Gertrude’s personality attracted or intrigued him, and in the course of the numerous sittings he attempted gradually to lay bare her soul, or to uncover his own through her. And yet there was a compromise between structural simplification and psychological study. They were simply there on the canvas to do the job of establishing a form” ( Warncke and Walther 1991, pp. There was no realistic illusions in these lines and brushwork. Any infringement of natural proportion he accepted with a shrug, even accentuating it to highlight the independence of art. Increasingly he had been seeing the human form in terms of plastic volume, stripping it down to essentials, to a very few blocks, stylizing it into something that was less and less naturalistic. When toward the end of February, Picasso continued working on the canvas Portrait de Gertrude Stein, 1 the influence of both Ingres and the archaic sculptures he had studied in the museum was obvious. A classical revival was sweeping through France, indeed much of southern Europe ( Richardson 1991, p. He was not the only young man feeling a renewed enthusiasm for the art of the past. He later recalled: “ Picasso always returned to the ground-floor rooms, where he would pace around and around like a hound in search of game between the rooms of Egyptian and Phoenician antiquities-among the sphinxes, basalt idols and papyri, and the sarcophagi painted in vivid colors” ( Soffici 1942, pp. Soffici frequently found him in the galleries of antiquities. Pablo set about studying this art first hand in the Louvre, as we know from Ardengo Soffici, the Italian futurist artist and critic who lived in the French capital from 1900 until 1907. His spontaneous reaction to it coincided with a more instinctive response to classical art-Greek as well as Roman, high style as well as archaic. The latter’s 1905 retrospective at the Salon d’Automne might have been one of the triggering factors ( Daix 2007, p. In Picasso’s case, the search for a more rigorous approach led him also to the art of Jean-Auguste-Dominigue Ingres (b. 1839), when he had tried to impose geometric structure on the amorphous clouds of Impressionism by studying the work of the great seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin (b.

Initially, his course paralleled the one taken a couple of decades earlier by Paul Cézanne (b. In seeking an alternative to their chromatic profligacy, Picasso steeped himself in the art of the past. All he knew for sure was that he had to take his art in new directions if he wished to rise to the challenge posed by the artists Henri Matisse (b. He took the crucial steps on the path to an artistic revolution with no clear destination in mind.

During these months of intense work, “a painter of late-nineteenth-century sensibility was reborn as a prophet of modernity, one whose utterances seemed to ring with both the promise and the peril of the new age” ( Unger 2018, p. Unger has noted, 1906 was a transitional year for Picasso: a year separating youth from maturity, promise from fulfillment. 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.Īs Miles J. It should follow its own generative principles. The new art he defended was an art of creation, not imitation. 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. 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. 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.

Picasso paintings cubism