Pablo Picasso: Spanish by birth, French at art

The 20th century’s greatest painter was born in Malaga but came into his own amid the sleaze and bohemianism of Paris – the only city that could have matched his peerless imagination

French tradition … Pablo Picasso at his studio in Mougins, France, 1971. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Pablo Picasso, the greatest artist of the 20th century, was French.

Hold on … don’t comment yet.

I am fully aware that Picasso was born in Malaga in southern Spain in 1881, that he started his artistic career in Barcelona and remained proudly Spanish all his life.

But the reopening of the Musée Picasso in Paris last autumn confirmed the French capital’s unique claim on this stupendously creative painter, sculptor and poet. His genius is so tangled up with the streets and garrets, palaces and attics of Paris, a city that he first visited in 1900 and whose artistic life he would take to new heights.

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

Picasso never forgot Spain, but he needed Paris to become a great artist. In 1900, the French capital was already crawling with modernists. The young Picasso emulated the raw nightlife scenes of Toulouse-Lautrec, and soon became fascinated by the art of Degas, Van Gogh and, most of all, Cézanne. Picasso’s “rose” period echoes the late works of Degas while Cézanne is the god of cubism. Picasso was eventually rich enough to buy a chateau at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire, thus owning, he boasted, the view his hero Cézanne had painted. He is buried there.

Picasso in 1908 in his workshop in Montmartre, Paris. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images

These great French artists fed Picasso’s changing styles, while the city itself – with its sleaze and bohemianism – inspired his imagination. In his 1907 masterpiece of sharp-edged menace Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso takes the women who inhabit Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre and reimagines them as brazen sexual terrorists.

Picasso’s early time in Paris living in the ramshackle Bateau-Lavoir was riotous. Events like a banquet he gave in his studio for the untrained genius Henri Rousseau have become legendary. But Picasso’s Paris also includes the Left Bank and its cafes where, in the 1930s, he encountered the surrealist movement. While covering the relaunch of the Musée Picasso last year, I found the loft where he lived in the 30s, a stone’s throw from the famous Left Bank cafes where he talked art with radical intellectuals. It was also in this 17th-century attic that he painted Guernica.

We rightly see the greatest political artwork of modern times as a defence of Spain from Franco and Hitler – Picasso’s war painting portrays the destruction of Guernica in the Basque region by Nazi bombs. But it is a very French painting. It was created in his Paris loft and went straight from there to the 1937 Paris Universal Exhibition, where it was unveiled in the Spanish pavilion. The remains of this exhibition site – where Nazi and Fascist pavilions faced each other grimly – still exist beside the Seine.

Guernica was not merely painted in Paris but is steeped in art history, which Picasso taught himself in the Louvre. The great French tradition of history paintings, from Poussin to Géricault, which stands out in the Louvre collection, hovers behind Picasso’s great modern history painting.

It was, of course, Guernica and the Spanish civil war that led to Picasso spending the rest of his life in France. The victory of Franco and destruction of Spanish democracy meant this principled artist would never go home. He stipulated that Guernica itself could only go to Spain after Franco died.

The Musée Picasso in Paris. Photograph: Romauld Meigneux/Spia/Rex Features

Picasso spent the second world war in Paris, quietly working and supporting the Resistance. His defiance of the Nazi occupation made him even more inseparable from the story of this city.

Alright, maybe Picasso wasn’t French. But he was definitely a Parisian.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/feb/20/pablo-picasso-spanish-french-art-painter-paris