. But such paintings allow us to imagine things for ourselves. They can make our own view of the world sharper. For they force us to say to ourselves, "What does he see that makes him paint like that?" And we begin to look beneath the surface of the things we see.

Picasso painted thousands of pictures in many different styles. Sometimes he painted the natural look of things. Sometimes he seemed to break them apart and throw the pieces in one's face. He demanded the right to show us what the mind knows as well as what the eye sees. He himself remained as curious about the world as he had been when he was young.

Birds, places and familiar objects play a part in Picasso's painting. But mostly, when one thinks of him, one thinks of the way he painted the human face and figure, which is both beautiful and strange. Gertrude Stein wrote, "The head, the face, the human body, these are all that exist for Picasso. The souls of people do not interest him. The reality of life is in the head, the face and the body."

If you like looking at pictures, try to find some books of Picasso's paintings—and of other artists' too—and see what they mean to you.

From Great People of Our Time ed., Carol Christian,

Macmillan Education, 1977.