Dictionary of Literary Influences

Paul VI

Gladkov, Aleksandr K. Meetings with Pasternak: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).

Leonidze, Georgi. Boris Pasternak: Materialy fonda gosudarstvennogo muzeia gruzinskoi literatury (Tbilisi: Diogene, 1999).

Markov, Vladimir. “Notes on Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Russian Review 18 (1959), 14–22.

Moravia, Alberto. “Visite à Pasternak. Un adolescent aux cheveux gris,” Preuves 8, 88 (1958), 3–7.

Eva-Maria Stolberg

PAUL VI (1897–1978)

Giovanni Battista Montini was born at Concesio, a village just north of Brescia. The scion of a prominent, patriotic Brescian family, he combined his father’s sense of sociopolitical engagement with his mother’s introspective spirituality. Exempted from military duty due to his frail constitution, Montini entered the priesthood in 1920. As ecclesiastical assistant to the Federation of Catholic University Students (FUCI) from 1925 to 1933, he mentored many future leaders of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party. Astute, discrete, and diligent, Montini was well suited for the Vatican diplomatic service, which he entered in the early 1920s. In 1944 he and Monsignor Domenico Tardini jointly became Pope Pius XII’s undersecretaries of state. Ten years later he was unexpectedly named Archbishop of Milan—a “promotion” which may in fact have reflected deepening differences between the “liberal” Montini and the “Roman Party” surrounding Pius XII. Thrust into the rough and tumble of Milanese life during Italy’s “economic miracle,” the bookish Montini gained invaluable pastoral experience. Montini supported John XXIII in calling the Vatican II Church Council in 1962. Elected John’s successor the following year, he took the name of Paul VI. Vatican II’s culminating proclamation, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes, 1965), clearly reflects Paul VI’s values—both in its collegial mode of drafting and in its engaged, optimistic tone. The fruit of painful soul-searching, Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on birth control, Humani generis, heralded the more conflictual last decade of his pontificate.

Montini’s worldview was shaped by a broad array of writers and thinkers. As a youth he was captivated by the lyrical piety of Alessandro Manzoni’s (1785–1873) The Betrothed (1825–27) and Antonio Fogazzaro’s (1842–1911) The Saint (1905). Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), and Albert Camus (1913–60) were among his favorite novelists later in his life. The son of a journalist, Montini was a voracious reader of newspapers; as pope, he urged reporters to exercise their influential vocation with moderation and charity. The Intellectual Life (translated into Italian in 1925) by Antonin Sertillanges, OP (1863–1948) convinced him of the inherent spirituality of both intellectual and artistic endeavor: in his view, learning could not remain merely an end in itself, but naturally led to the service of others. His ecclesiology was shaped by the German bishop and historian Karl Joseph Hefele’s (1809–93) History of the Councils (1855–74) and the Jesuit liturgist Josef Jungmann’s (1889–1975) concept of the church not as hierarchy but as community of the faithful.

Philosophically, Montini owed his greatest debts to the French. The prolific neo-Thomist writer Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) exercised a continuing influence on Montini’s thinking from the 1920s onward. Particularly important for him

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during the interwar period was Maritain’s conception of modern history, especially as demonstrated in his Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes and Rousseau (1925 in the French original, subsequently translated by Montini into Italian) and the French philosopher’s aesthetics, set forth in his Art and Scholasticism (1920). Like so many Catholics of his generation, he was captivated by Maritain’s evocation of a “new Christendom,” particularly as set forth in his Integral Humanism (1936), as well as the opening to modern pluralism and parliamentarism offered in Christianity and Democracy (1943). Montini’s ecumenism owed much to the writings of Dominican theologian Yves Congar (1904–95) and to the example of Louis Massignon’s (1883–1962) “Badaliya” groups, dedicated to Catholic–Muslim dialogue. Also noteworthy is the unique friendship which Montini formed with Jean Guitton (1901– ), a member of the Academie Francaise and a brilliant, if very conservative, philosopher, essayist, and painter. Beginning in 1950, the two men met annually for the remarkably candid, far-reaching intellectual colloquies which Guitton has documented in the works cited below in the bibliography.

