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Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 - 8 April 1973)

Pablo Picasso is considered to be one of the most famous painters in the twentieth century. He was born in Malaga, Spain on October 20, 1881. In addition to painting, Picasso was also a printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright. He spent most of his adult life in France.

Early life

Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were "piz, piz", a shortening of lápiz , the Spanish word for "pencil". From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son"s technique, the father felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting.

Fame

Picasso grew up to become one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Picasso is now regarded as one of the artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century

Personal life and death

Picasso had affairs with a lot of women and was married twice and had four children, Paulo, Maya, Claude and Paloma by three women. He died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was interred at the Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline Roque prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline Roque killed herself by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.

Pablo Picasso (25.10.1881 - 08.04.1973) - Spanish painter.

Pablo Picasso was an outstanding artist, sculptor, poet and simply one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. Moreover, he was the co-founder of Cubism. Picasso was born on October 25th, 1881, in Malaga, Spain. As a child he was given his father’s surname Blasco, but when he was fourteen he chose to have his mother’s surname - Picasso. His father was an art teacher, while his mother was a housewife. Some biographers believe that Picasso started drawing before he even knew how to speak. When he was ten, they had to move to the north, because his father was offered a job in the School of Art in La Coruna.

In 1985, Picasso enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. He was only fourteen at that time. That’s why the teachers didn’t want to accept him. However, when they saw his incredible talent, they agreed. Two years later he moved to Madrid to study at the Royal School of Fine Arts. His career as an artist began in Barcelona. He met lots of other talented people there and began to attend the “Els Quatre Gats”. It was a place where famous artists, musicians, poets of that time spent their free time. His first exhibition took place in 1900. The same year he went to Paris, where he visited the impressionist exhibitions.

After this trip he felt the burst of extraordinary creativity and began drawing a series of pictures in blue tones. In 1904, he moved to Paris and settled in Bateau Lavoir. There he met many famous and talented people, including Fernande Olivier, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse. Gradually, the depressive motifs in his paintings were replaced by cheerful images of circus and theater. He began to favor gold and pink tones in his pictures. These two periods of his life are known as the Blue and Rose Periods. After experiments with colors the painter turned to the analysis of figures and shapes. This is when he develops cubism in his works.

Picasso’s personal life greatly influenced his works. After the unsuccessful marriage with Russian ballet dancer he began drawing a gloomy surreal world filled with monsters and shapeless creatures. In 1927 he met Marie-Therese Walter and his art dramatically changed. Her natural beauty inspired him to create a series of sculptures in the nude. With Marie-Therese they had a daughter Maya. Picasso had several other mistresses during his life, but his legal wife was Olga Khokhlova. One of his best works was dedicated to the civil war. It was a huge painting “Guernica” (1937), which was full of horror and sadness. One of the most influential artists of all times died 1973 at the age of 91.

Pablo Picasso Essay, Research Paper

Pablo 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 of art.

Born in M laga on October 25, 1881, Picasso was the son of Jos Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher, and Mar a 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, Picasso Museum, Barcelona), depicting a doctor, a nun, and a child at a sick woman’s bedside, won a gold medal.

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 caf s 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, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) 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.

Shortly after settling in Paris in a shabby building known as the Bateau-Lavoir (laundry barge, 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, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.). 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.

In the summer of 1906, during Picasso’s stay in G sol, Spain, his work entered a new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African art. His celebrated portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) reveals a masklike treatment of her face. The key work of this early period, however, is Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), 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.

Inspired by the volumetric treatment of form by the French postimpressionist artist Paul C zanne, 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, Art Institute of Chicago). 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 (Mus e Picasso, Paris). 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: Harlequin (Museum of Modern Art) is a synthetic cubist painting, whereas a drawing of his dealer, Vollard, now in the Metropolitan Museum, 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.

Picasso created cubist sculptures as well as paintings. The bronze bust Fernande Olivier (also called Head of a Woman, 1909, Museum of Modern Art) shows his consummate skill in handling three-dimensional form. He also made constructions such as Mandolin and Clarinet (1914, Mus e Picasso) 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, Museum of Modern Art), combining a silver sugar strainer with a painted bronze sculpture, anticipates his much later found object creations, such as Baboon and Young (1951, Museum of Modern Art), as well as pop art objects of the 1960s.

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 as Harlequin;1924, Mus e Picasso), 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, Museum of Modern Art), and works inspired by mythology, such as The Pipes of Pan (1923, Mus e Picasso). 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, Private Collection, Brussels) and Seated Bather (1930, Museum of Modern Art).

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 Th r se Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Ma a in 1935. Marie Th r se, frequently portrayed sleeping, also was the model for the famous Girl Before a Mirror (1932, Museum of Modern Art). 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.

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. It was on extended loan at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art from 1939 until 1981, when it was returned to Spain at Madrid’s Prado Museum. In 1992 the work was moved to the city’s new museum of 20th-century art, the Centro de Arte Reina Sof a. Dora Maar, Picasso’s next companion to be portrayed, took photographs of Guernica while the work was in progress.

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, D sseldorf, Germany) and The Charnel House (1945, Museum of Modern Art). He formed a new liaison during the 1940s with the painter Fran oise 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. He then spent much of his time in southern France.

