This too would prove hugely influential for decades to come. Picasso had a liberal attitude to style, and although, at any one time, his work was usually characterized by a single dominant approach, he often moved interchangeably between different forms - sometimes even in the same artwork.
His encounter with Surrealism in the mids, although never transforming his work entirely, encouraged a new expressionism that had been suppressed throughout the years of experiment in Cubism and subsequently during the early s when his style was predominantly classical. This development enabled not only the soft forms and tender eroticism of his portraits of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter but also the starkly angular imagery of Guernica , the century's most famous anti-war painting.
Picasso was always eager to place himself in history, and some of his greatest works, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , refer to a wealth of past precedents - even while overturning them.
As he matured, he became ever more conscious of assuring his legacy, and his late work is characterized by a frank dialogue with Old Masters such as Ingres, Velazquez, Goya, and Rembrandt. Aside from the several anti-war paintings that he created, Picasso remained personally neutral during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, refusing to join the armed forces for any side or country.
He had also remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in , Picasso was already in his late fifties. He was even older at the onset of World War II, and could not be expected to take up arms in those conflicts.
As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either World War. In the Spanish Civil War, service for Spaniards living abroad was optional and would have involved a voluntary return to their country to join either side. The Spanish Civil War provided the impetus for Picasso's first overtly political work, The Dream and Lie of Franco, which was produced "specifically for propagandistic and fundraising purposes.
Guernica , together with various versions of The Weeping Woman , toured England to build support for the Republican cause in the Civil War. This tour was organised by Roland Penrose. At its British opening at the Whitechapel Gallery, around 15, people attended during the opening week.
The admission price was a pair of boots for the Republican Army fighting at the front. They were laid out in front of Guernica, adding to the dramatic impact of the event. In , Picasso joined the French Communist Party, attended an international peace conference in Poland. In received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government, But party criticism of a portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso's interest in Soviet politics, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death.
In a interview, Picasso stated: "I am a Communist, and my painting is Communist art. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics. Weeping Woman by Pablo Picasso, The Story. The Bigger Picture. Picture Highlights. Guernica by Picasso, This collection includes fifteen drawings of the weeping woman and four paintings. Although all nineteen items are to be found in Zervos IX , they are more accurately documented and reproduced in colour in the exhibition catalogue Guernica - Legado Picasso , Museo del Prado, Cason del Buen Retiro, Madrid The following list includes all known paintings and drawings of the weeping woman executed between May and November Over the years these images have been reproduced and exhibited under many different titles.
For this reason definitive titles cannot be confirmed by the compiler and in the following list individual titles are not cited. Works are listed chronologically.
Unless otherwise indicated, all works are in the Museo nacional Centro de arte Reina Sofia. Madrid exh. Los Angeles exh. Picasso also developed the theme in various prints , which are listed by B. For each print Picasso editioned there are various states. The subject of the weeping woman was not wholly confined to this period between May and October.
In July , five months after the victory of the Popular Front in the general elections in Spain, a military uprising in Spanish Morocco precipitated the Spanish Civil War. Picasso's association with the Spanish Republican cause dates back to February when a retrospective exhibition of his work at Sala Esteva in Barcelona was organised by Sert, director of the Amigos de las Artes Nuevas.
This group openly supported the leftist Popular Front, whose victory in the National elections coincided with the opening of Picasso's exhibition.
The artist's association with the Republican cause was cemented in September when, following the outbreak of civil war, the Republican government named Picasso as director of the Prado Museum, Madrid. According to Roland Penrose, Picasso was kept in touch with news from Spain during the autumn of by newspaper reports and by letters from his mother in Barcelona which brought news of the burning of a local convent and described the acrid, eye-watering smoke Penrose , p.
Most of Picasso's literary friends, especially the Surrealist poets, Eluard, Aragon and Breton, were deeply involved in the Republican cause.
However, prior to politics had rarely emerged in Picasso's work either as an inspiration or theme, and according to Chipp , p.
Picasso originally intended to make a series of eighteen postcard-size prints to be sold individually to raise money for the Spanish Republican cause. The two plates were thus divided into nine compartments giving each sheet a comic-strip layout of nine images, which due to the reversal of the images in the printing process read from right to left. The etchings caricature Franco in invented forms imbued with symbolism drawn from bullfighting, Moorish military tradition and Spanish Catholicism.
The last quarter of the prose poem reads:. This poem shows that the imagery of tears and of a weeping woman as an icon evocative of the suffering of Spain under Franco was already part of the artist's literary vocabulary well before its development in visual form. The news of the devastation of the historic Basque town of Guernica first reached Paris on 27 April, the evening following the bombing, in a broadcast from Radio Bilbao.
Picasso probably heard of the tragic events in the paper he customarily read, Ce Soir , published by the French Communist Party and edited by Aragon. This carried a telegram from its Bilbao correspondent in its 28 April edition, on sale from the evening of the previous day.
On 30 April Ce Soir published photographs of the ruined city. The bombardment of Guernica was part of Franco's campaign against the Basque province of Vizcaya. This campaign in the north of the country followed the stagnation of Franco's offensive against Madrid where Republican resistance was at its height and was particularly important because raw materials and industrial plant in the Basque area, which was rich in heavy industry, had been promised to Germany by Franco in exchange for its active support of the Nationalist cause.
The bombing, which took place on 26 April and was followed by three days of burning, was particularly thorough, and has been seen as a rehearsal for the notorious blitzkrieg tactics of the Second World War. The bombing of Guernica was particularly emotive not only because of the severity of the attack but also because of the venerable history of the town as the Basques' Holy City, guardian of liberty and democracy.