Archives

Istituto Paulo VI, Brescia (contact e-mail: info@istitutopaulovi-bs.org). The institute’s archives include edited and unedited manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and documents pertaining to Paul VI’s radio and television addresses. The institute’s Notiziario, generally published twice a year, covers unpublished material from Paul VI, including news of work in progress, manuscripts discovered, and theses written. The Quaderni, published periodically, included the pope’s writings and speeches. Of particular note are the Discorsi e scritti sul Concilio, 1959–1963 and the Discorsi e documenti sul Concilio, 1963–65. See also the Insegnamenti, cited below.

Vatican guidelines bar access to archival holdings until 75 years have elapsed since the end of a pontificate.

Printed Sources

Clancy, John G. Apostle for Our Time: Pope Paul VI (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1963). Particularly helpful with regard to Italian, French, and German literary influences on Montini (see especially pp. 35, 79–80).

Cremona, Carlo. Paolo VI (Milan: Rusconi, 1991).

Finotti, Fabio. Critica stilistica e linguaggio religioso in Giovanni Battista Montini (Rome: Edizioni Studium; Saggi I for the Istituto Paolo VI, 1989).

Guitton, Jean. Dialogues avec Paul VI (Paris: Fayard, 1967); translated by Anne and Christopher Freemantle as The Pope Speaks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968).

———. Paul VI, secret (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1979).

Hebblethwaite, Peter. Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (New York: Paulist Press, 1993). Deals broadly with Montini’s tastes and practices as a reader, writer, and correspondent.

Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, vols. I–XVI (Vatican City: Libreria editrice Vaticana, 1963–74). Macchi, Pasquale. Ricordo di Paolo VI (Milan: Rusconi, 1979).

Paul VI et la Modernite dans l’Eglise. Actes du colloque organise par l’Ecole francaise de Rome

(Rome: Ecole francaise de Rome and Istituto Paolo VI, 1984).

Steven F. White

PAZ, OCTAVIO (1914–1998)

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, Mexico, and educated in Roman Catholic elementary and secondary schools. He attended the University of Mexico and originally studied law and literature before shifting his focus to poetry. He published

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his first volume of poems, Luna Silvestre, in 1933, before traveling to Spain to support the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Republican brigade. From 1939 onward, Paz founded a number of literary reviews including

Workshop, Plural, The Prodigal Son, and Vuelta. In 1943 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to the United States, then joined the diplomatic corps after World War II and traveled to Japan, Paris, and India as Mexico’s representative to UNESCO. Throughout his career, Paz’s work centered on the major theme of man’s ability to overcome isolation through artistic creativity and erotic love. His masterpieces The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and The Sun Stone (1957) contain a more regional focus, however, as they analyze the history and culture of Paz’s native Mexico. In 1962, Paz became Mexico’s ambassador to India but resigned in 1968 when Mexican student protestors were shot at Tlatelolco. Paz was a visiting professor of Spanish American literature at the Universities of Texas and Pennsylvania (1968–70), Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies at Churchill College (1970–71) and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, Cambridge (1971–72). He was awarded an honorary doctorate at Harvard University in 1980 and a decade later became the first Mexican to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Paz was an avid reader of traditional and contemporary literature, and his grandfather had an extensive library of works that the poet read as a youth. These included Sinbad, El Cid, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as well as the works of Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Stearns Eliot. South American authors that Paz read included the Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, who focused on the political struggles faced by the Chilean peasantry, and the seventeenthcentury Jeronymite nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who dealt with existential concepts that Paz would emulate as the major themes of his poetry. Paz believed that poetry constituted a form of religion for the modern age and that through its reading, one could leave historical time to reenter other eras. This idea is closely linked to the concept of the timeless atman, or self, that Paz would have been familiar with from his frequent readings of Hindu texts such as the Ramayana, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-Gita. Paz was an admirer of both metaphysical writers, such as the poet Stephane Mallarmé, as well as Arthur Rimbaud and the French symbolists. He was also influenced by the manner in which surrealist writers, like his friend André Breton, creatively transformed experience in their works. Surrealist literature also often negated the contemporary world and the values of democratic, bourgeois society in favor of a more artistic and imaginative worldview. In much the same way, Paz shunned Mexico’s plans for modernization and instead urged its citizenry to become independent of the influences of both communism and the United States.

