pablo picasso easy biography

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism.

(1881-1973)

Who Was Pablo Picasso?

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881. Picasso's mother was Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father was Don José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art teacher.

His gargantuan full name, which honors a variety of relatives and saints, is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.

A serious and prematurely world-weary child, the young Picasso possessed a pair of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him destined for greatness.

"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope,'" he later recalled. "Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

Though he was a relatively poor student, Picasso displayed a prodigious talent for drawing at a very young age. According to legend, his first words were "piz, piz," his childish attempt at saying "lápiz," the Spanish word for pencil.

Picasso's father began teaching him to draw and paint when he was a child, and by the time he was 13 years old, his skill level had surpassed his father's. Soon, Picasso lost all desire to do any schoolwork, choosing to spend the school days doodling in his notebook instead.

"For being a bad student, I was banished to the 'calaboose,' a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on," he later remembered. "I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly ... I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping."

In 1895, when Picasso was 14 years old, his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he quickly applied to the city's prestigious School of Fine Arts. Although the school typically only accepted students several years his senior, Picasso's entrance exam was so extraordinary that he was granted an exception and admitted.

Nevertheless, Picasso chafed at the School of Fine Arts' strict rules and formalities, and began skipping class so that he could roam the streets of Barcelona, sketching the city scenes he observed.

In 1897, a 16-year-old Picasso moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando. However, he again became frustrated with his school's singular focus on classical subjects and techniques.

During this time, he wrote to a friend: "They just go on and on about the same old stuff: Velázquez for painting, Michelangelo for sculpture." Once again, Picasso began skipping class to wander the city and paint what he observed: gypsies, beggars and prostitutes, among other things.

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.

Picasso 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.

Of his penchant for style diversity, Picasso insisted that his varied work was not indicative of radical shifts throughout his career, but, rather, of his dedication to objectively evaluating for each piece the form and technique best suited to achieve his desired effect.

"Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should," he explained. "Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it."

Blue Period

Art critics and historians typically break Picasso's adult career into distinct periods, the first of which lasted from 1901 to 1904 and is called his "Blue Period," after the color that dominated nearly all of his paintings over these years.

At the turn of the 20th century, Picasso moved to Paris, France — the center of European art — to open his own studio. Lonely and deeply depressed over the death of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas, he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue and green.

'Blue Nude’ and ‘The Old Guitarist’

Picasso's most famous paintings from the Blue Period include "Blue Nude," "La Vie" and "The Old Guitarist," all three of which were completed in 1903.

In contemplation of Picasso and his Blue Period, writer and critic Charles Morice once asked, "Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?"

Rose Period: 'Gertrude Stein' and 'Two Nudes'

By 1905, Picasso had largely overcome the depression that had previously debilitated him, and 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" (1904-06).

Not only was he madly in love with a beautiful model, Fernande Olivier, he was newly prosperous thanks to the generous patronage of art dealer Ambroise Vollard. His most famous paintings from these years include "Family at Saltimbanques" (1905), "Gertrude Stein" (1905-06) and "Two Nudes" (1906).

Cubism was an artistic style pioneered by Picasso and his friend and fellow painter Georges Braque.

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. At once destructive and creative, Cubism shocked, appalled and fascinated the art world.

‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’

In 1907, Picasso produced a painting that today is considered the precursor and inspiration of Cubism: "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, the work was unlike anything he or anyone else had ever painted before and would profoundly influence the direction of art in the 20th century.

"It made me feel as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire," Braque said, explaining that he was shocked when he first viewed Picasso's "Les Demoiselles." Braque quickly became intrigued with Cubism, seeing the new style as a revolutionary movement.

French writer and critic Max Jacob, a good friend of both Picasso and painter Juan Gris, called Cubism "the 'Harbinger Comet' of the new century," stating, "Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end."

Picasso's early Cubist paintings, known as his "Analytic Cubist" works, include "Three Women" (1907), "Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table" (1909) and "Girl with Mandolin" (1910).

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" (1912), "Card Player" (1913-14) and "Three Musicians" (1921).

Classical Period: ‘Three Women at the Spring’

Picasso’s 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. The outbreak of World War I ushered in the next great change in Picasso's art.

He grew more somber and, once again, preoccupied with the depiction of reality. 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).

From 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: "Guernica." After Nazi 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 this work of art.

In black, white and grays, the painting 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.

Later Works: 'Self Portrait Facing Death'

In contrast to the dazzling complexity of Synthetic Cubism, Picasso's later paintings display simple, childlike imagery and crude technique. Touching on the artistic validity of these later works, Picasso once remarked upon passing a group of school kids in his old age, "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."

In the aftermath of World War II , Picasso became more overtly political, joining the Communist Party. He was twice honored with the International Lenin Peace Prize, first in 1950 and again in 1961.

