Essay on Pablo Picasso Major Accomplishments

Pablo Picasso is considered as being one of the greatest artistic influencers of the 20th century. He was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramics artist, etching artist, and also a writer. Picasso’s work matured from the naturalism of his childhood through Cubism, Surrealism, and beyond. Through his art, he shaped the direction of modern and contemporary art through the decades. Pablo Picasso was born in Spain and is the son of Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez, and Don José Ruiz Blasco. He was raised as a Catholic but became an atheist later in his life. Don José Blasco, Picasso’s father, was an artist and he began teaching Picasso drawing and oil painting when Picasso was seven years old. At 13 years of age, Picasso started attending the School of Fine Arts, where his father thought.

According to Freud, “To grow up and be like one’s father or mother is the most intense desire of the early years” (Freud 37). This is exactly what Picasso did at the age of 13 when he surpassed his father’s artistic talent. This desire was fulfilled too early in Picasso’s life so it created in him a lot of resentment towards his father for taking away from him an intense fantasy at such a young age. At age 15, Picasso took on the challenge of painting large compositions. His father was the one who made all the significant composition decisions. During this time, he painted his sister Lola’s First Communion. Picasso was praised for this painting and so Ruiz, Picasso’s father, awarded him with his studio that he shared with his friend. At the time, Picasso was painting his next piece called Science and Charity.

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The basic composition of this painting was done by Picasso’s father. Ruiz serves as the model for the apparent hero in this painting, playing the role of a doctor who cares for the bedridden mother. Sketches of this painting were viewed. In the sketches, the doctor’s back is facing the viewers which causes the viewers to pay less attention to him. This shows Picasso’s resentment towards his father. He did not want to give attention to the model of Ruiz. However, as a result of Ruiz’s forced influence in this painting, the final composition awarded the doctor a more primary position. It was Ruiz who named this painting Science and Charity. This painting won an honorable mention at the General Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid, and a gold medal at the provincial Exhibition in Malaga. When Jose learned that Picasso’s behavior at the Academia Real de San Fernando in Madrid was less than studious, he cut off Picasso’s allowance leaving Picasso officially free of his family ties.

Picasso stopped intending to paint for prestige and recognition, like his father thought he should do and instead started curiously painting in different styles. The intention to paint for prestige and recognition was something that Picasso started despising. The combination of Picasso’s father taking away his profound fantasy at a young age, making all the significant composition decisions, and teaching Picasso to paint for prestige and recognition ended up creating a lot of resentment in Picasso towards his father and this can be seen clearly in Picasso’s paintings. In 1939, Picasso painted Cat Catches a Bird. The painting depicts a cat that caught a bird, and the bird being torn apart. Picasso held Barcelona close to his heart and he painted this after Barcelona fell to Franco. This is why most discourse on this painting centers on the Spanish Civil War. Picasso’s reflection on this painting indeed shows that a lot of his work at the time was impacted by the war. He says, “I did not paint the war because I am not the kind of painter who sets out looking for subjects like a photographer. But there is no doubt that the war is present in the paintings that I did at the time.

Later, perhaps a historian will demonstrate that my work changed under the influence of war”. Picasso continues to explain, “The subject obsesses me, I don’t know why” meaning the cat and the bird and their action in the painting. Such an idea, not knowing why a certain subject matter is of such interest, calls for psychoanalysis. Picasso’s mother passed away a few months before he painted Cat Catches a Bird. Picasso’s father used to specialize in painting birds upon observing them fly around the family home. Therefore, birds, to Picasso, are a symbol of his father. According to Freud, some behavior is driven by the unconscious, and so the behavior reveals in covert form what would otherwise not be known at all. According to psychoanalysis, during a child’s phallic stage of development, he/she develops an interest in the sexual organs as a site of pleasure.

