Retrato de vollard picasso biography

In Juan Gris traveled to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and participated in the development of Cubism. Just six years later, Gris too was known as a Cubist and identified by at least one critic as &#;Picasso’s disciple.&#; Gris’s style draws upon Analytic Cubism—with its deconstruction and simultaneous viewpoint of objects—but is distinguished by a more systematic geometry and crystalline structure. Here he fractured his sitter’s head, neck, and torso into various planes and simple, geometric shapes but organized them within a regulated, compositional structure of diagonals. The artist further ordered the composition of this portrait by limiting his palette to cool blue, brown, and gray tones that, in juxtaposition, appear luminous and produce a gentle undulating rhythm across the surface of the painting.
Gris depicted Picasso as a painter, palette in hand. The inscription, &#;Hommage à Pablo Picasso,&#; at the bottom right of the painting demonstrates Gris’s respect for Picasso as a leader of the artistic circles of Paris and as an innovator of Cubism. At the same time, the inscription helped Gris solidify his own place within the Paris art world when he exhibited the portrait at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of

Ambroise Vollard () was one of the great art dealers of the 20th century. He championed Paul Cezanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Gauguin and Henri Matisse. He promoted Picasso's blue and rose periods, but he was careful about cubism. When Picasso later returned to a figuration informed by cubist richness and surrealist eroticism, they collaborated on one of Picasso's greatest achievements: his lubricious, mytho-erotic Vollard Suite, engraved plates completed in , culminating in emotional portraits of Vollard, who was to die two years later in a car crash.

In Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, Vollard's downcast eyes, apparently closed, the massive explosion of his bald head, multiplying itself up the painting like an egg being broken open, his bulbous nose and the dark triangle of his beard are the first things the eye latches on to. They are recognizable. At least that's the way your mind, through habit, composes the details into information.

But what head? What beard? Above Vollard's eyes is a broken architecture of shards of flesh- or brick-coloured painting; planes that have been started and stopped, as if in a slow-motion exaggerated cartoon of the movement a painter makes between looking up,