The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (370 page)

(1683–1754).
Venetian painter and graphic artist. After preliminary training in Venice he worked under G. M.
Crespi
in Bologna, then settled permanently in his native city by 1711. He was one of the most individual Venetian painters of his period, his sombre and dramatic style looking back to work done a century earlier by
Liss
,
Strozzi
, and
Feti
. Apart from a ceiling fresco of the
Glory of St Dominic
(
c.
1727) in SS. Giovanni e Paolo, he painted in oils and he was a notoriously slow worker, but his pictures seem fresh and spontaneous rather than laboured. He had a large family and although he was not without wealthy patrons (
Algarotti
among them) he relied much on drawings and book illustrations to earn money. As a painter he did religious and historical works and portraits, as well as some hauntingly enigmatic
genre
scenes that reflect his training with Crespi . In 1750 Piazzetta became the first Director of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, but in his last years he was eclipsed by the new generation. The young
Tiepolo
was greatly influenced by him, but later the influence was reversed, as Piazzetta's style became softer and light—more
Rococo
—in feeling.

 
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(1879–1953).
French painter, designer, writer, and editor. His talent as an artist was modest, but his restless and energetic personality gave him a significant role successively in the
Cubist
,
Dadaist
, and
Surrealist
movements, and through his publications he helped to disseminate avant-garde ideas. A private income enabled him to carry on his activities without having to worry about earning a living, as well as to indulge his love of fast cars, fast women, and wild living in general. Early in his career he was a successful painter of
Impressionist
landscapes. In 1908–9 he experimented with
Neo-Impressionism
, and then with
Fauvism
and Cubism. In 1911 he met Marcel
Duchamp
, who was to be the most important influence on his career, and with him became an exponent of
Orphism
. He painted his first purely abstract works in 1912. In 1913 he visited New York as spokesman for the Cubist pictures in the
Armory Show
, and he returned in 1915–16, when he, Duchamp, and
Man
Ray were involved in the first stirrings of Dada. After moving to Barcelona (where he lived 1916–17), he launched a magazine entitled 391 (1917–24). In 1917 he returned to New York for six months then lived in Zurich (1918–19) before returning to Paris, where he helped to launch the Dada movement. However, in 1921 he denounced Dada for being no longer ‘new’, and became involved with André
Breton
and the nascent Surrealist movement. In 1924 he attacked this, too, but some of his later works are in a Surrealist idiom. From 1925 to 1945 he lived mainly on the Côte d'Azur, experimenting with various styles. In 1945 he settled permanently in Paris and in his final years returned to abstract painting. Apart from his contributions to avant-garde magazines, Picabia published various pamphlets and wrote poetry. He also conceived the fantasy ballet
Relâche
(1924), with music by Erik Satie , together with the film
Entr'acte
(directed by René Clair ), which was used to fill the intermission between the ballet's two acts. Among Picabia's paintings, the most highly regarded today are those in his ‘machinist’ style, in which mechanistic and
biomorphic
forms are combined in dynamic compositions. The most famous is
I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie
(MOMA, New York, 1914).

