"Women are Suffering Machines" - Picasso ;)

After Midnight, Outside Picasso Museum, in Barri Gòtic, Barcelona's old quarter- its Medieval centre.

(From 2nd visit to Barcelona during a business trip for a conference a week ago. First visit to the museum and that locality was couple of years ago..during a personal solo trip to France and Spain )

Artists, Picasso said, "should invent, not just copy nature like an ape" ;)

If a two-dimensional duplicate of the world is wanted, the modernist argument ran, then photography is always going to supply that much more efficiently than painting..



Some collection of Animals by Picasso.
Picasso's father Ruiz was a professor at art school, specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game animals. Early formal training from his father starting at 7, might have influenced Picasso?.

 Below are some interesting bits about the artist and his life, extracts from the book "Picasso.. off the record" that I got from Picasso Museum, Barcelona.. and from wiki page of Picasso,
I've edited and rearranged to fit this narrative :

Portrait from the Museu Picasso

Married twice, but having also had many other relationships, Picasso left a trail of emotional destruction in his wake. He had enormous personal magnetism: although short in stature he was a commanding presence and charismatic in company. When Picasso wanted to turn on the charm, he trapped his 'victim' in an intense black-eyed gaze. Lovers, friends, family and even museum curators all hankered after that feeling of intimacy, and would tolerate endless abuse in order to retain it!..

He once said, commenting on his Weeping Woman (in permanent collection of London's Tate Modern Art Gallery) .. "Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman....And it's important, because women are suffering machines." (see details from its wiki page added at the bottom )

 Also check out the recent arrival in Mar 2011 at Tate Modern, on loan from its anonymous owner, with speculation that it could be Chelsea FC's Russian owner, Roman Abramovich..

Nude, Green Leaves and Bust – the Picasso painting that last year became the most expensive art work ever sold at auction, for $106.5m – is publicly displayed in the UK for the first time.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/07/picasso-nude-green-leaves-bust?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

Whatever we may think of Picasso as a person, he was the most renowned artist of the 20th century and one of the most prolific and important innovators in the history of modern art. There are 4 major museums that honour his genius: The Musée Picasso, Paris; the Musée Picasso, Antibes (resort town in French Riviera, next to Cannes.Picasso lived last 12years in a nearby village Mougins where he died); the Museu Picasso, Barcelona; and the Museo Picasso, Málaga (birthplace).

Museu Picasso, Barcelona

Artists, Picasso said, "should invent, not just copy nature like an ape" ;)
If a two-dimensional duplicate of the world is wanted, the modernist argument ran, then photography is always going to supply that much more efficiently than painting..

Since the 1860's self-consciously modern art had defined itself as post-photographic, always seeking a different reason to be looked at, something other than a surface impression of the world..
Before Cubism, modern painting had flirted with this break-up of coherence. Van Gogh, for instance, chose the colour of things and people according to emotive perception rather than optically observed hue..
But around 1910 Picasso and his friend Georges Braque, stirred by Paul Cézanne's late destruction of solid form into crystallographically faceted structures that were somehow both broken and coherent at the same time, went for the kill. Bye-bye resemblance.


-From the forward to the book, "Picasso.. off the record"
--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

Picasso's Birth name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso..!!
A series of names honoring various saints and relatives, and added to these were Ruiz and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish law.

Picasso was born in Málaga, Andalusia (Spain's southern region) where his father Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum (As a painter Ruiz specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game.).

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were “piz, piz”, a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for ‘pencil’.[4]
From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting.

The family later moved to Barcelona when Picasso was 13, after his 7-yr old sister died, which traumatized him. His father Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts, where Picasso got admission through entrance exam at an unusually young age, impressing the jury, to study advanced classes.. Picasso completed the entrance exam process in a week, which normally took a month for others.


At the age of 14, he was delighted to be given the chance to draw from live models. It was around this time that Picasso first visited prostitutes and acquired his first girlfriend and enjoyed the nightlife of a large city
The student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented him a small room close to home so Picasso could work alone, yet Ruiz checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his son’s drawings. The two argued frequently.


Picasso thrived in Barcelona, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home..


He was later sent to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando) the country's foremost art school.[7] At age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and quit attending classes soon after enrollment.


At 19, Picasso made his first trip to Paris in 1900, then the art capital of Europe. There, he met his first Parisian friend, the journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm.....
--

Picasso had a pathological objection to having his voice recorded. Picasso managed only a few words in the 1955 film The Picasso Mystery ("that's going badly!", he says of a painting in progress).

Most of those close to him agree that he was not given to extended comments on art or on other serious topics, but preferred instead ironic bon mots, paradoxes and riddles. Sincere intellectual discussions that was by all accounts only very rarely granted, and only to his most trusted friends.

This following part from an imagined conversation, with a solid basis in biographical facts, (which is the general basis of the book- series of interviews thus created) is taken from the above book's blurb. Found it particularly interesting, given the way the world often analyses, gives interpretations, and attributes meanings which are unintended by the original creators of artworks..:

"Can you tell me a little about how you discovered Cubism with Georges Braque?

The first thing to say is that Braque and I didn't know what we were doing! When you say we 'discovered Cubism' it sounds like it was an uncharted island waiting for us to set foot in. But it wasn't like that at all. Later, when people started trying to explain it they made up all sorts of rubbish about The Fourth Dimension and analysis and things. But these were just theories - one might as well listen to the birds!.."

--
The Weeping Woman.. ".. because women are suffering machines" - Picasso
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weeping_Woman

Echoes of Guernica
The Weeping Woman series is regarded as a thematic continuation of the tragedy depicted in Picasso's epic painting Guernica. In focusing on the image of a woman crying, the artist was no longer painting the effects of the Spanish Civil War directly, but rather referring to a singular universal image of suffering.[2]

The model for the painting, indeed for the entire series, was Dora Maar, who was working as a professional photographer when Picasso met her in 1936; she was the only photographer allowed to document the successive stages of Guernica while Picasso painted it in 1937.[3]

Dora Maar
Dora Maar was Picasso's mistress from 1936 until 1944. In the course of their relationship Picasso painted her in a number of guises, some realistic, some benign, others tortured or threatening.[3] Picasso explained:

"For me she's the weeping woman. For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one."[4]


"Dora, for me, was always a weeping woman....And it's important, because women are suffering machines."
 

This woman, sitting outside the closed entrance to Picasso Museum, seemed to be suffering as well: Looked like she was in a distress call, for more than half an hour she was around, almost oblivious to the surroundings.
[Original shot of the edited version on top: the couple walking in the alley ]