“Everyone wants to understand art. Why don’t we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only an insignificant part of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.”
Picasso

The Beginning: Childhood and Youth 1881-1901

In 1896 Pablo’s first large “academic’ oil painting, “The First Communion”, appeared in an exhibition in Barcelona. His second large oil painting, “Science and Charity” (1897) received honorable mention in the national exhibition of fine art in Madrid and was awarded a gold medal in a competition at Málaga. Pablo’s uncle sent him money for further studying in Madrid, and the youth passed entrance examination for advanced courses at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. But already in the winter he abandoned the classes. His everyday visits to the Prado seemed to him much more important. At first he copied the old masters, trying to imitate their style; later they would be the source of ideas for original paintings of his own, and he would re-arrange them again and again in different variations.
Picasso’s time in Madrid, however, came to a sudden end. In summer 1898, caught with scarlet fever, he came back to Barcelona, then, to regain health, he went to the mountain village of Horta de Ebro and spent long time there to return home only in spring 1899.

In Barcelona he frequented Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), the café, where artists and intellectuals used to meet. He made friends, among others, with the young painter Casagemas, and the poet Sabartés, who would later be his secretary and lifelong friend. In Quatre Gats Picasso met the vivid representatives of Spanish modernism, such as Rusinol and Nonell; he was very enthusiastic about new directions in art, he said farewell to “classicism” and started his enduring search and experiments. The relations with his parents strained, they could not understand and forgive him the betrayal of “classicism”.

In October 1900 Picasso and Casagemas left for Paris, the most significant artistic center at the time, and opened studio at the Montmartre. Art dealer Pedro Manach offered Picasso his first contract: 150 Francs per month in exchange for pictures. His first Paris picture “Le Moulin de la Galette” (Guggenheim Museum, New York).  In December he departed for Barcelona, Málaga, and Madrid where he became co-editor of Arte Joven. But already in May 1901 he returned to Paris. This restless life with constant travels  continued all his life, though  later he would become more or less settled, but never finally settled.
 

The Blue and Rose periods 1901-1906

In 1904 Picasso finally settled in Paris, at 13, Rue Ravignan (until 1909), called “Bateau-Lavoir”. He met Fernande Olivier, a model, who would be his mistress for the next seven years. He even proposed to her, but she had to refuse because was already married. They paid frequent visits to the Circus Médrano, whose bright pink tent at the foot of the Montmartre shone for miles and was quite close to his studio. There Picasso got ideas for his pictures of circus actors. The pub Le Lapin Agile (The Agile Rabbit) was a meeting place of young artists and authors. In the pub Picasso got acquainted with the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. The landlord, Frédé, accepted pictures as payment, that made his café attractive for the artists and he acquired a splendid collection of pictures, including, of course, one by Picasso “At the Lapin Agile”, with Picasso as a harlequin and Frédé as a guitar player. The picture “Woman with a Crow” shows Frédé’s daughter.
By 1905 Picasso lightened his palette, relieving it with pink and rose, yellow-ochre and gray. His circus performers, harlequins and acrobats became more graceful, delicate and sensible.
In 1906 the art dealer Ambroise Vollard  bought most of Picasso’s “rose” pictures, thus started his life free of financial worries. Accompanied by Fernande he again traveled to Barcelona, then to Gosol in the north of Catalonia, where he painted “La Toilette”. Deeply impressed by the Iberian sculptures at the Louvre he began to think over and to experiment with geometrical forms.
 
 

Cubism 1907-1917

“Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, and an English book is a blank to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?”
Picasso.

In 1907 after numerous studies and variations Picasso painted his first cubistic picture - “Les demoiselles d’Avignon”. Impressed with African sculptures at ethnographic museum he tried to combine the angular structures of the “primitive art” and his new ideas about cubism.
“In the Demoiselles d’Avignon I painted a profile nose into a frontal view of a face. I just had to depict in sideways so that I could give it a name, so that I could call it ‘nose’. And so they started talking about Negro art. Have you ever seen a single African sculpture – just one- where a face mask has a profile nose in it?” Picasso.
Picasso’s new experiments were met very differently by friends, some were sincerely disappointed, and even horrified, others were interested. The art dealer Kahnweiler really liked the Demoiselles and took it for sale. Picasso’s new friend,  the artist Georges Braque (1882-1963), was so enthusiastic about Picasso’s new works that the two painters for several years to come were to explore together the possibilities of cubism. In the summer of 1908 they started by going on a holiday in the country together, only to find afterwards that they had painted similar pictures independently of each other.

With Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table (1909) the critics mark the beginning of Picasso’s “analytical” cubism: he gives up central perspective, splits up forms in facet-like stereo-metric shapes. The famous portraits of Fernande Woman with Pears, and of the art dealers Vollard and Kahnweiller are fulfilled in the “analytical” cubist style .
By 1911 Picasso’s relationships with Fernande experienced crisis: he broke with her and started a new liaison, with Eva Gouel (Marcelle Humbert), whom he called “Ma Jolie”.

By 1912 the possibilities of the “analytical” cubism seemed to be exhausted. Picasso and Braque started new experiments: within a year they were composing still lifes of cut-and-pasted scraps of material, with only a few lines added to complete the design. Still-Life with Chair Caning. These collages led to synthetic cubism: paintings with large, schematic patterning, such as “The Guitar”.
“Cubism has remained within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond. Drawing, design and color are understood and practiced in cubism in the spirit and manner that are understood and practiced in other schools. Our subjects might be different, because we have introduced into painting objects and forms that used to be ignored. We look at our surroundings with open eyes, and also open minds. We give each form and color its own significance, as far as can see it; in our subjects, we keep the joy of discovery, the pleasure of the unexpected; our subject itself must be a source of interest. But why tell you what we are doing when everybody can see it if they want to?” Picasso.

The World War I (1914-18) changed the life, the mood, the state of mind, and, of course, the art. His French fellow artists, Braque and Derain, were called up into the army at the beginning of the war. The art dealer, the German Kahnweiler, had to go to Italy, his gallery was confiscated. Picaso’s pictures became somber, more often realistic features appear. Pierrot.
“When I paint a bowl, I want to show you that it is round, of course. But the general rhythm of the picture, its composition framework, may compel me to show the round shape as a square. When you come to think of it, I am probably a painter without style. ‘Style’ is often something that ties the artist down and makes him look at things in one particular way, the same technique, the same formulas, year after year, sometimes for a whole lifetime. You recognize him immediately, but he is always in the same suit, or a suit of the same cut. There are, of course, great painters who have a certain style. However, I always thrash about rather wildly. I am a bit of a tramp. You can see me at this moment, but I have already changed, I am already somewhere else. I can never be tied down, and that is why I have no style.” Picasso.

In 1916 the young poet Jean Cocteau brought the Russian Impressario Diaghilev and the composer Erik Satie to meet Picasso in his studio. They asked him to design the décor for their ballet “Parade”, which was to be performed by the Ballet Russe. The meeting and Picasso’s affirmative answer brought to his life deep changes for years to come. In 1917 he traveled to Rome with Cocteau and spent time with Diaghilev’s ballet company, worked on décor for “Parade”, met Igor Stravinsky and fell in love with the dancer Olga Koklova. He accompanied ballet group to Madrid and Barcelona because of Olga, and persuaded her to stay with him.
 

Between Two Wars 1917-1936

In 1918 Olga and Picasso married. Contacts with high society through the ballet and the marriage brought changes in his lifestyle. The young family moved into an apartment, which occupied two floors at 23 Rue La Boétie, acquired servants, then chauffeur, and moved in different social circles, no doubt due to Olga’s influence. The chaotic artists’ get-togethers gradually changed into receptions. Picasso’s image of himself had changed, and this was probably reflected in more conventional language he adopted in his art, the way in which he consciously made use of artistic traditions and was almost never provocative.
After cubism Picasso returned to more traditional patterns, but not exactly the classical ones, this style, a’la classical, was called “classicist style” The Lovers., from time to time he returned to cubism. His collaboration with the Ballet Russe went on: he worked on décor for “Le Tricorne”; drew the dancers; in 1920 began to work on décor for Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella. With the birth of his son Paul (Paolo) (1921) he again and again returned to Mother and Child theme. Mother and Child.
To 1921 belongs his cubistic Three Musicians, in which he for the first time used a group of people as a cubist subject: three figures from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte (Pierrot, Harlequin and a monk) playing trio. Though created in his post-cubist period, the picture came to be regarded as the climax of cubism. “Those who set out to explain a picture usually go wrong. A short time ago Gertrude Stein elatedly informed me that at last she understood what my picture ‘Three Musicians’ represented. It was a still life!” Picasso.

