Pablo Picasso: The Legacy of a Genius

Picasso has been buried here in the south of France since 1973. but the story of the impact he had on the art of art times has by no means been laid to rest and the work has come to an end his life has come to an end you can begin to look at it as a complete whole so looking at Picasso in 1980 is quite different from looking at Picasso in 1920 isn't it naturally of course it's going to be different [Music] the legacy of Picasso is now a part of our Western Heritage the task of assessing it is an enormous challenge but it's terribly difficult to put down any rules about um about Picasso I mean I think that's the fun of Picasso the nerve of Picasso the courage of Picasso you know they're all absolutely unbeatable [Music] I don't know anybody that could change their whole artistic Persona so variously and so quickly Picasso how do the many styles of Picasso affect the course of Art in our times his fellow artists do not agree on a definitive answer I don't think that the different languages that he used at different times in his life many of which have been in often a very unfortunate way very influential already are going to come back again I think it's Picasso as a a living artist as a living professional artist who will have the effect thank you my rose to speak of his art Parts selected to convey the whole but many voices will argue the whole effect of Picasso the artist [Music] the knowledge of his work was completely obscured by the myth of the man the power he held in his life inevitably hindered his contemporaries because he dominated both the art scene and the market for the artists who followed that was a real problem a pepper I think Picasso scared people yeah it completely stifled several generations of artists he was someone who fed off painting fed off the history of painting and off the painting of others I suffered under the Picasso myth and I am certainly not the only one thing's sure at least I felt it to be the mood we waited with a certain impatience for Picasso to die [Music] his personality acted as a screen between us and his work and it took his death for that scream to finally lift [Music] in the last Decades of his life Picasa began to Look Backwards rather than forwards in fact the late decades are very often filled with dialogues not only with the old masters with Velasquez and Rembrandt and chronic and Manet and delacroix but also with Picasso himself he seems indeed to have looked back on his own work as if it were part of the treasury of Western Art of Western experience and offer personal dialogues with the Picasso of the past [Music] Picasso almost seems to be guiding us to the trail of unity that goes through his varied body of work [Music] the cryptic features of this 1964 model for a large public sculpture seemed to be gazing back over the thousands of variations on the human figure and the numerous women who haunted Picasso's life and work foreign s us through the Kaleidoscope of Picasso's styles to his Cubist experiments and paper folding and collage in spite of its destined magnitude something that might almost serve Chicago as a Statue of Liberty because as head of a woman looks as if it might just take off like a kite in a gust of Chicago wind perhaps if it would it could take us back to the very beginnings of the great man's life [Music] Picasso's life began in 1881 in Malaga in southern Spain one of the greatest child prodigies in the history of art he soon outdid the training and talents of his father an artist of local Renown who specialized in doves traveling around Spain he picked up with legendary facility everything the art schools could teach about the techniques of the Old Masters his eye seems to have absorbed the world around him with a Spanish sense of ritualistic intensity by the time he was 19 he was ready for broader Horizons at the cafe in Barcelona he heard about Nietzsche about Wagner Gogan Van Gogh and so it was no surprise that the year 1900 would find him crossing the Pyrenees to Paris the location of the great World's Fair a moment of supreme optimism for anyone who wanted to LEAP from the 19th century past into the 20th century future [Music] still Picasso was not ready to become Picasso as if he had left his instincts in Spain he looked at everything happening around him and adapted like a chameleon he was able to pick up the look of toulouselo Trek [Music] or Daga [Music] or any of the other impressionist Masters he saw in Paris and these lessons went into his palette along with his academic training and a Spanish Heritage ready now for him to find his own vision [Music] it was not in fact until 1901 that he began to develop a style which at least for posterity has become familiarly known as the blue period style and one that is instantly recognizable these days almost to every child as well that is Picasso the color blue seems to suggest the very otherworldly quality something that has to do with renunciation of pleasure and luxury as for the cast of characters that you find in the blue period they are almost always the poorest people people who reflect Picasso's own poverty at the time the outcasts and aliens of society [Music] when bikasu arrived here in Monmouth in 1904 there was already a rich historic fabric about this place it was already a spot where many artists had settled a building of Studios there was a tradition of painting since the days of Goga and Van Gogh though there is no longer much to see the original building burned down is in its legend the legend of Picasso's most poverty-stricken years must have been a fascinating place because it was built in such a way that was likely to fall down to any moment it was on the side of the hill of momat so that you went in at the top because her Studio was about on the the top floor you walked straight in and you came to this studio which must have been quite small and packed with pictures and he made friends with the French poet Mike Jacob who had a great feeling for Picasso and understood him from the very beginning and from that it grew to other French poets and particularly guillauma bolognaire who had tremendous influence on Picasso and Picasso on him poetry certainly was extremely important to him and for that he really had decreased sensitivity and I I guess that sometimes even a world would trigger his imagination and he would set to work now when he came to Paris and that work was seen by apolinere and Mike Jacob then they gave it a completely different meaning probably apollina and Mark Zucker were the first poets who gave him an image of himself with words those two poets could find intentions in his work that he perhaps didn't have which must have been very astonishing for him sometimes I would say that those discussion might give rise to the theme even of the next painting that's how he went from just depicting you know a blind man playing the guitar things like that to what is called a Salton Bank [Music] by the end of 1903 this pervasive Melancholy blue seems almost