Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris

Internationally recognized as one of the most innovative and influential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) was at his most ferociously inventive between 1905 and 1945. Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris surveys his work during these crucial decades, when he transformed the history of art through his innate virtuosity and protean creativity. The exhibition follows the trajectory of Picasso's career from his early experiments with abstraction to his pioneering role in the development of Cubism, as well as his dialogue with Surrealism and other important art movements in the ensuing decades. The exhibition will also explore the important role that the city of Paris played in the history of modern art during the first half of the twentieth century, when artists from around the world followed Picasso's example and moved to the French capital. It will include works by expatriate artists like Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Man Ray, who collectively formed a vibrant, international avant-garde group known, for posterity, as the School of Paris. Drawn from the Museum's extraordinary collection of paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings by Picasso, with additional loans from private American collections, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to reconsider the cross-fertilization of ideas that took place in Paris during one of the most experimental and creative periods in Western art. Two-hundred fourteen paintings, sculptures, and works on paper will be on view, including Picasso's Three Musicians (1921), a grand summation of the artist's decade-long exploration of Synthetic Cubism in which the artist seems to cast himself and his poet friends Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob as players in a radical form of Cubist concert.

Behind the Scenes

The Americans in Paris gallery

The Salon Gallery - part 1

The Salon Gallery - part 2

Dream and Lie of Franco

Picasso's Three Musicians

Picasso's Drawing for Lysistrata

Brancusi's Mademoiselle Pogany [III]

Chair with Gladiolas

Collage and Papier Collé gallery

Picasso's Self-Portrait with Palette

Picasso's Man with a Lamb

Georges Braque's Violin and Newspaper

Picasso's Woman with Loaves

Fernand Léger's The City

Juan Gris' Still Life before an Open Window, Place Ravignan

Virgil Marti, artist and designer of the Sigmund pouf

Timothy Rub, George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer

Michael Taylor, The Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art

Suzanne Penn, Conservator of Paintings

Jack Schlechter, Installations Designer

Marla K. Shoemaker, The Kathleen C. Sherrerd Senior Curator of Education

Gallery Guide

Picasso: The Early Years in Paris

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In the spring of 1904, Pablo Picasso decided to move permanently to Paris and rented a studio in a dilapidated tenement building called the Bateau-Lavoir, where he would work until 1909. Having already established a reputation in his native Spain as a young painter capable of deftly mastering the most advanced pictorial techniques, the ambitious twenty-three-year-old artist could no longer resist the urge to live and work in the cultural capital of the world. It was within the bohemian artistic community of Paris that Picasso would establish lifelong friendships with fellow artists, especially Georges Braque and Juan Gris, with whom he both collaborated and competed throughout his artistic career. Picasso's early years in Paris encompass his "Rose Period," when he made such works as Woman with Loaves, which in 1931 became the first painting by the artist to enter the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection. Completed in the summer of 1906, the work depicts a sturdy Spanish peasant woman balancing two heavy loaves of bread on her head. The indistinct shapes of the background, with their sun-baked terracotta tones, relate to the prehistoric paintings that were discovered at Altamira, a cave in northern Spain, in 1879. Picasso greatly admired these polychrome rock paintings of bison and other wild mammals, and declared that, "After Altamira, all is decadence." Woman with Loaves represents an early attempt to reinvent human anatomy through nontraditional art forms like cave painting and ancient Iberian sculpture. It was also during this time that Picasso visited the Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum in Paris, where he encountered African art for the first time. This seminal experience would forever change the direction of Picasso's art and inspire the masklike faces and compacted limbs and torsos found in his groundbreaking, proto-Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), for which the Philadelphia Museum of Art owns an important watercolor study.

Picasso and Braque: Inventing Cubism

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Much as the invention of the airplane announced the beginning of the modern age, Cubism can be said to have inaugurated the art of the twentieth century. As the earliest paintings and works on paper in this exhibition attest, Picasso began as a prodigiously gifted artist working with a fairly traditional pictorial repertoire. Between 1907 and 1914, however, the artist's work evolved as if it were a secret language being invented in private conversation with the French artist Georges Braque (1882–1963), his close friend and collaborator in the development of Cubism. Picasso's large and vertiginous Man with a Guitar reflects the two artists' nearly day-to-day interchange in 1912, a time when their styles became almost indistinguishable, based on a shared vocabulary of gridlike scaffolding, overlapping planes, and a reduced palette of beige, ocher, white, and gray. Without completely renouncing the traditional formats of the three-quarter-length human figure and the still life, Cubism introduced a code of abbreviated signs in which people and objects were depicted through esoteric hieroglyphs of autonomous lines and interlocking planes that operate according to their own logic. In their extraordinary representations of string instruments, such as the violin and the guitar, Picasso and Braque flattened, dissected, and recomposed forms into myriad essential shapes and planes, and then showed them from different angles, like a deck of playing cards that are constantly reshuffled before our eyes. The revolutionary use of multiple, shifting perspectives in these works represented a radical shift from the conventions of illusionism that had dominated Western painting since the Italian Renaissance. It allowed Picasso and Braque to declare that, after Cubism, a painting's success was no longer determined by its resemblance to the visible world, but rather by a profound reordering of reality.

Collage and Papier Collé

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Collage, the juxtaposition and application of found materials on a two-dimensional surface, is among the most innovative artistic techniques of the twentieth century. The term "collage" derives from the French verb coller, which means "to glue," and refers to the introduction of nontraditional materials into fine art, often in the form of cut and pasted papers (also known as papiers collés). Although Picasso and Braque are credited with the invention of this radically new means of artistic expression, the Spanish artist Juan Gris (1887–1927) was another strong proponent of collage. All three artists skillfully incorporated such unconventional materials as artificially wood-grained wallpaper, newspaper fragments, sheet music, and advertisements in their collages as a means of creating paradox, ambiguity, and wit. Picasso's breathtaking 1913 collage Still Life with Fruit, Violin, and Wineglass, for example, uses a newspaper fragment containing the end of the word "journal" to suggest a newspaper on a café table. The artist also pasted colored prints of apples and pears in the upper left-hand corner to indicate fruit in a bowl made of newspaper and a stand formed by a strip of white paper. The numerous textural variations and collage elements are amplified through their careful juxtaposition with drawn elements, such as the violin and the wineglass. By applying collage to their paintings and works on paper, artists like Picasso, Braque, and Gris created an illusion of three-dimensionality that highlighted the physicality of the artwork and its artificial nature, while radically rejecting traditional fine-art notions of originality and purity. By integrating everyday objects and texts on contemporary events (via newspaper clippings), they complicated the boundaries between the art world and the outside world as well as challenged some of the most fundamental assumptions about the nature of painting inherited by Western artists since the Renaissance.

Synthetic Cubism

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The terms "Analytic Cubism" and "Synthetic Cubism" have firmly entered the vocabulary of art history as period definitions for the stylistic changes in the work of Picasso and Braque between 1908 and 1914. Analytic Cubism denotes the period between 1908 and 1912 when the two artists broke down three-dimensional objects into fragments—corresponding to their appearance from different angles—which were then recombined on a two-dimensional surface. Although Analytic Cubism rejected single-point perspective, its combination of multiple viewpoints is thought to offer a more complete version of perceived reality than traditional forms of painting. Synthetic Cubism, which Picasso and Braque pioneered between 1912 and 1914, reassembles the elemental compositional shapes and fragments of Analytic Cubism in order to create new kinds of reality. The birth of Synthetic Cubism coincided with the invention of collage and papier collé in 1912, which encouraged the artists to reject the near monochrome palette of Analytic Cubism and reintroduce bright color. Another key component of Synthetic Cubism was the incorporation of illusionistic devices such as simulated wood-grain, whose wavy texture was achieved by dragging housepainters' combs through wet paint. Picasso and Braque were joined during this second phase of Cubism by Juan Gris, a master of papier collé, whose vibrantly colored still-life paintings similarly questioned the identity of objects through fragmentation and elision, as well as humorous visual puns. In his 1913 painting Violin, a fragmentary sheet of music reads, "Auprès de ma blonde," the title of a famous seventeenth-century French drinking song that translates as "by my blonde girlfriend's side." In a verbal and visual joke, Gris has united the love song with a fluted beer glass beside the sheet of music, since a glass of light beer in France is also called une blonde.