By this point in his life, he was also an international celebrity, the world's most famous living artist. While paparazzi chronicled his every move, however, few paid attention to his art during this time. Picasso continued to create art and maintain an ambitious schedule in his later years, superstitiously believing that work would keep him alive.

Picasso created the epitome of his later work, "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.

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A lifelong womanizer, Picasso had countless relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, muses and prostitutes, marrying only twice.

He wed a ballerina named Olga Khokhlova in 1918, and they remained together for nine years, parting ways in 1927. They had a son together, Paulo. In 1961, at the age of 79, he married his second wife, Jacqueline Roque.

While married to Khokhlova, he began a long-term relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter. They had a daughter, Maya, together. Walter committed suicide after Picasso died.

Between marriages, in 1935, Picasso met Dora Maar, a fellow artist, on the set of Jean Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (released in 1936). The two soon embarked upon a partnership that was both romantic and professional.

Their relationship lasted more than a decade, during and after which time Maar struggled with depression; they parted ways in 1946, three years after Picasso began having an affair with a woman named Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two children, son Claude and daughter Paloma. They went separate ways in 1953. (Gilot would later marry scientist Jonas Salk , the inventor of the polio vaccine.)

Picasso fathered four children: Paulo (Paul), Maya, Claude and Paloma Picasso. His daughter Paloma - featured in several of her father's paintings - would become a famous designer, crafting jewelry and other items for Tiffany & Co.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 91, in Mougins, France. He died of heart failure, reportedly while he and his wife Jacqueline were entertaining friends for dinner.

Considered radical in his work, Picasso continues to garner reverence for his technical mastery, visionary creativity and profound empathy. Together, these qualities have distinguished the "disquieting" Spaniard with the "piercing" eyes as a revolutionary artist.

For nearly 80 of his 91 years, Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that he superstitiously believed would keep him alive, contributing significantly to — and paralleling the entire development of — modern art in the 20th century.

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Pablo Picasso
• Birth Year: 1881
• Birth date: October 25, 1881
• Birth City: Málaga
• Birth Country: Spain
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism.
• World War II
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• La Llotja (Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi)
• Royal Academy of San Fernando
• School of Fine Arts (Barcelona, Spain)
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that he superstitiously believed would keep him alive.
• Pablo Picasso's full name was: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.
• Death Year: 1973
• Death date: April 8, 1973
• Death City: Mougins
• Death Country: France

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Pablo Picasso Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/pablo-picasso
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: August 28, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.
• If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
• 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.
• Everything you can imagine is real.
• Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
• For being a bad student, I was banished to the 'calaboose,' a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly ... I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping.
• When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
• Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?
• If you don't know what color to take, take black.
• Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
• God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.
• It's not what the artist does that counts. But what he is.
• Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird?
• Of course, you can paint pictures by matching up different parts of them so that they go nicely together, but they'll lack any kind of drama.
• It has often been said that an artist should work for himself, for the love of art, and scorn success. It's a false idea. An artist needs success. Not only in order to live, but primarily so that he can realize his work.
• Nothing can be done without solitude.
• In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
• I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.
• People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

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Pablo Picasso Biography

As a significant influence on 20th-century art, Pablo Picasso was an innovative artist who experimented and innovated during his 92-plus years on earth. He was not only a master painter but also a sculptor, printmaker, ceramics artist, etching artist and writer. His work matured from the naturalism of his childhood through Cubism, Surrealism and beyond, shaping the direction of modern and contemporary art through the decades. Picasso lived through two World Wars, sired four children, appeared in films and wrote poetry. He died in 1973.

Early Years: 1881-1900

Although he lived the majority of his adult years in France, Picasso was a Spaniard by birth. Hailing from the town of Málaga in Andalusia, Spain, he was the first-born of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. He was raised as a Catholic, but in his later life would declare himself an atheist.

Pablo Picasso's father was an artist in his own right, earning a living painting birds and other game animals. He also taught art classes and curated the local museum. Don José Ruiz y Blasco began schooling his son in drawing and oil painting when the boy was seven, and he found the young Pablo to be an apt pupil.

Picasso attended the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where his father taught, at 13 years of age. In 1897, Picasso began his studies at Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, which was Spain's top art academy at the time. Picasso attended only briefly, preferring to roam the art exhibits at the Prado, studying paintings of Rembrandt , Johannes Vermeer , El Greco , Francisco Goya , and Diego Veláquez .

During this nascent period of Picasso's life, he painted portraits, such as his sister Lola's First Communion . As the 19th century drew to a close, elements of Symbolism and his own interpretation of Modernism began to be apparent in his stylized landscapes.

Middle Years: 1900-1940

In 1900, Picasso first went to Paris, the center of the European art scene. He shared lodgings with Max Jacob, a poet and journalist who took the artist under his wing. The two lived in abject poverty, sometimes reduced to burning the artist's paintings to stay warm.