Archives

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, control no. PAUR01-A2540.

Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, control no. NYPW87-A420. Houghten Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, control no. MAHV00-A18.

Printed Sources

Castanon, Adolfo, and Beatriz Zeller. The Passing of Octavio Paz (Mexico: Mosaic Press, 1999).

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Grenier, Yvon. From Art to Politics: The Romantic Liberalism of Octavio Paz (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

Quiroga, Jose, and James Hardin. Understanding Octavio Paz (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).

Gregory L. Schnurr

PEI, IEOH MING (1917– )

I. M. Pei was born in Canton, China, in 1917 and emigrated to the United States to study architecture at the age of 17. He received a bachelor of architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940 and upon graduation was awarded the Alpha Rho Chi Medal and the MIT Traveling Fellowship. World War II interrupted Pei’s plans to return to China, and in 1942 he enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Upon completion of his master’s degree in 1946, Pei received the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, which allowed him to travel extensively throughout Europe. Pei returned to the United States and became a naturalized citizen, forming the partnership I. M. Pei and Associates. In 1978 Pei became the first architect to hold the position of chancellor of the American Academy, and in 1979 he received the gold medal of the American Institute of Architecture. This was followed by the Pritzker Architectural Prize in 1983, which honored Pei’s outstanding work in designing over 50 major projects worldwide, more than half of which had received architectural awards. His choice of materials such as concrete, glass, and stone coupled with his use of uncomplicated geometric shapes allow Pei’s designs to exude a cool clear rationalism while at the same time appearing refined and elegant. Notable projects Pei has completed include the controversial pyramidal addition to the Louvre in Paris, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Bank of China, which is currently Asia’s tallest building. In late 1990, after more than four decades of practice, Pei retired from his firm in order to pursue smaller projects of personal interest.

Pei was first and foremost inf luenced by the theories of modernist architecture. The pioneers of this twentieth-century movement such as Le Corbusier (1887–1965) and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe (1886–1969) believed in the prominence of functionalism and abstraction in their buildings and the need for the architect to experiment with both form and technique. While at MIT, Pei studied the treatises of these men and was also a student of Walter Gropius (1883–1969), who was the founder of the Bauhaus school in Berlin and Munich. Throughout his early career, Pei became familiar with the written work of both Louis Henri Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright believed that elementary geometric forms held a spiritual quality and that an architect should attempt to design his buildings in harmony with nature. Pei followed Wright’s treatises and also Sullivan’s basic precept that making architecture was an important social, symbolic, and intellectual endeavor. The principles of these men meshed nicely with Pei’s early Eastern literary inf luences. As a youth, Pei was familiar with the precepts of Buddhism and would frequently accompany his mother on mountain retreats during which he would enjoy a sense of spiritual fulfillment through the appreciation of the beauty of nature. While in China, Pei also read many traditional fables, including Xiyouji’s The Journey to the West and The Golden Lotus. In latter life, Pei would incorporate the settings associated with such tales directly into his architecture, as he did with the processional entrance to the Miho

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Museum that ref lects in a tangible form the lost paradise processional referenced in the ancient Chinese tale Peach Blossom Spring.

Archives

Archives of American Art and Design, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Printed Sources

Cannell, Michael T. I. M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1995). Chester, Nagel. The Indomitable Ieoh Ming Pei (Denver: Aurora Library, 1985).

Wiseman, Carter. I. M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001).

