Pencils and Pablo Picasso

He isn’t our Pencil Artist of the Week, but one might call him one of the Pencil Artists of All-Time. Pablo Picasso, who was born 130 years ago today in Malaga, Spain, experimented with a host of artistic mediums including oil paint, clay and pencil.

It is Pablo Picasso’s pencil works that are drawing high-profile attention this October. The Frick Collection in New York City is hosting “Picasso’s Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition,” a major retrospective that focuses on early drawings by Pablo Picasso, many of which are sketched with pencils. The oldest sketch in the collection is a simple pencil and paper rendering of a statue in the Picasso home, completed in 1890. While images of abstract, cubist figures flash before the mind at the mention of Picasso’s name, this early sketch is scrupulously careful; one can almost sense the nine-year-old Picasso gritting his teeth as he attempts to accurately depict the statue before him. Yet, even in this early schoolboy drawing, there are hints of what is to come; the left arm, which has been re-drawn over an earlier attempt, gives the sketch a sense of movement, and the nimbus of pencils zig-zags that surround the figure both ground it and imbue it with energy.

By 1904’s “Mother and Child and Study of Hands,” the tension between classical composition and Picasso’s own trail-blazing aesthetic is apparent. While the traditional figure of a mother holding her child is rendered in soft strokes that delineate a realistically shaded figure, the contortion of her body and her elongated hands suggest the bold composition of figures in Picasso’s later cubist works, as well as the spare, graphic lines in the his later sketches.

One of the show’s final sketches, “Three Bathers by the Shore,” was completed in 1920 and shows the growth and scope of Picasso’s skill and vision. Gone are the extraneous flourishes and strict adherence to realism; instead we have three figures that are simultaneously classical yet modern, detailed yet stark. The bold, clean pencil lines are precise and spare, but the figures are somehow fully realized. Gone is the tentative schoolboy, and in his place is the artist who would become a legend.

While Picasso would leave his mark on virtually every artistic medium he touched, his impact can still be felt among pencil artists who sketch today. As the man himself said, “If they took away my paints I’d use pastels. If they took away my pastels I’d use crayons. If they took away my crayons I’d use pencils. If they stripped me naked and threw me in prison I’d spit on my finger and paint on the walls.”

If Picasso changed the way we create art with pencils, perhaps it is equally true that pencils changed the way Picasso created his art.

Photo Credit: “Pablo Picasso”/Star Media