Carmen Naranjo I Madrid, (EFE).- 50 years after his death, Pablo Picasso continues to be “a magnet”, an artist who changed the way of looking at reality and art and became one of the most famous painters of the world, which now pays him a tribute that also addresses controversial issues such as his relationship with women.
Fifty exhibitions and events make up Picasso Year, which addresses a historiographical analysis of his work and its influence on contemporary art, a tribute to an unrepeatable artist who spans the world and for whom the governments of Spain and France set up a commission binational.
“Picasso changed the way of looking and that is what makes him a myth, he is something more than a common artist,” Carlos Alberdi, commissioner for the Picasso Year commemoration, told EFE, who defines him as “a magnet” and on which a congress of experts in Paris will discuss at the end of this year, after the one held at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.
Because Picasso is the artist with the most works in museums around the world and who leads the world ranking in art auctions.
Picasso’s lesser known era
Born in Malaga in 1881, and died in the French town of Mougins on April 8, 1973, Pablo Ruiz Picasso moved with his family to A Coruña at the age of 9, where his father was a professor at the School of Fine Arts. There he began as a painter and held his first exhibition, although he also suffered the death of his little sister, which marked his life.
This period, perhaps the least known of the artist, is made visible in the exhibition “Picasso blanco en el recuerdo azul” in A Coruña: “those paintings that he painted at the age of 13 and 14, like the first ones in Barcelona, are curious because they are a bit academic and although he does not break the Picasso that he later became in them, it shows that he was a boy with a special talent”, explains Alberdi.
After living in Barcelona and Madrid, where he entered the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Picasso settled in Paris in 1904 and lived his “blue period”. In his next stage, the “pink period”, he paints paintings such as “Harlequin’s Family”. In 1906 it is the year of the “great transformation”: he begins “Las señoritas de Avignon”, considered the first cubist work and with which he revolutionizes the history of art.
With his need for constant evolution in languages, after going through “analytical cubism” and “synthetic cubism”, he began a neoclassical period until in 1925 he allied himself with the surrealist movement of André Bretón. In 1936, just after the start of the Spanish Civil War, he was appointed director of the Museo del Prado, a position that he never held, although he helped to evacuate some of the museum’s most important works to France.
“El Guernica”, controversial from the beginning
In 1937, the government of the Republic commissioned him a mural painting to represent Spain in the Universal Exhibition Pavilion in Paris, which he paints, shocked by the German bombardment that devastated the Biscayan town of Guernika: what is today an emblem in the Defense of human rights.
“’Guernica’ at the time was already a somewhat controversial painting, enormous, in black and white, with a representation of the phenomenon of war that had not been done up to now. There were people who said that they would have preferred it to be more realistic, and yet today we look at that painting and we all see the disasters of the war”, says Alberdi, who considers it to be “an icon of pacifism”.
The world changes, says Alberdi, “and Picasso remains” although he is looked at “with new eyes”: before, in addition to being a great artist, he was a character with a political reading. He was anti-Franco, communist but he did not follow the dictates of socialist realism but rather admired the United States. Politics surrounded Picasso, while today that subject is practically treated very little and now the main topic is his relationship with women ”.
In this matter, Alberdi considers that there is a somewhat “activist” literature that “tends to turn Picasso into a villain, and that is a bit of an exaggeration.” The commissioner advises going to the sources” through two readings written by two women who shared their lives with the artist.
Four children of six relationships
One of them was that of Fernande Olivier, a French model and writer who accompanied him in the Parisian bohemia. The other is “Living with Picasso”, written in 1965 by Françoise Gilot, a French artist, art critic and writer who had two daughters with him and who, at the age of 102, lives in New York.
In total, Picasso had four children from six romantic relationships.
“He was a man with contradictions, macho like most of his contemporaries, but he was a man who also gave, he could have annoying things but he also had his loving and generous side. And that is reflected in books like Gilot’s, which rightly reproaches him for many things but acknowledges others, ”says Alberdi, who does not believe that these issues overshadow the commemorations that he was a great artist.
He was as prolific a sculptor as a painter and one of the lesser-known facets is that of a poet, with texts that combined shapes and letters. And he also had a great connection with music and he captured it in his paintings.
Likewise, the connection of the painter with the revolution that Coco Chanel made in fashion was highlighted and has been underlined in an exhibition at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid.
Upon his death without a will, the judicial inventory encrypted his works as follows: he owned 1,876 paintings, 1,355 sculptures, 7,089 drawings, 25,388 engravings, 2,880 ceramics and 149 notebooks with a total of 4,659 works.
Few anniversaries have had the magnitude of international events that this adds up to, but, says Alberdi, there are not many artists “with the mythical power of Picasso.” EFE