Gregory L. Schnurr

PELÉ (1940– )

Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known as Pelé, was born in Três Corações, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. His father, João Ramos do Nascimento, played professional soccer as Dondinho in the way Brazilian players are given single-word names. In 1944 the family moved to Baurú in São Paulo, where Dondinho was promised a playing contract and a state job. But he was thwarted by injuries and red tape and the family lived in poverty. Edson played street soccer with a stuffed sock for a ball. In school he resented the discipline, and by the age of seven he was working as a shoeshine boy and selling peanuts. By 10 he had become Pelé, a name he then detested, concocted by his friends from mispronunciations of the Portuguese for foot, the Turkish for stupid, and the name of a famous local player. He graduated to his own teams, September 7 and Ameriquinha, with whom he scored goals, won trophies, and gained a reputation as a budding phenomenon. At 14 he was working in a shoe factory and playing for the Baurú youth team and later for other local teams, Radium and Noroestinho, where, alongside professionals, he was soon leading scorer. At 15, small, skinny, and homesick, he went to play with the state champions, Santos, for $10 a month. Within a year he was the leading club and state goal-scorer. At 16 he was selected for the national team. In 1958 he made his first World Cup appearance in Sweden against the Soviet Union and scored his first World Cup goal against Wales. He scored three goals in the semifinal and two in the final as Brazil won the championship. Pelé was the center of media attention because he was so young and talented, full of speed, power, and creativity. He was a national hero and had already won his place in football history. He played in three more World Cups, in 1962 in Chile, 1966 in England, and 1970 in Mexico. Brazil won in 1962 and 1970. Meanwhile Santos became one of the best clubs in the world, exploiting the fact that they had Pelé. He scored his one-thousandth goal in 1969 and finished his professional career of 1,363 games with 1,281 goals, almost a goal a match. He retired in 1974 but came out of retirement because of financial problems and played for the New York Cosmos from 1975 to 1977.

Pelé played what he calls the Beautiful Game with obvious joy, inspiring his fellow team members and making his fans exuberant. He remains a legend not just because of his outstanding ability and performances but because no other player has done or possibly can ever again do what he did. He is famous for being famous, yet modest and accessible and deeply religious. He had little education and yet heads of state respect his views and take his advice. The myths say that war tem-

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porarily stopped in his name in Biafra in 1967. He has worked for UNESCO. From 1994 to 1997 he was Brazilian minister of sports, determined to stamp out football corruption and working to get poor youth off the streets in Brazil. He won the 1978 International Peace Award, and as the twentieth century closed he was Reuters Sportsman of the Century. He became a soccer ambassador, working to improve the game through youth. He is the greatest soccer player the world has known, ahead of his time as a media superstar, before the mammoth salaries and sponsorships today’s players earn. His name is known far beyond soccer by people who know little about the game, as shown by his media success in the United States. Although his business affairs have not always run smoothly or profitably, Pelé has an astute eye for an opportunity whether in finance or the media. Recently he has made more from credit card and sports equipment endorsements than he ever did in soccer.

Archives

No significant archives. The small but developing Federation Internationale Football Association (FIFA) Archives is accessible on-line, www.fifa.com; and at Hitzigweg 11, P.O. Box 85, 8030 Zurich, Switzerland.

Printed Sources

Harris, Harry. Pelé: His Life and Times (London: Robson Books, 2000). Kissinger, Henry. “The Phenomenon,” Time (14 June 1999).

Morrison, Ian. The World Cup: A Complete Record 1930-1990 (Derby: Breedon Books, 1990). Pelé. My Life and the Beautiful Game (London: Horizon, 1977).

Gillian Fenwick

PERÓN, EVA (1919–1952)

Born Eva María Ibargueren in the small town of Los Todos, Perón was the illegitimate child of Juan Duarte, an estanciero, who took Eva’s mother, Juana Ibarguren, as a mistress shortly after he arrived. Eva was always aware of her illegitimacy, and once she became Juan Perón’s wife, she buried this part of her life forever. In 1935, Eva moved to Buenos Aires, where she intended to conquer the city and become a famous actress. For 10 years, she struggled to make a name for herself, and by 1943, she found success as one of the highest-paid radio stars in Argentina.