to vanish and by 1904 and five a new kind of tonality that has given rise to the familiar phrase the rose period begins to take over Picasso's work in looking at Picasso's earliest pictures up to about 1906 one might well ask whether he was in the mainstream of modern painting at the time this picture was painted in the summer of 1905. just months before the great foe Salon of the Autumn of that year a communal effort on the part of a whole group of young French painters named Matisse vlamank in which there seemed to be an explosion of rainbow color so that at least at this point picasa's work seems to be somewhat insular somewhat apart from the major action in Paris in many of the pictures of circus families a withdrawn adolescent quality seems to linger on from the blue period while in others psychologically speaking there doesn't seem to be very much going on at all the figures have attained a kind of neutrality a moment of calm that as so often is the case with Picasso is the lull before the storm because in just two years Picasso would create the earthquake making demoiselle davignon but it wasn't a violent eruption the transformation if one looks at the development of the Rose period the transformation of forms the stylization it all serves as a preview to this painting thank you [Music] foreign [Music] one day in the privacy of his Studio Picasso called his friends together and showed them the demoiselle [Music] if anybody took a vote about which painting was the first real painting of the 20th century I suspect that the decision would be unanimous it would be the demoiselle davenon of 1907 the picture when it was first painted was so hideously ugly was so startling that practically no one even the most open-minded artist could deal with it The Story Goes that Matisse was violently hostile toward the painting Brock had just returned from a trip to Le stack and was so shocked by the savagery of the painting that he made his famous remark it's as if you made us drink kerosene and then swallow a lit match that's extraordinary picture it begins in a sense it begins cubism and uh it's where I can't as I've written put myself inside the mind of the artist too painted that picture how he was able to do it in 1907 I saw that sometime in the 30s and that seemed to me a tremendous jump of the imagination Picasso seemed to open doors that had been closed that was very stimulating for a young painter the scale of his brush Strokes was absolutely new before Picasso I think brush Strokes were all much smaller Picasso applied paint with these huge sweeps and I think that was of immense importance as an influence on avant-garde artists in fact if you look at details of the painting you can actually see the kind of sputter and splatter of paint that almost prophesies the painting technique of the abstract expressionists in the 1950s for the democell and effect on American painting incidentally I know it had great effect on Pollock he looked at it hard and often Pollock said it was full of stuff full of stuff the origins of this revolutionary composition are diverse early studies show it clearly as a bordello scene including the client who was later removed but now we ourselves become the clients viewing the painting as Picasso might have viewed an early 20th century pornographic photo taking his inspiration from the high as well as the low Picasso also Drew on the example of Aang who had removed his sensuous nudes from the proprieties of 19th Century Paris and put them into the harems of an exotic world for stylistic inspiration he is known to have been looking closely at the artistic traditions in other distant places the features of the central figures for instance can be traced to the rude classical statuary of Picasso's native Iberian Peninsula and then of course on the other side of the picture these other grotesque figures those two grotesque figures on the right hand side of the picture which were very much influenced by African sculptured by African conceptual magic sculpture he found there what I suppose you called barbaric way of expression a very direct way of expression the I for instance was so emphatically drawn [Music] that sense that here a whole new language of form and space in which for instance it is very hard to tell the difference between what is a solid form like this one and what is going on in the void between it and the next figures seems to be so amazing that the very language in which the picture was painted seems to be the main thing to look at and in fact this painting seemed to offer as it were the whole premise the whole basis of a whole new language of form that got to be more and more rational schematized in the vocabulary that got to be known as cubism [Music] at its Beginnings cubism was like an explosion in slow motion an explosion of the Apparently solid mass of reality Caso looked very hard at the shapes he saw on a trip to Spain in 1909 [Music] in 1908 and 9 his work tended toward a tough ABC language of Elemental volumes and shapes but exactly who invented cubism and when will continually be debated it was not the work of Picasso alone his vision was certainly affected by the Loosely floating Plains of the late Cezanne whose whole career might be said to have progressed to the point where Picasso now stood and the slow explosion was kept fired by the repeated visits between Picasso and his neighbor George Brock whether Picasso or Brock invented cubism I can't say I prefer to think it was a joint uh invention and let it go with that it is very difficult for the sharpest Cubist connoisseur and by Legend it was difficult for the artists because when Brock themselves to discern the difference between the work of Brock and the work of Picasso by about 1910 and 11 many of their works really look interchangeable it's a phenomenon in fact that occurred earlier in the history of Modern Art in the Heyday of impressionism when uh Masters like Renoir and Monet tended to paint pictures on the same spot that almost have looked exactly alike and that's very interesting and I don't think we really saw that again until the 60s you know with a lot of minimal works and stuff where all of a sudden the look of individual artists became more Anonymous that the focus was on an external problem Brock himself once said that he and Picasso were roped together like Mountaineers and one feels in looking at a sequence of these pictures by Brock and Picasso that neither artist knew exactly where he or the other one was going because the language became so much more strange and difficult almost as if it took not one but two men to create a kind of art that really was going to become the basic language of 20th century art cubism is the source that's right and it's the underlying discipline it's a kind of Canon of all the Cannons I'd say plural of all sophisticated abstract painting all sophisticated abstract sculpture a lot of the language used to analyze cubism makes it sound cold mathematical and yet if we let our eyes see as picassos may