Pablo Picasso Essay, Research Paper

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One of the Picasso favorite pastimes was during the first winter of the First World War

was learning Russian. ?It was a fasicination with Russia and mostly a fascination with the

Barones Helen d?Oettingen. ? Part f Picasso seductiveness was his willingness to be seduced,

and he and the Barones spent many long evenings together, absorbed, as far as the world was

concerned, in advancing his knowledge of Russia? (Cooper 15). At the same time when

Picasso was having one of his many flings, Eva became very sick. When Eva was

hospitalized, that was the first time Picasso was alone in years. He went to see her everyday at

the hospital, but he needed someone to comfort him during his lonely nights. He found

someone to comfort him during his lonely nights. Gaby Lespinasse was her name. A beautiful

twenty-seven year old Parisian. December 14, 1915, Eva dies. ?My poor Eva is dead,? he

wrote to Gertrude Stein. ? It was a great sorrow? she was always so good to me.? Ever since

his little sister had so suddenly died, it seemed that death always winning.? (Huffington 52).

This was Picasso saddest Christmas of his life. After Eva?s death Picasso met Olga

Koklova, she was the daughter of a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and had been bornin

in Niezin, in the ukraine. Picassso had always had a fascination with Russian things. On July

12, 1918 Picasso married Olga. On February 4, 1921, Olga gave birth to a baby boy. They

named him Paulo. Paulo was one of Picasso favorite subjects for many years. He first

sketched him on the day he was born, and he continued and paint pictures of Paulo while he

grew up.

In 1927, Picasso met Marie-Therese, who would later give birth to his daughter. On

September 5, 1935 Marie-Therese gave birth to a girl. This was Picasso second child by a

different women. ? The baby was given the name of her father?s dead sister, Maria de

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LaConcpcion, but on her birth certificate the identity of the father was declared

unknown?(Huffington 54). He loved Paulo more than he loved her. He would later change her

name to Maya Walter.

One of Picasso?s best-known paintings is Guernica, done in 1937 during the Spanish

Civil War. Nazi airplanes had bombed the Spanish town of Guernica. Picasso was outraged

by news of the death and destruction and put these feelings into a painting 26 feet long. It was

painted in black, white, and grey, and it shows people dying and suffering raid. (e.library).

The novelist Claude Roy, saw Guernica at the Paris World?s Fair and described it as ? a

message from another planet.? ?Its violence dumbfounded me, it petrified me with an anxiety

I had never experienced before.? The Surrealist poet Michel Leiris summed up the sense of

despair engendered by Guernica: ? In a rectangle of black and white such as that in which

ancient tragedy appeared to us, Picasso sends us our announcement of our mourning: all that

we love is going to die?..? Herbert Read went even further: all that we love, Picasso is

saying has died.

On May 15, 1947, at the Belvedere Clinic in Boulogne, Francoise gave birth to a baby

boy. This was Picass?s third child by a third women. They named the baby Claude. This is

what Dominique Desanti, who visited a few times after Claude was born had to say.

?They were very striking couple together. She was so beautiful and he was

really astonishing, so aesthetically they were very striking to look at. He would

make aggressive remarks meant to pu down and humiliate her in front of

otheres ans she would laugh and make what he said seem innocuous. He would

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refer to her as ?the woman.? ?What has the woman made for dinner?? he

would ask. Or he would look at an erotically dressed woman on a postcard and

sight: ?What a dream to have such a woman in front of you.? And Francoise

would laugh and diffuse it: ?It?s very easy. We can do that. Just get me a dress

like that and I?ll put ion ? it would be a very amusing disguise.? She never

looked cross or humiliated; she always made you feel that they were acting in a

play. That was his way of being? he was cruel whether it was with his woman,

his best friends or whoever was around if he felt like it. So if you decided to

live with him, you needed unusual strength an unusual maturity to find your

part in his play and improvise the text?(Huffington 60).