Americans in Paris

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The cultural epicenter for the community of American artists and writers who came to Paris in the aftermath of World War I was the lively salons hosted by Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo at their home at 27 rue de Fleurus. The Steins arrived in Paris in 1903, bought their first Paul Cézanne painting the following year, and by 1905 had acquired works by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who became good friends with Gertrude. His development of Cubism inspired her to experiment with similar effects of dislocation and fragmentation in her writings, and she and Leo would be the artist's principal patrons for the next decade. The Steins' exceptional art collection soon became the gateway to European modernism for recently arrived expatriate American artists, including Arthur Beecher Carles, Charles Demuth, and Max Weber. Weber recalled their Saturday-night salons as a "sort of international clearing-house of ideas and matters of art for young and aspiring artists from all over the world," where newcomers to the Parisian avant-garde scene encountered firsthand the aesthetics and ethos of modernism. Another important meeting place for artists were the cafés, such as the popular Dôme in Montparnasse, as seen in Preston Dickinson's Cubist-inspired Café Scene (Portrait of Charles Demuth) of c. 1912–14. An essential part of the Parisian expatriate experience, cafés came to represent both the lively public intellectual debates among luminaries who gathered there, such as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and writer-filmmaker Jean Cocteau, as well as the disillusionment and ennui of the so-called Lost Generation, a term coined by Gertrude Stein for the young men and women traumatized by World War I. The isolation and dissipation that were common themes in the writing of Lost Generation authors such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are reflected in the inwardness of the figures in Dickinson's faceted composition, whose solitude is reinforced by their imposing urban setting.

Salon Cubism

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The artists in this gallery represent the public face of Cubism in France during the early 1910s. Although Picasso and Braque had initiated the movement, their dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, prohibited them from showing their paintings at the two annual Salon exhibitions in Paris—the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne—preferring instead to show their work to clients at his art gallery on the rue Vignon. Therefore, the general audience at the Salons first encountered Cubism through the work of Alexander Archipenko, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, and Francis Picabia, among others. While dependent on the innovations of Picasso and Braque, the Salon Cubists created works that were more brightly colored and legible than those of their forerunners. This eclectic group of artists met regularly on Sunday afternoons at the studio shared by the older brothers of Marcel Duchamp—Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon—in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux. These informal gatherings, which combined games of chess, archery, and toy-horse races with lively discussions of art and science, formed the basis of Gleizes and Metzinger's famous 1912 treatise Du Cubisme, which defended Cubism in the face of hostile attacks from the press. This publication coincided with the Salon de la Section d'Or exhibition, which opened in October 1912 at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris. Although the exhibition's title referred to the mathematical concept of the Golden Section, an ideal system of proportions used in the design of the Parthenon and other buildings, it was chosen less for its literal meaning than for its connotations of reason and order. Several of the works in this gallery were included in the Section d'Or exhibition and that year's Salon d'Automne, which was also on view in the fall of 1912. Their display here consciously evokes the installation at the Salon d'Automne, in which Cubist paintings were densely hung and punctuated at intervals by sculpture that functioned like architectural elements.

Cubism between the Wars

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Fernand Léger's 1919 painting The City, which was shown to great acclaim at the 1920 Salon des Indépendants exhibition in Paris, announced in spectacular fashion the continued viability of Cubism in the post–World War I era. At a time when many painters were rejecting modern art in favor of traditional techniques and timeless subject matter—such as views of the unspoiled French countryside before it was ravaged by trench warfare—Léger's fragmented cityscape represented a wholesale celebration of the machine-age urban environment. The monumental scale of the painting enveloped Salon visitors like a theater backdrop, inviting them to join the mechanized figures climbing the staircase in the foreground and enter this bustling modern metropolis, which Léger constructed from abbreviated city sights and abstract forms redolent of scaffolding, bridges, steel structures, billboards, and shop-window mannequins. The City is illuminated by the intensity of Léger's palette—vivid hues inspired by the colorful posters of the Place de Clichy, where Parisians were bombarded by a deluge of advertising billboards and commercial signs. While Léger's painting envisioned a bright future for Cubism and avant-garde experimentation after World War I, Picasso's Three Musicians of 1921 represents a grand summation of his decade-long exploration of Synthetic Cubism. Although painted in oil, its brightly colored, intricately interlocking shapes echo the collages and papiers collés he made before the war, which has led the painting to be interpreted as a symbolic and nostalgic elegy to his lost bohemian youth. According to this biographical reading, the three masked musicians can be identified as the recently deceased writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who wears the white baggy costume of Pierrot; the writer Max Jacob as a monk (he joined a monastery in the spring of 1921); and Picasso himself as Harlequin. Sporting the red and yellow colors of the Spanish flag, Picasso adopts the persona of the sad clown, with whom he had frequently identified in his early work.

Return to Order

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These works of art reflect the resurgence of interest in traditional subject matter and techniques after World War I, in line with the reactionary international movement known as the rappel à l'ordre (call to order). This phrase was coined on Armistice Day 1918 by the French poet Jean Cocteau, a close friend of Picasso, who called for a return to the classical themes and high levels of craftsmanship that had defined European painting before the advent of modern art. Abandoning the radical experimentation of the pre-World-War-I-era, artists turned their attention to the serenity and nobility of the art of the past. Jean Souverbie's timeless images of frolicking female bathers, steeped in ideas of classicism, order, and harmony, were thus seen as the perfect antidote to the disjunctive fragmentation of Cubism, whose destructive impulse was unpalatable to a society that had barely survived the carnage of war. Many of the most innovative artists of the European avant-garde, including Picasso and Braque, were sympathetic to the politically conservative return-to-order movement and sought a link in their own work between modernism and the essential values of the art of the past. Braque's Seated Bather (1925), for example, references Greco-Roman art through the figure's proportions and drapery, although it is executed in a nonclassical manner, with fluid paint handling, undulating contours, and strong contrasts between light and shade. Similarly, Picasso's return to figuration in his neoclassical period of the early 1920s can be linked with the cultural backlash against Cubism, although the artist never viewed his groundbreaking earlier work as progressing away from classical ideals, despite its revolutionary appearance. The painting of his fellow countryman Joaquín Valverde Lasarte is thus more typical of the return-to-order movement, as seen in The Hunters of 1931, which caused a sensation when it was first shown at the 1932 Venice Biennale.

Picasso and Surrealism

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While the Cubists fixed their attention on the rational, objective world around them, the next generation of artists looked for inspiration in the realms of the unconscious and the imagination. In 1924, a group of young writers and artists, led by the French poet André Breton, launched the Surrealist movement in Paris. Indebted to the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud, they turned to chance procedures, dreams, and taboo fantasies to create artwork that embraced the irrational and celebrated the marvelous. The term "Surrealism" was coined by Picasso's friend Guillaume Apollinaire, who used it to describe the Spanish artist's designs for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the program notes for the 1917 ballet Parade, Apollinaire claimed that Picasso's costumes and set designs led to such a remarkable transformation of reality that the ballet was elevated to a "sur-real" experience for its audience members. Although Picasso never officially joined Breton's group, his work entered into a fascinating dialogue with Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s. In December 1924, Picasso was represented in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste with a sheet-metal guitar construction, and two of his works were shown in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Pierre the following year. The artist later contributed to a number of Surrealist publications, including the first issue of the journal Minotaure in 1933, for which he designed a collage of the half-man, half-bull of Greek legend. Picasso had earlier explored the themes of passion, violence, and sexual aggression in a series of Surrealist-inspired paintings on the subject of the female bather that he made in the French coastal resort of Dinard in the late 1920s. The model for these transgressive, sexually charged paintings was the artist's teenage lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Her body is subjected to apparently limitless re-inventions and expressive distortions in these images, which share the convulsive biomorphic beauty and witty, yet grotesque sexuality found in the work of Surrealists, including fellow Spaniard Joan Miró.

