Art-o-Gram: Picasso – The Artist, Life and Love – Scene 1

Picasso's life and his loves – especially regarding Picasso's relationship with women – is an endless topic on which serious art historians and agitated feminists, outraged petit bourgeois and imaginative cookbook authors, confused social scientists and envious tabloid journalists have expressed themselves exhaustively from virtually every conceivable point of view.

The artist's lifestyle and his relationships with women have already been thoroughly dissected, so it's probably not that important who shares which bed with whom, why, and when.

Nevertheless, a comprehensive view of Picasso cannot entirely avoid considering his lifestyle and his love life – both are pieces of the puzzle of "Picasso the person ," and both influenced his art. Therefore, what follows is a sketch in seven scenes of the artist's private life – a life lived intensely.

Scene 1: Unusual lifestyle – always a field day for some of the media

It's not just It girls who are where the action is

But also many artists, and not just in our century. Right at the beginning of the 20th century, in 1900, Picasso the city for the first time, a city that would become his most frequent residence until the end of the Second World War: He traveled with his friend Casagemas to the World's Fair in Paris and there, as in the cities he had previously lived in Barcelona and Madrid, he immediately found the part of the city where life was truly vibrant and where the avant-garde artists met.

The “Exposition Universelle de 1900” , the global media event of the time, attracted a staggering 48 million visitors to Paris. As many of these visitors as possible crowded into the partly newly built hotels on both sides of the Seine in the city center, while a large number found accommodation somewhere along the way to the second exhibition site in the town of Vincenne, southeast of Paris.

Picasso, on the other hand, unerringly found his way to the notorious northern outskirts of Paris, Montmartre , birthplace of the Paris Commune and home to Parisian artists in the 19th century; he would share a studio there with Casagemas for a while.

This appearance of the 19-year-old Picasso in Paris shows something that would be repeated constantly in Picasso's life: wherever Picasso goes, he always quickly finds the urban “hot spot” where the respective cultural upheaval is taking place – he is always “right in the middle of it” .

When he was in Paris and, for example, stayed at the Bateau-Lavoir artists' residence on Montmartre, it was anything but a quiet life: Montmartre was home to numerous artists, living freely, unrestrained, and cheaply, surrounded by cabarets, dance halls, and small restaurants, and the artists' studios/apartments were the scene of frequent and rather unrestrained parties.

In 1908, Picasso threw a grand party in honor of Henri Rousseau , which generated so much talk that it acquired art historical significance. An impressive array of artists descended upon the studio, which had been converted into a barn; "everyone was said to have been beautifully drunk," and the party didn't end until the sun was already high in the sky.

The media paint the pictures as they want to

Sometimes, not only did a party get completely out of control, but the media were also provided with stories that had the potential to become full-blown scandals. Even back then, celebrities suspected of involvement in some unsubstantiated way, due to their "bohemian lifestyle," were very often made the subject of news reports.

, around 100 years ago, Picasso found himself in the middle of one of THE scandals of the time , a scandal about the theft of what was probably the most famous portrait of a woman in the world, which revealed as its most shocking result that the Louvre was then almost a self-service store for thieves.

In the summer of 1911, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre. Picasso and his friend Guillaume Apollinaire may have acquired a reputation in Paris for being unable to resist beautiful women; however, Apollinaire was officially suspected because two stone masks stolen from the Louvre were found in his possession.

Apollinaire had acquired it from a roommate, and Picasso from Apollinaire. Apollinaire was arrested and testified that Picasso was involved, and Picasso was immediately caught up in the media frenzy surrounding the theft of the century.

There was a lot of back and forth; the roommate (Géry Pieret) even stole another sculpture from the Louvre and handed it over to the newspaper Paris-Journal – just to demonstrate that security at the museum was far from ideal. The newspaper offered 50,000 francs to anyone who recovered the Mona Lisa, and Apollinaire and Picasso eventually surrendered their sculptures to the Paris-Journal.

Picasso was merely questioned; the case against Apollinaire was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. The real thief was an Italian picture framer who had worked at the Louvre. The Mona Lisa reappeared in Florence in December 1913; until then, the press had had a great deal of fun with the case, and Picasso had a great deal of trouble.