The child also develops a deep sexual attraction for the parent of the opposite sex and hatred towards the person of the same sex. This is called the Oedipus complex. However, society’s norms initiate feelings of guilt in that child for wanting to act in that manner. So, the child realizes he cannot satisfy that desire and more so, a male child also fears that if he pursues his sexual attraction, he will be punished by his father. In Picasso’s case, he engaged in art to release this tension. So, after his mother died and he realized that his sexual attraction could never be satisfied, and also while still feeling aggression towards his father for how he treated him, Picasso drew this painting. Many other works of Picasso’s demonstrate his tension and aggression including all his paintings of the Minotaur. This is because at times the Minotaur is “a symbol of violence and brutality, as in the scenes in which it is about to rape a sleeping girl… at other moments it is a gentle and domesticated” (Koppleman). As mentioned, Picasso’s phallic stage resulted in him painting aggressive art, but it also resulted in him painting sexualized paintings. A comparative analysis with Leonardo da Vinci reveals just how much Picasso’s youth affected his work. Picasso’s youth was very different from da Vinci’s.

Da Vinci was born illegitimate and lived without a father for all of his first five years of life, whereas Picasso was born as the son of an established painter who devoted his life to improving the artistic talent of Picasso. In da Vinci’s case, “there was an intense erotic attachment to a woman… the mother, in earliest childhood which was evoked or intensified by excessive affection on the mother’s part” (Freud 73). The absence of a father, da Vinci, led to a life of sexual repression. He painted women only ever depicting their beauty. In contrast to da Vinci, the assumption that Picasso’s father undertook as extreme a role in Picasso’s early life as he did in adolescence explains the highly sexual behavior of Picasso’s adulthood and his multiple depictions of female sexuality and sexual acts in his art, representing women as more sexual and beautiful. Picasso was a man of many wives and many mistresses. Picasso’s sexual desires brought him guilt and shame, so instead he painted his sexual desires to live them through his paintings. According to Freud, “The creative writer acts no differently from a child at play” (Freud 26).

A child plays to fulfill his desires and because he is not subject to guilty feelings or shame. As the child grows older, and such emotions become attached to wish fulfillment and play, the child stops playing and starts fantasizing. In the case of a writer or an artist, they fulfill these desires in their literary work or artistic masterpiece and this eases their tension. Consequently, when the reader or viewer observes the art, he experiences the same relaxation of tension and enjoys the subject of his gaze. Picasso’s artwork, though, has a different effect. Picasso said, “In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture – then I destroy it. In the end, nothing is lost; the red I took about from one place turns up somewhere else” (Koussiaki). The effect releases tension for Picasso. He paints his shameful desires and then destroys the painting, and with it are destroyed the shameful desires. For the viewer, however, this induces more tension rather than the release of tension. The painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which Picasso created in 1907 serves as the pinnacle of his cubism. It is named Avignon after a street in Barcelona that is famous for its brothel.

The painting depicts five naked prostitutes which have masculine jagged lines and shapes rather than feminine rounded figures, due to Picasso’s destructive technique. Picasso’s best friend, Carles Casagemas, attempted to kill French seductress Germaine Gargillo, but instead of killing her, he turned the gun on himself. Picasso then fell into a deep depression over the death of his best friend blaming himself for Casagema’s death. Such regret and feelings of responsibility paired with his decision to begin relations with Germaine post-suicide indicate that he may have had sexual relations with the woman pre-suicide. This suicide of Casagemas marked the beginning of Picasso’s blue period. One of the most important pieces of Picasso’s blue period directly agrees with Freud’s observation that “anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going bling, is quite often a substitute for the fear of castration” (Freud 139). The painting is titled The Blind Man’s Meal. It seems an uncanny depiction of Picasso’s symbolic castration. The man in the painting is not afraid of becoming bling, while already being blind. According to psychoanalysis, creating a piece like this, whether conscious or unconscious, served as a release of pain, guilt, and suffering for the disloyal artist.

Pablo Picasso is the founder of cubism and is the one who instigated the entire modernist movement. There were not many artists who were able to conjure the same level of interest and reputation as Picasso. An artist who holds this much intrigue and acceptance begs for further analysis. Psychoanalysis of Picasso confirmed that Picasso’s aggressive artwork derive from his highly sexual content that resulted from his over-attentive father and from his inability to satisfy his sexual attraction towards his mother. And also, that Picasso’s blue period aligns with Freud’s connection to blindness and castration. Additionally, the artist’s self-awareness that his method of creating was a method of destruction indicated his awareness of his tension and the release of that tension through his art. Thus, the release and heightening of tension served as the primary goal of his artwork. As fascinated onlookers, the audience mysteriously experienced the same heightened emotions. Such intentionally captivating and mysterious feelings led to the foundation of cubism and thrust the art world into a new era, modernism.