Before long, Picasso relocated to Madrid and lived there for the first part of 1901. He partnered with his friend Francisco Asis Soler on a literary magazine called "Young Art," illustrating articles and creating cartoons sympathetic to the poor. By the time the first issue came out, the developing artist had begun to sign his artworks "Picasso," rather than his customary "Pablo Ruiz y Picasso."

Blue Period

The Picasso art period known as the Blue Period extended from 1901 to 1904. During this time, the artist painted primarily in shades of blue, with occasional touches of accent color. For example, the famous 1903 artwork, The Old Guitarist , features a guitar in warmer brown tones amid the blue hues. Picasso's Blue Period works are often perceived as somber due to their subdued tones.

Historians attribute Picasso's Blue Period largely to the artist's apparent depression following a friend's suicide. Some of the recurring subjects in the Blue Period are blindness, poverty and the female nude.

Rose Period

The Rose Period lasted from 1904 through 1906. Shades of pink and rose imbued Picasso's art with a warmer, less melancholy air than his Blue Period paintings. Harlequins, clowns and circus folk are among the recurring subjects in these artworks. He painted one of his best-selling works during the Rose Period, Boy with a Pipe . Elements of primitivism in the Rose Period paintings reflect experimentation with the Picasso art style.

African Influence

During his African art and Primitivism period from 1907 to 1909, Picasso created one of his best-known and most controversial artworks, Les Damoiselles d'Avignon . Inspired by the angular African art he viewed in an exhibit at the Palais de Trocadero and by an African mask owned by Henri Matisse , Picasso's art reflected these influences during this period. Ironically, Matisse was among the most vocal denouncers of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" when Picasso first showed it to his inner circle.

Analytic Cubism

From 1907 to 1912, the artist worked with fellow painter Georges Braque in creating the beginnings of the Cubist movement in art. Their paintings utilize a palette of earth tones. The works depict deconstructed objects with complex geometric forms.

His romantic partner of seven years, Fernande Olivier, figured in many of the artist's Cubist works, including Head of a Woman, Fernande (1909). Historians believe she also appeared in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Their relationship was tempestuous, and they separated for good in 1912.

Synthetic Cubism

This era of Picasso's life extended from 1912 to 1919. Picasso's works continued in the Cubist vein, but the artist introduced a new art form, collage, into some of his creations. He also incorporated the human form into many Cubist paintings, such as Girl with a Mandolin (1910) and Ma Jolie (1911-12). Although a number of artists he knew left Paris to fight in World War I, Picasso spent the war years in his studio.

He had already fallen in love with another woman by the time his relationship with Fernande Olivier ended. He and Eva Gouel, the subject of his 1911 painting, "Woman with a Guitar," were together until her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1915. Picasso then moved into a brief relationship with Gaby Depeyre Lespinesse that lasted only a year. In 1916-17, he briefly dated a 20-year-old actress, Paquerette, and Irene Lagut.

Soon thereafter, he met his first wife, Olga Khoklova, a ballet dancer from Russia, whom he married in 1918. They had a son together three years later. Although the artist and the ballerina became estranged soon thereafter, Picasso refused to grant Khoklova a divorce, since that meant he would have to give her half of his wealth. They remained married in name only until she died in 1955.

Neoclassicism and Surrealism

The Picasso art period extending from 1919 to 1929 featured a significant shift in style. In the wake of his first visit to Italy and the conclusion of World War I, the artist's paintings, such as the watercolor Peasants Sleeping (1919) reflected a restoration of order in art, and his neoclassical artworks offer a stark contrast to his Cubist paintings. However, as the French Surrealist Movement gained traction in the mid-1920s, Picasso began to reprise his penchant for Primitivism in such Surrealist-influenced paintings as Three Dancers (1925).

In 1927, the 46-year-old artist met Marie-Therese Walter, a 17-year-old girl from Spain. The two formed a relationship and Marie-Therese gave birth to Picasso's daughter Maya. They remained a couple until 1936, and she inspired the artist's "Vollard Suite," which consists of 100 neoclassical etchings completed in 1937. Picasso took up with artist and photographer Dora Maar in the late '30s.

During the 1930s, Picasso's works such as his well-known Guernica , a unique depiction of the Spanish Civil War, reflected the violence of war time. The menacing minotaur became a central symbol of his art, replacing the harlequin of his earlier years.

Later Years: 1940-1973

During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris under German occupation, enduring Gestapo harassment while he continued to create art. Some of the time, he wrote poetry, completing more than 300 works between 1939 and 1959. He also completed two plays, "Desire Caught by the Tail," and "The Four Little Girls."