have seen in 1910 we become aware of a sense of mystery whiffs of things appearing and disappearing as if recollected in memory [Music] for instance watch what Picasso did when he painted the portrait of a German art dealer Wilhelm UDA [Music] these Cubist Works recall the years of Monet's late impressionism when the presence of cathedrals Haystacks or lily pads lurked like Phantoms behind the painted surfaces [Music] thank you [Music] picasa's work as usual is about the transformation of shapes that occurs when the world outside meets the inner eye reality is pulverized but never lost you see Picasso always said During the period of cubism when his art appeared to be a sort of very controlled very geometric and very conceptual nevertheless for him that was only the means to an end which was much more ecstatic when you are looking at the crystal for example if you see you know Crystal formation of amethyst getting away from nature as we see it in order to get into a kind of ecstatic experience no matter where your eye lands in this picture you suddenly realize that where you think you are is contradicted by something else this right angled form that suggests the structure of the chimney uh on the one hand it is behind uda's head on the other hand it suddenly joins forces with the ear so that it shifts planes right as we watch it the effect on traditional perspective is absolutely devastating I think cubism is an important a development as a perspective was that had an effect all through the Renaissance and continues both of them have their roots in in basic perception and cubism just seems to have pervaded this part of the 20th century both those that uh whose work is influenced by cubism and and those who try desperately to get away from cubism I think abstract expressionism was almost devoted to to ridding itself of the Cubist influence and still has a very strong Cubist influence in spite of its effort to free itself and uh Pop might at the very beginning might have been an effort to free itself both of uh abstract expressionists ways of working and Cubist I've always felt that Cuba Square was extremely uncharacteristic that it was this one chunk of time where Picasso had a totally different character the Cubist workers so intellectualized so architectural so cut up it's without those powerful sweeps and curves the application of paint is almost timid it's done with the wrist whereas all of the other painting is done with the shoulder I've always felt it was out of character for Picasso I do not agree with um the majority of critics who think that it's it says strongest rare Brock and Picasso went by intuition which is all you have to go by you know it really no matter what schemes you give yourself in advance or as you go along in the end intuition is what decides whether it's good or bad Picasso was so even in those days he's hitting it every time for me it's one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Art [Music] it's one of the common places of Picasso criticism to say that the master is always a realist in 1912 in fact that real world outside re-entered the language of cubism with a bang all sorts of stuff that you would throw out in the garbage suddenly became the material for constructing a new kind of art this pasting of 1914 is a particularly witty example one must never forget how funny many of these pictures are and this one is a kind of chest beating by Picasso as a sort of magician artist who can make a still life out of almost nothing at all there is a cheap wallpaper pattern that would give offense to anybody who had taken the trouble to paint decorative background as say Matisse or Cezanne had done in the late 19th or early 20th century and then to add the Supreme insult he has dared to put his name in a mock nameplate right in the bottom of the picture as if he had relegated this picture to the Louvre I think I know that Brock was the first one to put printed letters you know give his painting around 1910 now that was the source of collage Picasso saw it as it seems to me and immediately saw what was involved printed letters would State the flatness of the picture plane and then the next thing you put newsprint or simulated textures so forth and that clinched at that drove it home this is meant to be the physical literal surface of the picture and collage was a turning point for cubism [Music] result of the invention of collage is a sense that a picture is ironed onto the flat background which in turn pushes the image forward as in a children's pop-up book it's a look that was pushed even further forward in the constructions Picasso began in 1912 with absolutely revolutionary effects he broke away from the monolith the monolith had been a staple of sculpture for thousands of years not just in the West the African sculptor takes the tree trunk and he chops a flat a flatness into it somewhere and everything begins to follow from that that aspect where he's done his chopping somehow because I was able to take that and because he's using the materials he's using paper and Tin he's able to make the whole thing have a kind of a looseness a transparency and an openness and because as I say he took the guitar as an example he's able to suddenly shatter it [Music] you know that was like the the beginning of of of modern sculpture the modern sculpture took off from that from that point started Russian constructivism it's responsible for giacometti's Primo's got you it told David Smith everything and after Smith Carroll he invented the way I work Ed [Music] when you say 20th century sculpture the great turning point is Picasso 1912. [Music] after about 1914 and the outbreak of World War One the Cubist years were coming to an end whether they were Picasso's best or some people feel can be passionately debated but the power of the explosion that had taken place continues to reverberate in later years Picasso himself might be said to have been influenced by his own Cubist period his light sculpture pieced together out of discarded baby strollers or toy cars is born from the concept of collage the shock waves of the explosion spilled into the work of other artists in an amazing variety of ways after years of making my own sculpture I started dealing with fragments and wool reliefs that I was trying to figure out uh certain problems that were cropping up and I made a piece called Picasso's chair where I literally used a 1933 etching that Picasso had done for the volart suite as a blueprint for a three-dimensional real sculpture that I built relatively realistic girl with her hand on a strange Picasso invention of a chair in the form of a woman that was full of Cubist and surrealist vocabulary to my surprise and shock the structure stood on its own he had that strong a visual grasp and what had been related to me about Cuba's theory was accurate it starts with a flat plane that sits against the wall and advances out toward me in a series of shallow flat planes and that's exactly what Picasso's cubism was about [Music] for