Picasso, Pablo / 1.0 / encyclopedic - 1914-1918-Online (WW1) Encyclopedia (original) (raw)
Picasso, Pablo
Picasso, Pablo
Artist
Born 24 October 1881 in Málaga, Spain
Died 08 April 1973 in Mougins, France
Summary
A citizen of neutral Spain, Pablo Picasso did not fight in the war, but his avant-garde artwork accompanied war culture right up to its use in camouflage.
Table of contents
Introduction
Three artists parted ways on mobilization day: André Derain (1880-1954) and the two inventors of cubism, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). The neutral Spaniard saw the two Frenchmen off on a train for the front, but did not enlist himself. While Picasso’s interest in the war focused on his friends who were mobilized, killed, wounded or maimed – like Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), whose portrait he painted as an artilleryman, then wounded –, he focused above all on his work, between cubism, pointillism and a certain tendency for neo-classicism which in 1919 was called a “return to order”.
Cubism and the War
At the start of the war, cubism was incorrectly perceived as a German invention and scorned as “_kubist Kultur_”, partly because Picasso’s art dealer was the German Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) who was forced to flee to Switzerland. And yet cubism and its fragmentation of pictorial space – like all of the modernisms, futurism and vorticism – influenced camouflage. According to Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), when Picasso saw the first camouflaged canons in Paris, he exclaimed, “we created that”.1 In Rome, where he went with Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), Picasso worked as a set painter on the ballet Parade choreographed by Léonide Massine (1896-1979) for Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) Russian ballet, set to music by Eric Satie (1866-1925). On 18 May 1917, Parade premiered at the Châtelet theatre in Paris, but the avant-gardism of the whole show and of Picasso’s cubist masks more particularly enraged the audience. He went back to Harlequins – perhaps the camouflage in his own war.
Annette Becker, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Notes
- Stein, Gertrude: Autobiographie d’Alice Tokias, Paris 1934, (in English, 1933).↑
Selected Bibliography
- Becker, Annette: Arts, in: Winter, Jay (ed.): The Cambridge history of the First World War. Civil society, vol. 3, New York 2014 Cambridge University Press.
- Becker, Annette: Voir la Grande Guerre. Un autre récit, 1914-2014, Paris, 2014: Armand Colin.
- Richardson, John: A life of Picasso, 1907-1917. The painter of modern life, vol. 2, New York, 1996: Random House.
Citation
Annette Becker: Picasso, Pablo, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2015-08-21. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10710
Metadata
Author Keywords
cubism; modernism; avant-garde
Article Type
Encyclopedic Entry
Classification Group
Persons