During the two and a half years that the Mona Lisa was missing, a total of eight Mona Lisa forgeries were sold to collectors.

There are versions of the story according to which all the thefts recorded in connection with the scandal were committed solely to expose the massive security gaps in the Louvre's anti-theft system.

Guillaume Apollinaire was allegedly only accused because he belonged to the group of artists who were fiercely critical of the kind of stale museum art that the Louvre represented – Apollinaire had once signed a manifesto threatening: The Louvre .”

The next version of the story saw the Italian glazier Perugia as a dedicated savior of national art – he was supposed to have stolen the Mona Lisa because he believed it had been illegally taken from Florence by Napoleon, and with the “return” he only wanted to do his duty as a patriot.

TV documentary: Picasso and the Women – The Master of the Game

Picasso and the Women – The Master of the Game A film by Jacqueline Kaess-Farquet Production: BR 1997, Lido series Recording: BR 27.06.2010

The media and the foreigners

Much more interesting than the actual scandal is the reporting on it – then as now – which is sometimes utterly dehumanizing and unprofessional.

Picasso was harshly criticized by the press at the time , his lifestyle portrayed as completely unrestrained, excessive, and dangerous. And – it's hard to believe – clear echoes of this can still be found in today's media reports about Picasso and Apollinaire and the theft of the Mona Lisa.

For example, it is stated (in the 21st century!) that while the story surrounding the theft of the Mona Lisa is very peculiar, this is probably not the case for people with an avant-garde lifestyle like Apollinaire and Picasso . The author thus simply assumes that "people with an avant-garde lifestyle" find criminal acts perfectly normal. Poor artists who live next to such neighbors, and it's probably not long before the block warden is reintroduced…

According to a scientist who – also in the 21st century! – is writing an article about Picasso, he led an eccentric life because he spent his free time meeting friends in cafes and discussing painting, literature, music, philosophy, and the latest developments in science and technology.

We anxiously wonder what kind of life this scientist leads…

Picasso and Apollinaire were indeed viciously mocked because they feared arrest by the Parisian authorities. The reason for this fear is particularly distasteful when one is already appalled by much of today's media coverage, which vilifies refugees from foreign countries.

The phenomenon of members of a group of people anxiously isolating themselves from the outside was also known back then. This group of people could be a nation (a group held together by the characteristic of nationality), the population of a city who define themselves as inhabitants of that city, or a close-knit village community (a football club, the regular fans of a club, a school class, the allotment gardeners in the "secret corner"...).

Even back then, within this group of people, it was either the particularly privileged who wanted to maintain their status by denigrating newcomers, or the particularly underprivileged who, fearing the loss of what little they had left, absolutely refused to grant outsiders access to their group. Even then, there were media outlets that supported both sides for the sake of sensational headlines.

Thus, in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century, there were pronounced signs of racism ; Apollinaire was known by the nickname “Macaroni wog” (wog = non-white person); all immigrants around Apollinaire and Picasso could report on occasional very malicious racist attacks, which came mainly from the press and the “crème de la crème” of Parisian society.

If you are interested in learning more about how and how quickly such an attitude contrary to human dignity develops, we would like to draw your attention to an exciting and excitingly good report that was first broadcast on ZDFNeo :

“The racist in us” helps to understand this in a chilling way; see it at blog.zdf.de/ .

The media and the facts

There were many versions of the story surrounding the Mona Lisa theft, in which countless completely different versions of the truth were written down and published. The media reports from that time could therefore serve as the beginning of a short lesson on the importance of truth and verifiable facts in media coverage, and the media reports of today as evidence that this importance has not improved in the last 100 years.

Even today's reports about the theft of the Mona Lisa are surprising due to their astonishingly uncritical acceptance of "factual accounts," for example, when an article reports that Vincenzo Perugia had himself locked in the Louvre, took the Mona Lisa out of its frame, hid it in his work clothes, and transported it out of the museum unmolested.