Many of Picasso’s later pictures were based on works by great masters of the past Diego Vel zquez, Gustave Courbet, Eug ne Delacroix, and +douard 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, Philadelphia Museum of Art), an over-life-size bronze, emanates peace and hope, and She-Goat (1950, Museum of Modern Art), 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 (60-ft) sculpture Head of a Woman (unveiled in 1967), for Chicago’s Civic Center. 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. A 1971 exhibition at the Louvre, in Paris, honored him on his 90th birthday. 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 April 8, 1973.

Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He experimented in many different styles and changed the world of art during his time.

Early life

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881. His father was a drawing teacher. At 10 Pablo became his father’s pupil and at the age of 13 he held his first exhibition.

His family moved to Barcelona in 1895 where Pablo joined an art academy. In his early period the young artist painted life as he observed it around him – in cafes and on the streets. As a young man he took interest in masterpieces of famous artists like El Greco and de Goya.

At the turn of the century, Picasso went to Paris, which was, at that time, the centre of art and literature.

Blue and Rose period

In 1901 a close friend of Picasso shot himself. This had a great impact on Pablo. He was very sad and began painting his pictures in grey and blue tones instead of bright, vivid colours. This part of his career is called his Blue Period.

Later on, he changed his painting style and started using more earth colours – rose, pink or brown. He liked to paint pictures of circus life with dancers and acrobats. This rose period lasted until 1907.

When Picasso started working with his friend and fellow painter Georges Braque in Paris they started experimenting with a new style that was called cubism.

Picasso and Braque didn’t want to show nature as it really was. They thought that all objects in nature had geometric forms. In cubism, objects were cut into many flat shapes, which looked like a puzzle. All the sides of a person’s face, for example, were shown at once, maybe even with three eyes instead of two. Cubist painters wanted to show all parts of an object from one angle.

Picasso and Braque also experimented with other materials, like cloth and newspaper clippings, which they glued onto the canvas. This technique became later known as collage.

Classicism

In 1917 Picasso went to Rome to design costumes and scenery for a Russian ballet company. During this period he fell back to classical forms and painting techniques but never gave up experimenting with cubism.

Civil War

In 1936 Civil War broke out in Spain. During this period he painted his masterpiece Guernica. It shows the terrified people of the ancient Spanish town which was bombed during the Civil War. Picasso was shocked by this inhuman act and in his painting he shows people running in the streets and screaming with their mouths wide open. To display his sadness and anger he used only black and white as well as shades of grey.

During World War II Picasso lived in Paris which, at that time, was under Nazi occupation. The Nazis didn’t like his modern paintings and Picasso had to hide them in a secret vault in the Bank of France.

Later life

After the war Picasso moved to a big house in the southern part of France. There, he continued experimenting with paintings and sculptures.

He continued his work up to his death in 1973. Picasso was known as a very moody person and he also displayed this in his paintings. Sometimes he was thoughtful, even sad, and at other times he could be very humorous. Picasso was never satisfied with his own work and he never stopped experimenting. For his great imagination and skill he is called “El Maestro” of modern art.

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Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He experimented in many different styles and changed the world of art during his time.

Early life

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881. His father was a drawing teacher. At 10 Pablo became his father"s pupil and at the age of 13 he held his first exhibition.

His family moved to Barcelona in 1895 where Pablo joined an art academy. In his early period the young artist painted life as he observed it around him – in cafes and on the streets. As a young man he took interest in masterpieces of famous artists like El Greco and de Goya.

At the turn of the century, Picasso went to Paris, which was, at that time, the centre of art and literature.

Blue and Rose period

In 1901 a close friend of Picasso shot himself. This had a great impact on Pablo. He was very sad and began painting his pictures in grey and blue tones instead of bright, vivid colours. This part of his career is called his Blue Period (1901 – 1904).

Later on, he changed his painting style and started using more earth colours – rose, pink or brown. He liked to paint pictures of circus life with dancers and acrobats. This rose period lasted until 1907.

When Picasso started working with his friend and fellow painter Georges Braque in Paris they started experimenting with a new style that was called cubism.

Picasso and Braque didn"t want to show nature as it really was. They thought that all objects in nature had geometric forms. In cubism, objects were cut into many flat shapes, which looked like a puzzle. All the sides of a person"s face, for example, were shown at once, maybe even with three eyes instead of two. Cubist painters wanted to show all parts of an object from one angle.

Picasso and Braque also experimented with other materials, like cloth and newspaper clippings, which they glued onto the canvas. This technique became later known as collage.

Classicism

In 1917 Picasso went to Rome to design costumes and scenery for a Russian ballet company. During this period he fell back to classical forms and painting techniques but never gave up experimenting with cubism.

Civil War

In 1936 Civil War broke out in Spain. During this period he painted his masterpiece Guernica. It shows the terrified people of the ancient Spanish town which was bombed during the Civil War. Picasso was shocked by this inhuman act and in his painting he shows people running in the streets and screaming with their mouths wide open. To display his sadness and anger he used only black and white as well as shades of grey.

During World War II Picasso lived in Paris which, at that time, was under Nazi occupation. The Nazis didn"t like his modern paintings and Picasso had to hide them in a secret vault in the Bank of France.

Later life

After the war Picasso moved to a big house in the southern part of France. There, he continued experimenting with paintings and sculptures.

He continued his work up to his death in 1973. Picasso was known as a very moody person and he also displayed this in his paintings. Sometimes he was thoughtful, even sad, and at other times he could be very humorous. Picasso was never satisfied with his own work and he never stopped experimenting. For his great imagination and skill he is called "El Maestro" of modern art.