Eastern Europeans in Paris

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As a symbol of culture, freedom, and modernity, Paris held a special allure for aspiring modern artists during the first half of the twentieth century, which accounts for the huge migration of painters and sculptors to the city. A large number of Eastern European artists settled in a vibrant area of Paris known as Montparnasse, which was sprinkled with artists' residences, cafés, and art galleries; it was here that Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Chana Orloff, Jules Pascin, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine established studios and discovered each other's work in an atmosphere of mutual encouragement and support. Many of these émigré artists were also attracted to the religious tolerance of Paris, which provided a safe environment free from the pogroms and persecution that their Jewish families had endured for generations in their former homelands of Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries. While Lipchitz, Marcoussis, and Zadkine experimented with the interlocking planes and sharply angled forms of Cubism, others attempted to reconcile the latest trends in modern art with the folk traditions of their native lands. This can be seen in the stylistic schematization of Constantin Brancusi's marble portrait of the Hungarian artist Margit Pogany, where the simplified abstract forms are strongly reminiscent of Art Deco design. The elegant refinement and egglike smoothness of this sculpture are contrasted with the roughly hewn wooden base that Brancusi hand-carved according to the folk traditions of his native Romania. Chagall's brightly colored, folkloric paintings similarly referenced the customs and rituals of Jewish life in his native Belorussia. His large-scale 1911 painting Half-Past Three (The Poet), however, made shortly after his arrival in Paris from an art school in Saint Petersburg, reveals the head-spinning impact of Cubism, which encouraged him to incorporate fragmented planes and diagonal shafts of color to imbue the composition with a prismatic sensation.

Death and Sacrifice

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When France and Great Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, Picasso was forced to remain in Paris for the duration of the global conflict. The recent victory in Spain of General Francisco Franco's Falangists over the democratically elected Republican government, which the artist had vociferously supported during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), ensured that he would not return to his homeland again during his lifetime. The artist instead spent the war in a large studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, which he moved into in the fall of 1940. Picasso's gloomy wartime output reflects the severe deprivations that French civilians endured during World War II, including food shortages and lack of heating fuel during the winter. The large and austere Chair with Gladiolus, which Picasso completed on September 17, 1943, conveys the oppressive mood of the war years in its heavily contoured depiction of a vase of gladiolus on a chair. The cut flowers fail to cheer up the empty room, whose melancholy atmosphere is similar to that found in other still lifes that Picasso made during this time, which often feature human skulls in a macabre pun on nature morte (French for "still life") with its connotations of death and decay. Despite a scarcity of artistic materials in German-occupied Paris, Picasso produced a prodigious amount of work during this period, including Man with a Lamb (1943–44), his most important wartime sculpture. The themes of sacrifice and redemption addressed in this work were also explored by Jacques Lipchitz, who used the image of an aged man performing a ritual sacrifice in The Prayer (1943) to express his horror at the discovery of Nazi concentration camps. The artist later recalled that he had cried throughout the making of this work, which was his heartfelt prayer for the innocent victims of Hitler's atrocities.

Chronology

1. 1904
   1. Apr, Paris

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) returns to Paris from Barcelona and decides to live and work permanently there. He lives in a tenement building called the Bateau-Lavoir at 13, rue de Ravignan.

1. Autumn, Paris

Picasso meets Fernande Olivier, with whom he would live for nine years. She describes Picasso's quarters in the Bateau-Lavoir when she first visits him: There was a mattress on four legs in one corner. A little iron stove, covered in rust with a yellow earthenware bowl on it, served for washing; a towel and a minute stub of soap lay on a whitewood table beside it. In another corner a pathetic little black-painted trunk made a pretty uncomfortable seat. A cane chair, easels, canvases of every size and tubes of paint were scattered all over the floor with brushes, oil containers and a bowl for etching fluid. There were no curtains. In the drawer of the table was a pet white mouse which Picasso tenderly cared for and showed to everybody. (Olivier 1964, p. 27).

1. 1905
   1. Paris

Picasso meets the American writer Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, both avid collectors of modern art who had lived in the city as expatriates since 1903. Picasso begins to paint a portrait of Gertrude Stein (completed 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The American painter Max Weber arrives in Paris and will stay for three years, during which he studies with Matisse and meets Picasso.

1. 1906
   1. Spring, Paris

An exhibition of ancient Iberian sculpture excavated from Osuna in southern Spain is held at the Louvre Museum, Paris. Picasso responds strongly to its imagery in works such as Seated Nude and Standing Nude (1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

1. Mid-May–mid-Aug Gósol, Spain

Picasso spends three months at Gósol near Andorra in the Spanish Pyrenees. Fernande Olivier later writes, "He lived for several months in a Catalan village above the Andorra valley, at Gósol, where he worked regularly and felt far healthier" (Olivier 1964, p. 94). The works he paints there, such as Woman with Loaves (1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art), have the pale terracotta tonality of the soil.

Upon his return from Spain, Picasso completes Portrait of Gertrude Stein and paints Self-Portrait with Palette (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

1. Oct, Paris

The death of Paul Cézanne on October 22 in Aix-en-Provence, France, is acknowledged by the showing of ten of his paintings at the Salon d'Automne.

1. 1907
   1. Feb, Paris

A young German, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, opens a gallery on the rue Vignon near the Madeleine cathedral.

1. Late Apr–May Paris

Picasso begins to work on the large canvas of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York), based on a watercolor study (1907, Philadelphia Museum of Art). [1952-61-103] He finishes the painting in July.

1. Spring, Paris

Picasso meets Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963). The two work incredibly closely over the next several years, developing the coded visual language of Analytic Cubism seen in Picasso's Man with a Guitar (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

1. Oct 1, Paris

A Cézanne memorial exhibition featuring fifty-six works opens at the Salon d'Automne.

1. 1908
   1. Autumn, Paris

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler buys Picasso's work when he can afford it.

1. Nov 9, Paris

In his review of an exhibition of Braque's work at Kahnweiler's gallery, the critic Louis Vauxcelles uses the word "cubes" in reference to the artist's paintings.

1. 1909
   1. May 11
      Barcelona

Picasso arrives in Barcelona with his girlfriend Fernande Olivier to visit his parents.

1. Sept
   Paris

Picasso and Fernande move to a large and comfortable apartment at 11, boulevard de Clichy, Montmartre. She later writes:

He worked in a large, airy studio, which no one could enter without permission, where nothing could be touched and where, as usual, the chaos . . . had to be treated with respect.

Picasso ate his meals in a dining-room furnished with old mahogany furniture, where he was served by a maid in a white apron.

He slept in a peaceful room, on a low bed with heavy, square, brass ends.

Behind the bedroom, at the back, was a little drawing-room, with a sofa, a piano and a pretty Italian cabinet, inlaid with ivory, mother-of-pearl and shells, sent him by his father, along with several other beautiful old pieces of furniture. . . .

There were two windows, and if one leant out one could feel the sun and see beautiful trees and gardens (Olivier 1964, p. 135).

1. 1910
   1. May

Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is reproduced for the first time, in the American magazine The Architectural Record.

1. June 26 Cadaqués Spain

Picasso leaves for Cadaqués, a small village on the Mediterranean.

1. Aug 6-12 Barcelona

Picasso and Fernande visit his parents in Barcelona.

1. Dec 20, 1910Feb 11, 1911 Paris

An exhibition of Picasso's work is held at Ambroise Vollard's gallery; no catalogue seems to exist. Vollard, who had been buying works from Picasso since 1901, becomes disillusioned with his work in 1910—the year the artist paints his now-famous portrait of the dealer (The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow)—and stops purchasing his work.

