Enrique Mallen’s research while affiliated with Sam Houston State University and other places

In 1905 and 1907 Pablo Picasso worked on two large canvases for which multiple preparatory studies exist. These paintings marked quite different stages in the Spaniard's career. If the first one symbolized his final acceptance into the French modernist establishment, which is usually known as his Rose Period; the second was meant to be a radical break from those conventions, and a determined push to distance himself from established practices. More specifically, what took place between the two canvases was a transition from a fusion of realism and metaphor/allegory to a neo-primitive (and modern) perspective leading to quasi-abstraction. Not surprisingly, the first painting was auction for a record-breaking price in March of 1914, despite the growing political tensions between the great powers, particularly France and Germany, caused by colonial competition and old territorial grievances. Conversely, the second painting sold for much less in 1923, even though France was experiencing a period of rapid economic growth and social change: the so-called "Roaring 20s."

The article explores Picasso’s multiple influences early in his career as he searched for a language that best expressed his vision of reality. Already the first critics, such as Félicien Fagus for his first exhibition at Galerie Vollard, mentioned the impact on the young Spaniard of a wide range of modern painters in addition to the great classical masters. Many of the identifiable periods in his extensive career can be associated with one or more influential artists: Casas, Rusiñol, Steinlen, Munch during the Modernist years in Barcelona; Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh and others in the first years in Paris; El Greco, Nonell, Puvis, among others during the Blue Period; Matisse, Redon, and others, in the Rose Period; Gauguin later on, etc., etc. These are just a few of the many artists whose styles Picasso explored in numerous ways. Their influence often occurred in complex combinations and would not fully disappear from his works once their incidence had left their imprint. Thus one can find the presence of El Greco or Van Gogh as late as the last years of Picasso’s life. Here we will focus on their influence in the period that preceded Cubism, Picasso’s first truly original language.

Pablo Picassos poetry expands the expressive power of language through syntactic mechanisms provided in natural grammar. His poems often consist of adjunct phrases, following a technique that recalls his cubist collages. The relation between the nuclei of those phrasal constituents as they come in contact remains open, so that readers are free to establish multidirectional semantic associations between them. His poetry is primarily word-oriented. As Picasso once stated, he wanted to compose his poems with a palette of words, leaving those words free to fight it out among themselves to attain any possible meaning. Such a combinatorial approach to language could be interpreted from the perspective of linear grammars as proposed by Culicover and Jackendoff, Jackendoff and Wittenberg and Culicover.

Marina Picasso escribió con respecto a la relación de su abuelo con sus compañeras que «las embrujaba, las digiría, y las plasmaba en sus lienzos» (Picasso, 2001, p. 180). Lo que no tomó en cuenta es el hecho que aquellas mujeres jugaron un papel vital en el proceso creativo del artista, a menudo estimulando grandes cambios en su carrera. Aunque no aprobamos de ninguna manera su comportamiento hacia el sexo opuesto, este artículo se concentra en el impacto crucial que una de sus primeras compañeras, Fernande Olivier, tuvo en su obra mientras Picasso avanzaba hacia el Cubismo. El estilo del artistas fue cambiando al inicio de su convivencia con ella en el Bateau-Lavoir, consolidando el conocido Período Rosa. La influencia transformadora de Fernande continuará por algún tiempo, alcanzando puntos críticos durante dos viajes que hicieron juntos a España. Como se sabe, el joven Picasso regresaba a su país de origen cuando se disponía a hacer importantes cambios en su estilo. Éste fue el caso definitivamente durante estas dos visitas a Gósol en 1906 y Horta en 1909. La primera condujo al desarrollo del llamado Periodo Ibérico en el que se centró progresivamente en el uso de máscaras, aplicándolas en un principio al rostro de Fernande. Ella será igualmente un componente esencial durante la segunda estancia en España, cuando Picasso desarrolla en Cubismo Geométrico. Aquí de nuevo, el artista projectó los nuevos descubrimientos en se compañera, intentando integrar pintura y escultura en sus lienzos a través de los rasgos de ella.

For a biographical artist like Pablo Picasso, exploring the correlation between specific individuals or events in his life and certain shifts in his style is a crucial step in understanding his artistic works. This article analyzes these correlations using information recorded on a MySQL database by the Online Picasso Project for over two decades. We exported the database to SQLite and extracted entities using Python and its BeautifulSoup library to analyze term frequency-inverse document frequency using the Gensim library. Our analysis has confirmed that the connections between artistic creations and biographical events do indeed exist.

This article describes Picasso’s first visit to the French capital in 1900, and the events that led to his first major exhibition at the acclaimed Galerie Ambroise Vollard in Paris in 1901. The first section provides a narrative of his early experiences abroad as a young unknown artist, his influences, and the contacts he established with friends, artists and dealers during this important period of his career; the second section traces the histories of the sixty-five artworks that were exhibited, identifying the collections those items went through after they were exhibited, their current locations, as well as the exhibitions in which they have been featured since Vollard first displayed them in his gallery. The last section elaborates on some of the immediate repercussions of the exhibition. The reported findings are the result of extensive research on hundreds of books and catalogs published on Pablo Picasso from 1901 to the present. The new facts we have uncovered are published here for the first time. Readers of the article will learn that the works included in Picasso’s first exhibition in France have been part of the most prestigious art collections, such as those of Justin K. Thannhauser, Gertrude Stein, Chester Dale, Paul Guillaume, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Paul Mellon, Helena Rubinstein, Alfred Flechtheim, Walter C. Arensberg, among others. The works have also been featured in such important overviews of his career as “Picasso, 75th Anniversary” 1957–1958, and “Picasso: An American Tribute”, 1962. Thus, while Vollard claimed that the exhibition at his gallery had no major impact, the facts show that it not only played an important role in Picasso’s acceptance as a groundbreaking newcomer, but also left a significant mark on the rest of his career, as evidenced by the works’ inclusion in the retrospectives held in Paris and Zürich in 1932, and New York in 1980.