In France the bombing was followed by a week of intense and often extremely contradictory newspaper reporting, which reflected the international political arena as much as actual events in Spain. On 1 May the May Day demonstration in Paris was the largest in its history, and its major themes were protest at the bombardment and appeal for support to the victims.
Much preparatory work was kept safe, most of the studies and related works were clearly dated by the artist, and the painting was photographed at key stages in its development. Of all the components of the finished composition , the horse, the bull and the female lamp-bearing figure were the first to be established and all were motifs Picasso had previously explored in other works.
By 8 May, the third day of working, the theme of the mother carrying her dead child had been established Madrid exh. While developing the composition as a whole, Picasso explored some of the elements in separate studies.
The mother and dead child theme was one such, and it was from this theme that the image of the weeping woman emerged. Chipp , p. Images of mothers and their children, wounded, homeless, fleeing and in distress, were frequently carried in the French press. The French Popular Front used such photographs to protest against the Spanish conflict and to call for disarmament in their anti-war demonstrations in see, for example, the photograph by David Seymour of the Popular Front demonstration in Paris, reproduced in Frances Morris ed.
Other factors may have informed the nature of the mother and child motif for Picasso. Mary Mathews Gedo argues that the image was inextricably bound up with Picasso's feeling towards his mother and an early childhood trauma.
She draws attention to those sketches in which the female figure is depicted wearing a scarf, especially those dated 8 and 9 May. Shortly following the earthquake, Picasso's mother gave birth to Lola, Picasso's first sister.
To this personal symbolism must be added a more general iconographical source, namely the use of scarves or mantillas by Spanish women.
Picasso was not the only artist to explore this symbolism in his work for the Spanish Pavillion. Oppler , p. The woman is shown wearing a head scarf and carrying a sickle. Many commented on her heroic posture. On 13 May Picasso made a colour sketch for the head of the mother repr. This more regular orientation is seen in the mother and child sketch of 13 May repr.
This drawing is the first in which Picasso paid pronounced attention to the eyes represented as tear-drops. In a drawing of 24 May repr. This was the first in the series of thirty-six weeping women cited above. At least twelve further depictions followed over the next four weeks. The heads depicted in drawings dated 31 May and 3 June are flat and mask-like, combining an almost decorative black outline with patches of colour unrelated to the contours.
From 8 June the drawings, while still highly stylised, are more naturalistic with descriptive details and the appearance of fleshy volume.
In a painting dated 22 June repr. Her hand has long pointed finger nails. On 4 July the weeping woman is shown repr. There followed a long gap in the exploration of the theme while Picasso holidayed in Mougins near Cannes in the South of France in August and September.
During the summer the sombre tones of Guernica were replaced with a bright palette of yellow, pink, mauve and crimson in portraits of his companions at the Hotel Vaste Horizon, Mougins. Penrose , p. After his stay at Mougins the obsession with Spain returned and Picasso took up and radically developed his earlier themes. In a large painting of the mother and child theme dated 26 September repr.
Later still, on 12 October, a drawing repr. The grief of the weeping woman had become bitter and cruel. Picasso became obsessed with the theme: from 12 to 18 October he painted nothing but weeping women and he returned to the theme the following week. The drawings and paintings dated 13, 17, 18 and 24 October show him particularly absorbed in the iconography of the handkerchief. All the elements that Picasso had explored through the early summer and then developed in September and October were brought together in T The face combines a profile dominated by an angular nose outlined in black with a full-face depiction of the eyes.
The mouth is shown in a three-quarters view. This very distinctive design was first adopted by Picasso in several portraits of women made in the early s but did not become a distinctive feature of his work until the summer of Anthony Blunt argued that this mixed treatment of the face may have been inspired in part by eleventh-century Spanish apocalyptic drawings of the type discussed in a article published in Cahiers d'art Blunt , p.
Although the specific example that Blunt discusses - a manuscript depicting a woman's head in profile with both eyes on one side of the face - is not reproduced in the Cahiers d'art article, Blunt suggested that Picasso may have been familiar with such striking images.
It is also distinct from the curvilinear volumetric style employed in the sketches and etchings of early June. In T , and also in the paintings of 17 and 18 October repr. The hybrid facial structure of T is internally divided into planes of contrasting, vivid colour delineated in black and dark grey.
A confusion of hands, mouth, teeth, handkerchief and tears in the centre of the face is painted predominantly in white and blue. Above, firm black and dark grey strokes describe the deeply furrowed brow, tilted eyebrows and staring eyes. The eyes and eyelids are given extraordinary analytical attention. The eyebrows and lashes are depicted in a childlike fashion with thick individual strokes; the lids and sockets are depicted as capsized vessels from which tears cascade while the eyes are flung overboard.
The eyes are seemingly tossed up, poised on the crests of the two white triangular forms describing the handkerchief and tears. She may, for instance, symbolize the pieta - the anguish of the Virgin Mary, as she mourns the horrifying death of her son, Jesus Christ. The hand of the trampled corpse under the horse in Guernica , contained signs of Christ's stigmata, indicating martyrdom, so there may also be a religious dimension to this painting.
Note: The colour scheme used in the painting remains something of a mystery. Picasso frequently used a monochrome or even a grisaille palette when evoking pain and suffering. By contrast, the palette used in "Weeping Woman" incorporates all the major colours, including: red, yellow, blue, as well as orange, green and brown. Was Picasso trying to imbue the woman with strong feelings, or with a vivid sense of life?
Was he trying to contrast the portrait with the blacks and greys of the earlier Guernica? There is no consensus on this issue.
Explanation of Other Paintings by Picasso. Early painting of the Parisian art patron. Picasso's first step towards Cubism. A masterpiece of contemporary classicism.
0コメント