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The works of Picasso published in the present volume cover those early periods which, based on considerations of style, have been classified as Steinlenian (or Lautrecian), Stained Glass, Blue, Circus, Rose, Classic, “African”, Proto-Cubist, Cubist… From the viewpoint of the “science of man”, these periods correspond to the years 1900–1914, when Picasso was between nineteen and thirty-three, the time which saw the formation and flowering of his unique personality.

Study of a Nude seen from the Back

1895

oil on wood, 22.3 × 13.7 cm

Museo Picasso, Barcelona

But a scientific approach to Picasso’s œuvre has long been in use: his work has been divided into periods, explained both by creative contacts and reflections of biographical events. If Picasso’s work has for us the general significance of universal human experience, this is due to the fact that it expresses, with the most exhaustive completeness, man’s internal life and all the laws of its development.

Academic Study

c. 1895–1897

oil on canvas, 82 × 61 cm

Museo Picasso, Barcelona

Only by approaching his œuvre in this way can we hope to understand its rules, the logic of its evolution, the transition from one putative period to another.

Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to the artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours tracing his first pictures in the sand.

Portrait of the Artist’s Father

1896

oil on canvas and cardboard, 42.3 × 30.8 cm

Museo Picasso, Barcelona

This early self-expression held the promise of a rare gift.

Málaga must be mentioned, for it was there, on 25 October 1881, that Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born and there that he spent the first ten years of his life. Málaga was the cradle of his spirit, the land of his childhood, the soil in which many of the themes and images of his mature work are rooted.

First Communion

1896

oil on canvas, 166 × 118 cm

Museo Picasso, Barcelona

He first saw a picture of Hercules in Málaga’s municipal museum, witnessed bullfights on the Plaza de Toros, and at home watched the cooing doves that served as models for his father.

The young Pablo drew all of this and by the age of eight took up brush and oils to paint a bullfight. As for school, Pablo hated it from the first day and opposed it furiously.

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother

1896

pastel on paper, 19.5 × 12 cm

Museo Picasso, Barcelona

In 1891, financial difficulties forced the Ruiz Picasso family to move to La Coruña, where Pablo’s father was offered a position as teacher of drawing and painting in a secondary school. La Coruña had a School of Fine Arts. There the young Pablo Ruiz began his systematic studies of drawing and with prodigious speed completed (by the age of thirteen!) the academic Plaster Cast and Nature Drawing Classes.

Self-Portrait

1896

oil on canvas, 32.7 × 23.6 cm

Museo Picasso, Barcelona

What strikes one most in his works from this time is not so much the phenomenal accuracy and exactitude of execution as what the young artist introduced into this frankly boring material: a treatment of light and shade that transformed the plaster torsos, hands and feet into living images of bodily perfection overflowing with poetic mystery.

The Embrace

1900

oil on cardboard, 52 × 56 cm

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

He did not, however, limit his drawing to the classroom; he drew at home, all the time, using whatever subject matter was at hand: portraits of the family, genre scenes, romantic subjects, animals. In keeping with the times, he “published” his own journals – La Coruña and Azul y Blanco (Blue and White) – writing them by hand and illustrating them with cartoons.

Woman Reading

1900

oil on cardboard, 56 × 52 cm

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

At home, under his father’s tutelage during his last year in La Coruña, Pablo began to paint live models in oils (see Portrait of an Old Man and Beggar in a Cap).

These portraits and figures speak not only of the early maturity of the thirteen-year-old painter, but also of the purely Spanish nature of his gift: a preoccupation with human beings, whom he treated with profound seriousness and strict realism, uncovering the monolithic and “cubic” character of these images.

Le Moulin de la Galette

1900

oil on canvas, 90.2 × 117 cm

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Justin K. Thannhauser Foundation, New York

That is the way in which Picasso expressed how much his work was intertwined with his life; he also used the word “diary” with reference to his work. D.-H. Kahnweiler, who knew Picasso for over sixty-five years, wrote: “It is true that I have described his œuvre as “fanatically autobiographical”.

Frenzy

1900

pastel, 47.5 × 38.5 cm

private collection

That is the same as saying that he depended only on himself, on his Erlebnis. He was always free, owing nothing to anyone but himself.” Indeed, everything convincingly shows that if Picasso depended on anything at all in his art, it was the constant need to express his inner state with the utmost fullness.

Pierrot and a Dancer

1900

oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm

private collection

One may compare Picasso’s œuvre with therapy; one may, as Kahnweiler did, regard Picasso as a Romantic artist. Let it also be noted that Picasso looked upon his art in a somewhat impersonal manner, took pleasure in the thought that the works, which he dated meticulously and helped scholars to catalogue, could serve as material for some future science.

Self-Portrait

1901

oil on canvas, 73.5 × 60.5 cm

private collection

Kahnweiler testifies that in his old age Picasso spoke with greater approval of these early paintings than of those done in Barcelona, where the Ruiz Picasso family moved in the autumn of 1895 and where Pablo immediately enrolled as a student of painting in the School of Fine Arts called La Lonja.

Two Figures in Profile and the Head of a Man, Studies

1901

oil and tempera on paper, 41.2 × 57.2 cm

The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

So as not to upset his father, Picasso spent two more years in there, during which time he could not but fall, albeit temporarily, under the deadening influence of academism, inculcated by the official school along with certain professional skills. “…I hate the period of my training at Barcelona,” Picasso confessed to Kahnweiler.

Le Gourmet

1901

oil on canvas, 92.8 × 68.3 cm

The National Gallery, London

However, the studio which his father rented for him, and which gave him a certain freedom from both school and the stifling atmosphere of family relations, was a real support for his independence.

It was here that Picasso summarized the achievements of his school years by executing his first large canvases: The First Communion (winter of 1895–1896) and Science and Charity (beginning of 1897).

Harlequin and His Companion

1901

oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm

The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

The latter received honourable mention at the national exhibition of fine arts in Madrid and was later awarded a gold medal at an exhibition in Málaga. His departure from home for Madrid in the autumn of 1897, supposedly to continue his formal education at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, in fact ushered in the period of post-study years – his years of wandering.

Child with a Pigeon

1901

oil on canvas, 73 × 54 cm

The National Gallery, London

Pablo Picasso’s wander-years consisted of several phases within a seven year period, from his initial departure to Madrid in 1897, to his final settling in Paris, artistic capital of the world, in the spring of 1904. To Picasso, Madrid meant first and foremost the Prado Museum, which he frequented more often than the Royal Academy of San Fernando in order to copy the Old Masters (he was particularly attracted by Velázquez).

The Absinthe Drinker

1901

oil on canvas, 73 × 54 cm

The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

It might be said that the most important events for Picasso in the Spanish capital were the harsh winter of 1897–1898 and the subsequent illness that symbolically marked the end of his “academic career”. In contrast, the time spent at Horta de Ebro – a village in the mountainous area of Catalonia, where he went to convalesce and where he remained for eight long months (until the spring of 1899) – was of such significance for Picasso that even decades later he would invariably repeat: “All that I know, I learnt in Horta de Ebro.”

The Absinthe Drinker

1901

oil on cardboard, 65.5 × 50.8 cm

collection Mrs Melville Hall, New York

The months spent in this village were significant not so much in the sense of artistic production as for their key role in the young Picasso’s creative biography, with its long process of maturation.

After his first stay at Horta de Ebro, a matured and renewed Picasso returned to Barcelona, which he now saw in a new light: as a centre of progressive trends, as a city open to modern ideas.