1. 1911
   1. Paris

Marc Chagall (French, born Belorussia, 1887–1985), who recently arrived in Paris from art school in Saint Petersburg, makes his monumental painting Half-Past Three (The Poet), whose prismatic composition reveals the influence of Cubism.

1. Feb 7, Paris

Braque sends Picasso a postcard from Le Havre, France, saying he will see him Thursday. Braque has begun to live with Marcelle Lapré, whom he will marry in 1912 but who is always known as Mme Braque.

1. March 28April 25

Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291, in New York presents the first exhibition of Picasso's work in the United States. In the exhibition catalogue, a translation of an interview between the illustrator Marius de Zayas (Mexican, 1880–1961) and Picasso is published. The interview took place during the winter of 1910–11 for de Zayas's father's Spanish-language publication, América revista mensual ilustrada.

1. July-AugCéret, France

Picasso goes to Céret in the French Pyrenees.

1. Aug 17Céret

Braque joins Picasso, and both begin to experiment with lettering in their work. Picasso writes to Kahnweiler that he has already shown Braque the whole region. He remains in Céret until early September (possibly September 4) before returning to Paris.

1. AutumnParis

Jean Metzinger's Tea Time (Woman with a Teaspoon) (1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art) is shown at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. The prominent art critic André Salmon dubs it "The Mona Lisa of Cubism."

1. NovParis

This is the probable date of the beginning of Picasso's liaison with Marcelle Humbert (born Éva Gouel), whom he calls Éva (as well as "Ma Jolie") to distinguish her from Mme Braque, who is also named Marcelle.

1. 1912
   1. Feb 5
      Paris

An exhibition of the work of the Italian Futurists, including Gino Severini's La Modiste (The Milliner) (1910–11), is shown at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. The accompanying text by artists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Severini attacks the French Cubists. The exhibition closes on February 24.

1. Spring, Paris

Gertrude Stein buys Picasso's The Architect's Table (1912, Museum of Modern Art, New York), her first purchase without her brother Leo.

1. April 28, Paris

Picasso returns from an expedition with Braque to Le Havre (Cousins 1989, p. 389).

1. May, Céret

Picasso goes to Céret with Éva.

1. May 24, Céret

Picasso writes to Kahnweiler about sending him painting materials. His interest in decorators' techniques is apparent in his request for stencils and combs for making faux bois, or wood-graining. The colors of paints he requests are white, ivory, black, burnt sienna, emerald green, Verona green, ultramarine blue, ocher, umber, vermilion, cadmium dark, and clear or preferably cadmium yellow. He already has cobalt purple and Peruvian ocher (1984–1985 Paris, pp. 165–166).

1. July 12, Céret

Picasso writes to Kahnweiler how much he loves Marcelle (Éva). He also says he has been working and has begun eight canvases. He adds, "I believe my painting has gained in robustness and clarity." He is also curious to know whether the book on Cubism by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes has appeared (1984–1985 Paris, p. 168).

1. Summer, Céret or Sorgues (near Avignon) France

In a notebook, now in the Musée national Picasso in Paris, Picasso writes in a characteristic mixture of French and Spanish, "trouver le equilibre entro le nature et votre imagination" (find the balance between nature and your imagination) (MP 1864, p. 40 v).

1. June 14, Céret

Picasso writes to Braque from Céret, "I get no letters except from you, and I'm very happy when you write me, as you well know" (Cousins 1989, p. 395).

1. June 21–23 Sorgues

The artist moves from Céret to Sorgues, where Braque joins him in late July.

1. Aug 16 Sorgues

Braque writes Kahnweiler, "Picasso and I are spending pleasant evenings by the fire," and signs it "Wilburg Braque," alluding to Wilbur Wright of the Wright brothers (1984–1985 Paris, p. 26).

1. Aug 21 Sorgues

Picasso writes to Kahnweiler that he has removed the wallpaper from one wall of the house he is renting in Sorgues and has painted a fresco in its place—a still life with his usual tribute to Éva as "Ma Jolie" (Cousins 1989, p. 402).

1. Sept 3-13 Sorgues

During Picasso's absence from Paris, Braque makes the first papier collé, or collage, Fruit Dish and Glass.

1. Oct, Paris

The Salon de la Section d'Or exhibition opens at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris, and includes Juan Gris's Man in a Café (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Gris was the only artist included in the exhibition who actually used the ideal mathematical proportions of the Golden Section to construct his compositions. The Salon d'Automne exhibition in the same month includes Albert Gleizes's Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud) (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Gleizes and Jean Metzinger publish their treatise Du Cubisme, which defends Cubism in the face of hostile attacks from the press.

1. Oct 9, Paris

Picasso, who has returned to Paris, writes Braque in Sorgues, "I've been using your latest papery and powdery procedures" (Cousins 1989, p. 407).

1. Oct 31, Paris

Picasso writes to Braque, who had stayed longer in Sorgues and rescued Picasso's fresco from his rented house, Les Clochettes. Picasso tells Braque that he has received the fresco, which Braque had removed, packed, and shipped carefully. It is oil on a whitewashed plaster wall transferred to canvas (Cousins 1989, p. 410).

1. Autumn, Paris

As each artist challenges the other, Braque and Picasso enrich their works with other materials. Picasso creates constructions frequently made of relatively ephemeral materials such as paper and cardboard. The combinations are often visually beautiful and full of a joie de vivre, and animated by humor. Toward the very end of the year, Picasso employs newspapers in surprisingly large papiers collés.

1. Dec 18, Paris

Picasso sends a signed contract to Kahnweiler (as Braque also does) giving the dealer exclusive rights to buy his entire production. In the contract, the dealer specifies the prices he will pay. The contract lasts less than two years, until the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.

1. By Dec 26 Paris

Picasso and Éva go to Barcelona, where they stay until January 21, 1913.

1. Dec 1912 - Jan 1913

Picasso and Braque begin to develop what will be known as Synthetic Cubism, continuing to experiment with papier collé in works such as Picasso's early 1913 collage, Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and Wineglass (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

1. 1913

Chaim Soutine (1893–1943), a Jewish painter from Lithuania, moves to Paris and works in relative obscurity until 1923, when the noted American art collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes purchases fifty-two of his expressionist paintings for his Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania.

1. March 12Céret

Éva sends a postcard to Gertrude Stein to say that she and Picasso have settled in Céret.

1. April 11Céret

In a letter to Kahnweiler, Picasso writes, "Max [Jacob] will be coming to Céret. Would you be kind enough to give him the money for the trip and also some pocket money for his expenses? Put it on my account" (1984–1985 Paris, p. 170).

1. April 23Céret

Picasso writes to Braque, "I've been very worried about my father's illness. He's not doing very well" (Cousins 1989, p. 416).

1. May

Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955) begins a series of works, all of which are entitled Contrast of Forms, shortly after giving a lecture at the Académie Wassilief in Paris. In this celebrated lecture, Léger argued for the independence of painting from its traditional role of representation and proposed instead that it should express the experience of living in a modern technological environment through nonrepresentational contrasts of lines, shapes, and colors.

1. May 3 Barcelona

Picasso's father, José Ruiz Blasco, dies.

1. May 5 Barcelona

Picasso notifies friends of his father's death. To Kahnweiler he writes, "I am announcing the death of my father last Saturday morning. You can imagine the state I am in" (1984–1985 Paris, p. 170).

1. July Céret

Picasso is suffering from an illness that Éva describes to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as a "little typhoid fever" (Cousins 1989, p. 420).

1. Aug 19 Paris

Picasso writes to Kahnweiler that he and Éva had come back to Paris and found a studio with an apartment, 5 bis, rue Schoelcher, into which they will move in the fall (1984–1985 Paris, p.170). They return to Céret.

1. Nov 15 Paris

Picasso's constructions are published in Les Soirées de Paris, a magazine edited by his friend Guillaume Apollinaire and underwritten by the wealthy Comte Étienne de Beaumont. The press is violently opposed to the works.

1. 1914
   1. Jan 1

The first issue of the Italian Futurist publication Lacerba is published and includes two of Picasso's papier collé still lifes (Daix 701, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and Daix 702, private collection, Paris).