 
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(1881–1973).
Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, ceramicist, and designer, the most famous, versatile, prolific, and influential artist of the 20th cent. Although it is conventional to divide his work into certain phases, all such divisions are to some extent arbitrary, as his energy and imagination were such that he was at all times working on a wealth of themes and in a variety of styles. He himself said: ‘The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or future. I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in painting. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I haven't hesitated to adopt them.’
Picasso was the son of a painter and drawing master and was remarkably precocious, mastering academic draughtsmanship when he was still a child (his first word as a baby is said to have been ‘lápiz’—pencil). In 1900 he made his first trip to Paris and by this time had already absorbed a wide range of influences. Between 1900 and 1904 he alternated between Paris and Barcelona, and this time coincides with his Blue Period, when he took his subjects from the poor and social outcasts, and the predominant mood of his paintings was one of slightly sentimentalized melancholy expressed through cold ethereal blue tones (
La Vie
, Cleveland Mus. of Art, 1903). He also did a number of powerful engravings in a similar vein (
The Frugal Repast
, 1904). In 1904 Picasso settled in Paris and became the centre of an avant-garde circle of artists and writers including
Apollinaire
. A brief phase in 1904–5 is known as his Rose Period. The predominant blue tones of his earlier work gave way to pinks and greys and the mood became less austere. His favourite subjects were acrobats and dancers, particularly the figure of the harlequin. In 1906 he met
Matisse
, but although he seems to have admired the work being done by the
Fauves
, he did not himself follow their method in the decorative and expressive use of colour (indeed his work often shows little concern with colour, and it is significant that—unlike most painters—he preferred to work at night by artificial light). The period around 1906–7 is sometimes called Picasso's Negro Period, because of the influence of African sculpture on his work at this point, but
Cézanne
was an equally powerful influence at this time, as he concentrated on the analysis and simplification of form. His researches culminated in
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
(MOMA, New York, 1906–7), which in its distortions of form and disregard of any conventional idea of beauty was as violent a revolt against tradition as the paintings of the Fauves in the realm of colour. At the time the picture was incomprehensible to artists, including Matisse and
Derain
, and it was not publicly exhibited until 1937. It is now seen not only as a crucial achievement in Picasso's personal development but as the most important single landmark in the development of contemporary painting and as the herald of
Cubism
, which he developed in close association with
Braque
and then
Gris
from 1907 up to the First World War.
In 1917 Picasso went with his friend Jean Cocteau to Rome to design costumes and scenery for the ballet
Parade
and in the following years he designed for other
Diaghilev
productions. The visit to Italy was one factor in introducing the strain of monumental classicism that was one of the features of Picasso's work in the early 1920s (
Mother and Child
, Art Institute of Chicago, 1921), but at this time he was also involved with
Surrealism
—indeed André
Breton
hailed him as one of the initiators of the movement. However, his predominant interest in the analysis and synthesis of forms was at bottom opposed to the irrationalist elements of the Surrealists, their exaltation of chance, and equally to the direct realistic reproduction of dream or subconscious material. Following the most serene period in his art, Picasso began to make violently expressive works, fraught with emotional tension, a mood of foreboding, and an almost clinical preoccupation with anguish and despair. This phase begins with
The Three Dancers
(Tate Gallery, London, 1925), a savage parody of classical ballet, painted at a time when his first marriage was becoming a source of increasing unhappiness and frustration. Following this he took up the mythological image of the Minotaur and images of the Dying Horse and the Weeping Woman. The period culminated in his most famous work,
Guernica
(Centro Cultural Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1937), produced for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1937 to express horror and revulsion at the destruction by bombing of the Basque capital Guernica during the civil war (1936–9). It was followed by a number of other great paintings, including
The Charnel House
(MOMA, New York,1945), attacking the cruelty and destructiveness of war. ‘Painting is not done to decorate apartments’, he said: ‘it is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.’ Picasso remained in Paris during the German Occupation, but from 1946 lived mainly in the South of France, where he added pottery to his many activities. His later output as a painter does not compare in momentousness with his pre-war work, but it remained vigorous, varied, and continuously inventive of new modes for the solution of new problems. It included a number of variations on paintings by other artists, including forty-four on
Las Meninas
of
Velázquez
. The theme of the artist and his almost magical powers is one that exercised him greatly throughout his long career.Picasso's status as a painter has perhaps overshadowed his work as a sculptor, but in this field too (although his interest was sporadic) he ranks as one of the outstanding figures in 20th-cent. art. He was one of the first artists to make sculpture that was assembled from varied materials rather than modelled or carved, and he made brilliantly witty use of found objects (see
OBJET TROUVÉ
). The most celebrated example is
Head of a Bull, Metamorphosis
(Musée Picasso, Paris, 1943), made of the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle. Alan Bowness has written (
Modern Sculpture
, 1965) ‘Picasso's sculpture sparkles with bright ideas—enough to have kept many a lesser man occupied for the whole of a working lifetime… it is not inconceivable that the time will come when his activities as a sculptor in the second part of his life are regarded as of more consequence than his later paintings.’ As a graphic artist (draughtsman, etcher, lithographer, linocutter), too, Picasso ranks with the greatest of the century. He was a prolific book illustrator, and as few other artists had the power to concentrate the impress of his genius in even the smallest and slightest of his works. Picasso's emotional range is as wide as his varied technical mastery. By turns tragic and playful, his work is suffused with a passionate love of life, and no artist has more devastatingly exposed the cruelty and folly of his fellow men or more rapturously celebrated the physical pleasures of love. There are Picasso museums in Barcelona and Paris and other examples of his huge output (which has been estimated at 20,000 works) are in collections throughout the world.