After Paris was liberated in 1944, Picasso began a new relationship with the much younger art student Francoise Gilot. Together, they produced a son, Claude, in 1947, and a daughter, Paloma, in 1949. Their relationship was doomed like so many of Picasso's previous ones, however, due to his continual infidelities and abuse.

He focused on sculpture during this era, participating in an international exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1949. He subsequently created a commissioned sculpture known as the Chicago Picasso , which he donated to the U. S. city.

In 1961, at the age of 79, the artist married his second and last wife, 27-year-old Jacqueline Roque. She proved to be one of his career's greatest inspirations. Picasso produced more than 70 portraits of her during the final 17 years he was alive.

As his life neared its end, the artist experienced a flurry of creativity. The resulting artworks were a mixture of his previous styles and included colorful paintings and copper etchings. Art experts later recognized the beginnings of Neo-Expressionism in Picasso's final works.

Picasso's Influence on Art

As one of the greatest influences on the course of 20th-century art, Pablo Picasso often mixed various styles to create wholly new interpretations of what he saw. He was a driving force in the development of Cubism, and he elevated collage to the level of fine art.

With the courage and self-confidence unhindered by convention or fear of ostracism, Picasso followed his vision as it led him to fresh innovations in his craft. Similarly, his continual quest for passion in his many romantic liaisons throughout his life inspired him to create innumerable paintings, sculptures and etchings. Picasso is not just a man and his work. Picasso is always a legend, indeed almost a myth. In the public view he has long since been the personification of genius in modern art. Picasso is an idol, one of those rare creatures who act as crucibles in which the diverse and often chaotic phenomena of culture are focussed, who seem to body forth the artistic life of their age in one person.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

The old guitarist, girl before a mirror, three musicians, the weeping woman, the women of algiers, dora maar au chat, girl with mandolin, portrait of gertrude stein, family of saltimbanques, portrait of ambroise vollard, massacre in korea.

Pablo Picasso

Spanish Draftsman, Painter, Printmaker, and Sculptor

Summary of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was the most dominant and influential artist of the first half of the 20 th century. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism , alongside Georges Braque , he also invented collage and made major contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism . He saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics. Finally, he was a famously charismatic personality; his many relationships with women not only filtered into his art but also may have directed its course, and his behavior has come to embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.

Accomplishments

• It was a confluence of influences - from Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau , to archaic and tribal art - that encouraged Picasso to lend his figures more structure and ultimately set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he deconstructed the conventions of perspective that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. These innovations would have far-reaching consequences for practically all of modern art, revolutionizing attitudes to the depiction of form in space.
• Picasso's immersion in Cubism also eventually led him to the invention of collage, in which he abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world, and began to conceive of it merely as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects. This too would prove hugely influential for decades to come.
• Picasso had an eclectic attitude to style, and although, at any one time, his work was usually characterized by a single dominant approach, he often moved interchangeably between different styles - sometimes even in the same artwork.
• His encounter with Surrealism, although never transforming his work entirely, encouraged not only the soft forms and tender eroticism of portraits of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, but also the starkly angular imagery of Guernica (1937), the century's most famous anti-war painting.
• Picasso was always eager to place himself in history, and some of his greatest works, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), refer to a wealth of past precedents - even while overturning them. As he matured he became only more conscious of assuring his legacy, and his late work is characterized by a frank dialogue with Old Masters such as Ingres , Velazquez , Goya , and Rembrandt .

The Life of Pablo Picasso

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them." Said Picasso, and whether he was partnering with Braque on Cubism or spending time with the poets he admired, or the muses he loved and craved, he was finding new ways to see, and represent what he saw. His life is a virtual progression of modernism.

Important Art by Pablo Picasso

La Soupe is characteristic of the somber melancholy of Picasso's Blue Period, and it was produced at the same time as a series of other pictures devoted to themes of destitution, old age, and blindness. The picture conveys something of Picasso's concern with the miserable conditions he witnessed while coming of age in Spain, and it is no doubt influenced by the religious painting he grew up with, and perhaps specifically by El Greco. But the picture is also typical of the wider Symbolist movement of the period. In later years Picasso dismissed his Blue Period works as "nothing but sentiment"; critics have often agreed with him, even though many of these pictures are iconic, and of course, now unbelievably expensive.