In 1944, Evita was introduced to Colonel Juan Domingo Perón. The experience was memorable for both. Eva recalled it as “marvelous,” and to Perón, it was “destiny.” From that moment on, she took on a new role. After her last film, The Prodigal, was completed, she ended her life as an actress and began her job as Perón’s political activist, in which role she used the name “Evita.” They were married on October 17, 1945, and on February 24, 1946, Perón was voted president of Argentina. As the president’s wife, Evita familiarized herself with labor and union issues, and in 1947 she became the proprietor of Democracia, a newspaper designed as the propaganda tool for the Perón regime. She became the bridge between Perón and his constituents, whom she acknowledged as her “people.” Outspoken, Evita drew criticism from the Parliamentary opposition, for her influence with Perón and her freedom to pursue political agendas, such the promotion of family members into government positions. She worked tirelessly for the poor, the sick,

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and the descamisada, with whom she felt she most identified. According to one biography, she created what would be the cabinet appointed in the middle of 1950 (Taylor 1979, 53). She was quoted as being “the woman behind the throne” (Fraser 1980, 82). However, her activism would be cut short when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 1950. Evita remained in the public eye until her illness rendered her incapacitated. Eva Perón passed away on July 26, 1952, at the age of 33.

It is hard to determine what Eva Perón’s literary influences were, given that she buried much of her past and that she never went beyond an elementary school education. Most biographies point to her love of poetry, but never mention any titles. In her autobiography, In My Own Words (Mi Mensaji), Evita mentioned that Perón became her mentor: “I remember asking him to be my teacher. In the respites of his fight, he would teach me a little of as much as I could learn. I like to read by his side. We started with Plutarch’s The Parallel Lives and The Complete Letters of Lord Chesterfield to His Son Stanhope” (Perón 1996, 53).

Archives

Hoover Institution Library, Stanford University, California.

Stanford University Library, Stanford University, California.

Archivo General de la Nacion, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Printed Sources

Alexander, Robert J. The Perón Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951).

Flores, María. The Woman with the Whip: Eva Perón (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1952).

Fraser, Nicholas, and Marysa Navarro. Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980).

Ortiz, Alicia Dujovne. Eva Perón: A Biography, Shawn Fields (trans.), (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

Perón, Eva. In My Own Words, Laura Dail (trans.), (New York: The New Press, 1996).

———. My Mission in Life, Ethel Cherry (trans.), (New York: Vantage Press, Inc. 1953). Taylor, J. M. Eva Perón: The Myths of a Woman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

1979).

Cheryl Lemus

PIAGET, JEAN (1896–1980)

The oldest child of Arthur Piaget, professor of medieval literature at the Académie de Neuchâtel, and of Rebecca Jackson, Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where he studied at the Latin College from 1907, at the gymnasium from 1912, and at the Université de Neuchâtel from 1915. At age 11, while he was a pupil at the Latin High School, he published a short notice in a local nature magazine (Rameau de Sapin) on an albino sparrow (1907). After high school graduation, he studied natural sciences at the University of Neuchâtel, where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1918. That year, Piaget wrote his second book, titled Recherche (Research), in which he explained what questions still remained without answers for him. Piaget was professor of the history of scientific thought (1929–39), and later professor of sociology (1939–51) at the University of Geneva; he was also professor at the Université de Lausanne (Switzerland). In 1952, he was apointed professor of genetic psychology at he Université de Paris Sorbonne. Piaget published over 60

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books and some seven hundred articles and was honored with the 1969 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association.

