Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Spanish, Travel Advertisement Lithograph. This image was first created in 1962 by the artist for the French Tourist Bureau to suggest a visit to the Cote D'Azur or Riviera, site of the Cannes Film Festival and many other popular activities.
Overall Size: 39 1/2 x 27 1/2 in.
Sight Size: 37 1/2 x 25 1/2 in.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born October 25th, 1881 in Málaga, Andalusia in southern Spain. His father was a naturalist painter who exposed Picasso to many artforms early on and provided him formal training starting at the age of seven. He was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts at 13, and lacked discipline but made many friendships that would affect him in later life. At 16 he was sent to Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, but frequently skipped classes to observe art and architecture around the city, eventually falling out with his father for good. By 1897 his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, and his Modernist Period (1899-1900) soon followed, emulating the work of Rossetti, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edvard Munch combined with Old Masters like El Greco. In 1900 he traveled to Paris, where he burned many of his early works to keep himself warm at night, and he spent 1901 in Madrid with his anarchist friend Francisco de Asis Soler publishing the Arte Joven magazine. Picasso’s Blue Period (1901-1904) was characterized by somber paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green and began when he returned to Paris later that year. The Rose Period (1904-1906) is characterized by a lighter tone and style utilizing orange and pink colors and featuring many circus people, acrobats, and harlequins, which became a personal symbol for Picasso. During the period he became a favorite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, whose patronage led him to meet Henri Matisse, a lifelong friend and rival. Picasso’s African Period (1907-1909) began when he first saw artifacts in the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro. The paintings from this period were considered shocking, but they were instrumental in developing formal ideas that led directly to his Cubist Period (1910-1919). In 1911 Picasso was arrested and questioned about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, and began an affair with Marcelle Humbert, also known as Eva Gouel. He was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915. Picasso spent World War I in France, and his work grew darker as he became involved with costume design for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with the troupe, in 1918. Picasso’s brash bohemian lifestyle clashed with Khokhlova’s opulent high-society manner, and in 1927 Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began an affair with her, eventually having a daughter named Maya together. Picasso separated from Khokhlova but refused to divorce her to avoid losing half of his wealth and to keep from being alienated from their son, Paulo, and the two remained legally married until her death in 1955. Between the Wars Picasso produced many works in the neoclassical style, as well as becoming pivotal in the Surrealist movement. The minotaur replaced the harlequin as the most common motif in his work, prominently visible in his 1937 magnum opus “Guernica,” painted to depict the German bombing of the city during the Spanish Civil War at the behest of Francisco Franco. The painting was sent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York when Franco won the war, where Picasso requested that it be kept until Spain was no longer under his rule. During World War II Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city, taking the photographer Dora Maar as his mistress. He did not exhibit during this time, and he was often harassed by the Gestapo. He wrote poetry and plays, and smuggled bronze in through the French Resistance to make casts. In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Picasso began a romantic relationship with Françoise Gilot, an art student 40 years his junior, with whom he had two children, Claude and Paloma. Jacqueline Roque, who worked at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris on the French Riviera, met Picasso when he was making and painting ceramics and became his second wife in 1961, remaining with him for the rest of his life. His final years were spent acting in films, touring America, and simultaneously embracing and denigrating his status as an international celebrity, often painting in a childish and farcical style, simply to see how much people would pay for his work. He died on April 8th, 1973 in Mougins, France, a prolific and provocative figure who touched many lives, invented numerous art forms, and changed political and cultural standards and traditions towards art forever. He remains one of the most sought after artists in history, with work in hundreds of museums and a lasting influence on nearly every art movement of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
