Pablo Picasso: "Reality must be destroyed"

April 08, 2021 at 07:14 a.m.
Mediterranean Landscape (1952), Source: Canal Foundation
Mediterranean Landscape (1952), Source: Canal Foundation

 

The year 1943 passed, the world was living the Second World War, and Francoise Gilot, who spent the afternoon in a restaurant in Paris with her friend Genevieve Aliquot and the movie actor Alain cuny, was visited at his table by the same Pablo Picasso.

Thus, she with 21 years and he with 61, began a love relationship of ten years that would bear two children, and where she well remembers that the painter born in Malaga once told her: "Françoise, reality must be shattered. "

Thus, as anticipated by his then partner, Gilot mentions in his book "life with picasso”, Picasso magically transformed all the things he saw, even Gilot herself, who felt that the Spaniard had forced" a metamorphosis in his nature ", re-making it to suit him, only to then look elsewhere when she It had served its purpose, which was ultimately to fuel his creativity and comfort his ego.

And it is that the example of what Françoise Gilot survived serves as a useful mirror to the life and work of Pablo Picasso, whose hand throbbed with vitality to give life to something as simple as the handles of a bicycle, but also felt diabolical pleasure in deforming appearances, deforming faces and twisting bodies, subjecting reality to a tormenting inquisition.

 

Image within content

Les femmes d'Alger (Version 'O')(1955). SourceLouise Leiris Gallery.
 

Since young, Picasso he was rebellious. He himself said that “For being a bad student they banished him to the 'dungeon', an empty cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took a sketch pad with me and drew endlessly ... I could have stayed there forever drawing nonstop. " Although that did not remain so. In 1900 he moved to France, where he met many of the famous artists who made him placed among the guild. By 1905, American art collectors Leo and G they began to compile his work and helped to make him famous, tearing the story from the legend.

His biographer John Richardson, who lived near him in Provence during the 1950s, talk about a man that he was never interested in telling the whole truth, since his most hidden themes were always the source of his work. "Picasso could be fierce," Richardson said, "but he was also gentle, sweet, like a child.

 

Image within content

Lamp, painted on the Château de Boisgeloup, where Pablo Picasso had a studio, from January 21 to June 8, 1931. Source: Christie's.
 

For Richardson, Picasso was like Frankenstein, who challenged God's creative primacy by welding corpses together; "And he also had a Dracula side," he adds. "He fed on those around him, like a vampire sucking the life out of his victims. Referring to his fans, autograph seekers, collectors and paparazzi: 'These people cut me up like a chicken at the dinner table. food, but who feeds me?

Dora maar, the woman who cries in the paintings of the late 1930s and her partner after their separation with Gilot, decided to call him the apostle who regenerated art, he mentioned that Pablo Picasso took control of you, he turned you upside down. Everyone had to be seduced, it drained your energy and left you drained.

 

Image within content

Portrait of Dora Maar, 1939. Source: Reina Sofia Museum.
 

A living legacy

 

Pablo Diego Francisco de Paula Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santisíma Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, who decided to use only the first and last word of his extensive name to show himself to others, not only stands out as a fundamental personality in the history of XNUMXth century art, but also as an influential surname in the history of mankind.

His strong personality, intense form of painting, the contortion of his characters, and the turbulent life that places him as the first rockstar in the history of art, are part of the vast universe that is formed only by the rumbling of his surname. 

 

Image within content

Bullfight, (1934). The bull, the artist's alter ego, appears in his painting loaded with symbolism, although always endowed with ambiguous meanings. Source: Thyssen Museum.
 

Pablo Picasso was a paradox. Whatever is said about him, the opposite is also true. Lydia corbett, Also known as Sylvette David, is a French artist and artist model known for being "the girl with the ponytail"In Pablo Picasso's Sylvette series of paintings, he mentions that" His lovers, friends, models - in short, all of us who surround ourselves with him - know that he metamorphosed us, and if we were redeemed or destroyed, not even we can to be sure."

 

Image within content

Sylvette David was born in Paris in 1935, and at the age of 19 she posed for Pabli Picasso. Later he became known as La ponytail girl. Source: Pablo-Ruiz-Picasso Gallery.
 

At the end of his life, and today that another year of a world without him is being celebrated, the clearest thing that remains of Pablo Picasso is that lately he did destroy reality, made it his own, and in fact, he has never let it go.