Palmer (1999) describes a sequence of four basic stages for visual perception: an im-age-based phase that deals with extracting image structure (primal sketch), a surface-based level which concerns itself with recovering surfaces in depth (2.5-dimensional—henceforth two*-dimensional—sketch), an object-based stage that covers the description of three-dimensional objects (volumetric descriptions), and a category-based phase that handles the identification of objects in terms of known categories. Each of these levels is defined by a different kind of output representation and by the processes that are required to compute it from the input representation. This article points at an interesting parallelism between the surface-based and object-centered stages of vision, and Picasso's two different phases of Cézannian Cubism. In general terms, it is fascinating to see how an artist's intuitive approach to pictorial representation appears to mirror scientific research on vision. Cézanne’s influence becomes clear in the spring of 1908 when the Spaniard started applying the familiar Frenchman’s postulates to his work. Despite the fact that the compositions were strictly inscribed on the picture’s flat surface, none of the object’s corporeality was lost, so that one can often speak in terms of “flat relief.” A change occurred between the end of 1908 and the beginning of 1909 when depicted objects became more solid and roundly modeled, and when pure surface representation yielded to attempts at presenting objects in the round. To that extent, we may speak of an object-based stage in Picasso’s output.

According to Michael Tucker, the breakdown of consciousness in modern art, a breakdown that carries the modern artist backwards to an all-embracing participation with the world, leads to a return to archaic qualities of participation mystique that involves constructive, creative elements of a new vision of reality. This may be observed in Pablo Picasso, who wanted with the help of primitive vision to cleanse painting of the stale and paralyzing conventions that he viewed as a sham compared to the profound truth of art. For the Spaniard, painting at its origins was capable of an expressive force so powerful that even the great classic masters were unable to match it, much less strengthen it. The new art he defended was an art of creation, not imitation. It should follow its own generative principles. I examine the three major periods of Cubism (Cézannian, analytic and synthetic) from this perspective as a process of creativity in which Picasso struggled to find the true real and in the process opened up the possibility for new creations including his own persona.

The 1907 Salon d’Automne included a Cézanne retrospective. Comprising fifty-six of his works, most of them oils, it featured a group of late paintings, among them some nominally “unfinished.” It had not been until his final years that the painter had begun to have wider public appeal. Now he had become the focus of attention of the avant-garde. Leo Stein recounted this transformation: “Hitherto Cézanne had been important only for the few; he was about to become important for everybody. At the Salon d’Automne of 1905 people laughed themselves into hysterics before his pictures, in 1906 they were respectful, and in 1907 they were reverent. Cézanne had become the man of the moment.” And Picasso would say: “For us, Cézanne was like a mother who protects her children ... He was my one and only master ... I’ve spent years studying his pictures ... Cézanne! He was as you might say a father to us all. It was he who protected us.” The article explores the influence the Master of Aix had on both the Spaniard and his French colleague Georges Braque as they developed the ideas of what would become Cubism.

Picasso started writing poems in April, 1935 during a period of personal crisis. This shift to literature is predicated on an assumed irreducible conflict between new verbal expressions and his established visual composition. Picasso’s texts provide a window into the artist’s mind that is separate from his own artistic creations —which makes them extremely relevant. This paper investigates two aspects of Picasso’s poetry. First, how Picasso used subtle differences between the lexical realization of concepts in French and Spanish: the two languages he used to compose his poems. And Second, how he explored the potential overlap between semantic categories for concepts associated with co-occurring words. When these linguistic phenomena are examined carefully, it becomes clear that the lexical combinations that Picasso implemented in his poems were far from arbitrary. Résumé Picasso a commencé à écrire des poèmes en avril 1935, pendant une période de crise personnelle. Ce passage vers la littérature se fonde sur le conflit irréductible supposé entre de nouvelles expressions verbales et sa composition visuelle établie. Les textes de Picasso nous donnent un aperçu de ce qui se passe dans la tête de l’artiste qui est séparé de ses propres créations artistiques – ce qui rend ces textes extrêmement pertinents. Cet article enquête sur deux aspects de la poésie de Picasso. Premièrement, la manière dont Picasso a employé des différences subtiles entre la réalisation lexicale de concepts en français et en espagnol, les deux langues dans lesquelles il a écrit ses poèmes. Deuxièmement, la manière dont il a exploré le chevauchement potentiel entre des catégories sémantiques pour des concepts associés aux mots coexistants. Après un examen approfondi de ces phénomènes linguistiques, il s’est avéré clair que les combinaisons lexicales avec lesquelles Picasso a composé ses poèmes étaient loin d’être arbitraires. Mots-clés: Picasso; bilingue; la poésie; domaines conceptuelsl; catégories sémantiques