1. SpringParis

Picasso uses paint and sand to decorate six different versions of his Synthetic Cubist sculpture Glass of Absinthe (Philadelphia Museum of Art). The work is cast in bronze and incorporates a silver-plated absinthe spoon.

1. Mid-JuneAvignon

Picasso goes to Avignon with Éva; they will return to Paris mid-November.

1. Mid-July

Kahnweiler and his wife leave Paris on their annual holiday to Italy but, due to his German citizenship, they cannot return to Paris. They will live in Switzerland for the duration of World War I, and return to Paris in 1920. Kahnweiler is unable, however, to continue to support his artists.

1. Aug 2Avignon

At the Avignon railroad station, Picasso sees Braque and André Derain (French, 1880–1954) off for their military service, which he recognizes will end his close collaboration with Braque.

1. Aug 3

Germany declares war on France.

1. Mid-Nov Avignon Paris

Picasso and Éva return to Paris after five months in Avignon.

1. Christmas Paris

On the back of a watercolor of an apple (Daix 801), Picasso writes: "Souvenir pour Gertrude [Stein] et Alice [B. Toklas] / Picasso / Noël 1914." This painting was intended to be a consolation for Gertrude's having lost a painting by Paul Cézanne in a division of property with her brother Leo.

1. 1915

Spanish artist Juan Gris (1887–1927) paints Still Life before an Open Widow, Place Ravignan (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

1. SpringParis

Éva's health deteriorates; she has tuberculosis, which, according to Gertrude Stein, she attempts to hide from Picasso.

1. May

Braque is wounded in the war.

1. Autumn

Picasso may have begun a dalliance with Gabrielle (Gaby) Lespinasse (John Richards in 1987/1988 Basel/London, p. 184).

1. Nov

Éva is taken to a hospital at Auteuil, a Paris suburb.

1. Dec, Paris

Picasso writes to Gertrude Stein, "My life is hell. Éva becomes more and more ill each day. I go to the hospital and spend most of the time in the Metro." He continues, "However, I have made a picture of a Harlequin that, to my way of thinking and to that of many others, is the best thing I have ever done" (Museum of Modern Art, New York) (1980, p. 179).

1. Dec 14 Paris

Éva dies. Among the small group of friends at the funeral are Max Jacob and Juan Gris, who describes the funeral in a letter to Maurice Raynal written on December 18: "Picasso's mistress died the other day. There were 7 or 8 friends at the funeral, which was a very sad affair except, of course, for Max's [Jacob] witticisms, which merely emphasized the horror. Picasso is rather upset by it" (Letters by Juan Gris, collected by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, trans. and ed. Douglas Cooper [London: privately printed, 1956], letter XLI, p. 34).

1. 1916
   1. Feb 22 Paris

Picasso creates a construction intended as a declaration of love to Gaby Lespinasse. The work features oval photographs of each of them, a small oval painting of Cupid waking a sleeping Venus, and three oval Cubist still lifes of musical instruments, adorned with flowers. In the middle is the illuminated inscription, "Je t'aime, Gaby" (I love you, Gaby), and pasted below it is a handwritten statement: "j'ai demandé ta main au Bon Dieu Paris 22 février 1916" (I have asked the Good Lord for your hand, Paris, February 22, 1916).

1. March 17

Apollinaire returns from the war with a head wound.

1. March-AprilParis

Wearing a Harlequin costume, French poet Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) visits Picasso and asks him to design the sets for Parade, a ballet to be performed by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He leaves the costume with Picasso.

1. June or July

Picasso moves to a small house in the working-class suburb of Montrouge.

1. Aug 24

Picasso agrees to work on Parade, choreographed by Léonide Massine, and for which Cocteau is writing the scenario, and Erik Satie the music.

1. 1917
   1. Jan 16

Picasso visits his family in Barcelona.

1. Feb 17 Paris-Rome

With Cocteau, Picasso leaves for Rome to work on Parade. He will meet the Russian dancer Olga Koklova there.

1. April 23

Gaby Lespinasse marries Herbert Lespinasse, whose name she had been using for some years.

1. April or May Naples

Picasso accompanies Diaghilev's troupe, including Cocteau and Massine to Naples. Massine writes, "We made a number of trips to Pompeii and Herculaneum, Picasso was thrilled by the majestic ruins, and climbed endlessly over broken columns to stand staring at fragments of Roman statuary" (Massine 1968, p.108). Visits to the Naples Museum and possibly to the Vatican in Rome give Picasso a familiarity with Roman art, including fresco and mosaic.

1. May 18 Paris

The opening performance of Parade at the Théâtre du Chatelet shocks Paris. In his program notes for the ballet, Apollinaire uses the word surréalisme, his invention, for the first time.

1. June 23-30 Barcelona

The Ballets russes performs at the Teatro de Liceo in Barcelona. Picasso follows Olga Koklova there, living with his family while Olga stays at the Pension Ranzini. She remains in Barcelona while the rest of the company tours South America.

1. July 12 Barcelona

Picasso's old Barcelona friends give him a banquet at the Lyon d'or.

1. Nov 10 Barcelona

The only presentation of Parade in Barcelona is given at the Tivoli theater.

1. Late Nov

Picasso and Olga return to Montrouge; he has been absent in Spain for nearly six months.

1. 1918

Picasso signs a contract with Paul Rosenberg's gallery in Paris (Rudenstine 1976, p. 610 n. 1).

1. May 2 Paris

Picasso and Vollard are witnesses at the wedding of Apollinaire and Jacqueline Kolb. Apollinaire has been seriously ill.

1. July 2Paris

Picasso and Olga are wed at the Russian Orthodox church on rue Daru, Paris. Cocteau, Max Jacob, and Apollinaire are witnesses at the civil ceremony.

1. July 13 Biarritz

Picasso and Olga spend their honeymoon with Mme Eugenia Errazuriz in her villa; she introduces them to international society.

1. Late Sept

Picasso and his wife return to Paris.

1. Nov Paris

Apollinaire dies of Spanish influenza.

1. Nov 11

The armistice ending the First World War is declared. French poet Jean Cocteau, a close friend of Picasso, initiates the rappel à l'ordre (call to order) movement, arguing for a return to the classical themes and high levels of craftsmanship that had defined European painting before the advent of modern art.

1. Mid-Nov Paris

Picasso and Olga move to 23, rue La Boëtie, an elegant neighborhood in which his dealers live and have galleries.

1. Mid-Nov Paris

Picasso and Olga move to 23, rue La Boëtie, an elegant neighborhood in which his dealers live and have galleries.

1. 1919
   1. Early May London

Picasso visits his family in Barcelona.

1. Feb 17 Paris-Rome

Picasso leaves for London to design the sets and costumes for Le Tricorne.

1. June Paris

An exhibition of Picasso's work is held at the Galerie de l'Effort Moderne, owned by Léonce Rosenberg.

1. July 22 London

First performance of Le Tricorne at the Alhambra Theatre in London (music by Manuel de Falla, choreography by Massine, decor by Picasso).

1. Late summer Saint-Raphaël

Picasso vacations on the Riviera with Olga, where he completes a number of gouaches showing still-life arrangements before an open window

1. Oct 20 Paris

The opening of an exhibition of Picasso's drawings and watercolors at Paul Rosenberg's gallery, 21, rue La Boëtie takes place.

1. 1920

Fernand Léger's The City is shown to great acclaim at the Salon des Indépendants exhibition in Paris, announcing in spectacular fashion the continued vitality of Cubism in the post-World War I era.

1. May 14 or 15

Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Pulcinella, premiers in Paris. Commissioned by Diaghilev, the production features sets and costumes designed by Picasso, and libretto and choreography by Massine.

1. Mid-June

Picasso and Olga leave Paris for Juan-les-Pins on the Riviera.

1. Late Sept

Picasso and Olga return to Paris.

