Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism, he established the basis for abstract art.
Pablo Picasso was born Pablo Blasco on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain, where his father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a professor in the School of Arts and Crafts. Pablo's mother was Maria Picasso and the artist used her surname from about 1901 on. In 1891 the family moved to La Coruña, where, at the age of 14, Picasso began studying at the School of Fine Art. Under the academic instruction of his father, he developed his artistic talent at an extraordinary rate.
When the family moved to Barcelona in 1896, Pablo Picasso easily gained entrance to the School of Fine Arts. One year later he was admitted as an advanced student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, he demonstrated his remarkable ability by completing in one day an entrance examination for which an entire month was permitted.
But, Pablo Picasso found the atmosphere at the academy stifling, and he soon returned to Barcelona, where he began to study historical and contemporary art on his own. At that time Barcelona was the most vital cultural center in Spain, and Picasso quickly joined the group of poets, painters, and writers who gathered at the famous café Quatre Gats.
In 1900 Pablo Picasso made his first visit to Paris, staying for three months. In 1901 he made a second trip to Paris and Ambroise Vollard gave him his first one man exhibition. Although the show was not financially successful, it did arouse the interest of the writer Max Jacob, who subsequently became one of Picasso's closest friends and supporters. For the next three years Picasso stayed alternately in Paris and Barcelona.
First Works : When he returned to Paris he was the center of the international art world. In painting it had spawned such masters as Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Each of these artists practiced advanced, radical styles.
In spite of obvious stylistic differences, their common denominator lay in testing the limits of traditional representation. While their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction. In effect, they implied that painting need not be predicated upon the values of Renaissance illusionism.
Picasso emerged within this complicated and uncertain artistic situation in 1904 when he set up a permanent studio in an old building called the Bateau Lavoir. There he produced some of his most revolutionary works, and the studio soon became a gathering place for the city's vanguard artists, writers, and patrons. This group included the painter Juan Gris, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, and the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein.
Picasso's early work reveals a creative pattern which persisted throughout his long career. Between 1900 and 1906 he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary painting, from impressionism to Art Nouveau. In doing so, his own work changed with unprecedented quickness, revealing a spectrum of feelings that would seem to lie beyond the limits of one human being. In itself this accomplishment was a mark of Picasso's genius.
The Moulin de la Galette (1900), the first painting Picasso executed in Paris, presents a scene of urban café society.
With its acrid colors and sharp, angular figures, the work exudes a sinister, discomforting aura. The rawness of its sensibility, although not its superficial style, is characteristic of many of his earliest works.
Blue and Pink Periods : The years between 1901 and 1904 were known as Picasso's Blue Period, during which nearly all of his works were executed in somber shades of blue and contained lean, dejected, and introspective figures. The pervasive tone of the pictures is one of depression; their color is symbolic of the artist's personal hardship during the first years of the century--years when he occasionally burned his own drawings to keep warm--and also of the suffering which he witnessed in his society. Two outstanding examples of this period are the Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).
In the second half of 1904 Picasso's style exhibited a new direction. For about a year he worked on a series of pictures featuring harlequins, acrobats, and other circus performers. The most celebrated example is the Family of Saltimbanques (1905). Feeling, as well as subject matter, has shifted here. The brooding depression of the Blue Period has given way to a quiet and unoppressive melancholy, and the color has become more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with a prevalence of reddish and pink tones.
Thus this period was called his Pink Period.
In terms of space, Picasso's work between 1900 and 1905 was generally flat, emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the painting surface. Late in 1905, however, he became increasingly interested in pictorial volume. This interest seems to have been stimulated by the late paintings of Cézanne, ten of which were shown in the 1905 Salon d'Automne. In Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse (1905) and Woman with Loaves (1906) the figures are vigorously modeled, giving a strong impression of their weight and three-dimensionality. The same interest pervades the famous Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906), particularly in the massive body of the figure. But the face of the sitter reveals still another new interest: its mask-like abstraction was inspired by Iberian sculpture, an exhibition of which Picasso had seen at the Louvre in the spring of 1906. This influence reached its fullest expression a year later in one of the most revolutionary pictures of Picasso's entire career, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).
Picasso and Cubism
Pablo Picasso is considered to be one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Pablo Picasso showed great artistic promise growing up.
Pablo Picasso really began to thrive creatively once he moved to Paris in the early 1900’s. There he was exposed to works of other artists and developed friendships with some of them, including Georges Braque.
With a career that spanned more than seven decades, Picasso's work is often categorized into different periods and associated with a number of artistic movements. His early days in Paris coincide with his Blue period, named for the predominant use of that color in his work and his general mood at that time. This was followed by his Rose period and a brief dabbling in work inspired by primitive art. It was Cubism the style in which the artist breaks down his or her subjects into geometric shapes that put Picasso in the spotlight. One of his paintings in this style Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) shocked critics and friends alike when it was exhibited.
Later Picasso sought a different type of reaction from his painting Guernica (1937), which is thought to be one of Picasso's greatest works. Created during his Surrealist period, Picasso captures the horror of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, which killed many innocent civilians during the Spanish Civil War.
By the end of World War II, Picasso had become an internationally known artist and celebrity. A highly productive artist, he created a large number of works during his lifetime. Besides painting, he made sculptures, etchings, and many different types of prints.
While Picasso died on April 8, 1973, in Antibes, France, interest in his art continues to grow. Highly regarded, Picasso's work is in many major museums around the world, including the Louvre in Paris, and has sold for millions of dollars at auction.
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