THE YOUNG PICASSO
Hilary Hope Guise, professor of art history, Florida State University
Thursday 30–Friday 31 January 3.00 pm COURSE FEES R220; Staff and students R110
Picasso dominated the twentieth century by the force of his personality and extraordinary gifts. He inhabited a non-verbal world in which violence and vulnerability competed for expression, and in which his unique inner visions were both demonic and tender. The young Picasso was indelibly marked by his southern Spanish childhood and the traumas that led to a lifelong fear of death, coupled with an urgent need to express intense life and sexuality.
His arrival in Paris at the age of nineteen, unprepared for the cold north and unable to speak French, plunged him into the toxic atmosphere of Montmartre with its wannabes, its conmen, its prostitutes and its absinthe, which led to tragedy and depression. It also led to life-changing relationships with such charismatic and powerful people as Gertrude and Leo Stein, Fernande Olivier, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, the legendary art dealer Ambroise Vollard, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and many others. While Picasso refused outright to show his works in any salon, Gertrude Stein supported him and hung his works in her ‘pavilion’.
His terrifying ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, for example, was not exhibited for sixteen years. True artists are unwitting mystagogues, and Picasso’s sensitivity to the zeitgeist and his prophetic instincts about the coming of a world war are to be traced in his works leading up to 1914.
This two-lecture course looks at what happened afterwards and how his worldwide fame set the tone for the myriad of ‘schools’ that reflected his original ground-breaking works.
Lecture titles
- The young Picasso: his friends and enemies
- The young Picasso: war and beyond
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