Pablo Picasso wrote many wonderful paintings, but if all of them are familiar only to venerable art historians and researchers of his work, the most important ones should be known to all cultural people. We will talk about them in this article.
In 1937, the Germans began bombing the Basque town of Guernica, which became one of the most brutal and senseless crimes of the fascists. The fact is that most of the dead - and there were many of them - were women and children, because most of the men had already fought in the Spanish Civil War and there were simply no men in the city.
Picasso. Guernica
Picasso then lived and worked in Paris, considered himself apolitical, but after such a blatant crime could not stay away and, abandoning all his work, including the painting for the World Exhibition, decided to write a truly large-scale and grandiose work, which became his main anti-war statement.
Everything about it is impressive. The scale - the size of the painting is 4 by 8 meters, the speed of execution - only a little over a month, although at this time Picasso worked like a man possessed, the number of interpretations and hidden symbols, which different art historians are trying to unravel to this day. The painting is dedicated to ordinary people - not heroes and not even soldiers, but those about whom they try not to remember at all, limiting themselves to the lines - the bombing killed so many thousands of civilians. But they are, in Picasso's mind, the true victims of war.
There are only 50 shades of gray in the painting, not even pure white, but this is how Picasso imagined war - an action that contradicts life itself, because the meaning of war is its destruction, albeit clothed by court propagandists in various high ideas.
Picasso. Absinthe lover
Absinthe can be called a special phenomenon in culture, and its use was praised by Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Rimbaud. And many impressionist painters such as Degas, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec could not stay away and willingly portrayed fans of the Green Fairy.
Édouard Manet. Absinthe lover
True, most of the pictures if not resemble the poster "fight drunkenness", then close to it - drunks are depicted very authentically and eloquently, and few people would want to be in their place - neither joy nor outright fun, as when drinking wine in good company, they do not show. But they have already fallen into the arms of the "green witch" and there is no way back to normal life.
Picasso. Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (The Absinthe Lover)
But it is Picasso's The Absinthe Lover that is considered to be the most famous painting on the subject. Picasso knew what he was writing about - he lived in Paris, when beggar artists and other representatives of bohemia went to brothels at night and willingly drank absinthe to fully taste all the delights of the "bohemian life". However, happy that time for Picasso was difficult to call it - he was torn between Paris and Barcelona, worked hard and felt the acute shortage of money. Before the recognition and universal adoration was still far away.
Jean-François Rafaelli. Absinthe drinkers
Perhaps this unsettledness helped to make the painting particularly expressive. It would seem a simple subject - a lonely woman sitting at a cafe table in front of a glass of absinthe. But Picasso managed to find in this echoes of real drama and write a great picture of loneliness in the crowd, so characteristic of many inhabitants of large cities. The woman is extremely tense, embraced her chin and shoulders unnaturally long arms - Picasso already at that time used the distortion of the proportions of the human body for the sake of greater expressiveness of the images in his paintings.
She is both completely immersed in herself and ready for any hidden trouble, she must feel like a real outcast of society, an outcast, that's why she has shrunk herself so much, just to take up as little space as possible, or, better still, to become invisible.
Edgar Degas. Absinthe (in a cafe)
It was not customary for decent ladies at that time to drink absinthe alone, and in general, to use this drink, which was even banned in 1914, although at that time it was still possible to buy marinade, i.e. cocaine, in pharmacies. So the lady clearly stepped on a "crooked path", perhaps she is a former courtesan or priestess of love, whose beauty has faded and all admirers have abandoned her. But she can't get rid of her addiction to absinthe, though she suffers from it. A sad end to a not very righteous life.
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