Pablo Picasso’s changing oeuvre and how he was once accused of stealing Mona Lisa

Early Life

Born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881, Picasso’s talent for art was recognised early by his father Don Jose Ruiz y Blasco, an artist himself, and Pablo’s first art teacher. His mother reportedly claimed that the young Picasso’s first word was “piz”, short for “lapiz”, meaning pencil in Spanish and the child prodigy completed his earliest painting, Picador, when he was only eight.

At 13, he enrolled in an advanced class at Barcelona’s School of Fine Arts after he completed its complex entrance exam – which usually took one month – in just a week. Admitted to Madrid’s leading art school, Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, three years later, he found the school’s focus on classical subjects and techniques frustrating, and soon moved back to Barcelona, where he began frequenting the popular Els Quatre Gats (“The Four Cats”) cafe. There, he developed his first artistic friendships with the likes of Manuel Pallares, Carlos Casagemas, Josep Cardona and Jaume Sabartés, among others.

By the turn of the century, he was in Paris, in the country which would become his home till his demise in 1973.

Picasso prior to cubism

In a career that lasted over 75 years, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, Picasso created over 13,500 paintings and designs, 1,00,000 prints and engravings, 34,000 book illustrations, and 300 sculptures and ceramics. One of the most prolific modernists, he was constantly innovating, with his work reflecting his preoccupying thoughts at the time.

Human miseries and social alienation he saw in the early 1900s, apart from death of fellow artist-friend Carles Casagemas, led him to paint in melancholic blue from 1901 to 1904, in what is now recognised as the Blue Period. The friendships he developed subsequently, including a relationship with French artist and model Fernande Olivier, was represented by a palette of reds, browns, oranges and yellows, that defined the Rose Period (1904-1906), with depiction of harlequins, acrobats and circus performers.

This is also the period when he found a patron in American novelist and art collector Gertrude Stein, whom he painted a portrait of in 1905.

The birth of cubism and thereafter

Representing realities and subjects in fragments and deconstructed forms, allowing for viewing from multiple angles, Cubism as a revolutionary new approach was invented around 1907-08 by Picasso and French painter Georges Braque, influenced, among others, by the late work of Paul Cezanne, African and Iberian sculptures, and with a desire to reject the accepted norms of representation. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) — with five nude women, two of them wearing African masks — is largely considered one of Piccaso’s earliest paintings hinting at cubism. Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), meanwhile, is celebrated for being modern art’s first collage.

After the World War, at a time when artists across Europe called for ‘le rappel à l’ordre‘ or ‘the return to order’, seeking a revival of the arts of antiquity and classical traditions, Picasso made his first trip to Italy. There he adopted a new classical approach, that soon moved to surrealism that emphasised on depicting images from within one’s unconscious mind.

His oeuvre in the subsequent years blended his several influences and saw experiments with varied media, from sculptures to copperplate etchings and ceramics. In 1937, he painted Guernica, one of his largest works, measuring 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide, considered now to be one of the greatest anti-war paintings. Made in response to the bombing of the Basque town Guernica in April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, it reportedly took Picasso one month to paint and was the highlight of the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition that year.

Picasso as a poet and playwright

Picasso’s experiments were as wide-ranging as his influences. The Spanish artist is known to have harboured a keen interest in dramatic arts, and 1916 onwards he collaborated with Paris-based company Ballets Russes for set designs and costumes. This is also where he met his first wife Olga Khokhlova, who was a dancer in the company. He worked on several productions in the 1920s, and in 1946, he did the curtain design for Roland Petit’s Le Rendez-vous at the Ballets des Champs-Élysées.

The 1940s also saw him pen two full-length surrealist plays, Desire Caught by the Tail and The Four Little Girls. His legacy also includes over 300 poems that he began to write much later in life, after the end of his first marriage in 1935.

When Picasso was accused of stealing Mona Lisa

Not protected with as much security that it garners today as one of the world’s most recognised paintings, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris 1911, and Picasso was one of the suspects. The theft was traced to him after Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret, secretary of his close associate, poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire, entered a newspaper office in Paris and confessed that he had stolen artworks for the two in the past.

Soon it became clear that Mona Lisa wasn’t one of them, and Apollinaire and Picasso were finally completely absolved in 1913, when Vincenzo Peruggia, who was trying to sell the painting to an Italian art dealer, was caught for the theft.

Incidentally, as one of the world’s most prolific artists, Picasso himself has the world’s most stolen or missing artwork or in dispute. According to My Modern Met website, in 2012, the Art Loss Register listed 1,147 stolen works by Picasso.