The Mona Lisa is not painted on a rollable canvas, but on a sturdy poplar wood panel. Today, poplar wood at least 2 cm thick is used in such cases; in earlier times, artists were more lavish with materials when it came to exceptional commissions like a "portrait for eternity." The Mona Lisa is also not a small painting, as is often claimed, but at most a small painting by 16th-century standards.

By today's standards, the Mona Lisa, with its nearly half a square meter of surface area, certainly no longer qualifies as a miniature, and above all, this 77 cm × 53 cm thick wooden panel with oil paint is simply a massive piece, making it rather doubtful that someone would simply conceal it in their (usually tight-fitting) work clothes.

The media and the events

Another parallel to today's press can be seen in the frequently expressed assumption that it was precisely the hype surrounding this art theft that elevated the Mona Lisa to a work of art with an absolutely exceptional status. There are some artists who would still be tinkering away in their hobby rooms today if they hadn't triggered a massive media spectacle with some "event" that had very little to do with their art (and the art of these artists is often enough more spectacle than art).

As early as the first Venice Biennale in 1895, an Italian painter speculated that the entire festival “was merely a malicious speculation to generate profits for innkeepers and railway companies,” and such a suspicion was certainly not only expressed regarding the event in Venice.

“Event” is in quotation marks because it refers precisely to the original meaning of the word – the English word event simply means occurrence, and a corresponding feeling often creeps up on clear-headed observers of an event: It's about something happening, anything at all, with or without meaning, as long as the media report on it.

But at least the event-organizing artists are still creating art once the media hype has made them famous, while we have to put up with rows of annoying girls with puppies as their trademark, annoying girls with handbags as their trademark, annoying girls with blonde and dark hair and abysmal language skills as their trademark, annoying girls with plump bottoms as their trademark, annoying girls with duck-like lips as their trademark, and annoying girls with long names and no trademark, who simply do nothing but exist and almost inescapably bother us with their appearance.

Do you see it as a feminist regression to the Middle Ages that an author doesn't mention any annoying boys here? She wanted to, but the author's point was to highlight that one can become famous without any semblance of intelligence AND without any productivity, and she simply couldn't think of a male protagonist – they all become presenters, so they produce something.

The media and personal knowledge

It is also astonishing how well some authors know what Picasso knew and what he didn't know:

Picasso certainly had no inclination towards mathematics, and he most definitely knew as little about Einstein around 1907 as any other artist, someone reports.

This seems dubious: Picasso was known to spend his time not devoted to painting in the Parisian cafés around Montmartre. These cafés were intellectual centers of the city; people didn't go there to eat cake (or to be seen), but rather to cultivate coffeehouse culture in the original sense of the word: sitting for hours over a coffee, all the important newspapers available free of charge, lively discussions across the tables.

This coffeehouse culture, known as “Viennese coffeehouse culture”, has been part of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage since 2011 , and although the Viennese certainly deserve the honor of preserving this culture, they were not its founders.

The first coffee houses opened in the 12th century in Mecca, in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula. By 1554, coffee houses had arrived in Istanbul, thus reaching the European continent. Around 1650, coffee houses opened in Venice, Oxford, and London, followed by Vienna in 1685, and the first proper (permanent) coffee house in Paris in 1686.

this Café Procope , with its elegant yet cozy atmosphere and numerous offerings “all about coffee”, that became a popular meeting place for society and a discussion forum for writers and philosophers; in Paris, coffeehouse culture as a platform for observing intellectual life was thus actually “invented”.

Picasso felt comfortable on this “observation platform” and eagerly absorbed the intellectual stimuli; his “Bande à Picasso”, included not only avant-garde artists, but also writers and journalists, and people with an interest in natural sciences and mathematics.

The latest developments in these sciences were discussed, as were the latest events in the world of art; popular science magazines of the time and reviews of scientific books were available as reading material, as was the entire spectrum of daily newspapers.

That the latest discoveries in physics were also a topic in this circle of artists is even explicitly documented; the 1905 bestseller by Gustav Le Bon, “L’Evolution de la Matière.” , in which the author attributed all types of radiation to the decay of atoms and doubted the existence of stable matter, is recorded as a topic of discussion with quotations.

