Above: Picasso, La Vie. 1903. (Blue period)

Father Pablo Sings the Minotaur Blues During Modernisms Maddest Moments

Derek Dey © April 2011

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Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso 1881-1973

"Women are machines for suffering ... For me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats.” - Picasso.

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881. He was the son of a painter who specialized in birds and nature scenes. His mother, Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez idolized the young Picasso obsessively. By age 13 Pablo was so obviously talented his father despaired of his own trade and handed his brushes over to the boy; myth which can be found in a similar form as far back as some Renaissance artists. However Picasso showed himself to be a child prodigy in drawing and outgrew the confines of a strict academic routine. His father was over-controlling much to the young artist's chagrin. The levels of idealization and control in his family robbed Picasso of his secure family base and established a narcissism and anger, which underpinned his ambitions throughout his life.

During his youth a time of artistic and political liberalism was imported into Spain via England and France and the young Picasso grasped the opportunities of the age, as did others, notably Duchamp, the Dadaists and the Surrealists. Marx and his followers introduced communist philosophy and Freud opened up the unconscious in the new science of psychology proclaiming art to be neurosis and life's creative energies, the libido, to be a sexual endeavor. Superficially it looked like a can of worms and these influences ranged through culture, creating revolution, discontent with tradition, and began to form a new literary canon exemplified by D. H. Lawrence's openly provocative works. The First World War, now looming on the humanist's horizon, created poetry of cynicism found in Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and sculpture such as the Vorticist works of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The age of 'Empire' now only a form of delusion and repressed follies drew to a close. The arts reflected this age of chaos, or were defined by it, or strove to create something different despite it; something new, but most were ill prepared for the task. Seeds of contradiction lay secretly within.

Picasso: Portrait of Gertrude Stein. 1906. (a considerable early talent)

Entering the Academy in Barcelona at the age of 16 Picasso soon abandoned or simply forgot any obligation to his family who had already allowed his ambition to become a singular motive force in their own lives. He had been revered by the mother, as a 'golden child,' an enfant terrible, a Diablo, as she thought, and she called him, "an angel, and a devil in beauty," who could do no wrong. His father was persuaded to set him up in a studio close to the Picasso home where his father 'dropped in' more than four or so times a day much to the young artist's chagrin. Being given permission for his narcissism and filled with rising anger and rebellion, from then on, he was always to set his own values and his own rules and do whatever he pleased. There were no boundaries here; he was his own man, the measure of all things usually without regard for others; he was set up for a dysfunctional existence.

In 1895 Picasso's sister died of diphtheria. The event left him traumatized but then the family moved to Barcelona. The young Picasso seemed to revive here. His father took a position at the School of Fine Arts and Picasso had his first studio, the same, where his father dropped in on him all too often only to end up with the two in argument after argument. Picasso however was entered into the school and was found to be impressive in talent but lacking in discipline. His work was shown and attracted honorable mention and on this basis his uncle supported Picasso financially to enter the Royal Academy of San Fernando. Picasso soon abandoned classes though and spent his days in the Prado devouring the old masters.

The tradition he studied here influenced Picasso and images of these masters appear and reappear throughout his life in different forms like recombinant DNA, but in the summer of 1898 he caught scarlet fever and withdrew to the mountains to recuperate. He stayed with a friend, Manuel Pallares in his native village where, it is said, he drank in the skills and crafts of the local people. It must have been his introduction to honest simplicity, a primitivism that he was soon to adopt. Picasso said of this experience, "All I know I learned in the village where Pallares was born."

Picasso moved to Paris in 1900. At the time Paris was lauded as the capital of Europe. Cafes, cabarets, wildness, the architecture, the Universal Exhibition, the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, and the much-celebrated Louvre, held many in enthrallment. The general bustle of life added to the texture, as did getting drunk with additional and frequent encounters of casual sex. The newfound freedom seemed exhilarating and Casagemas, his companion of the time, wrote of Picasso's 19th birthday, "The following day we got together at petit-Pousset and we all got drunk. Utrillo wrote nursery rhymes, Peio sang bawdy songs in Latin and Picasso made sketches." Picasso called his womanizing, "fondling" and stated it did not get in the way of important things such as painting. He and Casagemas went "fondling" at Calle de Londres, a famous brothel and somewhere between there and the other watering holes they met Germaine and Odette; not prostitutes, models. Casagemas fell hard for one of them.

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