Drawing
P. Picasso — Igor Stravinsky
Picasso in his bowler, pipe clamped; Stravinsky monocled under a top hat, bowing into the conversation — two revolutions of the Ballets Russes years caught gossiping in Cocteau's single wandering line.
- Painter
- Sculptor
Pablo Picasso
The painter whose canvases papered the walls of 27 rue de Fleurus before the writers arrived — the salon's resident modern master.
In images
Details
- 1881–1973
- 25 October 1881
- Málaga, Spain
- 8 April 1973
- Mougins, France
- Spanish
- Olga KhokhlovaJacqueline Roque
- Paulo, Maya, Claude, Paloma
- PainterSculptor
- Pablo Ruiz Picasso
About Pablo Picasso
Picasso reached Paris out of the Blue Period — The Old Guitarist was painted in Barcelona the year before he settled — and was collected almost immediately: by 1905 his canvases papered the walls of 27 rue de Fleurus, and the Saturday salons took their form around the ninety sittings he spent on Stein's portrait. The writers in these pages met modern painting in his company, most of them in that room.
The decades that follow run through our own walls: the Cubist years with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer who kept the movement solvent and was dissolved into the planes of his own portrait; wartime Paris with most of the avant-garde at the front; the monumental calm of the postwar neoclassical turn; and a late Paris he never really left.
The Blue Period
Picasso's Blue Period runs from about 1901 to 1904 — the years he worked in a near-monochrome palette of blue and blue-green and painted the people at society's margins: beggars, prisoners, blind men, and destitute mothers. It began in the wake of his friend Carles Casagemas's suicide in Paris in 1901, though the poverty he saw in Barcelona and Paris, and his own empty pockets, fed it as much as the grief did.
The period's defining picture is The Old Guitarist, painted in Barcelona in 1903–04: a blind musician folded around the one warm object in a cold blue world. By that canvas the blue had stopped being a mood and become a system, a single restricted colour flattening skin, cloth, and wall into one climate.
The Blue Period closed as Picasso settled in Paris for good and warmed his palette into the pinks and ochres of the Rose Period around 1904–06 — the harlequins and circus performers that led, a few years later, to Cubism.
Picasso, illustrated
Picasso across a working life, drawn for The Paris Atlas — from the young man at a Montmartre café table to the old one walking a village lane in the south. These are illustrations rather than photographs.
Life events
Born in Málaga, 25 October, to a painting teacher who reportedly handed over his own brushes when the boy surpassed him.
Barcelona: La Llotja art school at fourteen, and soon the Els Quatre Gats café crowd.
First Paris — Montmartre, the Lapin Agile, and the decision that kept being remade until it stuck.
The Blue Period — The Old Guitarist painted in Barcelona the year before Paris finally held him.
Settles at the Bateau-Lavoir on the rue Ravignan; the Rose Period's circuses follow, and Fernande Olivier.
Ninety sittings for the portrait of Gertrude Stein; told it doesn't look like her, he answers that it will.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — shocking even to his own circle; the twentieth century in one canvas.
With Braque, 'roped together like mountaineers': Analytic then Synthetic Cubism, with Kahnweiler's gallery keeping the movement solvent.
Parade for the Ballets Russes in Rome — where he meets the dancer Olga Khokhlova, married the next year; the move to the Right Bank and the drawing rooms.
The neoclassical turn: monumental bathers and mothers — Mother and Child among them — painted while the avant-garde caught its breath.
Guernica, for the Spanish pavilion of the Paris Exposition — the century's other defining canvas.
The Occupation in the rue des Grands-Augustins studio — forbidden to exhibit, painting anyway; visitors were shown postcards of Guernica.
The south: Antibes, then the Vallauris ceramics years — doves, fauns, and a Mediterranean last act.
Dies at Mougins, 8 April, at ninety-one — still working.
In art
Selected works
Ballet
Parade
The one-act ballet that dragged the avant-garde onto the popular stage: Cocteau's scenario, Satie's score with its typewriter and siren, and Picasso's Cubist curtain, sets, and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes — premiered in Paris in May 1917 to a scandalized house. In his program note, Guillaume Apollinaire described it as 'a kind of surrealism' — the word's first prominent appearance in print, and the name André Breton's movement later adopted. The Rome working trip also gave Picasso his first long look at the antique, helping initiate the classical turn that became the Return to Order.
Painting · Rose Period
Boy with a Pipe
Picasso's 1905 portrait of a Montmartre boy, seated in blue workman's clothes with a garland of roses on his head and a pipe in his left hand, against a wall of painted flowers. A Rose Period picture that in 2004 became, for a time, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.
Painting · Analytic Cubism
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
The dealer who kept Cubism solvent, dissolved into its planes — painted in Paris at the movement's most austere moment.
