The choice to use newspaper clippings has many implications, and proves Picasso’s mastery in the art of producing works of art that were not just representations of reality, but integral parts of it. The café settings he depicted usually included a small table, a bottle or glass, and often a piece of a musical score, or an instrument, indicating music. Together, these elements "…evoke not only a place -a bar- but also an activity there: the figure alone with a newspaper, enjoying a quiet drink". Also, the clippings suggest the custom among artists to discuss contemporary issues with one another in cafes.

Newspapers were an ordinary material, and a very common part of the iconography that surrounded the social setting in the urban world of the early 1900’s. Their ordinary nature adds to the complexity of the works created with them. Newspapers provide a very inexpensive means of reading about contemporary political events. Years before people were able to get news instantaneously via television and the Internet, a newspaper was the best way to keep informed. Because they were created in a manner that allowed them to be mass-produced, and were cheap and outdated quickly, newspapers could generally be seen as having a short life span. By using them in his collages, Picasso was able to deny their short life span and allow them to remain as pieces of information about the justices and injustices of society in the early twentieth century. Also, freezing these events in time by attaching them to a canvas suggests that Picasso was trying to impress upon the viewer the timelessness of violence and stress the idea that even though society seemed to be ordered, it was really chaotic. As Christine Poggi writes, the very use of paper, "…negates ideas of uniqueness and individuality…one newspaper is as good as another". This confirms the idea that what was written in the newspapers was neither unique nor individualized. The problems and conflicts that were happening were merely repetitions of what happened in the past.

In creating his works, Picasso carefully cut and pasted the newspaper clippings so that the articles he chose to use could actually be read. During the years immediately following the creation of his collages, critics and admirers of his work did not pay much attention to the text. The critics actually thought that these works were shorthand ways of laying out compositions which Picasso would reproduce in oil at a later date. Picasso refuted these claims, however and said that the compositions were always intended to be what they were, which was pictures in their own right. Later in the century, people began to wonder if the specific articles he used had any relevance. They did. During 1912 and 1913, Picasso made approximately eighty collages. Out of these eighty, fifty-two had text that was related to contemporary events, and one half of those related to the Balkan wars.

The Balkan wars of 1912-1913 were brief but intense. The Balkan peoples watched the Italians and Germans establish large nationalist states, and this combined with a strong desire to achieve national unity motivated them to try to break free from their Ottoman overlords. According to John Richardson, there is no written evidence, that is, letters to friends or statements by Picasso, that outline how he felt about war. In a statement he made in 1922, Picasso said that he "…[expressed himself] through painting what he [could not] explain through words". Picasso saw his art as a way of expressing his feelings on what he saw as the problems of society. But the works he created during this time were not made to educate, that is, they weren’t meant to be viewed, rather they seem to be a private commentary on the struggles of Europe previous to World War I. He referred to drawing and color as his "weapons" and stated that painting was an "…instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy".

Picasso’s attack on the "enemy" is most prevalent in his work, Glass and Bottle of Suze . The newspaper clippings used are almost all about the first Balkan War which lasted from October to December of 1912. Though Picasso did not include headings, save one which is covered with a zigzag shape of black color, it is not difficult to figure out what the newspaper clippings are about, especially since one of the clippings has a date. It is not known whether it is the issue from the sixteenth or eighteenth of November, because of the poor condition of the clipping. The only other clue that the work gives is on the left side, in L’ordre du jour, or the agenda of the day, which tells of a demonstration in Paris on November 17 in which pacifists chanted "down with war" and "long live the social revolution". Also on this side of the bottle of Suze are reports of the wounded and of war victims. Combined with the reports of pacifist demonstrations, one senses that Picasso did not support war. Years later in a conversation with Pierre Daix, when asked if he included the pacifist article on purpose, Picasso replied, "Of course…because it was an important event involving a hundred thousand people…Oh yes, I found that in the newspaper , and it was my way of showing that I was against the war".

At the center of this work, there is an ellipse that represents a table, and it is framed on the left by the report about the group of pacifists, and on the right by a piece detailing the plight of Turkish soldiers as they struggled with a cholera breakout. The triple column at the bottom of the table is a dispatch with details about the gory battlefields of war. That these are all placed around the circular form of the table gives the impression that one of the events depicted leads to another, which leads to another, which leads back to the first. In Picasso’s eyes, history was cyclical, and did in fact repeat itself.

Along the right side of the bottle of Suze are two clippings which Picasso chose to attach to the work upside-down. One is an account of a cholera epidemic that almost annihilated the Turkish troops and was a result of inhuman war conditions. The author of the article, Paul Erio writes,

Before long I saw the first corpse still grimacing with suffering and whose face was nearly black. Then I saw two, four, ten, twenty; then I saw a hundred corpses. They were stretched out there

It is not known if this section is the article by Paul Erio in its entirety, or if it is just a part of the article that Picasso chose to use. If it is the entire article, the fact that the reader is left hanging, not knowing what the writer saw next adds drama and emotion to the experience. The account he gave was devastating; one could only imagine what, if anything, could be worse.

The other clipping tells of a Serbian procession, to Constantinople, over the snow and ice, demonstrating the superior nature of the Serbs in comparison the epidemic-stricken Turks. Interestingly enough, both of these clippings were placed on the picture plane upside-down, showing that Picasso thought that the stories they told were of a world that was turned on its head. But for some reason, Picasso left the triple column at the bottom of the work right side up, when it too recounted terrible stories about the war.

Some pieces of newsprint he used that he did not allow to remain in their columnar form. These pieces are closer to the center of the composition, and appear to be just fillers of space. Again, when the text is read, however, they shed a new light on an interpretation of the work as a whole. These fragments are pieces of a fictional novel published in Le Journal which described some of the most frivolous aspects of living in Paris. The superficial nature of the story provides a nice contrast to the utter seriousness of the war.

