Glossary

The working vocabulary of Picasso's world — thirty terms, plainly defined.

Analytic Cubism

The first cubist phase (c. 1910–1912): objects dissected into interlocking facets and near-monochrome planes, showing multiple viewpoints at once.

Assemblage

Sculpture built from found objects and disparate materials — a three-dimensional extension of collage thinking, which Picasso pioneered.

Bateau-Lavoir

The ramshackle Montmartre studio building (13 rue Ravignan) where Picasso lived and worked from 1904; Max Jacob coined the name (“laundry boat”) for its rocking corridors. Cubism was substantially invented here.

Blue Period

Picasso’s 1901–1904 phase of near-monochrome blue painting — beggars, the blind, mourning figures — triggered by the suicide of Carles Casagemas.

Collage

From the French coller (to glue): pasting real materials onto the picture surface. Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) is the first collage in fine art.

Conchita

Concepción Ruiz Picasso (1887–1895), Picasso’s younger sister, who died of diphtheria aged seven — a grief scholars link to the mourning imagery of his early work.

Cubism

The movement Picasso and Georges Braque built (1908–1914): fractured planes, multiple viewpoints, and eventually collage. The decisive rupture in twentieth-century painting.

Dora Maar

See People: Surrealist photographer, Picasso’s partner 1936–mid-1940s, who documented the making of Guernica.

Els Quatre Gats

“The Four Cats”: the Barcelona café that was the headquarters of Catalan modernisme and the young Picasso’s bohemian circle; site of his first solo exhibition (1900).

Fauvism

The “wild beast” movement of Matisse and Derain (c. 1905) — violent, non-naturalistic color. Picasso’s great rival movement; he answered it with structure rather than color.

Françoise Gilot

See People: painter, Picasso’s partner 1943–1953, mother of Claude and Paloma, author of Life with Picasso (1964).

Guernica (the town)

Basque town bombed on 26 April 1937 by German and Italian aircraft supporting Franco; the atrocity Picasso answered with his mural.

Guernica (the painting)

Picasso’s 1937 mural (349.3 × 776.6 cm), painted for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Paris Exposition; now in the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. See Guernica.

Harlequin

The masked clown of the commedia dell’arte; Picasso’s recurring alter ego, especially in the Rose Period — the outsider-artist in costume.

Iberian sculpture

Ancient stone sculpture of pre-Roman Spain, which Picasso studied at the Louvre; its staring, simplified heads fed directly into Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Picasso’s 1907 brothel-scene breakthrough (243.9 × 233.7 cm), now at MoMA, New York — five fractured figures that broke single-point perspective. See Les Demoiselles.

Linocut

Printmaking from carved linoleum blocks; Picasso revolutionized it in the 1950s–60s with a reductive method printing multiple colors from a single block.

Madoura

The Vallauris pottery where Picasso made ceramics from 1946 — thousands of plates, vessels, and figures that treated clay with a painter’s freedom.

Minotaur

The bull-headed monster of Greek myth; Picasso’s alter ego in the Vollard Suite etchings and 1930s work — blind, violent, tender, devouring.

Modernisme

The Catalan art nouveau movement of 1890s Barcelona; the young Picasso’s first milieu, centered on Els Quatre Gats.

Papier collé

“Pasted paper”: Braque’s 1912 variant of collage, pasting paper (rather than objects) onto the surface — Fruit Dish and Glass was the first.

Primitivism

The early-modernist engagement with African, Oceanic, and Iberian art — a loaded historical term for what was, in Picasso’s case, a genuine artistic revelation. See African Art.

Rose Period

Picasso’s 1904–1906 phase of warm pinks and ochres: saltimbanques, harlequins, circus folk, painted in the first flush of love for Fernande Olivier.

Saltimbanques

Itinerant circus performers — acrobats, clowns, tumblers — the subjects of the Rose Period and Picasso’s self-image as a talented outsider.

Still Life with Chair Caning

Picasso’s 1912 oval canvas incorporating oilcloth printed with chair caning, framed with rope: the first collage in fine art (Musée national Picasso-Paris).

Surrealism

The Paris movement of Breton, Dalí, and Miró; Picasso never joined but his biomorphic 1930s figures breathe its air, and Dora Maar was a Surrealist photographer.

Synthetic Cubism

The second cubist phase (from 1912): building pictures up from flat shapes, bright color, and pasted materials — construction replacing analysis.

Vollard Suite

One hundred etchings Picasso made 1930–37 for the dealer Ambroise Vollard, dominated by the Minotaur and the sculptor in his studio.

Weeping Woman

The motif of 1937 — Dora Maar’s distorted, tear-streaked face — painted alongside Guernica as its private counterpart (Tate, London, holds the major version).

7 rue des Grands-Augustins

Picasso’s Paris studio from 1937, a former Hôtel particulier on the Left Bank where Guernica was painted — and where he worked through the Occupation.

Source notes

Definitions follow standard art-historical usage; see Sources for references.