Pablo Ruiz Picasso.
BARCELONA, Oct 9 – "No one ever leaves a man like me!" Pablo Ruiz y Picasso said to his lover Françoise Gilot and the mother of his two children Claude and Paloma. She only replied: "You wait and see."
Sure enough, she does so with their children in tow. Françoise, 40 years younger than Picasso, had discovered that he had another love interest and had intended to keep both women, to let them share him as he had done so with other women in the past.
Picasso was shocked by her move, as throughout his life he was the one who initiated the leaving when it came to relationships. The world-famous artist then had to deal with utter loneliness – though not for long – and the ghost of Françoise's presence in their home.
Picasso was a man destined for glory. His mother María Picasso y López, perhaps with more than a doting eye for her only son born on October 25, 1881, once said to him: "If you are a soldier, you will be a general. If you are a priest, you will be a pope."
It's said when Picasso was a toddler, he uttered the word "..piz" (i.e. lapiz, Spanish for pencil), after learning to mouth mama and papa. His father Don José Ruiz y Blasco was himself a painter who specialised in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game, and worked as a curator at a local museum.
Ruiz taught the young Picasso the fundamentals of art and guided his entry into the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona at the age of 13. This bustling cosmopolitan city was a far cry from the relatively provincial Málaga, Picasso's birthplace, with its tradition of machismo and bull-fighting, that visceral Andalusian sport which honours the romance of death.
It became clear in almost an instant to his peers and teachers that Picasso was gifted. It was a heady time for the teenage Picasso who found excitement in the local brothels and intellectual stimulus in Els Quatre Gats that restaurant bar which still stands today wherein the avant garde engaged in tertulias (intellectual debate). Fresh, bold ideas flowed and soon, young Picasso was yearning to move to Paris, the capital of art.
A Spanish Couple In Front Of An Inn, 1900.
With his
mirada fuerte (intense gaze), that singular faculty which let him draw upon all that he saw and experienced as inspiration for his paintings, Picasso sought to outdo the Parisian artists with a radical departure from tradition. He was nonetheless drawn to the work of the Impressionists – Monet, Renoir, Degas – who dazzled with bursts of colours and play on light and shadows.
Picasso had a colossal ego and had no tolerance for mediocrity, much less competition. The only artist he saw as his true rival was Henri Matisse, who unlike himself, was a polished gentleman who could hold forth at length on art, whereas Picasso – it is said of his early years in Paris – "could barely grunt in poor French."
Still, the ever-prolific Picasso won admirers drawn to his magnetism and passion for life. He was fiercely competitive, yet was fortunate to find kindred souls such as his friend and collaborator Georges Braque when others distanced themselves.
Picasso and Braque broke the centuries-old principles of perspective which had ruled since the Renaissance and together they founded Cubism, "the highpoint of Picasso's originality", which transformed the world of 20th-century painting.
I remember visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona five years ago and walking away in awe, but also feeling disturbed, perplexed, with a lingering sense of desolation.
Images of the Blue Period, created after the death of Picasso's very close friend Carlos Casagemas, touched a raw nerve. They reflect his experience of relative poverty and instability, depicting beggars, street urchins, the old and frail and the blind. And he painted Casagemas more than once with the bullet-wound in his head, haunted by the fact that he was now bedding the woman who had driven Casagemas to suicide.
What is also true of Picasso is that he could be cruel to his lovers, and he was cruel to Dora Maar who cried desolately having to share him with other women. He fed off her despair – in fact he fed off the youth and energy of all his lovers – and made the series called Femme en pleurs (A Woman in Tears) which seem to me suffering in adagio. Dora said of him: "He used me until there was nothing left of me, nothing but the hundreds of portraits of me he painted."
Picasso was a rebel, and he rebelled against the stifling conformism of academic painting whilst at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, the foremost art school in Spain.
Françoise, Claude and Paloma, 1951.
He quit attending classes soon after enrolment, preferring instinctively to learn from past masters such as Goya, Velazquez and El Greco whose works are still housed in the Museo Nacional del Prado.
He spent countless hours at the museum observing, tracing, sketching as "his way of revisiting the classics was to reinvent it." Laughter, playfulness, eroticism and tenacity marked his life and art.
"Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." Picasso once said. And steal he did with finesse, notably from Matisse when the latter remarked to Picasso's then lover Françoise Gilot that he would paint her in a singular way. Picasso, in a fit of jealousy, took Matisse's idea and created The Woman Flower with Françoise's body a pale blue and hair a dark green.
Picasso was driven to break boundaries in art, and he worked incessantly not simply to achieve perfection at first instance but to create a thing of beauty after having worked at it from untold number of angles and perspectives. Josep Palau i Fabre (poet, biographer and friend) said that Picasso worked inexhaustibly even till his 80s "which was like a struggle against death."
"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction," Picasso believed. And true to his conviction, at every breakthrough in his very different art periods covering his early youth, the African-influenced period, Cubism, Surrealism and more, Picasso sought to defy traditional logic, meaning and imagery. Some of his works had been described as "uneven and sloppy", others had caused unease and alienated even his artist friends and benefactors.
He leaves us questioning: What is beautiful, and what is repugnant? How do we respond to the sensual or overtly erotic? Picasso was true to his art and true to his soul as a man passionately in touch with his world. He lived to strip bare all that would cloud our eyes from the intensity of being alive.
* Sue is a Malaysian writer based in Barcelona, Spain. She can be reached at suechien.lee@gmail.com.
The Malaysian Insider :: Food
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