1. 1921

Arthur B. Carles takes a leave of absence from teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and travels to France. He stays at the home of the American photographer painter Edward Steichen, who lives in the small village of Voulangis, thirty miles east of Paris, and begins to make paintings utilizing the new principles of color espoused by Picasso's great rival, Henri Matisse, such as Steichen's Garden.

1. Feb 4 Paris

Picasso's son Paulo is born. The nickname used for the French Paul (perhaps after Cézanne) appears to have been a compromise with the Spanish Pablo, and perhaps even the Italian Paolo.

1. May 22 Paris

This is the date of the single performance of Diaghilev's Cuadro Flamenco with music by Manuel de Falla, for which Picasso produces the costumes and decor.

1. July 13-14 Paris

First of four sales of works from Kahnweiler's gallery, sequestered during the war, is held. Among the works sold is Glass of Absinthe.

1. Summer Fontainebleau

During this summer Picasso paints some of his greatest Cubist works, including the two versions of The Three Musicians (1952-61-96 and Museum of Modern Art, New York) and some large neoclassical paintings, such as Three Women at the Spring (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

1. Dec 31 Paris

Comte and Comtesse Étienne de Beaumont give a New Year's Eve party. Marcel Proust arrives about midnight. Jean Hugo tells us: "He had entered with the New Year, the year of his death . . . His pale face had become puffy; he had developed a paunch. He spoke only to dukes. ‘Look at him,' Picasso said to me, ‘he's pursuing his theme'" (Jean Hugo, Avant d'oublier [Paris: Fayard, 1976], p. 127).

1. 1922
   1. April Paris

Tristan Tzara defends the survival of Cubism in a pamphlet entitled Le Coeur à barbe: Journal transparent.

1. June

Olga and Picasso leave for Dinard in Britanny sometime in June.

1. July

Man Ray's portrait of Picasso at his apartment at 23, rue de La Boëtie is published in Vanity Fair.

1. Late Sept

Olga is ill, bringing the Picassos back to Paris sooner than expected.

1. 1923
   1. May 19 New York

The interview Picasso gave Marius de Zayas in Spanish appears in English in The Arts, New York. In this famous statement Picasso is clearly defensive about Cubism, which has increasingly come under attack and may also have seemed undermined by his own classical works. He argues with conviction that, Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. . . . Our subjects might be different as we have introduced into painting objects and forms that were formerly ignored. We have kept our eyes open to our surroundings, and also our brains . . . in our subjects we keep the joy of discovery, the pleasure of the unexpected our subject itself must be a source of interest (Barr 1946, PP. 270–271).

1. July 7 Paris

During a Dadaist "Soirée du ‘Coeur à barbe'" at the Théâtre Michel, someone yells, "Picasso dead on the field of battle [by implication Cubism]," which causes André Breton to climb on the stage to come to his defense.

1. Summer

Picasso's mother joins the artist and his family vacationing at Cap d'Antibes.

1. Sept

The Picassos return to Paris.

1. 1924

A group of young writers and artists, led by the French poet André Breton, launches the Surrealist movement in Paris.

1. March 9 Paris

The great French couturier and collector, Jacques Doucet, writes to André Suarès about buying several important works including "Un grand Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," of 1907. We know that Doucet paid 25,000 francs for this painting in several installments, and that Picasso almost immediately regretted having sold it (Cousins/Seckel 1988, p.587).

1. March 28 April 17 Paris

At a Picasso exhibition at Paul Rosenberg's gallery, rue de La Boëtie, a rival dealer, René Gimpel, records "twelve paintings, each 100,000 francs, and some drawings" (Gimpel, Journal d'un collectionneur, marchand & tableaux [Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1963], p. 264).

1. June 18 Paris

The first performance of Mércure at the Théâre de la Cigale (music by Satie, choreography by Massine, decor and costumes by Picasso, produced by Massine and Comte Étienne de Beaumont) takes place as part of a series of avant-garde events known as "Les Soirées de Paris." Some Dadaists enter Picasso's box and call him a "vieux pompier," or old Academician, and other invectives during the performance (Massine 1968, p. 160).

1. June 20 Paris

In answer to an attack on Picasso by certain Dadaists for his participation in Mércure, which was made for a bourgeois audience, other artists come to his defense in a letter published in Paris-Journal. Among the artists, writers, and musicians signing the letter are Louis Aragon, André Breton, Robert Desnos, Max Ernst, and Francis Poulenc.

1. Summer Juan-les-Pins

Picasso, Olga, and Paulo spend the summer at Juan-les-Pins.

1. December Paris

In the first issue of the review La Révolution surréaliste Picasso's metal Guitar is published with a photograph of the artist by Man Ray.

1. Sometime after 1924

John Quinn's entire collection of more than 60 works by Picasso is sold to Paul Rosenberg.

1. 1925
   1. March 1 Paris

Picasso's old Barcelona painter friend, Ramon Pichot, dies; his death was memorialized in Picasso's painting The Three Dancers (1925, Tate Modern), which he would finish in June.

1. April 9 Paris-Monte Carlo

Picasso leaves Paris for Monte Carlo with Olga and Paolo for the season of the Ballets Russes. They will stay through the month.

1. July 15 Paris

The fourth issue of La Révolution surréalist reproduces his The Three Dancers, along with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, painted eighteen years before. At the same time André Breton argues that Picasso is a Surrealist in the issue and declares, "Proudly we claim him as one of us."

1. Nov

Picasso's Man with a Guitar (1912) is included in the first Surrealist exhibition, which takes place at Pierre Loeb's gallery in Paris.

1. 1926
   1. Jan 1 Paris

Christian Zervos publishes the first issue of the art magazine Cahiers d'art. Zervos will later publish a thirty-two-volume catalogue raisonné of Picasso's work.

1. June 15 Paris

One of Picasso's two relief sculptures titled Guitar is illustrated in La Révolution surréaliste.

1. June-JulyParis

An exhibition of Picasso's recent work (from 1923) is held at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg.

1. Oct

Picasso visits his family in Barcelona.

1. 1927

The African American artist Aaron Douglas and his wife, Alta, move to France for a yearlong period of study.

1. Jan 8 or 11 Paris

This is the date Picasso is alleged to have first met the teen-aged Marie-Thérèse Walter (born in July 1909), but it was undoubtedly earlier.

1. May 11 Paris

The Spanish artist Juan Gris dies. Although they had been estranged, Picasso is a pallbearer at the funeral on May 13.

1. Summer

Picasso vacations at Cannes with Olga and Paulo.

1. 1928
   1. Summer

Picasso vacations at Dinard with Olga and Paulo, while Marie-Thérèse stays (concealed) nearby. Picasso completes a series of naked female bathers based on Marie-Thérèse's body, including Bather, Design for a Monument (Dinard).

1. March-May

Picasso begins to work with Julio Gonzalez, a compatriot in Paris, to learn welding for his sculpture.

1. Paris

In Cahiers d'art 111, no. 7 (1928): 288, two versions of Picasso's sculpture, the Glass of Absinthe, are published (Daix 753, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Daix 756, Museum of Modern Art, New York).

1. 1929
   1. Summer

Picasso spends the summer at Dinard.

1. 1930
   1. April Paris

A special issue of Documents, no. 3, published by the former Surrealist writer Georges Bataille, is devoted to Picasso.

1. June

Picasso buys a country home (Château de Boisgeloup) at Gisors, about seventy kilometers north of Paris.

1. Summer

Picasso leaves for a vacation at Juan-les-Pins.

1. AutumnParis

Picasso returns to Paris and installs Marie-Thérèse at 44, rue de La Boëtie near his and Olga's apartment at 23, rue de La Boëtie.

1. 1931

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the first American institutions to acquire a painting by Picasso, when Charles Ingersoll donates Woman with Loaves (1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

1. May

Picasso converts a barn at the seventeenth-century Château de Boisgeloup into a sculpture studio. He continues to weld sculpture with González, which he had begun to do in 1928, but he also returns to modeling in clay and plaster.