In 1923 Picasso composed The Pipes of Pan, which is regarded as the most important painting of his “classicist period”. Other interesting works: The Seated Harlequin. Women Running on the Beach.
“Of all these things – hunger, misery, being misunderstood by the public – fame is by far the worst. This is how God chastises the artist. It is sad. It is true.” Picasso
God had chastised Picasso, by mid-twenties he became so popular that “had to suffer a public that was gradually suppressing his individuality by blindly applauding every single picture he produced.” Added to this, there were marital problems. His wife Olga, the former ballet dancer, for whom the attention and admiration of the public was necessary, vital, and natural,  could not understand his crisis.
Picasso tried to rescue his independence by taking an interest in the unknown, the unfamiliar, he set up a sculptor’s studio near Paris and began to make numerous artistic experiments. Series of assemblages on Guitar theme, using objects such as a shirt, a floor-cloth, nails and string, sculptures. In 1927 Picasso met seventeen-year old Marie-Thérèse Walter. She became his mistress shortly afterwards.
Much of his work after 1927 is fantastic and visionary in character. His Woman with Flower of 1932 is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse, distorted and deformed in the manner of surrealism, which was so fashionable at the time. even Picasso could not really avoid being influenced by this group of Parisian artists, although, conversely, they regarded him as their artistic stepfather.
“I keep doing my best not to lose sight of nature. I want to aim at similarity, a profound similarity which is more real than reality, thus becoming surrealist.” Picasso

Picasso himself admitted that the worst time of his life began in June 1935. Marie-Thérèse was pregnant with his child, and his divorce from Olga had to be postponed again and again: their common wealth had become a subject for the lawyers. During this time of personal crisis Picasso would supplement his arsenal of artistic weapons in the form of a bull, either dying or snorting furiously and threatening both man and animal alike: being Spanish, Picasso had always been fascinated by bull fights, bu the “tauromachia”. October 5th 1935 his second child, daughter Maria de la Concepcion, called Maya, was born.
In 1936 he met Dora Maar, a Yugoslavian photographer. Later, during the war, she became his constant companion. Portrait of Dora.
 

Wartime Experience 1937-1945

The Spanish government had asked Picasso to fulfill a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition. He planned the topic “painter and studio”, but when he heard about events in Guernica, he changed his original plans. After numerous sketches and studies, Picasso gave his own personal comprehensive view of a historical fact. His gigantic mural Guernica has remained part of the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, because Guernica has been serving as a forceful reminder of it. In 1981, after forty years of exile in New York, the picture found its way back to Spain. This was because Picasso had decreed that it should not become Spanish property until the end of fascism. In October 1937 Picasso painted the Weeping Woman as a kind of postscript to Guernica.

In 1940 when Paris was occupied he held an action: handed out photos of Guernica to German officers. When asked “Did you do this?” he replied, “No, you did”. Whether the world-known military brains could not perceive the symbolism of the picture, or the world fame of Picasso stopped the Nazis, he was not arrested. He went on working. During the wartime he met a young woman painter, Françoise Gillot, who would later become his third official wife.
With his Charnel House of 1945 Picasso concluded the series of pictures, which he started with “Guernica”. The relationship between the two paintings becomes immediately obvious when we consider the rigidly limited color scheme and the triangular composition of the center. But the nightmare has now been overtaken by reality itself. The Charnel House was painted under the impact of reports from the concentration camps which had been discovered and liberated. It was not until now that people realized how many monsters had been born while reason slumbered. It was a time when millions of people had been literally pushed to one side – a turn of phase which Picasso expressed rather vividly in the pile of dead bodies in his Charnel House.

After WWII. The Late Works. 1946-1973.

In 1944 after liberation of Paris he joined the Communist Party, became an active participant of Peace Movement; in 1949 the Paris World Peace Conference adopted a dove created by Picasso as the symbol of the various peace movements; in 1950 and in 1961 (for the second time) he was awarded Lenin Peace Prize. He protested against American invasion in Corea, against Soviet occupation of Hungary. In his public life he always standed on humanistic positions.
After the WWII Françoise gave birth to his two more children born: Claude (1947) and Paloma (1949). Paloma is a Spanish word for “dove”, the girl was named after the peace fighters symbol.
More women come into his life, come and go, like Sylvette David; or stay longer, like Jacqueline Rogue.
Another woman came into his life and settled beside, was she better than the previous ones, or just new? All his life he had to change places of life, women, manner of painting, materials, with which he worked. Some people say that this helps to stay young, maybe…
In summer 1955 Picasso bought “La Californie”, a big villa near Cannes. From his studio he could see his enormous garden, which he filled with his sculptures. The south and the Mediterranean were just right for his mentality, they reminded of Barcelona, of his childhood and youth. He created there: “Studio ‘La Californie’ at Cannes” (1956), Jacqueline in the Studio. (1956). By 1958 however ‘La Californie’ became one more tourist attraction at Cannes. There had been a constantly increasing stream of admirers and of people trying to catch a glimpse, so that it had become necessary to move house. Picasso bought Chateau Vauvenargues, near Aix-en-Provence. Picasso’s move was reflected in his art with an increasing reduction in his range of colors to black, white and green.

