PABLO PICASSO

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PABLO PICASSO

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer. He is one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art. He is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Born on 25th October, 1881 in Malaga, Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. Picasso’s family was middle-class. His father was a painter, a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum.

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. Ruiz was a traditional, academic artist and instructor who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his class work.The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. and stayed there for four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son’s technique, an apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting.

In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his 7year old sister died of diphtheria. After her death, the family moved to Barcelona. Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso also applied to this school but it only took students elder to him. Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. However, Picasso's extraordinary performance convinced the professors and he was admitted to the school just at the age of thirteen.

Picasso went to Paris and found a friend named Max Jacob. He helped him learn language and literature and soon they shared an apartment. Picasso’s father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, the country's foremost art school. At the age of 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own for a new venture. In 1901, he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues in Madrid. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his work simply Picasso, while before he had signed Pablo Ruiz y Picasso. It showed that he no more needed his father's name to prove his identity. He had created his own.

El Quatre Gats, Barcelona

Pablo was a very good student at school. But he became frustrated with his school's singular focus on classical subjects and techniques. In 1899, Picasso moved back to Barcelona and fell in with a crowd of artists and intellectuals who made their headquarters at a café called El Quatre Gats ("The Four Cats"). Inspired by the anarchists and radicals he met there, Picasso made his decisive break from the classical methods in which he had been trained, and began what would become a lifelong process of experimentation and innovation.

Art critics and historians have divided Picasso's career into distinct periods. The first of these, which lasted from 1901-1904, is called his Blue Period after the color that dominated nearly all of Picasso's paintings during these years.

• Lasted from 1901-1904• The color Blue dominated nearly all of Picasso’s paintings• Felt lonely and deeply depressed over the death of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas• So he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue and green• His most famous paintings from the Blue Period include "Blue Nude," "La Vie" and "The Old Guitarist," all three of which were completed in 1903.

THE BLUE PERIOD

Blue Nude

La Vie

The Old Guitarist

Like it’s seen in all these images, his paintings belonging to the Blue Period are depicting depression and agony.

THE ROSE PERIOD• Had overcome the depression that had debilitated him• Fell newly in love with a model named Fernande Olivier• The artistic manifestation of Picasso's improved spirits was the introduction of warmer colors—including beiges, pinks and reds—in what is known as his "Rose Period" • From 1904-06 • Most famous paintings from these years include: Family at Saltimbanques (1905) Gertrude Stein (1905-06) Two Nudes (1906)

Two Nudes

Portrait of Gertrude Stein

Family at Saltimbanques (1905)

CUBISM

CUBISM:• In 1907, Pablo Picasso produced a painting unlike

anything he or anyone else had ever painted before, a work that would profoundly influence the direction of art in the 20th century: "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," a chilling depiction of five nude prostitutes, abstracted and distorted with sharp geometric features and stark blotches of blues, greens and grays. Today, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is considered the precursor and inspiration of Cubism, an artistic style pioneered by Picasso and his friend and fellow painter, Georges Braque.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

In Cubist paintings, objects are broken apart and reassembled in an abstracted form, highlighting their composite geometric shapes and depicting them from multiple, simultaneous viewpoints in order to create physics-defying, collage-like effects. Picasso's early Cubist paintings, known as his "Analytic Cubist" works, include "Three Women", "Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table" and "Girl with Mandolin". His later Cubist works are distinguished as "Synthetic Cubism" for moving even further away from artistic typicalities of the time, creating vast collages out of a great number of tiny, individual fragments. These paintings include "Still Life with Chair Caning" and "Three Musicians“.

Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table

CLASSICAL PERIOD

The outbreak of World War I ushered in the next great change in Picasso's art. He grew more somber and, once again, became preoccupied with the depiction of reality. His works between 1918 and 1927 are categorized as part of his "Classical Period," a brief return to Realism in a career otherwise dominated by experimentation. His most interesting and important works from this period include "Three Women at the Spring" (1921), "Two Women Running on the Beach/The Race" (1922) and "The Pipes of Pan" (1923).

Three Women at the Spring

The Pipes of Pan

SURREALISMFrom 1927 onward, Picasso became caught up in a new

philosophical and cultural movement known as Surrealism, the artistic manifestation of which was a product of his own Cubism. Picasso's most well-known Surrealist painting, deemed one of the greatest paintings of all time, was completed in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. After German bombers supporting Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces carried out a devastating aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, Picasso, outraged by the bombing and the inhumanity of war, painted "Guernica." Painted in black, white and grays, the work is a Surrealist testament to the horrors of war, and features a minotaur and several human-like figures in various states of anguish and terror. "Guernica" remains one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history.

Guernica

Picasso drew his "Self Portrait Facing Death," using pencil and crayon, a year before his death. The autobiographical subject, drawn with crude technique, appears as something between a human and an ape, with a green face and pink hair. Yet the expression in his eyes, capturing a lifetime of wisdom, fear and uncertainty, is the unmistakable work of a master at the height of his powers.

Self Portrait Facing Death

Self Portrait

Three Musicians

Three Women

Girl with the Mandolin

Pablo Picasso continued to create art and maintain an ambitious schedule in his later years, superstitiously believing that work would keep him alive. He died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 91, in Mougins, France. His legacy, however, has long endured. Inarguably one of the most celebrated and influential painters of the 20th century, Picasso continues to garner reverence for his technical mastery, visionary creativity and profound empathy, and, together, these qualities have distinguished him as a revolutionary artist. Picasso also remains renowned for endlessly reinventing himself, switching between styles so radically different that his life's work seems to be the product of five or six great artists rather than just one. EVERGREEN!

My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.-Pablo Picasso.

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