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    Picasso in the atelier
    Picasso in the atelier
    Picasso in the atelier
    Ebook371 pages3 hours

    Picasso in the atelier

    By Teresa Ocaña, Neil Cox, Brigitte Léal and

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Catalog of the exhibition held at Fundación Mapfre in Madrid in 2014.The book includes all the images from the exhibition and discusses in depth the importance of Picasso workshop space as a place of experimentation for the artist.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFundación MAPFRE
    Release dateJun 20, 2014
    ISBN9788498444797
    Picasso in the atelier

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      Book preview

      Picasso in the atelier - Teresa Ocaña

      anonymous.

      Picasso in his studio.

      A sum

      of destructions

      M. TERESA OCAÑA

      Paintings used to move gradually towards their conclusion. Every day brought something new. A painting was a sum of additions. In my work, a painting is a sum of destructions. I paint a work and then I destroy it.

      PICASSO, 1935¹

      Picasso’s studio is the setting in which the artist moved and much of his life took place: an inner sanctum where, through limitless experimentation, he made his dreams reality. In his successive studios, his inner isolation gradually transformed itself into the description of his surroundings. A faithful photographer and narrator of his autobiography, Picasso portrayed what was closest to him: the principal stage of his existence, the hidden laboratory where he boldly committed daring transgressions in which the internal gaze imposed itself on the external one. Without losing sight of the tradition of painting, Picasso infringed its rules to the point of destroying them, generating new canons of beauty that responded to the particular moment in his life and to the time he lived in; in other words, to the modern age.

      The studio as both the space for the artist’s creative activities and for the faithful and daily representation of his everyday existence provides the structure of this exhibition. The description of the studio, his interior landscapes as Picasso called them, became the laboratory in which the painter looked for formulas that would allow him to bring about new transformations and undertake innovative experiments that led to the critical results which obsessed him. This exhibition offers us the chance to undertake a long journey, from Picasso’s early affiliation with the avant-gardes to the end of his career. His exhaustive exercise based on still lifes in front of windows in the 1920s, involving a range of different techniques and formats, catalyzed his Synthetic Cubism investigations through the premises of classicism.

      Between 1917 and 1920, the studio became a space in which the Cubist experiments sought a conclusion that would use up and exhaust all the artist’s previous achievements. In his painting, Picasso gave absolute priority to a type of representation based on new spatial relationships in which the interior/exterior link became the connecting nexus between the real and the imagined. Picasso’s rebellion (and that of all the Cubist artists) against the flatness of painting was the detonator that forced him to investigate the resources that destroyed the very essence of the pictorial. Once again, Picasso should be described as persistent in his numerous and innovative spatial experiments that emphasize the three-dimensional quality of painting. His set designs for a ballet as notably conventional as The Three-cornered Hat (1919) presented the artist with various new options that revived themes which he had depicted some years earlier, specifically in the sketches for the ballet Parade (1917), in one of which, for the Manager on Horseback, we see a still life on a pedestal table before an open window (fig. 1).

      FIG. 1

      Pablo Picasso

      Study for the Managers on Horseback (Parade);

      Still Life on a Pedestal Table before an Open Window,

      Paris-Rome, 1916-17

      Musée Picasso, Paris

      FIG. 2

      Pablo Picasso

      La Vie (Life), 1903

      Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

      The challenge of the dancers’ movements on stage contributed to this rethinking of spatial relationships. The subject of the still life before a window is once again hinted at in some of the studies for The Three-cornered Hat (1919, Musée Picasso, Paris), in which a still life on a table is framed by the balustrade that surrounds the bullring. While these preliminary designs did not work for the final drop curtain, they became the germ of the suites of still lifes in front of open windows on which the artist would embark in the summer and early autumn of 1919 in Saint-Raphaël, following his return from London. Brigitte Léal has offered a rigorous interpretation of this series of still lifes before a Mediterranean landscape, in which Cubism and naturalism combine in a single work, most of them painted for the exhibition that Paul Rosenberg held at his Paris gallery between October 20 and November 15, 1919. Léal refers to the feeling that Picasso’s insistence and repetition of these objects arouses in the viewer, stating: The subject picks up speed, moving beyond the context of the Rosenberg exhibition and continuing until at least December 1919. ²

      Many of these compositions are subtle demonstrations of the confrontation that Picasso was bringing about between Cubism and classicism in his work. The first centered largely on still lifes while the second focused more on the human figure, although there are exceptions of the importance of The three Musicians (1921; two versions: Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia). Picasso continued using the motif of musical instruments on a pedestal table until 1922, a subject for which Christopher Green’s exhaustive catalogue is a key reference, in which the author studies the anthropomorphic nature of these still lifes on side tables. ³ Picasso himself referred to his alternation of Cubism and classicism during these years in a painting entitled Studies, which includes new symbols that would lead on to a different stylistic variant. These new quests delve into a variety of techniques and styles indebted to Synthetic Cubism. In some of these small compositions Cubism is reduced to an interplay of stripes and bright colors. Despite being painted in small formats and with a seemingly rapid execution, these are exercises which together constitute an experimental corpus that would find its ultimate expression in larger format works such as Still Life (1922, cat. 18). In addition, this offshoot of technical resources includes canvases derived from the papiers collés, such as Still Life with Fruit Bowl (1920, cat. 19).

      Between 1924 and 1926 Picasso produced a series of monumental still lifes in which curvilinear forms reappear. The artist abandoned classicism and energetically embarked on new experiments. In Juan-les-Pins in 1924 he created a series of drawings based on dots and stripes that form a type of grid or reticulum which gives shape to musical instruments. Some of these drawings would be reproduced in issue number 2 of the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste, which in 1931 they would illustrate Vollard’s edition of Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, together with twelve etchings by the artist. Picasso would return to these new and simple signs in several of the still lifes of these years. Some of them make use of a rich, overflowing palette while others are based on the juxtaposition of pale and dark tones that function to emphasize and contrast aspects of the composition. The presence of a bust in some of these canvases can be seen as a recollection of classical antiquity. In many of these works the objects are located before a window. Picasso himself explained this frequent movement between interior and exterior in his oeuvre: I paint a window as I look through a window. If that open window does not come out well in my painting, I draw a curtain and close it, the same as I would do in my room.

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