instance I did the Wallace Stevens poem yes where he began with reference to a Picasso painting an unused you know he used the word blue and guitar all for the imagination and the poem was about imagination and its power so I've played I quoted Picasso a great deal throughout it [Music] marvelous that it starts with reference to this imaginative artist prods you into being able to imagine many other things actually [Music] foreign [Music] is the colors are beginning to come in and give them a bit of a bit of trouble but same date the drawings are just as good they're still marvelous these drawings and then he recovers again so actually once cubism is beginning to wear out he still doesn't drop he drops it and recovers and I thought the game from one room to another you say oh gosh the guy's finished and he wasn't finished at all you know he thought he was finished but he went to the next drum he's made a recovery again in 1917 Picasso met and soon married a Russian ballerina Olga koklova whose social Ambitions lured him into a Bourgeois lifestyle the change in his life as usual with Picasso was mirrored in his art [Music] I think that after cubism he was in a quandary I think he was in a quandary I think it was incredibly intelligent man and so there he is this rather sculpture person torn between which two ways to go one the flat way towards flatness and the other towards sculpture so then you know you get these rather decorative pictures just flat decoration really and after that a tremendous um as if he suddenly says but I I don't even want I don't want that and so he's like schizophrenic at that point and then he starts painting these sculpturey pots and sculpture ladies and things and I think that a lot of the time a lot of the time in his life he has got these two things pulling at him flatness leading towards decoration towards lack of meaning in a picture and sculptureness leading towards painting sculptures throughout his long career almost 80 years Picasso had a continuing dialogue with the art of classical Antiquity sometimes it was very covert sometimes as in the case of the pictures and drawings executed in the late teens and early 20s it seems to be virtually an effort to resurrect the spirit of the art of Greece and Rome in fact the pictures in this room almost look as though they are temporary modern Recreations of the world of Pompeii or Herculaneum of some ancient Roman civilization if in cubism the tempo is very very rapid a kind of staccato improvised approach suddenly there is a feeling of a kind of slow Largo tempo as if these pictures had brought time to a stop as if they were some ancient relics of an old great civilization why did Pablo want let's say to read something that can be recognized that is very important in his work that's that has always been discussed why for example after cubism didn't go like Montreal you know in a completely non-figurative purely formal type of Art the neoclassical uh period was a very logical thing for for Picasso to have done next because cubism to me was reducing everything almost down to a molecular level or describing directions and then he turned around in a neoclassicism let you see the shape again and the relationship that was important was the relationship of the figure to the air to what existed around it my surmise is that Picasso was yearning the model again because you have a fling at doing that again he was just modeled to his heart's content go uh let's say backward it were in terms of the evolution of his art and uh and he had his fun and he painted some damn good pictures too but they're not his topic what seems to be at first a very modest still life would seem to refer to any number of other works not only in Picasso's earlier career but in the art of the late 19th and early 20th century there's an interesting point of contact with Picasso's own still lives of 1908 but this in turn goes back even farther to these still lives of Cezanne [Music] this seemingly still life which at first glance looks so stable has very cezannian qualities the pitcher for example suddenly has the quality of something that is swollen in fact something that is actively swelling before our eyes and the same goes for the handle or the lip of this picture both of which begin to have a curiously animate quality foreign paintings like those 1920 pictures the two boys sitting there looking they always look so miserable they reflect right back to the schmaltzy pictures of the blue period there's there's a lot of real feeling in Picasso this very seldom is uh Ishmael schmalsi is when he falls back is it what do I what am I going to do you know and then he puts in a bit of Schmaltz about um the sort of uh generalizations but isn't about life so I think that in a rather unadult way he saw himself as a father when he had his the little boy and the pictures of a little boy um on the donkey or dressed up in Pierre's costume I don't think they're tender at all I think they're perfectly awful [Music] it might be stretching it just a bit but I think you could say that almost every time you see a harlequin image in Picasso's art in some way the artist is projecting his own personality from the very beginning when he painted and Drew Cafe scenes in Paris often in the Cubist years of a kind of playing card or a stick figure image and then in the 20s the three musicians in which the figure of harlequin has been interpreted as a projection of Picasso himself or sometimes with that quality of self-projection he even represents his son Paulo at a desk doodling as a child will do but with a kind of seriousness as if Picasso were looking for his own image in that of his son [Music] the thing was one even the people who surrounded him and he liked to tell the story of that sculpture in the French Renaissance who wanted to make glazed still lives in a world it was very difficult to continue the fire long enough so finally he put all his furniture into the fire that please Pablo and obviously he said but if I had been vernapalisi I would not have stopped there I would also have put my wife meaning me because and then in the end myself it was if it was not enough to finish the fire so that was really his attitude art is not only something that you do but it is you and you are it and that identification in him was complete he remained a passionate Macho Spaniard a victim of the myth and primitive Superstition of his upbringing along with his Mastery of the most sophisticated civilized French discourse you can imagine and he never believed a sophisticated stuff for a second I've often wondered how self-critical he was I would imagine almost not at all in sort of uptight the European terms there's every reason to suppose he was sure of his greatness from a very early age and didn't think about it again yards of bad work in many places if one can say so or what one might from another point of view think was bad or slack or unsuccessful non-communicative it's all there for you to look at and still see there's still so much