Oil on canvas - The Art Institute of Chicago

Portrait of Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an author, close friend, and even supporter of Picasso, and was integral to his growth as an artist. This portrait, in which Stein is wearing her favorite brown velvet coat, was made just a year before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , and marks an important stage in his evolving style. In contrast to the flat appearance of the figures and objects in some of the Blue and Rose period works, the forms in this portrait seem almost sculpted, and indeed they were influenced by the artist's discovery of archaic Iberian sculpture. One can almost sense Picasso's increased interest in depicting a human face as a series of flat planes. Stein claimed that she sat for the artist some ninety times, and although that may be an exaggeration, Picasso certainly wrestled long and hard with painting her head. After approaching it in various ways, abandoning each attempt, one day he painted it out altogether, declaring "I can't see you any longer when I look," and soon abandoned the picture. It was only some time later, and without the model in front of him, that he completed the head.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

This painting was shocking even to Picasso's closest artist friends both for its content and its execution. The subject matter of nude women was not in itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was novel. Picasso's studies of Iberian and tribal art is most evident in the faces of three of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive. Picasso also went further with his spatial experiments by abandoning the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards, something Picasso borrowed in part from Paul Cézanne's brushwork. For instance, the leg of the woman on the left is painted as if seen from several points of view simultaneously; it is difficult to distinguish the leg from the negative space around it making it appear as if the two are both in the foreground. The painting was widely thought to be immoral when it was finally exhibited in public in 1916. Braque is one of the few artists who studied it intently in 1907, leading directly to his Cubist collaborations with Picasso. Because Les Demoiselles predicted some of the characteristics of Cubism, the work is considered proto or pre Cubism.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Still Life with Chair Caning

Still Life with Chair Caning is celebrated for being modern art's first collage. Picasso had affixed preexisting objects to his canvases before, but this picture marks the first time he did so with such playful and emphatic intent. The chair caning in the picture in fact comes from a piece of printed oilcloth - and not, as the title suggests, an actual piece of chair caning. But the rope around the canvas is very real, and serves to evoke the carved border of a café table. Furthermore, the viewer can imagine that the canvas is a glass table, and the chair caning is the actual seat of the chair that can be seen through the table. Hence the picture not only dramatically contrasts visual space as is typical of Picasso's experiments, it also confuses our sense of what it is that we are looking at.

Oil on canvas - The National Gallery, London

Maquette for Guitar

Picasso's experiments with collaged elements such as those in Still Life with Chair Caning encouraged him to reconsider traditional sculpture as well. Rather than a collage, however, Maquette for Guitar is an assemblage or three-dimensional collage. Picasso took pieces of cardboard, paper, string, and wire that he then folded, threaded, and glued together, making it the first sculpture assembled from disparate parts. The work is also innovative because it is not a solid material surrounded by a void, but instead fluidly integrates mass and its surrounding void. Picasso has translated the Cubist interest in multiple perspectives and geometric form into a three-dimensional medium, using non-traditional art materials that continue to challenge the distinction between high art and popular culture as he did in Ma Jolie (1911-12).

Paperboard, paper, thread, string, twine, and coated wire - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle

Picasso's Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle is typical of his Synthetic Cubism, in which he uses various means - painted dots, silhouettes, grains of sand - to allude to the depicted objects. This combination of painting and mixed media is an example of the way Picasso "synthesized" color and texture - synthesizing new wholes after mentally dissecting the objects at hand. During his Analytic Cubist phase Picasso had suppressed color, so as to concentrate more on the forms and volumes of the objects, and this rationale also no doubt guided his preference for still life throughout this phase. The life of the café certainly summed up modern Parisian life for the artists - it was where he spent a good deal of time talking with other artists - but the simple array of objects also ensured that questions of symbolism and allusion might be kept under control.

In this work, Picasso challenges the distinction between high art and popular culture, pushing his experiments in new directions. Building on the geometric forms of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Picasso moves further towards abstraction by reducing color and by increasing the illusion of low-relief sculpture. Most significantly, however, Picasso included painted words on the canvas. The words, "ma jolie" on the surface not only flatten the space further, but they also liken the painting to a poster because they are painted in a font reminiscent of one used in advertising. This is the first time that an artist so blatantly uses elements of popular culture in a work of high art. Further linking the work to pop culture and to the everyday, "Ma Jolie" was also the name of a popular tune at the time as well as Picasso's nickname for his girlfriend.

The Three Musicians

Picasso painted two version of this picture. The slightly smaller version hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but both are unusually large for Picasso's Cubist period, and he may have chosen to work on this grand scale because they mark the conclusion of his Synthetic Cubism, which had occupied him for nearly a decade. He painted it in the same summer as the very different, classical painting Three Women at the Spring . Some have interpreted the pictures as nostalgic remembrances of the artist's early days: Picasso sits in the center - as ever the Harlequin - and his old friends Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918, and Max Jacob, from whom he had become estranged, sit on either side. However, another argument links the pictures to Picasso's work for the Ballets Russes, and identifies the characters with more recent friends. Either way, the costumes of the figures certainly derive from traditions in Italian popular theatre.