Not only was the specific text that Picasso used in this work important, the fact that he chose Suze as the drink and placed it centrally also has certain implications. Suze is a liquor made from the herb gentian, named after Gentius, an Illyrian king of the second century B.C., who is said to have discovered the herb’s virtues. Illyria was the area on the Eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea; this area was also central to the Balkan league at the time that the collage was assembled. Picasso placed the bottle very centrally in the composition, and its label is almost completely surrounded by the white negative space that is created by the columns of text that represent the bottle. This makes the label of the bottle stand out more prominently, thus calling the viewer’s attention to the fact that this composition is largely about the area around the Balkans.

Earlier in 1912, Picasso completed a work called Guitar and Wineglass (Figure 2). In this piece, Picasso used only one piece of newspaper cutout, whereas almost the entire composition in Glass and Bottle of Suze was given over to the arrangement of newspaper clippings. The newspaper text in this image is in the lower left-hand corner of the work; it reads, "LE JOU", indicating the title of the periodical, Le Journal. Directly below are the words, "La Bataille s’est Engage’ which means "the battle has begun". It has been the subject of much debate whether this should be interpreted to mean that the Balkan War had begun, or if it was to mean that there was a "…challenge of collage as a new pictorial form", or both. Arguing for the idea that it had a double meaning, one might wonder why Picasso chose to challenge a form that had worked for so long. Picasso might have answered this question himself in an interview in 1922 by saying, "Now is the time in this period of change and revolution to use a revolutionary manner of painting and not to paint like before…".

In Guitar and Wineglass, there is a guitar which appears to be floating in indefinite space. The newspaper clipping is possibly supposed to act as a table, but if that were so, then the guitar is balanced rather precariously, and the wineglass rests on nothing. Furthermore, the black shape overlaps the newspaper, suggesting that it is closer to the viewer in actual space. The piece of musical score in the upper right hand corner is part of a love song, and connects the piece of paper to the guitar, on which it was presumeably played. The shape on the left that forms the curve on the side of the guitar is a piece of paper which Picasso painted to look like wood-grain. The large blue rectangle represents the neck of the guitar, and Picasso left the bottom of the guitar hollow so the viewer is able to see the wallpaper beyond.

The wallpaper beyond is the same wallpaper that Picasso used in Glass and Bottle of Suze, and again, Picasso turned it on its side. Omitting the flowers in the center of the diamond shapes, the wallpaper is composed of straight lines and curved forms. As a matter of fact, the entire composition is made up of straight lines and curves. This ties the wallpaper background to the guitar in the foreground and unifies the composition.

While the articles that he used were certainly important to discussions Picasso had with his contemporaries, not all of his cutouts were of breaking, front page news. In his Au Bon Marché, (Figure 3), there are advertisements pasted behind other clippings, indicating that they are farther away from the viewer. These served as the walls for the café that Picasso again chose to use as the subject matter in this work. In the foreground, there is a table, whose surface reads Au Bon Marché. The table is framed by a wineglass on the right and a bottle on the left, further emphasizing the idea that the action is taking place in a café. In the upper zone, there is the head and part of the torso of a woman. Below her is a lingerie advertisement, and below that is a newspaper clipping that reads "Un Trou Ici", or "a hole here". Au Bon Marché means inexpensive, so when read as a whole, the text reads, "one may make a hole here inexpensively". While contemporary critics of his most likely thought it was crude, it is clear that Picasso was simply making an erotic joke.

…stripped of all magic, displaying [the] works, [the] materials, and [the] craftsmanship simultaneously, abandoning all secrets of workmanship, all mystifying techniques, to be judged purely on [Picasso’s] responsibility as [an organizer] of reality.

With the invention of collage, Picasso challenged almost everything about the work of the artist, even down to what materials were acceptable to use. As Diane Waldman writes, "Painting itself and the work of the painter were brutally called into question".

In a study of Picasso’s collages, it is imperative to examine the specific texts which Picasso chose for the works, their orientation on the page, as well as the specific challenges that the new invention posed to the art of the twentieth century. While the message was sometimes political and sometimes humorous, it is clear that the pieces of newsprint that Picasso chose for his works were not arbitrary, they were chosen and placed on the canvas with a great deal of care and thought. Somehow, Picasso knew that contemporaries of his would criticize his new art and probably would not investigate the actual texts to determine their relevance. When asked why he created them in the first place, he said, "Well, I knew that people would find this later and understand".

Selected Bibliography

Barr, Alfred. Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art. New York: Museum of

Modern Art, 1946.

Boggs, Jean Sutherland. Picasso and Things. Cleveland: Cleveland

Museum of Art, 1992.

---. Pablo Picasso. Accessed 16 Apr. 2001; available from

Daix, Pierre. Picasso. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965.

Golding, John. Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Hall, Richard. The Balkan Wars 1912-1913. London: Routledge, 2000.

Harrison, Charles. Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early 20^th

Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Krauss, Rosalind. The Picasso Papers. New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 1998.

Leighten, Patricia. "Picasso’s Collages and the Threat of War." The Art

Bulletin, no. 1 (March 1985): 662-667.

Poggi, Christine. In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the

Invention of Collage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso. New York: Random House, 1996.

Shiff, Richard. "Picasso’s Touch: Collage, Papier-Coll¾ e, Ace of Clubs."

Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (1990): 38-47.

Stangos, Nikos. Concepts of Modern Art. New York: Harper and Row

Publishers, 1974.

Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History, 2 vols. New York: Harry N. Abrams,

1. Reprint, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

Waldman, Diane. Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object. New

York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.