in it of him his body of work exists as a kind of comment on the kind of artist he was do you know how he regarded art which is he was an artist and anything he did was just fine sometimes I'll look through you know this book and I'll think well did he really mean this one you know um what the equipment would be was he doing this and talking on the telephone or something I don't know a lot of time people shouldn't be frightened to let other people see uh what they do in there in that off moments also on it's a I mean there are things of all artists which are not uh as good as other bombs the things that were slight were things he did he was just the mood he was in um it wasn't meant to be um bought and sold necessarily it was just meant to do a museum and the fact that someone may make a lot of it sell it for a high price and put in a museum doesn't doesn't mean that it wasn't meant as a slight thing for him when he did it he was having a good time and many other brilliant works at the same time maybe that in some of the so-called failures you might find the quality that was never fully realized but which could have been or which might help somebody else do we're all human everybody is that Humanity which in the end I think is the Criterion of what is good or great or not [Music] Picasso has always was conscious of rivalry not only with the Old Masters but with the new Masters and it might well be said that this picture is part of a kind of continuing dialogue between Picasso's work and the Art of that other artist who is most likely to be claimed with Picasso as the greatest artist of the 20th century namely Ari Matisse there was between these two men a friendly but sometimes not so friendly rivalry and a picture like this of 1929 might be Picasso's retort to the series of sensuous relaxed odorless reclining women women in armchairs that Matisse had painted throughout the 20s Picasso offers us the Grim side of the coin quite characteristic of his Spanish frequently grotesque temperament matisse's paintings have a great deal to do with it with taste taste in the highest um sense of the word Picasso's paintings don't have anything to do with taste it seems to me um they have to do with uh this enormous attack on life this attack on the canvas is Attack on the sculpture that to do with um with uh bad it would be crazy to say that this was a portrait of his wife with whom he was on growingly bad terms in the late 20s but in the sense that Picasso's art is always in some degree a kind of extension of his personal biography this clearly reflects as do so many other pictures of the late 20s the idea that a woman could be a monster a demon a kind of destructive force in the middle of a well-organized household I once heard a discussion between Europe Picasso and Ari Matisse and Matisse was probably asking Picasso I will come that you go from one shape to a completely different one in the same painting as a kind of experiment and Pablo said but then I'll come you know you just sort of reduce the elements remaining you know in the same direction as you go like let's say you know a famous painting by Matisse of the 1930s which is a reclining nude there are about 120 different states and it seems that Matisse is sort of steadily going toward greater simplification the statement becoming stronger as it goes whereas with Picasso sometimes it would drift away from his first idea very soon not having a goal or even if he had a goal he would get away from it and get another goal and a third one Etc as if what was important is almost the stream of consciousness I think the Picasso had a sneaking suspicion um through his life that he wasn't quite as good as my teeth um and the reason I say that is that I think a lot of these paintings are influenced by Matisse at various times two not one time Picasso was influenced a bit primates but I think Matisse was too that Matisse had this younger man sort of um opening up ways and so on and they just just gave him him a freedom to do things that he might not what I can taste the way Matisse paints I've never tasted the white Picasso paste well I love Matisse I mean everybody loves Matisse don't they but I I think Picasso is a a broader artist to me anyway and this is why in certain periods things have died down because there hasn't been the experimenter or the grave or the opener the opener out which Picasso was he was an opener out you look at this painting in 1928 they will start mocking it people aren't that shape the woman has got no feet and or something on there you can you can tell everything they would have said but if you think really of what it's about the woman fumbling with the key all trying to do this no photograph can ever show that experience yeah everybody knows the experience of going up the steps with a key it's making you look I think this is a fantastic period of Picasso I mean a lot of artists thought so at the time I mean Henry Moore has been influenced by that a lot of Henry Moore's work is from a short period of Picasso I mean he made a wonderful enrichment of his own but it couldn't really have occurred probably without Picasso look at that swim I think again this is about the distortion on the water of these things he was telling everyone who could understand you are wasting your time if you want to talk about human beings with with static forms he pulled them as he liked you know in all directions and open all the possibilities of using the human body with no reference to the to the shape but trying to say his value was completely different when he was running and when he was sitting down he was in lava who was having a baby in his hand he was constantly upsetting the the the the verb to see take the portraits of Dora Ma and the other girl Marie yeah I can remember in the forties people would reproduce these pictures of two noses and eyes up here and everything this was hideous Modern Art and what were they doing to the figure and Etc but you look at them carefully now they don't even seem distorted what he does with the face is quite different to what say Francis Bacon doing Francis Bacon when the faces look as though this has been looked in all rightness that's been done nothing that's not true of those Picasso portraits they've been made up another way they can have tenderness they can have the emotion felt comes across in the in the expression it can put into it [Music] thank you [Music] isn't that funny his women changed his pictures he's not the pictures are changing but his women seem to actually force him into a different style [Music] in 1927 Picasso met by accident a kind of pickup a young blonde girl who was to be the reigning Muse over his art in the late 20s and early 30s Picasso worked out a most dangerous triangle in which the new woman in his life lived often in the closest proximity to the artist and his respectable Russian wife there are several reasons why Picasso came here to guajillu in 1930. first he wanted to continue doing the sculpture he had started in 1928. those