In that same year, 1905, Einstein presented four publications on different topics, each of which was worthy of a Nobel Prize: the light quantum hypothesis, the confirmation of the molecular structure of matter through 'Brownian motion', the quantum-theoretical explanation of the specific heat of solids, and the two papers that went down in history as the special theory of relativity.

With this work, Einstein 1905 the annus mirabilis (miracle year) of physics , and even if it is not certain when this term, which belongs to retrospective consideration, was first used, this “explosion of genius” was certainly a topic among interested people and will just as surely have reached Paris well before 1907 – the major centers of science and culture were then mostly located in the large cities of Europe and maintained close contact with each other.

Knowing all this, it is far more likely that Picasso, , knew Einstein in 1907 than that he did not – and there is also little reason to label the cosmopolitan and worldly-minded artists in Picasso's circle as ignorant ignoramuses.

The disparaging view of the “Bande à Picasso” probably reveals more about the reporter's mindset than about Picasso's level of information.

Therefore, more generous thinkers fundamentally classify Picasso's intellectual abilities differently, and they see the discussions surrounding mathematics and science as one of the foundations for the emergence of Cubism , for which Picasso launched his painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in 1907; more on this in the article "Art-o-Gramm: Picasso – Famous Art and its Secret".

The media and creative enterprises

Part of the secret to Picasso's phenomenal success is that he did not see art and science as irreconcilable opposites. Other creative individuals also perceive art and science as not so different in their thinking, because a fundamental creative process underlies the work in both disciplines.

In order to discover or create something new, every creator (whether artist or researcher) must analyze what already exists and understand its essential basic features; only then will they have sufficient overview to develop truly new approaches to thinking.

Only all-encompassing curiosity enables the inspiration that truly creates something new; a current example in this direction is the “artist in residency” program launched in 2011 by CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN aims to bring artists and physicists together and, to this end, hosts artists from all over the world in the CERN laboratories near Geneva, where they collaborate with physicists and exchange ideas.

It's normal that such approaches rarely appear in mainstream media coverage. We currently see plenty of examples in the internet business of the results that rather uninspired development produces, and these and their successes are eagerly and readily reported in the media

In September 2014, a “social network” (a self-presentation platform with a few functions) was worth as much as two-thirds of the German federal budget, an online shoe retailer was still worth 600 million, and a kind of popcorn maker for start-ups, which produces more of these monopolizing sales platforms like other people produce popcorn, is expected to be worth more than Lufthansa after its IPO.

Picasso commented on the topic of “coping with life through computer use” :

“Computers are useless. They can only give answers.”

(found on www.zitate-online.de/ ).

The quote dates back to 1946, and with it Picasso not only demonstrated a high level of knowledge about the latest technological developments, but also emphasized a fundamentally important perspective – something that the media, which categorize this quote among the “famous mispredictions” about computers (such as “Computers are useless”, Sueddeutsche.de ), simply failed to grasp:

Computers can perform tasks of any kind (faster than humans), but humans must remain responsible; they must define these tasks, including the ethical and moral limitations that a computer does not impose automatically, any more than a weapon does.

Communication via social networks can certainly connect people; however, the ability to tell the computer what to do with certain data is also a prerequisite for continuing to control this data – anyone who entrusts their data to foreign companies that process this data in a way that is unknown and incomprehensible to them relinquishes control, depending on the amount of data, control over their entire life.

Picasso was of course not just the prototype of a person who, with his life (and his loved ones, who are the subject of the next scenes of this article), provided splendid material for the media, which were more interested in profit than in genuine journalism.

There is much more to tell about him. On Kunstplaza his life is summarized in “Art-o-Gram: Picasso – A Long Life for Art,” and his training “Art-o-Gram: Picasso – Born an Artist.” “Art-o-Gram: Picasso – An Artist and Three Wars .” “Art-o-Gram: Picasso – Famous Art and Its Secret,” “Art-o-Gram: Picasso – A Guarantee for Top Rankings,” and “Art-o-Gram: Picasso Today” explore his art and its enduring influence.