Picasso 1906. The Turning Point

A young and already mature Picasso was an artist with the ability to drink in different cultures, digesting them at speed. Therefore, he had to situate himself in a position of otherness, a place in which other central figures from the first avant-garde movements were not positioned. This transcultural Picasso, at that point in time, knew of himself in foreign terms, his otherness framed in his personal, romantic and sexual relationships, in his libertarian mode of leaving bohemia behind, in the gender performativity of his iconographies, in his procedural making, in the early hybridisation of his ethnographic reference points, in his capacity to not differentiate between the mythological and the vernacular and in his art-making with traces of the museum in the proposals that sought to re-found art itself.

The friendship between Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein took shape around the core and shared elements of their respective pictorial and literary work. Stein was a Jewish North American immigrant, and homosexual, who settled in Paris before the artist’s arrival there in 1901. Picasso was a Spaniard and a suspected anarchist with a police file. Being foreigners with a partial command of French, as well as their marginalisation, underpinned their belonging to Parisian bohemia and their artistic freedom. This lecture explores the affinity between the artist and the writer, sketching the reverberations of this relationship on European art and post-war American art and examining their later influence on artists such as Jasper Johns, John Cage, Steve Reich, Roni Horn and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, among others.

Picasso’s work is a prime example of primitivist techniques, allusions and evocations stretching from his beginnings in modernist Barcelona around 1900 to the crystallisation of Cubism in Paris prior to the First World War. His contact with anarchism in Madrid, Barcelona and Paris bolstered experimentation as a radical intervention on the forms of the most institutionalised naturalism. This lecture explores the artist’s relationship with anarchism, not only through a political frame of reference, but also observing more specifically his employment of works, artefacts and documents from non-Western and popular art, defined historically under the category of Primitivism. Every cultural allusion, whether Iberian, African or children’s art, or even the comic strip, introduces radical techniques in his paintings, with a rejection of the values of realism, classicism and rationality and essentially in accordance with aesthetic principles. By way of these ideas, Picasso would reach the ideal of the anarchist artist.

Before his trip to Gósol in the summer of 1906, Picasso stopped working on the portrait of his patron Gertrude Stein after approximately sixty sessions. Upon his return to Paris, he resumed the portrait, replacing Gertrude’s face with a mask-like form. This experiment stems from Stein’s famous quote that Picasso “could no longer see her” and examines the role of the mask in the finished Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906), confronting lesbian sexuality and the gender identity of the model. The lecture addresses the portrait as a performative event between artist and model and also examines the role gender plays in Stein’s own literary corpus. Lubar, moreover, underscores the instability of gender in Picasso’s art throughout 1906 and 1907 and specifically examines the fluid gender work he produced in Gósol within the framework of a crisis of masculinity culminating in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

The portrait and nude genres were places of trial and experimentation for Picasso in 1906. This year is pieced together as a turning point with Picasso’s introduction of the mythology of Primitivism in his work, the “mask” and the “face” coming together as representational and ideological filters. Exploring these two systems of thought around individuality, figuration and the body as a place of generic and sexual inscription, Tamar Garb explores how an androgynous and non-binary pictorial identity emerges, despite the artist’s famed masculine and sexist stance. Thus, the lecture seeks to read the work as an alternative to the biography and veneration of the male genius, allowing for a more expansive and open revision of Picasso’s art.

This lecture touches on the weeks that Pablo Picasso, Fernande Olivier and their fox terrier puppy spent in Gósol in the summer of 1906 from a gynocentric perspective; namely, highlighting the agency women had in the radical transformation of the artist at the time and the trace they left on his work for posterity. It focuses on the border bodies of the Gósol matriarchy, on what Fernande Olivier must have felt at an altitude of 1,500 metres and surrounded by mountains and on the unusual friendship of both with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, strikingly present in their absence.