Piaget’s religious, protestant education was in conflict with the Darwinian theories he was aware of between 1912 and 1915, leading to a religious crisis. At 16 he discovered a book in his father’s library, written by a protestant theologian, Auguste Sabatier, titled La philosophie de la religion fondée sur la psychologie et l’histoire. Piaget later recalled that he “devoured that book with immense delight . . . a new passion took possession of me: philosophy” (quoted by Evans 1981, 110). Several months later, Piaget admitted that he was moved by French philosopher Henri Bergson, who wrote L’Évolution créatrice, although he later disagreed with him. In his Autobiography, Piaget remembered what he read around 1914: “everything which came to my hands after my unfortunate contact with the philosophy of Bergson: some Kant, Spencer, Auguste Comte, Fouillée and Guyau, Lachelier, Boutroux, Lalande, Durkheim, Tarde, Le Dantec; and, in psychology, W. James, Th. Ribot, and Janet” (quoted by Evans 1981, 112). Piaget also said: “If I had known at that time [1913–15] the work of Wertheimer and of Köhler, I would have become a Gestaltist” (quoted by Evans 1981, 115). After getting his Ph.D. in 1918, Piaget went to Zurich, where he attended lectures by Oskar Robert Pfister, Paul Eugen Bleuler, and C. G. Jung; he also discovered the work of Sigmund Freud. French philosopher Léon Brunschvicg also inspired Piaget, who often quoted two of his books: Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (1912) and L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique (1922). Much later, Piaget was influenced by the numerous books in English given to him by a philosopher from the United States, Wolfe Mays, from 1953; they worked together on research on genetic epistemology, which became one of Piaget’s most important contributions to scientific knowledge.

Archives

Archives Jean Piaget, Uni-Mail, 40 boulevard du Pont d’Arve, 1205 Genève, Switzerland (http://www.unige.ch/piaget/). Manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, notebooks.

Printed Sources

Bringuier, J. C. Conversations with Jean Piaget (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Ducret, Jean-Jacques. Jean Piaget. Biographie et parcours intellectuel (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et

Niestlé, 1981).

Evans, Richard I. Jean Piaget, the Man and His Ideas (New York: Praeger, 1981).

Jean Piaget Archives Foundation. The Jean Piaget Bibliography (Geneva: Jean Piaget Archives Foundation, 1989).

Piaget, Jean. “Autobiography.” In E. Boring (ed.), History of Psycholog y in Autobiography, Vol. 4. (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1952).

Smith, L. Necessary Knowledge (Hove: Erlbaum Associates, 1993).

Yves Laberge

PICASSO, PABLO RUIZ Y (1881–1973)

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, and attended the School of Fine Arts in La Coruna (1892–95), the Barcelona Provisional School of Fine Arts (1895–96), and the Royal Academy of San Fernando (1897–98). In Barcelona, Picasso became a member of a group of intellectuals who would meet at El Quatre Gats café and exchange ideas on art, poetry, and literature. At the age of 19, Picasso moved to

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Paris and painted through both his blue and rose periods before becoming interested in the simplified, iconic forms of African and Iberian art. By amalgamating these forms with Paul Cézanne’s simplified geometric shapes, Picasso produced his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Faceting the subject matter and exploring it from a variety of viewpoints, Picasso and his contemporary Georges Braque developed analytical cubism and later, through the inclusion of collage, its synthetic counterpart. Picasso became affiliated with the surrealist painters during the 1920s and in 1937 produced his monumental masterpiece Guernica in response to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. Like the Andalusian society of his origin, Picasso’s art was often misogynistic and phallocentric in nature, fusing the sacred and the profane in extremely personal, inventive, and abstract artistic expressions. Picasso continued his prolific production of paintings, sculpture, and ceramics well into his eighties, leaving behind more than 20,000 works at the time of his death.