Mass media turned Picasso into a celebrity, the public deprived him of privacy and wanted to know his every step, “but his art was given very little attention and was regarded as no more than the hobby of an ageing genius who could do nothing but talk about himself in his pictures.”
Picasso’s late works are an expression of his final refusal to fit into categories. He did everything he wanted in art and there was not a word of criticism.
His adaptation of Las Meninas by Velászquez, his experiments with Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, did he really try to discover or to create something, or did he just laugh at our stupidity, at our inability to see the obvious?
A number of elements had become part of constant pattern: Picasso’s use of simplified imagery, the way he let the unpainted canvas shine through, his emphatic use of lines, and the sketchiness of the subject. “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them”, Picasso explained in 1956.
In the last years of his life painting had become an obsession with Picasso, and he would date each picture absolutely precisely, thus creating in his latest works a vast amount of similar paintings, crystallizations of individual moments of timeless happiness, knowing that in the end everything would be in vain.

On 08 April 1973 he died, at last. Picasso was buried in the grounds of his Chateau Vauvenargues.

 “The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it will always remain in the present. I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I have wanted to express something, I have done so without thinking of the past or the future. I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I have wanted to say something, I have said it in such a way as I believed I had to. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress, but it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.”  Picasso.

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor, generally considered the greatest artist of the 20th century. He was unique as an inventor of forms, as an innovator of styles and techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history. He created more than 20'000 works.

Training and Early Work

Born in Málaga on 25 October 1881, Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher, and María Picasso y Lopez. Until 1898 he always used his father's name, Ruiz, and his mother's maiden name, Picasso, to sign his pictures. After about 1901 he dropped Ruiz and used his mother's maiden name to sign his pictures. Picasso's genius manifested itself early: at the age of 10 he made his first paintings, and at 15 he performed brilliantly on the entrance examinations to Barcelona's School of Fine Arts. His large academic canvas Science and Charity (1897), depicting a doctor, a nun, and a child at a sick woman's bedside, won a gold medal.

Blue Period

Between 1900 and 1902, Picasso made three trips to Paris, finally settling there in 1904. He found the city's bohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance halls and cafés show how he assimilated the postimpressionism of the French painter Paul Gauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis. The themes of the French painters Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the style of the latter, exerted the strongest influence. Picasso's Blue Room (1901) reflects the work of both these painters and, at the same time, shows his evolution toward the Blue Period, so called because various shades of blue dominated his work for the next few years. Expressing human misery, the paintings portray blind figures, beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes, their somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of works by the Spanish artist El Greco.

Rose Period

Shortly after settling in Paris in a shabby building known as the Bateau-Lavoir (which it resembled), Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of many companions to influence the theme, style, and mood of his work. With this happy relationship, Picasso changed his palette to pinks and reds; the years 1904 and 1905 are thus called the Rose Period. Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, which he visited several times a week; one such painting is Family of Saltimbanques (1905). In the figure of the harlequin, Picasso represented his alter ego, a practice he repeated in later works as well. Dating from his first decade in Paris are friendships with the poet Max Jacob, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, the art dealers Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, and the American expatriate writers Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, who were his first important patrons; Picasso did portraits of them all.

Protocubism

In the summer of 1906, during Picasso's stay in Gosol, Spain, his work entered a new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African art. His celebrated portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) reveals a masklike treatment of her face. The key work of this early period, however, is Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), so radical in style — its picture surface resembling fractured glass — that it was not even understood by contemporary avant-garde painters and critics. Destroyed were spatial depth and the ideal form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh, angular planes.

Cubism — Analytic and Synthetic

Inspired by the volumetric treatment of form by the French postimpressionist artist Paul Cezanne, Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque painted landscapes in 1908 in a style later described by a critic as being made of little cubes, thus leading to the term cubism. Some of their paintings are so similar that it is difficult to tell them apart. Working together between 1908 and 1911, they were concerned with breaking down and analyzing form, and together they developed the first phase of cubism, known as analytic cubism. Monochromatic color schemes were favored in their depictions of radically fragmented motifs, whose several sides were shown simultaneously. Picasso's favorite subjects were musical instruments, still-life objects, and his friends; one famous portrait is Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1910). In 1912, pasting paper and a piece of oilcloth to the canvas and combining these with painted areas, Picasso created his first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning. This technique marked a transition to synthetic cubism. This second phase of cubism is more decorative, and color plays a major role, although shapes remain fragmented and flat. Picasso was to practice synthetic cubism throughout his career, but by no means exclusively. Two works of 1915 demonstrate his simultaneous work in different styles: Pierrot is a synthetic cubist painting, whereas a drawing of his dealer, Vollard, is executed in his Ingresque style, so called because of its draftsmanship, emulating that of the 19th-century French neoclassical artist Jean August Dominique Ingres.