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Three Women at the Spring

Picasso made careful studies in preparation for this, his most ambitious treatment of what is an old classical subject. It makes reference to earlier pictures by Poussin and Ingres - titans of classical painting - but it also draws inspiration from Greek sculpture, and indeed the massive gravity of the figures is very sculptural. Critics have speculated that the subject appealed to him because of the recent birth of his first son, Paulo; the somber attitude of the figures may be explained by the contemporary preoccupation in France with mourning the dead of the First World War.

Large Nude in a Red Armchair

When Picasso's work came under the influence of the Surrealists in the late 1920s, his forms often took on melting, organic contours. This work was completed in May 1929, around the same time the Surrealists were preoccupied with the way in which ugly and disgusting imagery might provide a route into the unconscious. It was clearly intended to shock, and it may have been influenced by Salvador Dalí - and Joan Miro. It is thought that the picture represents the former dancer Olga Koklova, whose relationship with Picasso was failing around this time.

Oil on canvas - Musée National Picasso, Paris

This painting was Picasso's response to the bombing of the Basque town named Guernica on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Painted in one month - from May to June 1937 - it became the centerpiece of the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair later that year. While it was a sensation at the fair, it was consequently banned from exhibition in Spain until military dictator Francisco Franco fell from power in 1975. Much time has been spent trying to decode the symbolism of the picture, and some believe that the dying horse in the center of the painting alludes to the people of Spain. The minotaur may allude to bull fighting, a favorite national past-time in Spain, though it also had complex personal significance for the artist. Although Guernica is undoubtedly modern art's most famous response to war, critics have been divided on its success as a painting.

Oil on canvas - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

Biography of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born into a creative family. His father was a painter, and he quickly showed signs of following the same path: his mother claimed that his first word was "piz," a shortened version of lapiz , or pencil, and his father was his first teacher. Picasso began formally studying art at the age of 11. Several paintings from his teenage years still exist, such as First Communion (1895), which is typical in its conventional, if accomplished, academic style. His father groomed the young prodigy to be a great artist by getting Picasso the best education the family could afford and visiting Madrid to see works by Spanish Old Masters. And when the family moved to Barcelona so his father could take up a new post, Picasso continued his art education.

Early Training

It was in Barcelona that Picasso first matured as a painter. He frequented the Els Quatre Gats, a café popular with bohemians, anarchists, and modernists. And he came to be familiar with Art Nouveau and Symbolism , and artists such as Edvard Munch and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec . It was here that he met Jaime Sabartes, who would go on to be his fiercely loyal secretary in later years. This was his introduction to a cultural avant-garde , in which young artists were encouraged to express themselves.

During the years from 1900 to 1904, Picasso traveled frequently, spending time in Madrid and Paris, in addition to spells in Barcelona. Although he began making sculpture during this time, critics characterize this time as his Blue Period, after the blue/grey palette that dominated his paintings. The mood of the work was also insistently melancholic. One might see the beginnings of this in the artist's sadness over the suicide of Carlos Casegemas, a friend he had met in Barcelona, though the subjects of much of the Blue Period work were drawn from the beggars and prostitutes he encountered in city streets. The Old Guitarist (1903) is a typical example of both the subject matter and the style of this phase.

In 1904, Picasso's palette began to brighten, and for a year or more he painted in a style that has been characterized as his Rose Period. He focused on performers and circus figures, switching his palette to various shades of more uplifting reds and pinks. And around 1906, soon after he had met artist Georges Braque , his palette darkened, his forms became heavier and more solid in aspect, and he began to find his way towards Cubism .

Mature Period

In the past critics dated the beginnings of Cubism to his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Although that work is now seen as transitional (lacking the radical distortions of his later experiments), it was clearly crucial in his development since it was heavily influenced by African sculpture and ancient Iberian art. It is said to have inspired Braque to paint his own first series of Cubist paintings, and in subsequent years the two would mount one of the most remarkable collaborations in modern painting, sometimes eagerly learning from each other, at other times trying to outdo one another in their fast-paced and competitive race to innovate. They visited each other daily during their formulation of this radical technique, and Picasso described himself and Braque as "two mountaineers, roped together." In their shared vision, multiple perspectives on an object are depicted simultaneously by being fragmented and rearranged in splintered configurations. Form and space became the most crucial elements, and so both artists restricted their palettes to earth tones, in stark contrast with the bright colors used by the Fauves that had preceded them. Picasso would always have an artist or a group he collaborated with, but as Braque biographer Alex Danchev wrote: Picasso's "Braque period" was "the most concentrated and fruitful of his whole career."

Picasso rejected the label "Cubism," especially when critics began to differentiate between the two key approaches he was said to pursue - Analytic and Synthetic . He saw his body of work as a continuum. But it is beyond doubt that there was a change in his work around 1912. He became less concerned with representing the placement of objects in space than in using shapes and motifs as signs to playfully allude to their presence. He developed the technique of collage , and from Braque he learned the related method of papiers colles , which used cutout pieces of paper in addition to fragments of existing materials. This phase has since come to be known as the "Synthetic" phase of Cubism, due to its reliance on various allusions to an object in order to create the description of it. This approach opened up the possibilities of more decorative and playful compositions, and its versatility encouraged Picasso to continue to utilize it well in the 1920s.

