Biography

Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain, on October 25th. He was born to Don Jose Ruiz Blasco and Maria Picasso de Ruiz. He studied in Spain but lived most of his artistic life in France. He started to develop as a professional artist at a very young age. He experimented with Cubism in 1909. From that point on he became very famous.

The Influence

The Second World War changed Picasso’s form of expression.  Violence and symbols of destruction increased in Picasso’s work during the war.  Later paintings were influenced by war conditions in Europe. By the fall of 1939, several central European countries had been swallowed by up by Nazi Germany. Western Europe was alone in the fight since the leaders of Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a secret agreement not to go to war with each other. Due to the conflicts and confusion that spread quickly in the French military command and the strength and speed of the Germans invasion, France was defeated on May 12, 1940. 

Picasso had been staying at the seaside of Royan, but he returned to his studio in Paris, despite many invitations to leave the country and find safety overseas. He felt a deep loyalty to France because it had been his home for 35 years.  However, personal freedoms were severely restricted and the French people lived in fear.

Throughout these years, Picasso worked in his studio, despite shortage of food, fuel, and art materials. There were not many canvases and Picasso had to adapt to new materials in which he could paint his thoughts.  Newspaper became his canvas. Picasso did not paint the war realistically, but his pictures and sculptures reflected the trauma through which the world was passing.

One of the most important images of the war years was Guernica, which represents the great catastrophe of the bombing in a Spanish town. It is a mural, containing mostly newspaper because of the shortage of canvases. 

This mural warned the world about the horrors of war.  Within the mural is a human figure that is grossly distorted.  The human face’s attractive eyes detach out of their sockets, detached to such an extent that they are represented on another part of the body. The nose, mouth and the other features become something inhuman. 

Infrahuman faces were to be the predominant features of Picasso’s paintings in the long, dark years from 1939-1944.  He combined infrahuman faces with high violent colors in order to create a greater impact.  One such color is red. Black thick lines are added to the paintings in order to create that monstrous feeling of war. For example, Joseph Fabre, a writer, stated:  Women Dressing her Hair shows us the painter's vision had once more been marked by violence unleashed.”

In Picasso's great sculpture, Man With Sheep, the force of the sheep struggling to escape and the force of the man holding firmly in order to keep control of the sheep made this sculpture look like a symbol of life and hope. That hope finally became a reality to France because by late summer of 1944 all of France was free again. The German forces withdrew across the Rhine, and Paris awoke from a long nightmare.

Picasso emerged from the war years with a reputation even greater than before. He was seen as a hero who had defied and outwitted the Nazis.

That fall, the “Salon de la Liberacion” served as a large hall for his work: Seventy-four paintings and five sculptures from the war years were exhibited. Picasso’s body of work now included 7,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures. He is considered one of the world’s greatest contributors to modern art.