Painting · Return to Order
Head of a Woman
A monumental pastel study for Picasso's Three Women at the Spring, shaped by the features of Olga Khokhlova and by ancient Roman wall painting he studied in Italy. Its fragile medium is worked to suggest the mass and stillness of sculpture.
Painting · Return to order
Grande baigneuse
Picasso's monumental 1921 seated nude — Antiquity exaggerated rather than copied — the Walter-Guillaume collection's clearest statement of the postwar return to order.
Painting · Return to Order
Mother and Child
The postwar neoclassical turn — monumental calm from the same hand that had taken the figure apart a decade earlier.
Painting · Rose Period · toward Cubism
Gertrude Stein
Painted through eighty or ninety sittings at Picasso's Bateau-Lavoir studio, the portrait joins Stein's massive, calmly seated body to a face radically reinvented in 1906. She hung it above the fireplace at 27 rue de Fleurus, where it became both her public image and a threshold on Picasso's road to Cubism.
Painting · Blue Period
The Old Guitarist
Painted in Barcelona when Picasso was twenty-two, a blind musician folds himself around the only warm object in a nearly monochrome world. Beneath him lie abandoned figures — a woman, a child, animals — making this Blue Period icon literally a painting built over other lives.
Painting · Return to Order
Three Women at the Spring
At Fontainebleau in 1921, Picasso enlarged an ancient scene of women gathering water into a nearly seven-foot meditation on classical order. Yet the ritual has stalled: the bodies are disjointed, the faces masklike, and no water reaches the waiting hand.
Painting · Surrealist period
Woman in a Red Armchair
Picasso's 1929 painting of a seated woman broken into curved, bone-like forms — a Surrealist-era portrait so distorted that the sitter cannot be securely identified, though she is often read as his first wife, Olga Khokhlova. It hangs in the Menil Collection in Houston.
Sculpture · Cubism
Head of a Woman (Fernande)
Picasso's 1909 portrait of Fernande Olivier, modeled in clay as interlocking ridges, hollows, and facets. Often identified as his first fully Cubist sculpture, it tests how several implied viewpoints can occupy one solid head.
People they knew
Gertrude Stein
- Author
- Salon host
- Patron
Met · 1905–1907
Picasso painted Stein's portrait over some ninety sittings in 1905–07 — the sittings around which the Saturday salons took their form.
Guillaume Apollinaire
- Poet
- Critic
Met · 1905
A fixture of Picasso's circle from the Bateau-Lavoir years — the Autobiography remembers him at the salon's tables and at the 1908 banquet for the Douanier Rousseau, where Apollinaire presided.
Jean Cocteau
- Poet
- Playwright
- Illustrator
- +1
Met · 1915–1917
Cocteau sought Picasso out mid-war and by 1917 had carried him to Rome to design Parade for the Ballets Russes — the collaboration that opened the painter's classical turn. Cocteau's 1923 monograph on Picasso made the friendship a matter of public record.
Alice B. Toklas
- Salon host
- Publisher
- Author
Met · 1907
The second of Toklas's three bells: she met Picasso within weeks of arriving in Paris, at a rue de Fleurus dinner before the 1907 Autumn Salon — the start of a sixty-year acquaintance conducted largely across dinner tables.
Salvador Dalí
- Painter
- Filmmaker
- Sculptor
Met · 1926
Dalí went to Picasso's studio on his first trip to Paris in April 1926, at twenty-one, on Miró's recommendation.
Marcel Duchamp
- Painter
- Sculptor
- Filmmaker
Met
The two knew each other across decades of the Paris and New York avant-garde. The relationship was respectful rather than close; each measured himself against the other as the century's rival model of what a modern artist could be.
Marie Laurencin
- Painter
- Illustrator
Met · 1907
She joined the Bateau-Lavoir circle in 1907. Accounts of the introduction differ: AWARE credits her Académie Humbert classmate Georges Braque, Britannica the dealer Clovis Sagot.
Henri Rousseau
- Painter
Met · 1908
The 1908 banquet in Picasso's Bateau-Lavoir studio honored the old painter, with Apollinaire presiding — the evening the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made famous.
Joan Miró
- Painter
- Sculptor
Met · 1920
Miró's first trip to Paris, in 1920, was made to visit Picasso. The older Catalan remained a fixed point of his Paris world; six years later Miró was the one talking to Picasso about a still-unknown Dalí.
Who they drew from
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The Met states it plainly: the monumental, classically inspired style Renoir built from the 1880s onward influenced avant-garde giants including Picasso, and the late bathers' vision of plenitude was admired by Picasso, Matisse, and Maillol. The debt shows in Picasso's neoclassical figures after 1917.