constructions in metal wire is the essence of country life there's a place made for Marie Therese the image of Marie Perez represents the most Macho aspects of Picasso that is in contemporary terms these are the very uh stuff of a male chauvinist attitude toward woman they represent women as erotic preachers sex objects and they represent her also in a more beautiful way as a kind of fertility goddess a sort of Mother Nature who is capable of the miracle of procreation Picasso's relationship with nature had its great period at guajillu and at this time he often went to the beaches to denal in the north on the Mediterranean [Music] thank you this is often forgotten because we think of Picasso's characters as inhabiting a mental interior with ceilings weighing down heavily but there is much more to be seen in these paintings than a simple view of nature reflected in the mirror of Picasso's imagination green Sprouts from the groin and a Dark Inner self gazes out from the world of symbol this was the traditional psyche mirror which reflects the soul ideally suited to Picasso's fascination with the double nature of things [Music] Picasso's women the the profile down the center when I met ecoon and he was painting men um often bald men and I asked him why he never painted women and he said he had no way to think about hair and paint and he saw it of the image of woman as involved with hair but very definitely he was influenced by Picasso's image of women which uh de kooning pointed out that the castle really got from ions because I always had a profile very subtly worked into a full-faced poetry inspires Picasso to return to Ang the true anger and the distorter of forms in the bantuke the Turkish bath but especially the anger who celebrated feminine beauty through distorting the Arabesque curve the Arabesque which is found in the themes of dreams and sleeping women that Picasso explores between 1931 and 1934. the diamond pattern paper seems to provide a marvelous visual contrast to these irregular organic forms of nature but it is also a pattern that may well suggest the traditional Motif that Picasso uses throughout his career namely the diamond pattern of the harlequin costume and here it may well be a kind of pun a kind of projection a sense of the artist's own personal male presence dominating watching uh the sleeper that in itself is a familiar Motif and Picasso's work the idea of a male figure usually a projection of the artist who watches in a kind of possessive loving and erotic way a sleeping woman whom he has known and Picasso the Sculptor through his sculpture linear characters are realized in three dimensions if we compare the monument to apollinaire done in wire with the painting of the same period the painter and his model for example it's clear that the painter felt compelled to translate his forms into real space foreign [Music] foreign [Music] had a plastic sculptural Beauty and so perhaps it was inevitable for Picasso to extend into three dimensions the images of her that he had invented in his painting several years before foreign there is abstraction a Cubist Distortion and also a classicism the great profile of maritarez is a great sculpture of Classical Greece [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign so in 1936 when Pablo Picasso had been asked by the Republican government to make a very large painting for the international exhibition in Paris of 1937. he was to make a kind of mural for that Spanish Pavilion he began to look for a large studio because in real Boise he had a lot of space but not enough space for a mural like that showed him this place and in 1937 he moved in sit on the wall the Gonzo gustan Studio had been the setting for Balzac's the unknown Masterpiece one can imagine why Picasso was fascinated and wanted to move into the place the the two sets of Studios were all beautiful Oak beams but all the dolls and the beans were all painted black and you had red tiles on the floor and but it was a kind of very austere type of environment very Spanish anyway so it really pleased him very much and he closed all the windows he had only one window open all the others were closed it's like the camera obscura you have only one source of light and everything else is in darkness [Music] if you can imagine a painting that would represent the modern idea of the end of the world of some terrible apocalypse it might look something like this most famous picture by Picasso Guernica a picture which purports to record the bombing of The Basque capital on the 26th of April 1937 but which now today in the later 20th century seems really to be a kind of universal symbol of War of catastrophe a picture of a kind of last Devastation of the human race there on top of the painting is a kind of blinding flesh our idea of death from the air and there is a terrible cast of screaming women of a dead man of dead baby the horse a bull who seem really to symbolize the final Extinction not only of the human but of the animal race the the canvas on which he was about to pengonica was so loud that he was even too large to be put completely upright it was heating the ceiling so it had to be put at an angle and also diagonally in the room because it was so large and then just in front of that painting there happened to be a very ordinary source of Light which was just you know an electric bulb with a plate-like type of surrounding and I think this electric bulb and the light is is the one which you see in Guernica in the center of the painting very often you see his mind would be attracted by chance occurrences and he would say yes after all that's what I need or I will put it there as you can see the painting is clearly divided into three parts a major Central section which is peaked by the apex of the Triangular pyramidal form other than two side sections the terrible figure of the falling woman and then on the left an equally nightmarish image of a woman holding a helplessly dead limp child these side images evoke the structure of so many Christian triptychs that tell the story of the crucifixion in the central section and then at left and right subsidiary scenes that count events that proceed and follow the martyrdom of Christ Architects hate painters because they ruin walls you see I was working at the Spanish Pavilion for the show 1937. and there was this picture there was a myth and was late The Pavilion had to open and the picture never arrived you know and this painting you know which for for us a painting was something like a carpenter or something like you know that was going to bring this past and ruin the world was so beautiful you know and then they used to sell me to to this man that for me was a sort of an artisan or something like that to ask when was going to be picture going to be ready you know because they needed it and I arrived to this place was in a very torn down house you know and I saw this man who sort of practically like a worker like like a mason or something like that and there was on the wall this