1. Summer

Picasso spends the summer at Juan-les-Pins and works on etchings for The Vollard Suite.

1. Late autumn Paris

The photographer Gyula Halász, known as Brassaï, first enters Picasso's studio when "Picasso had just passed his fiftieth birthday," which was October 25. When Brassaï visits him, he finds: The man in front of me was simple and direct, without affectation, without arrogance, without sham. His frank and open manner and his kindness put me at ease at once. But then he goes on: I began then to survey my strange surroundings. I had expected an artist's studio, and this was an apartment converted into a kind of warehouse. Certainly no characteristically middle-class dwelling was ever so uncharacteristically furnished. There were four or five rooms each with a marble fireplaces surmounted by a mirror—entirely emptied of any customary furniture and littered with stacks of paintings, cartons, wrapped packages, pails of all sizes, many of them containing the molds for his statues, piles of books, reams of paper, odds and ends of everything placed wherever there was an inch of space, along the walls and even spread across the floors, all covered with a thick layer of dust . . . Picasso had stood his easel in the largest and best-lit room-what once had surely been the living room-and this room was the only room that contained any furniture at all. The window faced south, and offered a beautiful view of the rooftops of Paris, bristling with a forest of red and black chimneys, with the sle,der, far-off silhouette of the Eiffel Tower rising between them. Madame Picasso never came up to the apartment with the exception of a few friends, Picasso admitted no one to it. So the dust could fall where it would and remain there undisturbed (Brassaï 1966, p. 5).

1. 1932
   1. March Boisgeloup

Picasso paints Girl Before a Mirror (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a portrait of Marie-Thérèse.

1. June 15 Paris

A major retrospective exhibition of Picasso's work opens at Galerie Georges Petit. Picasso was heavily involved in the choice and in the installation of the 236 works shown.

1. Summer

Picasso spends the summer at Boisgeloup, while Olga and Paulo vacation at Juan-les-Pins. He continues to make sculpted heads of Marie-Thérèse.

Joaquín Valverde Lasarte's The Hunters (1931; Philadelphia Museum of Art) is shown at the 1932 Venice Biennale.

1. Sept 11

A large exhibition of Picasso's work, drawn largely from the one shown that summer in Paris, opens at the Kunsthaus, Zurich.

1. Oct Paris

Zervos publishes the first volume of his catalogue raisonné of Picasso's works; it covers works from 1895–1906.

1. Oct

The government of Catalonia acquires the collection of Luis Plandiura for the Barcelona Museum. It includes twenty early works by Picasso.

1. 1933
   1. March 14-June 11 Paris

Picasso makes 57 etchings, 40 on the theme of The Sculptor's Studio, which he would later publish with others as The Vollard Suite.

1. June 1 Paris

The first issue of the Surrealist periodical, Minotaure, appears, for which Picasso made a collage of a minotaur for the cover (see 1980 Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 317, color repr.).

1. Aug

Picasso travels with Olga and Paulo to Barcelona; he shows Paulo the Plandiura collection at the Barcelona Museum.

1. Autumn Paris

Fernande publishes her memoirs; Picasso reportedly had attempted to stop their publication.

1. 1934

Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky and his wife Nina move to Paris from Germany, where he had been teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Kandinsky lost his teaching position at the Bauhaus in April 1933, after the school was closed following the Nazi party's accession to power.

Picasso creates six etchings and thirty-three drawings to illustrate Gilbert Seldes's new edition of Aristophane's great anti-war drama Lysistrata. These include Drawing for Lysistrata (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which the artist made while blind-folded.

1. Late Aug

Picasso returns to Spain with Olga and Paulo, driving to San Sebastián, Burgos, Madrid, Toledo, Saragossa, and Barcelona to see bullfights and visit friends. This will be Picasso's last trip to his native country.

1. 1935
   1. May

Picasso ceases painting for almost a year although he does continue with printmaking and writing.

1. June Paris

Marie-Thérèse is pregnant. Picasso and Olga separate but for property reasons do not divorce.

1. Sept 5 Paris

Maria de la Concepción (to be known as Maya) is born to Marie Thérèse and Picasso.

1. Nov 12 Paris

Picasso's old Barcelona friend, Jaime Sabartés, arrives from Spain to become his secretary.

1. 1936
   1. March 25 Juan-les-Pins

Picasso leaves for Juan-les-Pins incognito with Marie-Thérèse and Maya; they will return on 14 May.

1. July 18

The Spanish Civil War begins. Salvador Dalí's painting of this year, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (Philadelphia Museum of Art) presents the artist's savage vision of his country as a decomposing figure tearing itself apart. The work preceded the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and thus prophetically foretold the atrocities committed during this bloody conflict.

1. Aug 1 Mougins

Picasso goes to Mougins, where he probably begins his liaison with Surrealist photographer Dora Maar. He will return to Paris on September 20.

1. Autumn Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre

At the invitation of Vollard, Picasso visits him at Le Tremblay and leaves Marie-Thérèse and Maya there in the house that he rents from Vollard.

1. 1937
   1. Jan 8-9 Paris

Picasso makes two etchings of the Dream and Lie of Franco to be sold to benefit the Spanish Republican cause (Philadelphia Museum of Art). [1953-64-27a] [1953-64-27b]

1. Early 1937 Paris

Dora Maar helps Picasso find a studio on the Left Bank, at 7, rue des Grand-Augustins.

The artist is asked by the officials of the Spanish Republican government in exile to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, scheduled to open in June.

1. April 26

The Basque town of Guernica is bombed, giving Picasso a dramatic and topical subject for his mural for the Spanish pavilion.

1. May 1 Paris

Picasso begins his first studies for Guernica (1937, Reina Sofía, Madrid).

1. May 11 Paris

In his large studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins, Picasso makes the first compositional outline on the large canvas for Guernica. Dora Maar photographs each stage before the painting is installed in the pavilion in mid-June.

1. June 4 Paris

Guernica is finished.

1. June 12 Paris

The Spanish pavilion designed by Luis Lacasa and Jose-Luis Sert is inaugurated. Besides Guernica, it contains two pieces of sculpture by Picasso.

1. Summer Paris

Picasso paints his postscripts to Guernica.

1. Summer

With Dora Maar, Picasso goes to Mougins, where Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch are also staying at the same hotel. They return to Paris in mid-September. On the beach near Mougins they find "the bleached skull of an ox which had been scoured by the sea" (Penrose 1958, p. 280).

1. Mid-Oct Switzerland

On a trip to Switzerland Picasso visits Paul Klee, who is very ill.

1. Dec 19

The New York Times publishes a short statement that Picasso prepared for the American Artist's Congress in New York, which includes the following plea regarding the Spanish Civil War: Artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake (Ashton 1972, p. 145).

1. 1938
   1. March 11

Austria is annexed by Hitler.

1. Summer

Once again the artist spends a vacation at the same hotel in the fishing village of Mougins in the South of France with his companion, Dora Maar, and the Eluards, returning to Paris in late September. While in Mougins, he paints Head of a Woman (Philadelphia Museum of Art), dislocating the facial features and extremities of Maar, as he had a decade earlier in works such as Bather (Design for a Monument).

1. Oct 4

Guernica begins a tour of Europe and eventually the United States under the auspices of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. The first stop is the New Burlington Galleries in London.

1. Winter Paris

Picasso is confined to bed with painful sciatica.

1. 1939
   1. Jan 13

The artist's mother dies in Barcelona.

1. Jan 26

Barcelona succumbs to Franco's fascist forces.

1. By Jan 29 Paris or Le Trernblay-sur-Mauldre

Responding to his mother's death and the fall of Barcelona, Picasso paints three still-lifes featuring the skull of a bull.

1. March 28

Madrid falls to General Franco's forces

1. Early July

Picasso and Dora Maar travel by train to Antibes, where they rent an apartment from the American Surrealist photographer and painter, Man Ray.

1. July 22 Paris

Vollard, who had exhibited and bought Picasso's work almost forty years earlier, dies. Picasso returns to Paris for the funeral.

