(1881-1973)
Large Nude in a Red Armchair (1929)
By 1929 Picasso’s domestic and emotional life had changed dramatically. His marriage had broken down irretrievably, and he had started a secret liaison with Marie-Therese Walter, a beautiful Scandinavian woman many years his junior. Picasso’s love life became legendary, and all of his women who shared his private life influenced the style and appearance of his art. His last years were spent with Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961.
Picasso was viewed as a painter who rewrote the language of art. The Surrealists, who founded their movement in 1925, were impressed by this type of work by Picasso. They sought to use painting to unlock and reveal inner states of mind. They were greatly influenced by Freud’s theories and his emphasis on sexuality and death. This work “Large Nude in a Red Armchair” explores both of these driving forces in a highly personal and impressive manner.
Picasso first painted violent female images in 1925 when his marriage first ran into trouble, and in so doing opened up a new area of expression that painting had not yet touched. The fragmented and flattened imagery comes out of Picasso’s earlier experiments with Cubism. Here he develops Cubist techniques to express intense emotion and conflict.
Picasso used color very directly and for expressive purposes. For him, painting was rarely an end in itself but a means to something else – for example, to investigate form or explore a deeply felt emotion. In this painting, he uses extreme distortion and crude color to express an inner torment.
In places, particularly in the areas representing flesh, the paint surface is cracking. This is evidence of the haste with which Picasso created the image. These cracks have now become part of the image and add to its expressive force. What is more, in the white cloth covering the seat and arm of the chair, the muddied paint shows Picasso changing his mind and, in his hurry, running the black and white paint together.
The human figure always remained central to Picasso’s art, and he was never tempted by abstract art. Such was his mastery of technique and the diversity of his imagination that he had the unique ability to switch between traditional imagery and styles and new ways of expression. He would choose whichever was more appropriate for the work he was creating. Like his Spanish predecessors Velasquez and Goya, he had the ability to express emotions and concerns that were simultaneously highly personal and universal in their meaning.
“Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?” said Picasso. Although he was a pioneer of the Modern movement, Picasso respected the past; as a young man spent long hours studying in the Louvre. The styles that he developed were not so much a rejection of past values as an expression of his desire to revive the fresh vision and vitality that characterized the work of the early Renaissance.