mess you see this mess was all pieces of newspapers stuck together you know and and spots of red lines like that and I thought of my wallet I've been drawing with all of this nonsense but the man was quite fascinating he saw my innocence and my ignorance because I was saying that when it's going to be ready this business isn't it and all of these pieces of paper kept moving from one week to the next you see and the Spanish population was very late because of this picture and then at last one day the picture arrived and and the picture was here Nika one realizes that some of the impact that Picasso's work had was historical that it had a meaning back then when it was first shown that it doesn't have now we were all involved with the Spanish Civil War this seemed like a living meaningful political statement are you nice the subject was political the violence all the things he was denouncing foreign and for me that is what is important nobody knows that the town of Guernica is our sanctuary in The Basque region and that's why it was destroyed well in 39 When The War you know second world war started it was asked if he wanted to come to the United States and he chose not to go and to stay in a way among the people we are suffering other than have an easy life which would have been also a very glorious life if he had been in the United States like many other European pandas chose to do then I think living through the war in France when so many people died you know in Constitution camp or in the resistance gave him maybe a sense of tragedy and also of the human helplessness [Music] this is the funa studio when did Picasso move here after the war 1946 48 around there 1949 yeah around there and this was a studio yes we didn't live here it was only a workplace yes exclusively wasn't this the sculpture Studio [Music] there are a lot of photos of it you guys have spent a fairly short time here 1949 to 53. it was then he did that ingenious sculpture series starting with the shego flowering water little girl jumping rope the baboon the baboon the pregnant woman the woman reading modeled after Francoise it's so Charming people always think Picasso spent his life and days and nights working you know working working working working all the time and they feel you know that of course he was a great genius but he was a busybody and in fact he was just like any other man he worked and then he went on to the beach or to have lunch or dinner with friends you know spend time with his family and many times I even spent a lot of time with his children well walking around he'd find things on the ground elastic a ball of string a nail a brick a piece of ceramic anything and it gathered them up yeah these big pockets and we'd rummaged through them all the time his trouser Pockets were ideal for that worthless object thrown into the gutter picked out and looked at in a new way given the new magic is because it comes to life again one moment the object was nothing and the next it became the gold sword the baboon snout for instance at one point he decided I had too many toys so he captured some of them and he took them to his studio and he turned some of the toys into a sculpture uh like the the ape and and it's and it's um a child you know which was made from two two cars of mine that I had slightly banged up I was a very little girl I never thought it was strange to have all sorts of things in our parlors things that belonged elsewhere or were in pieces it was normal to have that around I never lived in a conventional home [Music] this is the first time I've been to LA California and it's always fascinating because if you know Picasso's work and the photographs would show him in everyday life you see it as a place a home with a garden that played a precise role in his work came here in 1955 as a kind of retreat this has been interpreted quite a bit his private life was in turmoil Francoise had just left him and he had just met Jacqueline at age 75 Picasso found himself somewhat alone of his generation Matisse died in 54. a companion from the very start was dead perhaps felt that he was at the end of his life and his conflict between painting and death began again many times toward the end of his life Picasso made paintings which were in fact paraphrases of famous works of the past like he did quite a series of Las meninas from Velazquez [Music] some paintings which were derived from gour Bay um Greco you know the painter is a self-portrait El Greco by himself so it sort of gives life twice what we call you know dialogue with the Dead [Music] one of the most ambitious involvements with the work of art of the past was with deliqua's women of Algiers in mid-December of 1954 Picasso began a series of variations upon delacroix picture painting 15 different interpretations of what the french Master had done 120 years before that the reasons for this as usual in picassos are are multiple for one thing Ali Matisse had just died and Picasso wanted to offer him an oblique tribute by going back to a source that had often inspired Mattis namely delaqua maltese's series of otolisks had continued the orientalist tradition that deliqua had established with Aang in the early 19th century it was a commonplace and still is of a discussion of 19th century art to Pitt Ang and delacroix against each other in terms of one delaqua being the giant of color and the other Ang being the giant of line and this could have been restated in terms of the Rivalry between Matisse and Picasso everyone had assumed that Matisse was the Great Master of color in the 20th century which might have left Picasso in the role of being the Great Master of line of course Picasso as usual wanted to have his cake and eat it too he painted on the one hand a completely reside version that is a painting in grayish tonalities demonstrating his capacity to do a linear scaffolding and on the other hand he offered a kind of rainbow version of the same structure demonstrating his own rivalry with the chromatic Brilliance of Matisse people think that paraphrasing the Old Masters when you yourself are a master could be a regression like a young artist just starting out in fact it was a kind of reassessment of his work and the confrontation with the Masters he admired an act whereby he joined them in history and in time [Music] by the 1950s the world had decided that Picasso was its favorite artist he may have been in the spotlight but he was also on the spot it's difficult to discuss Picasso's influence on Contemporary Art listeners is a monument in art history a mass phenomenon but strangely in spite of that his direct influence on Contemporary Art is he wasn't the head of a movement that had a future I had a feeling that he had stylistic devices that other artists would follow and uh those devices were not those that corresponded to whatever it was I was looking for I feel that his influence was not precise not direct as was that of the New York school or Matisse rather it was a diffuse influence with an almost permanent effect