Cubist Sculpture

Picasso created cubist sculptures as well as paintings. The bronze bust Fernande Olivier (also called Head of a Woman, 1909) shows his consummate skill in handling three-dimensional form. He also made constructions — such as Mandolin and Clarinet (1914) — from odds and ends of wood, metal, paper, and nonartistic materials, in which he explored the spatial hypotheses of cubist painting. His Glass of Absinthe (1914), combining a silver sugar strainer with a painted bronze sculpture, anticipates his much later found object creations, such as Baboon and Young (1951), as well as pop art objects of the 1960s.

Realist and Surrealist Works

During World War I (1914-1918), Picasso went to Rome, working as a designer with Sergey Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He met and married the dancer Olga Koklova. In a realist style, Picasso made several portraits of her around 1917, of their son (for example, Paulo en Pierrot; 1924), and of numerous friends. In the early 1920s he did tranquil, neoclassical pictures of heavy, sculpturesque figures, an example being Three Women at the Spring (1921), and works inspired by mythology, such as The Pipes of Pan (1923). At the same time, Picasso also created strange pictures of small-headed bathers and violent convulsive portraits of women which are often taken to indicate the tension he experienced in his marriage. Although he stated he was not a surrealist, many of his pictures have a surreal and disturbing quality, as in Sleeping Woman in Armchair (1927) and Seated Bather (1930).

Paintings of the Early 1930s

Several cubist paintings of the early 1930s, stressing harmonious, curvilinear lines and expressing an underlying eroticism, reflect Picasso's pleasure with his newest love, Marie Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Maïa in 1935. Marie Thérèse, frequently portrayed sleeping, also was the model for the famous Girl Before a Mirror (1932). In 1935 Picasso made the etching Minotauromachy, a major work combining his minotaur and bullfight themes; in it the disemboweled horse, as well as the bull, prefigure the imagery of Guernica, a mural often called the most important single work of the 20th century.

Guernica

Picasso was moved to paint the huge mural Guernica shortly after German planes, acting on orders from Spain's authoritarian leader Francisco Franco, bombarded the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish civil war. Completed in less than two months, Guernica was hung in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of 1937. The painting does not portray the event; rather, Picasso expressed his outrage by employing such imagery as the bull, the dying horse, a fallen warrior, a mother and dead child, a woman trapped in a burning building, another rushing into the scene, and a figure leaning from a window and holding out a lamp. Despite the complexity of its symbolism, and the impossibility of definitive interpretation, Guernica makes an overwhelming impact in its portrayal of the horrors of war. Dora Maar, Picasso's next companion to be portrayed, took photographs of Guernica while the work was in progress. [detail]

World War II and After

Picasso's palette grew somber with the onset of World War II (1939-1945), and death is the subject of numerous works, such as Still Life with Steer's Skull (1942, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany) and The Charnel House (1945, Museum of Modern Art). He formed a new liaison during the 1940s with the painter Françoise Gilot who bore him two children, Claude and Paloma; they appear in many works that recapitulate his earlier styles. The last of Picasso's companions to be portrayed was Jacqueline Roque, whom he met in 1953 and married in 1961. [Jacqueline in the Studio, 1956]. He then spent much of his time in southern France.

Late Works — Recapitulation

Many of Picasso's later pictures were based on works by great masters of the past — Diego Velazquez, Gustave Courbet, Eugene Delacroix, and Edouard Manet. In addition to painting, Picasso worked in various media, making hundreds of lithographs in the renowned Paris graphics workshop, Atelier Mourlot. Ceramics also engaged his interest, and in 1947, in Vallauris, he produced nearly 2000 pieces. Picasso made important sculptures during this time: Man with Sheep (1944), an over-life-size bronze, emanates peace and hope, and She-Goat (1950), a bronze cast from an assemblage of flowerpots, a wicker basket, and other diverse materials, is humorously charming. In 1964 Picasso completed a welded steel maquette (model) for the 18.3-m sculpture Head of a Woman (unveiled in 1967). In 1968, during a seven-month period, he created an amazing series of 347 engravings, restating earlier themes: the circus, the bullfight, the theater, and lovemaking. Throughout Picasso's lifetime, his work was exhibited on countless occasions. Most unusual, however, was the 1971 exhibition at the Louvre, in Paris, honoring him on his 90th birthday; until then, living artists had not been shown there. In 1980 a major retrospective showing of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Picasso died in his villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie near Mougins on 08 April 1973.