Word: picasso
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Other big prices: $2.500 for Rouault's The Clown; $1,600 for Modigliani's Lunia Czechowska; $3,500 for a Derain still life; $3,000 for a Redon flower piece. Collector Chrysler also bought small Picasso and Cézanne water colors for $1,350 and $1,625 respectively...
...Picasso's work up to the present, the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective show omitted only his student output and his recent sculpture (whose casting for the show World War II halted). Perhaps no other artist could survive so big a one-man show so well. It ranged from an academic study of moonlight and roses, painted in 1898 when Picasso was 17 and had already set himself up as an independent artist in Barcelona, to 1939 portraits in which he practices artistic schizophrenia and tries to catch several views of a face at once...
...Paris and Barcelona, Picasso painted the sombre, introspective canvases of his "Blue Period." By 1904 he returned to live in Paris, permanently, and in swift succession followed the "Harlequin," "Rose" and "Negro" periods. By 1908 he was pioneering in cubism, with a side foray into pasted paper compositions. Picasso's seven years' designing for the Russian Ballet, beginning in 1917, led him into a neo-classical realism, culminating in the sculptural Three Graces (see cut) of 1924. Year later his classicism came to a violent end with his painting, The Three Dancers (see cut), which left...
Even his opponents admit that Picasso has influenced the art of his time more than any of his contemporaries. As an inventor and transmitter of painting techniques he is unrivaled. A believer in eclecticism if not in consecutive growth, Picasso himself knows why he is always changing. Says he: "The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. That is why we must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there...
...What Picasso's effect on the future will be, no one yet can say. Doubtless he is content to have provided so many possible breaks with the past. "In the old days," he told a disciple in 1935, "pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture-then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else...