Made for the Present: The Many Styles of Pablo Picasso | The Art Institute of Chicago

Presenting more than 60 of Picasso’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures, the show examines how these works reveal his professional relationships with art dealers and printers and his personal relationships with romantic partners, friends, and children. Because the show spans Picasso’s 70-year career, it also provides insight into the many styles Picasso practiced, from his early Blue Period to the works made during his last two decades. Here we take a closer look at some of these major artistic styles and approaches.

“The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.”

—Pablo Picasso

Blue Period

Lasting roughly from 1901 to 1904, Picasso’s Blue Period explores themes of despair and isolation and includes some of the Art Institute’s most recognizable works, such as the painting The Old Guitarist and two works in this exhibition, Woman with a Helmet of Hair and the unique impression of The Frugal Meal printed in blue ink. 

While his move to somber subject matter was not instigated by any one event or person, the death of his friend Carles Casagemas (1880–1901) was most certainly a contributing factor. In fact, Picasso said, “I started painting in blue when I learned of Casagemas’s death.”

Picasso was not in Paris when his friend died there the evening of February 17, 1901; he had recently left on a trip back to Spain. Casagemas had invited several other friends, including his love interest, Germaine Gargallo (1880–1948), to the Hippodrome Café for a farewell dinner before his own planned return to his native Spain. He asked Gargallo for a second time to marry him, and again she refused. In a drunken rage, Casagemas shot Gargallo in the head, grazing her temple, and then turned the gun on himself. The small pastel Young Woman with a Hat, currently on view in Picasso: Drawing from Life, is likely a portrait of Germaine Gargallo, thereby making this early work—the earliest drawing by Picasso in the Art Institute’s collection—a critical link between Picasso’s first months in Paris and the advent of his captivating Blue Period.

Cubism

In the summer of 1907, the German-born art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979) made his first visit to Picasso’s studio. There, he saw Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art), a painting that confused nearly everyone, including Picasso’s dealer at the time, Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939). But Kahnweiler instantly recognized the importance of the painting and the new artistic direction it suggested. From that moment on, Kahnweiler was committed to supporting Picasso.

In 1908 Kahnweiler introduced Picasso to Georges Braque (1882–1963), and together the two artists created the revolutionary style now known as Cubism, in which abstracted forms are depicted from several viewpoints at once. According to Picasso, they “wanted to paint not what you see but what you know is there,” and Braque described this creative friendship as two “mountain-climbers roped together.” Their resulting, nearly identical visual approach is evident in the prints Fox and Still Life with Bottle of Marc, both published by Kahnweiler.

The Art Institute is fortunate to house one of the most important works from this fruitful and influential period: Picasso’s Cubist portrait Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler’s unwavering belief in Cubism generally and Picasso specifically cannot be overstated. Even Picasso once asked, “What would have become of us if Kahnweiler had not had good business sense?”

“Style is besides the point. Nobody would pay attention if one always said the same thing, in the same words and the same tone of voice.”

—Pablo Picasso

A Return to Order

On the heels of his radical pictorial experimentations with Cubism, Picasso toggled between realism and abstraction. With Braque serving in World War I and the German Kahnweiler in exile, the artist found new forms of inspiration and patronage. Picasso traveled to Italy in 1917, where he became involved with a group of dancers and choreographers around the Ballet Russes, for whom he made stage designs and costumes. One such person was the choreographer Léonide Massine, whose powerful graphite portrait appears as the antithesis to that of Kahnweiler from 10 years prior.

The Russian Massine is drawn in exacting detail—his classical nose, almond-shaped eyes, and expertly combed hair nearly jumps off the page. Due to its naturalistically rendered forms and sculptural qualities, the style of this portrait, like Picasso’s related painting Mother and Child (1921), came to be known as the return to order, in opposition to the abstracting tendencies of the more avant-garde Cubism.

Another classically oriented portrait in the exhibition, the lithograph Face of Marie-Thérèse, was initially titled more anonymously, simply Face. Though married to Olga Kokhlova, Picasso began an affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter shortly before this lithograph was created as the frontispiece for a book. It was only later that it came to be identified as his young lover.

War and the Minotaur

During the Second World War, Picasso’s imagery became more openly political and aggressive. Among the repeated motifs he depicted during this period was the minotaur, a creature from Greek mythology that is half man and half bull. 

In Minotaur and Wounded Horse, the beast threatens a frightened and wounded horse in a ring. While the Spanish Picasso often depicted bullfights, here the man-bull emerges victorious, seemingly threatening the exquisitely drawn animal. A wounded horse appears again in Picasso’s two-part etching The Dream and Lie of Franco (plate 1, plate 2) along with women, children, and other victims of war. The etchings were made to satirize General Francisco Franco’s murderous rule in Spain, showing its protagonist as a monstrous beast. Each of the 18 vignettes were reproduced on separate postcards, intended to raise funds to support Spain’s anti-Fascist government.

Toward the end of the war, Picasso made the seemingly tranquil drawing Head of a Young Boy. However, upon close reflection, the viewer can see the sheet is torn and heavily worked. The young man was probably a resistance fighter the artist brought into his studio from the streets to serve as a model; with the older men off at battle, groups of teenagers rose up to fight against their Nazi occupiers. The sweet and placid face of the youth is at odds with both the likely role he played in the war and the aggressive measures Picasso took on the sheet itself.

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”

―Pablo Picasso

Later Years and Printmaking

Picasso spent the last three decades of his life in the South of France producing thousands of works of art in all media. He particularly embraced printmaking, and between 1945 and 1973, Picasso created hundreds of prints with master printers Roger Lacourière (1892–1966), Fernand Mourlot (1895–1988), and Hidalgo Arnéra (1922–2007).

Always looking for new creative outlets, Picasso turned to the medium of linocut, a printmaking process using a simple sheet of linoleum, a common material in kitchen flooring. Linoleum’s relatively soft surface made it easy to carve, which appealed to Picasso’s incessant need to create.

Working with Arnéra, Picasso produced approximately 150 linocuts over a 10-year period beginning in the mid-1950s, with themes including the bullfight; his second wife, Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986); and still lifes. The Art Institute’s collection contains 19 such linocuts, and 12 of them document the collaborative generation of Still-Life with Lunch I and II. Several sheets from the series are from Arnéra’s collection, and his handwriting and signature can be found on many prints below the image.

Throughout his lifetime, these professional and personal partnerships not only allowed Picasso to achieve great success but also galvanized his creative experimentation. From his friendship with Casagemas and support from Kahnweiler to his relationship with Walter and political actions against Franco, and on to his final collaborative projects with Arnéra, Picasso’s artistic phases and styles were nourished by others.

—Jay A. Clarke, Rothman Family Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Emily Ziemba, director of curatorial administration and research curator, Prints and Drawings

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