on our attitude today on the painting of my generation and specifically on my own or what I can do is is to more or less push you to to a picture of The Man Behind the picture while the market have tried to hide a man you know and only talk about the market value of the picture you know and then Picasso has become the name of a price as a matter of fact Picasso never wanted to be Picasso you know like let's say shagal wants to be Picasso and this is what had to be understood I think that Picasso is was always fighting what could be called the New York Arts Stock Exchange you know he would paint with broom balls and and screws and things anything that should upset or discourage the market and the value of being added to his work you know in other words he would spit in people's eyes you know but people will frame the spit you see and sell it if you begin to have a legend even when you are very young and you live 93 years and you always have to make a new somersault in a way it was almost expected of him to renew himself at like the Phoenix at all times maybe at times it might have been hard you have to go to the beginning you say always look into it how and how to start and Picasso start painting like the Russian strike and that gives you a key because a little bit strict was very persecuted by Society and this attitude is what makes him come somehow close to the character in Chaplin you know Nobody Does the effort to put themselves in the clothes that had Chaplin you know when he was a [ __ ] and see how an art is fundamentally a trapped you know and one should never forget when one ceased all of this clowning you know the famous tear in the eye of the clown you know and that is the question that that should come through your film that that people should see the tear in in in the clowning [Music] and so Picasso found himself cut off and away from the living world of Art in coming to LA California one realizes the extent to which the paintings are a preview Picasso always reflects reality you see the shapes of the Palms the Baroque Windows the color all in a style which has nothing to do with illusion but is a style all his own me it's the start of something completely new a return to color and the reconquest of painting [Music] I had always heard that Picasso's last work was just awful and I believe that because I heard it in our history class and I thought it was just remarkable and stunning when I thought I don't believe that things say that Clement Greenberg does about a a kind of Fall From Grace for an artist there is a falling off in my feeling and he's still a damn interesting damn seminal pain until the end of the 30s now I think with the end of the 30s there's a great falling off during the war and afterwards Picasso's last paintings are those of a young painter looks lipstick the extreme Freedom he shows and the manner in which he comes back to work over things more decisively with more deliberate brush work not caring how the color flows this bothered me because I thought the paint just escaped his hand is then I realized I was wrong in fact the late paintings showed the greatest freedom of Spirit and the greatest proof of mastery and they're different from the early ones I think they combine a lot of things that different periods that's that's one thing that interests me they seem to combine different aspects of the work that was divided more into categories before Melrose understood the significance of these paintings and named them the taros like the playing cards the last paintings of 1968 to 1972 are once again paraphrases but this time of Picasso's own work Picasso addresses the great themes he always used such as the kiss the lovers and mother and child towards the end of his life I had a feeling that he had used up his subject matter he had was still using linear devices compositional devices that he had used over so many years and that finally he was using color in a way that he hadn't ever he was using it exclusively he wanted it to carry the message instead of the line they were very rich brush were very large scale a new step I mean he was still alive it wasn't true that he fell off as he got older the enormous productivity of his last years was his response to death and a way to say that painting is not dead in this series of great tarots there is the old painter a reprise of the Harlequin and then the painting Picasso chose for the poster of the Avignon exhibition the young painter a true symbol of continuity and so one looks at the body of his work and you realize that he starts as a young man with fresh eyes and triangle Styles and then he goes through this young mature period where he's inventing say cubism and then he goes through middle age where he's increasingly aware of his every day around him he's recorded the pattern of a lifetime and in that way he's given expression to what it is to live and to die I think actually it's only now you're beginning really beginning to see Picasso the show has turned me on again enormously it's also made me suddenly start painting faster myself suddenly I realize half the time I keep farting around and taking so long over something you think just do it just get it down and don't care too much I remember once he said everybody has it in him or her to be a genius but they don't give everything that is in them to that for example Pablo would say to me you must never do anything else like let's say before I had met him I used to be a very good horse rider and I I sort of indulge in some supporters right I said that's out the inner fire has to be fed with everything in you there is nothing you can live out because otherwise you'll never get far enough he invented the climate really by which most of my friends paint you've got to pay a great deal of respect and homage to this um marvelous monster you can well imagine what a curious phenomenon this would be for archaeologists of some future Century who suddenly uncover this weird combination of the most primitive and the most advanced in the 20th century so that everyone whoever walks by this Square will say there's a Picasso Picasso is here as if he was the greatest King of the 20th century as well as the greatest artist somebody who has left this for posterity as if he were the leader of a whole civilization it's an incredible feat of vanity as well as of artistry because it not only sums up the man's personal and artistic career but it makes sure that he is going to last through the centuries at least as long as the skyscrapers of Chicago that surround it foreign [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: HENI Talks

Views: 124,797

Keywords: heni, talks, art, history, HENI, Talks, Pablo Picasso, Artist, Spain, David Hockney, Françoise Gilot, Clement Greenberg, Blue Period, Cubism, Guernica, Genius, Modern Art, Famous Artist, Art Market, Money, Paintings, Canvas, Paint, Sculpture, Life, Work, 50 years, Anniversary

Id: HgJXAaaLJDc

Length: 89min 5sec (5345 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023