Movements
Art movement · 1907–1914
Cubism
Created Cubism with Georges Braque in Paris — from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 through the papiers collés, until the war ended the partnership.
Art movement · c. 1918–1930
Return to Order
The classical turn: from the 1917 Rome trip with Cocteau to design Parade, through the monumental neoclassical figures — Mother and Child (1921) in our catalog — painted in parallel with his continuing Cubist work.
Pablo Picasso’s Places
Questions about Pablo Picasso
Who was Pablo Picasso?
A Spanish painter and sculptor (1881–1973), co-founder of Cubism and one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Here, he is the resident modern master of Gertrude Stein's salon, whose canvases hung on the walls before the writers arrived.
What is Pablo Picasso best known for?
Co-inventing Cubism with Georges Braque, and the 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon that opened the way to it. His work moved restlessly between styles across seven decades, from Cubism to the monumental classical figures of the 1920s.
How is Picasso connected to Gertrude Stein?
He painted her famous portrait over some ninety sittings in 1905–07, and his paintings papered the walls of her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. The sittings were the occasion around which the Saturday salons took their form.
What was Picasso's role in Cubism?
He created it, with Georges Braque, in Paris between 1907 and 1914 — breaking the single fixed viewpoint and rebuilding the subject from fractured planes. The First World War ended the founding partnership.
What was Picasso's neoclassical period?
After travelling to Rome with Jean Cocteau in 1917 to design the ballet Parade, Picasso turned to massive, calm classical figures — Mother and Child (1921), in our catalog, is the essence of it. He painted them in parallel with his continuing Cubist work, part of the postwar Return to Order.
Did Picasso know the Lost Generation writers?
Through Stein's salon, yes. He was a fixture there alongside Guillaume Apollinaire and, later, Jean Cocteau, in the same rooms where the young Hemingway was schooled in modern art.
Sourced claims
Frequented · 1905
27 Rue de Fleurus
A notable regular of the Saturday salons, whose paintings papered the atelier's walls before the writers arrived.
Met · 1905–1907
Gertrude Stein
Picasso painted Stein's portrait over some ninety sittings in 1905–07 — the sittings around which the Saturday salons took their form.
Associated with · 1907–1914
Cubism
Created Cubism with Georges Braque in Paris — from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 through the papiers collés, until the war ended the partnership.
Associated with · 1917–1925
Return to Order
The classical turn: from the 1917 Rome trip with Cocteau to design Parade, through the monumental neoclassical figures — Mother and Child (1921) in our catalog — painted in parallel with his continuing Cubist work.
Depicted in · 1923
P. Picasso — Igor Stravinsky
Captioned 'P. Picasso — Igor Stravinsky' in the album — Picasso in the bowler with his pipe, Stravinsky leaning in under the top hat.
Met · 1905
Guillaume Apollinaire
A fixture of Picasso's circle from the Bateau-Lavoir years — the Autobiography remembers him at the salon's tables and at the 1908 banquet for the Douanier Rousseau, where Apollinaire presided.
Met · 1915–1917
Jean Cocteau
Cocteau sought Picasso out mid-war and by 1917 had carried him to Rome to design Parade for the Ballets Russes — the collaboration that opened the painter's classical turn. Cocteau's 1923 monograph on Picasso made the friendship a matter of public record.
Met · 1907
Alice B. Toklas
The second of Toklas's three bells: she met Picasso within weeks of arriving in Paris, at a rue de Fleurus dinner before the 1907 Autumn Salon — the start of a sixty-year acquaintance conducted largely across dinner tables.
Met · 1926
Salvador Dalí
Dalí went to Picasso's studio on his first trip to Paris in April 1926, at twenty-one, on Miró's recommendation.
Met
Marcel Duchamp
The two knew each other across decades of the Paris and New York avant-garde. The relationship was respectful rather than close; each measured himself against the other as the century's rival model of what a modern artist could be.
Met · 1907
Marie Laurencin
She joined the Bateau-Lavoir circle in 1907. Accounts of the introduction differ: AWARE credits her Académie Humbert classmate Georges Braque, Britannica the dealer Clovis Sagot.
Met · 1908
Henri Rousseau
The 1908 banquet in Picasso's Bateau-Lavoir studio honored the old painter, with Apollinaire presiding — the evening the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made famous.
Influenced by
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The Met states it plainly: the monumental, classically inspired style Renoir built from the 1880s onward influenced avant-garde giants including Picasso, and the late bathers' vision of plenitude was admired by Picasso, Matisse, and Maillol. The debt shows in Picasso's neoclassical figures after 1917.
Met · 1920
Joan Miró
Miró's first trip to Paris, in 1920, was made to visit Picasso. The older Catalan remained a fixed point of his Paris world; six years later Miró was the one talking to Picasso about a still-unknown Dalí.