In 1949, Picasso had another child with Francoise, it was a little girl, her name was

Ann Paloma Gilot. Francoise taught it would be best if Picasso would just stop pretending that

he had no other life. She Maya to meet Claude and Paloma. ?Why have Maya continue to

grow a lie, hearing at school or reading a newspaper and magazines things that her mother

denied at home? It?s the easiest way to go crazy,? Francoise told Picasso, ?not knowing if you

are seeing the sun at noon or the moon. You pretend that you are unusual , then let?s really

lead an unusual life, instead of playing hide-and-seek with the truth.? He did not like idea of

Francoise trying to put and end to his games, but at the same he was intrigued by the .

possibilities that would be opened up by such an encounter? (Duncan 68). He finally agreed

for Maya to meet Claude and Paloma. Francoise and Marie-Therese were going to meet too.

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Picasso?s wife started to figure out Picasso?s strategy. ?He?d like to put those around

him in competition with each other. He was masterful at using one person like the red flag and

the other like the bull. While the bull was busy charging against the red flag, Pablo could,

unnoticed, deal his wounding thrusts. And most people didn?t even think to look who was

hiding behind the red flag? ( Huffington 63).

?November 28, 1953, a month after his seventy- second birthday, he stopped talking

and took his despair in hand, and started working.? He worked feverishly, and in just over two

months produced 180 drawings.? The peot Michel Leiris called the series a ?visual diary of a

hateful season in hell, a crisis in his private lif leading him to question everything?

(Huffington 63). Rebecca West wrote, ? soft against her smooth flesh, its nervous energy

crackling against her serenity, her faculty of acceptance bringing the little animal into unity

with herself. She is as strongly affirmative as a Greek goddess. ? She is the tree of life and the

tree of knowledge. And the painter?s despair is not just that he is an old man who must give

up ?his place at the feast of sensual pleasure?; it is that he an old who will die with out

knowing why he has lived and why he has painted. Neither his gifts nor his endless sexual

adventures have brought him any closer to the secret of life that the young woman seems to

know and from which she seems to draw her serenity and her deep acceptance of everything,

including? (Huffington 65).

On March 2, 1961 Picasso married Jacqueline Roque. This was his third wife and his

last one too. She wasn?t fond of his kids cause they were just a constant reminder of the

women Picasso has had in his life. Plus it also reminded her that Picasso couldn?t give her a

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child at his old age. As Picasso?s children got older she could no longer tolerate them

anymore. She would make up lies about them and he would totally isolate himself from his

kids. She just wanted Picasso all to herself.

In June of 1972 Picasso drew his last self-portrait. It was a face of a dozen anguish and

primordial horror held next to the mask that he had worn for so long and that had fooled so

many. ( Huffington 67). It was the horror he had painted and the anguish he had caused and

which, in his own anguish, he continued to cause. (Huffington 67).

On April 8, 1973 Pablo Picasso died. Three months his grandson Pablito died of

starvation. On October of 1977, on the fiftieth anniversary of the first time they met Marie-

Therese hanged herself. In 1986 Jacqueline shot herself in the temple. I learned that Picasso

always needed someone with him, sexually, mentally, he just needed someone. His death

brought a lot of tragedy on his family. As me move toward the beginning of a new century,

what will Picasso, so irrevocably tied to the age that is dying, have to say to the age being

born again(Huffington 70).

Bibliography

Juan Alfonso

Art Appreciation

Mr. Shields

Bibliography

Diax, Pierre and Boulaille, George . The Sculpture of Picasso . Time Life

Books, 1967

Cooper, Douglas. The Blue Rose Period of Picasso. Time Life Books,

1967

Berger, John. The Success and Failure of Picasso. Battmer: Penguin Books, 1965

Duncan, David. The Private World of Picasso. New York: Harper, 1958

Gilot, Francoise. Life With Picasso. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964

Padrta, Jim. Picasso The Early Years. New York: Tudor Publishing Co, n.d.

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition. Columbia University: Lemont

& Hauspie Speech, 1993

Picasso, Pablo , Young Students Learning Library, 1994

Huffington, Arianna. Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, Atlantic Monthly,

1988

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