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41
Cubist mode of vision and construction continued vital for many years. Every abstract current in
abstract art during the period from the 1920s to the present owes a debt to Cubism. For the rest of
his life Picasso continued to make use of Cubist forms and ideas.
During the years immediately after World War I, it is not possible to talk of "periods" in
Picasso's work; two sharply different styles, superficially opposed, but in reality strongly related to
each other, exist side by side. The gorgeous Three Musicians, of 1921, is a Synthetic Cubist picture
in that the planes are, now locked into a total design, governed by the recognisable image. The three
musicians are undoubtedly a Pierrot, a Harlequin and a Franciscan monk. The planes into which
they have been divided proceed according to their own laws and not those of natural appearances.
The colouring is as brilliant as that of any Fauve painting. Its hard clear tones together with the
astonishing size create a splendid decorative effect.
In 1917 Picasso visited Italy. He was greatly impressed by the grandeur of the Italian past,
especially Roman sculpture and the mural paintings of Giotto. Quite unexpectedly Picasso devel-
oped a monumental and largely monochromatic Classical style with complete figures heavily
modelled as if they were statues. He experimented with every aspect of Classical style, but his most
imposing Classical creations are the majestic compositions involving seated giantesses seeming to
derive from a legendary past. In Three Women at the Spring, of 1921, Picasso has made the figures
graceless, emphasising the bulk and weight of their hands and feet, and intensifying the
impersonality of their stony faces. For several years this Classical style coexisted in Picasso's
production with late Cubism.
Picasso's post-Cubist works are characterised by the lightning changes of styles. Sometimes
incompatible styles appear side by side in the same painting. During the 1930s Picasso took an
active part in the Surrealist movement. His best work of this decade, and the greatest of all social
protest pictures is Guernica. Picasso executed this enormous painting to fulfil a commission for the
pavilion of the Spanish republican government at the Paris Exposition of 1937, while the civil war
was still going in Spain. Intended as a protest against the destruction of the little Basque town of
Guernica in April 1937, by the Nazi bombers in the service of the Spanish Fascists, the picture has
become in retrospect a memorial to all crimes against humanity in the twentieth century. As he
worked, Picasso combined images drawn from Christian iconography with motives from Spanish
folk culture, especially the bullfight, and from his own past. Actual destruction is reduced to
fragmentary glimpses of walls and tiled roofs, and flames shooting from a burning house at the
right. A bereft mother rushes screaming from the building, her arms thrown wide. Agonised heads
and arms emerge from the wreckage. At the left a mother holding her dead child looks upward,
shrieking. The merciless bull above her, is surely related to the dread Minotaur, adopted by the
Surrealists, as an embodiment of the irrational in man. If the bull signifies the forces of Fascism, the
dying horse suggests the torment of the Spanish people, and the oil lamp held above is the
resistance of humanity against the mechanised eye, whose iris is a electric bulb. The spiritual
message of combined terror and resistance is borne, unexpectedly, by the Cubist aesthetic means.
An explosion of shattered planes of black, white, and grey reshapes itself as one watches into a
giant pyramid, as if triumphant even in the destruction.
Picasso never again reached this height, and though he continued painting with great energy for
36 years, much of his work is a recapitulation of motives he had invented.
Make sure you know how to pronounce the following words:
Picasso [
]; Cubism [
]; wreckage [
], Toulouse-Lautrec
[
]; synthetic [
]; abstract [
]; Pierrot [
];
Harlequin [
]; Franciscan [
]; Minotaur [
]; Dadaism
[
]; Basque [
]; Spanish [
]; France [
]; absinthe [
];
monk [
]; Guernica [
]; melancholy [
]
NOTES
Absinthe Drinker - "Любительница абсента"
Salimbanques - "Комедианты"
Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon - "Авиньонские девушки"