1. Aug 23

Russia and Germany sign a nonaggression pact.

1. Aug 25 Paris

Picasso, Maar, and Jaime Sabartés return to Paris.

1. Sept 1

Germany invades Poland.

1. Sept 2

Picasso arrives at Royan near Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast with Dora Maar, Sabartés, and Sabartés's wife. Marie-Thérèse and Maya had recently spent the summer there.

1. Sept 3

France and Great Britain declare war on Germany. Picasso is forced to remain in Paris for the duration of the global conflict.

1. Oct Royan and Paris

Picasso paints and draws the skulls and carcasses of sheep.

1. Mid-Oct Oct 22

Picasso returns to Paris to hunt for supplies and check on his works stored in bank vaults, but soon goes back to Royan.

1. Dec 5-21 Paris

Picasso returns to Paris from Royan for a visit, before returning on December 21.

1. 1940
   1. Beginning of 1940 Royan

In Royan, he takes a studio on the fourth floor of a villa, Les Voiliers.

1. Feb 5-29

Picasso makes another trip to Paris.

1. Mid-March- Mid-May

This longer return trip to Paris gives Picasso an opportunity to see certain friends: Brassaï, Man Ray, and the Zervoses, among others.

1. May 12

The Germans invade Belgium and France.

1. May 16

Picasso leaves Paris because the Germans are expected and finds Royan full of refugees from Belgium and the north of France.

1. May 31 Royan

Picasso makes some extraordinary drawings of death's heads in a notebook that he begins on 31 May and finishes on 10 August (Glimcher, no. 110).

1. June 14

The German army occupies Paris.

1. June 22

Pétain, premier of Vichy France, signs an armistice with Germany.

1. Aug 25

Picasso goes to Paris by car with Sabartés. Dora Maar follows by train, while Marie-Thérèse and Maya are temporarily left behind.

1. Aug 25 Paris

The photographer Brassaï relates, In occupied Paris, life was difficult, even for Pablo Picasso. No gasoline for his car; no coal to heat his studio. Like everyone else he was forced to adjust himself to the grim existence of wartime: standing on lines for everything, taking the Metro or the infrequent, crowded buses, to go from the rue La Boétie to the rue des Grands-Augustins (Brassaï 1966, p. 48).

1. Autumn Paris

Giving up living in his apartment on the rue de La Boëtie, Picasso moves into his studio at rue des Grands-Augustins.

1. 1941
   1. Jan 14-17 Paris

Picasso writes the Surrealist farce, Desire Caught by the Tail, an important stage in his increasing experimentation with writing.

1. Spring

Marie-Thérèse and Maya return to Paris to an apartment on the boulevard Henri IV at one end of the Ile Saint-Louis, where Picasso will visit them on most of Maya's school holidays, usually Thursdays and Saturdays (Brassai 1966, p. 77, and Gilot 1964, p. 179).

1. 1942
   1. March 27 Paris

Julio González, the Barcelona sculptor, who had long been a resident of Paris, dies. Picasso attends his funeral.

1. April 5-6 Paris

Picasso paints two startling still lifes with steer heads, probably as a memorial to González.

1. Summer

Paul Eluard rejoins the Communist party and works with the Resistance.

1. 1943
   1. Feb-March Paris

Although it is forbidden to make metal sculpture during the war, Picasso with the help of friends does have some of his works cast in bronze (Daix 1987, p. 282). He also makes sculptures out of found materials.

1. May, Paris

Picasso meets twenty-one year-old Françoise Gilot at his neighborhood restaurant, Le Catalan.

1. Sept 17 Paris

Picasso completes the large and austere Chair with Gladiolus, a still life that conveys the oppressive mood of the war years in its heavily contoured depiction of a vase of gladiolas on a chair.

1. December

Brassaï recalls that Paris was very cold, below freezing, on December 10, and that Picasso's studio was "glacial." He adds that, Although central heating had been installed in all of the rooms in 1939, only the vestibule has been heated recently because of the lack of coal (Brassaï 1966, pp.l03–109).

1. 1944
   1. Paris

Picasso finishes Man with a Lamb (Philadelphia Museum of Art), his most important wartime sculpture.

1. March 19 Paris

Michel and Louise Leiris hold a reading of Picasso's Desire Caught by the Tail with parts read by the Leirises, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Dora Maar, among others. Albert Camus directs the play. In the audience are the Braques, Brassaï, Sabartés, and others. Picasso tells the audience that his source was Alfred Jarry's scatalogical play Ubu roi.

1. Spring Paris

Picasso appears in public at the memorial service for his old friend Max Jacob, who died in the concentration camp at Drancy.

1. Mid-August Paris

Because of fighting on the streets of Paris, Picasso stays with Marie-Thérèse and Maya.

1. August 25

The Allied armies reach Paris. Brassaï later recalled: Paris was liberated and from one day to the next Picasso's studio was invaded. His courageous attitude had made him into a kind of standard-bearer, and the entire world was anxious to salute in him the symbol of liberty restored poets, painters, critics, museum directors, and writers, all wearing the uniform of the Allied armies, officers and ordinary soldiers, thronged up the narrow staircase in a compact mass (Brassaï 1966, p. 149).

1. Oct 5 Paris

The Communist newspaper L'Humanité announces that Picasso has joined the French Communist party.

1. Oct 6

For the first time Picasso participates in an official salon exhibition in Paris, the Salon d'Automne, where he shows 74 paintings, including Chair with Gladiolus, and five works of sculpture. Picasso was persuaded by Jean Cassou, the curator of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, to participate. There are demonstrations against the exhibition, partly because of Picasso's decision to join the Communist party, and partly because the modernity of the works seemed shocking after the isolation of Paris for five years during the war.

1. Oct 24 Paris

In an interview with the American Communist paper, New Masses, Picasso explains his decision to become a Communist as "the logical conclusion of my whole life, my whole work." (Pol Gaillard, L'Humanité, 29–30 October 1944, p. 1).

1. 1945
   1. April 28

Mussolini and his mistress are executed by partisans in Italy.

1. April 29

When American armies enter the concentration camp at Dachau, they release photographs of such camps for publication for the first time.

1. April 30

Hitler commits suicide in Berlin.

1. May 5

German forces surrender unconditionally.

1. May 8

V-E Day celebrates the end of the war in Europe.

1. June

In Paris at the Tenth Congress French Communists salute Picasso but also ask for realism in art.

1. June 8

Picasso's friend, the poet Robert Desnos, dies in Czechoslovakia. He had been relocated there (largely on foot) by the Germans from their concentration camp at Buchenwald (Brassaï 1966, p. 115).

1. July

With Dora Maar, who has not been well, Picasso goes to Antibes and also gives her a house in Antibes for which he trades a painting. In August he returns to Paris.

1. Aug 6

The first atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.

This chronology has been adapted, with permission, from the book Picasso and Things, by Jean Sutherland Boggs, which was published by The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, 1992.Picasso Chronology: Works Cited Ashton, Dore. Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views. New York: Da Capo, 1972.

Brassaï, Gyula Halasz. Conversations avec Picasso. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. English translation by Francis Price. Picasso and Co. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.

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Cousins, Judith and Hélène Seckel. Chronology in Les Dioiselles d'Avignon. 2 vols. Musée Picasso, Paris. Paris: RMN, 1988.

Daix, Pierre and Joan Rosselet. Le Cubisme de Picasso, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre 1907-1916. Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1979. English translation by Dorothy S. Blair. Picasso, The Cubist Years 1907-1916: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979.

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Hugo, Jean. Avant d'oublier. Paris: Fayard, 1976.

Massine, Leonide. My Life in Ballet. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968.

Monod-Fontaine, Isabelle. Donation Louise et Michel Leiris, Collection Kahnweiler-Leiris. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1984.

Olivier, Fernande. Picasso et ses amis. Paris: Stock, 1933. English translation by Jane Miller. Picasso and His Friends. London: Heiniann, [1964].

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