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Lot 39

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth”

Pablo Picasso was born on 25 October, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. He started drawing at an early age, following the steps of his father, José Ruiz Blasco, who was an academic painter. In 1892, at the age of eleven, he started his education in the arts at the Guarda School of Fine Arts in Corunna. Three years later, he moved with his family to Barcelona where he studied at the School of...
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth”

Pablo Picasso was born on 25 October, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. He started drawing at an early age, following the steps of his father, José Ruiz Blasco, who was an academic painter. In 1892, at the age of eleven, he started his education in the arts at the Guarda School of Fine Arts in Corunna. Three years later, he moved with his family to Barcelona where he studied at the School of Fine Arts, La Lonja, and then, in 1897, enrolled in the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid.

Picasso’s art was significantly influenced by his visit to Horta de Ebro in 1898, and by his involvement with the group of artists and intellectuals that gathered at the café Els Quatre Gate in Barcelona in 1899. In the early 1900, he exhibited for the first time in Barcelona, and later the same year travelled to Paris, where his works were shown in a solo exhibition at the Galerie Vollard. In 1904, Picasso settled in Paris, where he counted Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Gertrude and Leo Stein among his closest friends.

Picasso dominated the artistic scene in the twentieth century, and is widely regarded as one of the most important pioneers of modern art. During his first artistic phase, known as the Blue Period (1901-1904) due to the tones that dominated Picasso’s palette, the main subjects of his works were the destitute and the suffering. During Picasso’s brief Rose Period (1905), his work focused on circus-like environments and performers, represented in lighter tones.

During 1906-07, the artist began to shift his attention again, partly influenced by African tribal art and masks, and partly by the works of Paul Cézanne that he encountered in various museums and galleries around Europe. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is perhaps his most well known canvas from this period. 1907 also marked the beginning of Picasso’s experiments with Cubism, a style developed in collaboration with the artist Georges Braque at their Montmartre studios.

The term Cubism, was coined by the critic Louis Vauxcelles when he encountered the artists’ work in 1908. Depicting object from multiple viewpoints, Cubism was initially dismissed and even reviled by many, but eventually revolutionized the fields of painting and sculpture, and spread to related fields like literature, music and architecture as well. The peculiarity of Cubism was that it managed to preserve pictorial ambiguity through snatches of objects, broken words, double meanings and private associations. Later, when Picasso and Braque painted together in the French Pyrenees, they developed this style beyond its initial ‘analytic’ phase (1908-1911) to a ‘synthetic’ phase (1912-1913) where materials and subjects became diverse.

In 1916, Picasso started designing sets and costumes for theatre and ballet productions, following which the artist painted several ‘neoclassical’ figurative compositions, inspired by a trip to Rome in 1917. From 1925 until the 1930s, Picasso collaborated with Surrealist artists in Paris, and also turned his attention to sculpture.

Over the course of his extensive career, Picasso adopted several different styles, genres and media, often combining them together, in order to critically examine the issues that affected him. In 1932, two exhibitions of Picasso’s work, one in Paris and the other in Zurich, alongside the publication of his first catalogue Raisonné by Christian Zervos, cemented the artist’s worldwide celebrity. A few years later, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, which deeply affected the artist, he painted the masterpiece, “Guernica”, as a response to the devastation it caused.

From 1946, Picasso spent his life in the South of France, where he continued to prolifically produce drawings, paintings, ceramics and sculptures until 1973, when he died in the town of Mougins.

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