But the artist's dawning interest in ballet also sent his work in new directions around 1916. This was in part prompted by meeting the poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau . Through him he met Sergei Diaghilev , and went on to produce numerous set designs for the Ballets Russes.

For some years Picasso had occasionally toyed with classical imagery, and he began to give this free rein in the early 1920s. His figures became heavier and more massive, and he often imagined them against backgrounds of a Mediterranean Golden Age. They have long been associated with the wider conservative trends of Europe's so-called rappel a l'ordre , (return to order), a period of art now known as Interwar Classicism .

His encounter with Surrealism in the mid 1920s again prompted a change of direction. His work became more expressive, and often violent or erotic. This phase in his work can also be correlated with the period in his personal life when his marriage to dancer Olga Khokhlova began to break down and he began a new relationship with Marie-Therese Walter. Indeed, critics have often noted how changes in style in Picasso's work often go hand in hand with changes in his romantic relationships; his partnership with Khokhlova spanned the years of his interest in dance and, later, his time with Jacqueline Roque is associated with his late phase in which he became preoccupied with his legacy alongside the Old Masters. Picasso frequently painted the women he was in love with, and, as a result, his tumultuous personal life is well represented on canvas. He was known to have kept many mistresses, most famously Eva Gouel, Dora Maar , and Françoise Gilot. He married twice, and had four children, Claude, Paloma, Maia, and Paulo.

In the late 1920s he began a collaboration with the sculptor Julio González . This was his most significant creative partnership since he had worked alongside Braque, and it culminated in welded metal sculptures, which were subsequently highly influential.

As the 1930s wore on, political concerns began to cloud Picasso's view, and these would continue to preoccupy him for some time. His disgust at the bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War prompted him to create the painting Guernica , in 1937. During World War II he stayed in Paris, and the German authorities left him sufficiently unmolested to allow him to continue his work. However, the war did have a huge impact on Picasso, with his Paris painting collection confiscated by Nazis and some of his closest Jewish friends killed. Picasso made works commemorating them - sculptures employing hard, cold materials such as metal, and a particularly violent follow up to Guernica , entitled The Charnel House (1945). Following the war he was also closely involved with the Communist Party, and several major pictures from this period, such as War in Korea (1951), make that new allegiance clear.

Late Years and Death

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Picasso worked on his own versions of canonical masterpieces by artists such as Nicolas Poussin , Diego Velázquez , and El Greco . In the later years of his life, Picasso sought solace from his celebrity, marrying Jacqueline Rogue in 1961. His later paintings were heavily portrait-based and their palettes nearly garish in hue. Critics have generally considered them inferior to his earlier work, though in recent years they have been more enthusiastically received. He also created many ceramic and bronze sculptures during this later period. He died of a heart attack in the South of France in 1973.

The Legacy of Pablo Picasso

Picasso's influence was profound and far-reaching, and remarkably, many periods of his life were influential in their own right. His early Symbolist pieces remain iconic, while innovations in pioneering Cubism established a set of pictorial problems, devices, and approaches, which remained important well into the 1950s. Even after the war, even though the energy in avant-garde art shifted to New York, Picasso remained a titanic figure, and one who could never be ignored. Indeed, even though the Abstract Expressionists could be said to have superseded aspects of Cubism (even while being strongly influenced by him), The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been called "the house that Pablo built," because it has so widely exhibited the artist's work. MoMA's opening exhibition in 1930 included fifteen paintings by Picasso. He was also a part of Alfred Barr's highly influential survey shows Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936-37). Although his influence undoubtedly waned in the 1960s, he had by that time become a pop icon, and the public's fascination with his life story continue to fuel interest in his work.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Pablo Picasso

