An art genius

In the course of his life, he has been a real sign of contradiction, often at the centre of violent polemics, and this has happened because his activity has never been that of a "neutral" artist, both from a character point of view and from a political-social one, which is why his painting has found itself deeply involved in history. An artist and a man of alarm and emergency, who with his painting has been able to address the great issues that worry millions and millions of people around the world: think of the "Bombing of Guernica", the "Massacre in Korea", and especially the "Dove of Peace", which has become a universally recognized and loved symbol. On the other hand, he did not hesitate, directly, to expose himself, to take sides, to make his prestige weigh in favour of the causes he believed to be right. For more than sixty years Picasso dominated the modern art scene. He was born in Malaga on 25 October 1881 and died in Mougins in April 1973. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a painter and drawing teacher at the Provincial Art School. The name of Picasso, with whom he began to sign his works, omitting his paternal name, is that of his mother: Maria Picasso Lopez. His first attempts at painting were very early. Living in a house full of brushes and colours, his natural inclination was certainly favoured. Just look at a painting like the "Old Couple", painted when she was only ten years old. In 1897, in Madrid, Picasso enrolled at the Academy of San Ferdinando, but in reality, in the capital, he preferred the Prado Museum and independent work to academic classrooms. So he ended up interrupting his studies to devote himself to painting according to his own impulses.

In the fervour of the early 20th century, his friends are a group of artists and writers, influenced by the cultural circles of the time where people recited, played, discussed and drank, he developed his personality. The influences acting on him are various and different: Greek, Japanese prints, English Pre-Raphaelites and German draftsmen. But times were shortening and his fame as a young painter became apparent. In 1901, an exhibition with seventy-five works was organised in Paris: bullfights, cabaret scenes, variations on the theme of lovers embracing each other. In the same year, he began his first completely autonomous and original period, the “blue period”, which lasted until 1904, when the “pink period” began, followed by other periods: “African period” and “synthetic cubism”. Years later it will be considered forever the “father of Cubism”. In the meantime, he had met the great contemporary poets and discovered Cézanne's painting. The Cubist season was just around the corner: between 1908 and 1909. But many other things were happening in these years. The year before the outbreak of the war, in '13, his father died; the war took many friends away from him. The post-war period marked for him the full expansion of the neoclassical experience that began in '15, an experience that continued at the same time as the further development of Cubism.

It would take a long time to follow all Picasso's movements in those years, but we cannot forget to mention his stay on the Mediterranean coast, in Juan Les-Pins, in the spring and summer of '20: this stay had aroused the most constant motives of his art, the mythical ones, and the sea, from now on, will be an indelible memory for him, so much so that, from '22 onwards, his usual home will be that one. In the meantime, he was also involved in scenography, but above all in sculpture, producing a series of masterpieces: "the Cock" of '32, "The Man with the Lamb" of '44 and "the Goat" of '50. But for Picasso's art, a decisive year was 1934, the year of his return to Spain, when he seemed to discover almost for the first time the energy, vitality and exalting the beauty of his homeland. This passionate contact with his homeland also gave particular strength to his adherence to the cause of the Spanish Republic. The Republican government, in the very first days of the civil war, which broke out in July 36, appointed him director of the Prado Museum. The following year, Picasso engraved the two plates of "Franco's Dream and Lie". The drama of the war that led Picasso to choose to side with the Spanish Republic against Franco is, after all, in the very character of his life. From his adolescence, he had had precise political inclinations. Picasso was in Paris when he heard the news of the bombing of Guernica, perpetrated by the Nazi-Fascist air force on 28 April 1937. In June, the masterpiece, which commemorates the bombardment suffered by the civilian population of the Basque city of the same name, was exhibited in the Spanish pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris. The painting is now in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

In 39, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a major exhibition, which confirmed the value and recognition of Picasso on the other side of the Atlantic. But here, alongside this triumph, there was the painful announcement of his mother's death in Barcelona and, in September, the outbreak of World War II. During the summer in Antibes, he painted a large and happy picture: "Night fishing in Antibes"; with the war and the invasion of France, his paintings became increasingly tragic. After the liberation, Picasso joined the French Communist Party, explaining the reasons for it in a letter sent to an American magazine: "My membership of the Communist Party is the logical consequence of my whole life...". The feeling of a civil and political duty to fulfil will accompany him until the end of his days. In 1948 he participated in the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw, Poland. The following year, for the same reason, he went to Italy. This is also the year in which he gave Aragon, for the manifesto of the World Peace Congress, the lithograph of the famous Dove. With this same spirit, in the summer of '50, he painted the “Massacre in Korea”, and in '52 “War and Peace”. Some believe that Picasso was able to make his paintings because he suffered from migraine, believing that the disproportionate and vertically cut faces are the effect of the broken visions that those who suffer from this pathology have. Migraine or not, his artistic power was inexhaustible. Animated by a creative fervour of extraordinary intensity, even at eighty and ninety years old his creativity and ability to work seemed anything but extinct and paintings, drawings and engravings continued to accumulate in his studio leaving us all with an immense artistic and cultural heritage.