Pablo Picasso, with the «Corriere» the biography written by Patrick O'Brian-Corriere.it

Pablo Picasso, with the «Corriere» the biography written by Patrick O'Brian-Corriere.it


Of PIERLUIGI PANZA

From 31 March on newsstands for a month with the newspaper the volume dedicated to the Spanish genius who disappeared fifty years ago written by the novelist who was also his friend

Picasso (Malaga, October 25, 1881) it had seven names since it was popular belief that this number protected the newborn. He was baptized as Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, María de los Remedios, Crispiniano y de la Santísima Trinidad. Pablo was the name of his priest uncle who had died two years earlier, the others were the names of his grandparents or patron saints. As for his surname, Picasso was that of his mother, of Ligurian origin: his was Ruiz.


He was the son of the painter José Ruiz y Blasco, a teacher at art academies in Malaga, La Coruña and Barcelona, ​​he was therefore a son of art and received a classical education. The first painting of him, The yellow picador, was made at the age of 9 and shows perfect command of composition. Picasso was a lover of Andalusia and its traditions, including bullfighting. During his exile, during the Franco period, the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín (father of the singer Miguel Bosé) gave him a head (a cloak). Unable to deliver it, he had it delivered to him by the Real Madrid players at the end of a game. At the age of 13 he exhibited in an exhibition in the factory in calle Real in La Coruña: the Picasso Foundation keeps the enthusiastic reviews in the newspapers of the time.

Picasso's before and after was 1901, when his friend, the painter Carlos Casagemas, shot himself at the Parisian Café de l'Hippodrome on boulevard de Clichy as he was rejected by the model and dancer Laure Gargallo. Picasso fell into an irrepressible mourning, obsessed with the figure of his friend. It was the beginning of the so-called blue period, with dark works, gloomy themes, tragedies, poverty, or the beginning of his tug of war with life. He will follow the pink period when he settled, with chronic poverty, in Paris from 1904. In 1907 the transition to Cubism with Les demoiselles d'Avignon. It was the first Cubist painting belonging to the so-called African period. Picasso made a hundred preparatory studies and sketches for this work that was to be called Le bordel philosophiquea brothel that he knew well: however there are numerous interpretations.

In September 1936 the government appointed him director of the Prado, but he never took office and his dismissal has never been officially published. There, however, he found the paintings he idolized. One of the most important works to understand Picasso was the face to face with the totem of all Spanish painting: Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez, the painting of paintings, the meta-painting. Picasso goes to the court of the greatest Spanish painter and confronts him. He creates a cycle of 58 paintings, kept at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, ​​in each of which he deconstructs Velázquez's canvas. Here the process of reducing every realistic aspect of the ruling family to the abstract form of the cube or simple solids is extremely simplified and clear. The decomposition of the Infanta of Spain becomes a sensitive game of shapes.

Giulio Carlo Argan claimed that Picasso had revolutionized the entire conception of drawing, no longer thought of as a reproduction of reality but as a tool «which disintegrates the object and restores the naked form of consciousness». Perhaps, the primary form, rather than consciousness. Some critics have identified in another great seventeenth-century Spaniard, Francisco de Zurbarán, an antecedent of Picasso for his giving artistic dignity to humble subjects, for the genre bodegon (tavern, kitchen, market scenes) that captivated the Malaga painter.

Whole volumes have been written of his alpha-alpha male relationship in a striped tank top with women (let's hope this doesn't mean that his paintings will soon be removed from museums): one of his stormiest relationships was with the photographer Dora Maar. The catalog is not short, the list is useless. Of course, although ugly, it tore the hearts and lives of many of her: Olga died evicted, Marie Thérèse hanged herself, Jacqueline committed suicide with a gun to her head and Dora was unable to overcome her depression. It seemed an insatiable revenge from Minotauro-Picasso for what his friend Carlos had suffered (although he also ended up in bed with Gargallo, of course). It is no coincidence that she designed the cover of the first issue of “Minotaurs», the magazine printed by the Swiss-French publisher Albert Skira since 1933.

Fled from Spain in 1936, supported the Spanish Republic and in 1937 exhibited in Paris Guernica, a brutal gesture that became an icon following the news of the extermination of the city's population razed to the ground by Nazi bombing. She was in France during the Second World War, participated in the French Resistance and was a fervent communist after the war: she was also awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1950, although this prize today appears to be an oxymoron. She visited many cities in Italy such as Milan, Rome, Florence and Naples.

Picasso was one of the most prolific painters of all time. It is estimated that he made more than thirteen thousand paintings, 100 thousand prints, 34 thousand illustrations, 300 sculptures and ceramic pieces. He was also a poet and playwright: 300 poems and two plays are preserved (The desire I wish for the rabo And Las cuatro niñas). In 2015, his Les femmes d'Alger (version «O», the most successful) was sold at Christie's, in New York, for 179 million dollars: it was one of the highest prices in the world before being more than doubled by the Salvador Mundi attributed to Leonardo. After all, it is the last painting (there are various versions, more or less cubist) of orientalist painting out of time (1954-55) inspired by Delacroix when we were now in the decolonization phase.

The party for her eightieth birthday, in 1961, was told by María Teresa León in Memory of melancholia: perhaps rebellion against melancholy was his way of life. He died in Mougins, Provence, on April 8, 1973, at the ripe old age of 91: the heirs are varied and the division of the inheritance is complex. For him we can truly say that art was the continuation of life by other means.

The volume with the newspaper and in the bookstore for Longanesi


«Some art historians have wanted to distinguish between Picasso the painter, sculptor, draughtsman, lithographer, engraver and ceramist and the man Picasso, carrying out an operation certainly functional to their purposes; others, on the other hand, spoke of Picasso as an artist only incidentally, focusing on the man as he appeared away from the easel. Our book would like to be halfway between the two extreme positions, revealing a man who, although entirely dedicated to art, also lived intensely in the personal sphere». So writes Patrick O'Brian introducing his readers to the passionate adventure, mixed with art and life, which is the biography of Pablo Picasso, one of the most iconic painters of the twentieth century. O'Brian (1914-2000) was himself a master: renowned novelist (his famous seafaring saga of Aubrey and Maturinfrom which Peter Weir made his film Master and Commander) and essayist, here we discover him as a biographer of Picasso, of whom he was a personal friend. Direct knowledge of the Spanish genius and O'Brian's writing skills make this documented biography, published for the first time in 1976, a unique reading and one of the most authoritative texts on the artist's life and work. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), the "Corriere della Sera" and Longanesi republish it in a new edition and invite you to discover (or rediscover) it. picasso. A biography (translation by Paola Merla, pp. 576) will remain on newsstands from today for a month, on sale together with the «Corriere» at the price of 12.90 euros in addition to that of the newspaper. At the same time, from today it will be possible to buy the volume for sale in bookshops, for Longanesi.

March 30, 2023 (change March 30, 2023 | 22:14)



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