Picasso, Pablo

By Annette Becker

1914-1918 Online

Internal Encyclopedia of the First World War

This text is licensed under Creative Commmons Licence

(Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany-CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Table of Contents

- 1 Introduction

- 2 Cubism and the War

- Notes

- Selected Bibliography

- Citation

1 Introduction

Three artists parted ways on mobilization day: André Derain (1880-1954) and the two inventors of cubism, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). The neutral Spaniard saw the two Frenchmen off on a train for the front, but did not enlist himself. While Picasso’s interest in the war focused on his friends who were mobilized, killed, wounded or maimed – like Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), whose portrait he painted as an artilleryman, then wounded –, he focused above all on his work, between cubism, pointillism and a certain tendency for neo-classicism which in 1919 was called a “return to order”.

2 Cubism and the War

At the start of the war, cubism was incorrectly perceived as a German invention and scorned as “kubist Kultur”, partly because Picasso’s art dealer was the German Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) who was forced to flee to Switzerland. And yet cubism and its fragmentation of pictorial space – like all of the modernisms, futurism and vorticism – influenced camouflage. According to Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), when Picasso saw the first camouflaged canons in Paris, he exclaimed, “we created that”.[1] In Rome, where he went with Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), Picasso worked as a set painter on the ballet Parade choreographed by Léonide Massine (1896-1979) for Serge Diaghilev’s (1872-1929) Russian ballet, set to music by Eric Satie (1866-1925). On 18 May 1917, Parade premiered at the Châtelet theatre in Paris, but the avant-gardism of the whole show and of Picasso’s cubist masks more particularly enraged the audience. He went back to Harlequins – perhaps the camouflage in his own war.

Annette Becker, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

Section Editor : Emmanuelle Cronier

Translator: Jocelyne Serveau

Notes

1. ↑ Stein, Gertrude: Autobiographie d’Alice Tokias, Paris 1934, (in English, 1933).

Citation

Becker, Annette: Picasso, Pablo , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10710. Translated by: Serveau, Jocelyne

License

This text is licensed under Creative Commmons Licence (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany-CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Cubism and the War

Selected Bibliography

Citation

Content