From an early age, Picasso was exposed to classical and mythological tales, including Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the stories of the fall of Icarus and Perseus and Medusa. Much of Picasso’s work includes depictions of composite beasts such as the centaur and the minotaur that he first encountered in the traditional tales of the mithraic ritual of bull worship and which he would re-encounter in the books of Ramon Reventos, such as El Centaure Picador. Picasso would illustrate many of these tales in later life, as well as George Hugnet’s Le Chèvre-Feuille and Non Vouloir and the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle. Living among the Paris intellectuals of the early twentieth century, Picasso read the works of those individuals with whom he was acquainted, including the philosopher and writer Eugenio d’Ors and the art historian Miguel Utrillo. While in Paris, Picasso also became familiar with the work of Paul Verlaine and Fernando de Roja, upon whose La Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea of 1499 Picasso based his painting Celestina. The subject matter of many of Picasso’s blue and rose period paintings can be traced directly to his reading of Rudolph Lothar’s Harlequin King, Maurice Maeterlinck’s play L’Intruse: La Vie, and a familiarity with his acquaintance Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems dealing with magicians and circus performers. His love of poetry as a whole led Picasso to the work of Jean Cocteau, the French Dadaist writer Tristan Tzara, Andre Salmon, Max Jacob, and the surrealist poets André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon. The highly imaginative and bizarre writings of Alfred Jarry, such as The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, aided Picasso in understanding the contradictory use of symbols in art. Jarry’s work frequently contained biomorphic and geometric descriptions of objects that may have provided Picasso with an impetus for the development of analytical cubism.

Archives

Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities, Special Collections, Los Angeles, California, control no. CJPA86-A917.

Printed Sources

Penrose, Roland. Picasso: His Life and Work (Los Angeles: USC Press, 1983). Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso 1881–1906 (New York: Random House, 1991). Shapiro, Meyer. The Unity of Picasso’s Art (New York: George Braziller, 2000).

Gregory L. Schnurr

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PINTER, HAROLD (1930– )

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, London, on October 10, 1930. He grew up in this predominantly working-class neighborhood, being evacuated to Cornwall for a part of the time London was bombed during World War II, but also spending a portion of the war years at home and at first hand witnessing flying bombs and widespread destruction. He studied on scholarship at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he played football and cricket and ran track as well as acted the roles of Macbeth and Romeo. He won a grant to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts but left after a few months. Later he briefly attended the Central School of Dramatic Arts.

For roughly a decade starting in 1951, he acted under the stage name of David Baron, touring Ireland and England, appearing in over 90 plays including Oedipus, King Lear, Othello, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. While acting, he came under the influence of two theatrical figures, Anew McMaster and Donald Wolfit, both of whose views on plays and theater influenced Pinter greatly. During this time he began work on his only novel, The Dwarfs (written 1952–56, published 1990). Late in the 1950s Pinter began to write plays, having been exposed to the work of Samuel Beckett while touring with McMaster. Initially through correspondence, Pinter and Beckett became friends, with the older writer commenting on his work and offering advice on writing and literary subjects. Pinter was also influenced during this time by Hollywood gangster films, noir writing, and extensive reading in twentieth-century fiction, poetry, and drama.

Much of Pinter’s work can be read from a political perspective. Certainly the experience of growing up Jewish in a time of anti-Semitism and widespread persecution of European Jews in part formed Pinter’s political views. He has spoken of facing threats and violence from local bullies and thugs while growing up. He has been active in a number of left-wing causes, particularly marching for and writing on behalf of imprisoned or silenced or oppressed writers. His early plays—for instance, The Room (1957) and The Birthday Party (1958)—can be seen as political only figuratively, depicting metaphorically the forces of society as they act in concert to coerce conformity or obedience from individuals, to exert hegemony over members of the society. His one-act play The Dumb Waiter (1959)—in which two mysterious characters obey increasingly difficult orders from an unknown, offstage figure until one is ordered to kill the other—is often read as a metaphor for service in the armed forces (Pinter himself declined national service as a conscientious objector, facing tribunals twice, but escaping both times without being sentenced to prison but having to pay fines).

Pinter’s later plays—especially One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and Celebration (2000)—are more overtly political in their nature, and their social content can be read directly and not through the prism of metaphor. He also wrote the screenplay for the political dystopian film The Handmaid’s Tale (1987), based on the Margaret Atwood novel.

Printed Sources

Billington, Michael. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). Bold, Alan (ed.). Harold Pinter: You Never Heard Such Silence (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and

Noble, 1984).

Esslin, Martin. Pinter the Playwright (New York and London: Methuen, 1984).

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