• Pablo Picasso: Lives and Loves The Art Story Blog: The many women and muses of Picasso
• Picasso: Works Entering the Public Domain in 2019 Copyrights expire in the United States for a number of Picasso artworks
• Defining Modern Art Take a look at the big picture of modern art, and Picasso's role in it
• Timeline of Most Important Modern Art Picasso's 3 important works are a part of the overall history of Modern Art
• A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906 By John Richardson
• A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 By John Richardson
• A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 By John Richardson
• Picasso (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) By Gertrude Stein
• Life with Picasso Our Pick By Françoise Gilot
• Picasso & Lump: A Dachshund's Odyssey By David Douglas Duncan, Paloma Picasso Thevenet
• Picasso: 200 Masterpieces from 1898 to 1972 Our Pick By Pablo Picasso, Bernard Picasso, Bernice Rose
• Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973: Genius of the Century By Walther F. Ingo
• Picasso and the war years, 1937-1945 (1999) Guggenheim Exhibition Catalogue / By Steven A. Nash, Robert Rosenblum, Brigitte Baer
• Picasso and American Art By Michael FitzGerald, Julia May Boddewyn
• Picasso Line Drawings and Prints By Pablo Picasso
• Picasso Administration Official Website
• Picasso Museum Our Pick Museum in Madrid, Spain
• Page about the painting Guernica (1937)
• Page about the painting The Tragedy (1903) Analysis of painting beneath this painting. By National Gallery of Art
• The Artist Pablo Picasso By Robert Hughes / Time Magazine / June 8, 1998
• Artists on Picasso: Then and Now July 19, 2007
• Simon Schama's Power of Art series, on Picasso's Guernica
• Picasso: a documentary by Luciano Emmer
• Le Mystere Picasso: a documentary by Henri-Georges Clouzot
• Visit to Picasso: A Documentary by Paul Haesaert Our Pick
• Surviving Picasso (1996) Story of Picasso's lover Françoise Gilot
• Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies 2008 Documentary about the beginnings of Cubism
• David Bowie Music Video

Similar Art

Vision After the Sermon (Jacob's Fight with the Angel) (1888)

Table, Napkin, and Fruit (A Corner of the Table) (1895-1900)

The Woman with a Hat (1905)

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Biography Online

Biography Pablo Picasso

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

– Pablo Picasso

Short bio of Pablo Picasso

“When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

—- Pablo Picasso

His early artistic career went through various states. One of the first stages was known as the ‘Blue Period.’ In his late-teens his paintings were dominated by different shades of dark blue; they were also often melancholic. This included a famous self-portrait where Picasso looked much older than his 20 years.

Pablo_Picasso 1905 – ‘At the Lapin Agile;

During 1904-06, Picasso entered a phase known as ‘The Rose Period’ Losing the glumness of his previous ‘Blue Period’, Picasso painted circus clowns, harlequins and people from the circus. The more cheerful and optimistic tone helped to attract an increasing number of patrons and people interested in his work. In particular, the American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, and the art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.  Kahnweiler was influential in helping to put Picasso on a secure financial footing. Picasso later remarked; “What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had a business sense?”

In 1907, Picasso continued his artistic experiments and took inspiration from African art. This led to an early form of cubism and also one of his most controversial paintings – ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ – it is a picture depicting five prostitutes in a brothel. It is an eye-catching and an original exploration of modernism in art, but when displayed in his studio the reaction from art critics was strongly negative.

‘Nature morte au compotier’ – 1914-15, ‘crystal cubism.’

In the years before the First World War, Picasso – along with artists such as Georges Braque – continued to develop a new form of painting known as ‘cubism.’ Cubism involved capturing the essence of the subject on the canvas but exaggerating certain features. The colours were invariably dull – greys, brown and neutrals.

In 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon with fellow artists. His French artist friends were called up to the army, but he was able to continue painting during the war. However, the German-born Kahnweiler was exiled from France and Picasso was left without a dealer.

In 1918, Picasso married ballerina Olga Khokhlova. Shortly after he began a fruitful relationship with the French art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg became good friends with Picasso and helped the couple settle in Paris, giving Picasso a new artistic social circle. Paris was considered an artistic hotspot of the ‘Roaring Twenties,’ attracting many innovative artists. Picasso and his wife Khokholva had a tempestuous relationship. Picasso’s bohemian nature clashed with the social graces of Khokhlova. They remained married until 1955, but Picasso had several affairs and mistresses.

In the 1920s and 30s, Picasso concentrated on more classical works of art. He became interested in depicting the human form in the style of neo-classical. To some extent, he was influenced by artists such as Renoir and Ingres, although he always retained a unique and individual expression.

Picasso had an instinctive and natural compassion for those exposed to suffering, especially if it was as a result of injustice. His natural sympathy and desire for equality led him to join the French Communist party. During the Spanish Civil War, he supported the Republicans and nursed an intense dislike of Franco and what he did to Spain.

Pablo Picasso and Guernica

One of Picasso’s most famous paintings was his mural of the Guernica bombing (1937). The Guernica bombing was carried out by Italian and German planes and involved the carpet bombing of civil areas. The bombing of Guernica was a significant development in modern warfare as it showed a  new capacity for extending the horrors of warfare to the civilian population. The bombing became international news through the English journalist George Steer. Picasso’s painting helped to immortalise the tragedy as a key event in the Twentieth Century. (See: Events that changed the world )

Picasso was so enraged with Franco that he never allowed the painting to go to Spain during Franco’s lifetime. It eventually reached Spain in 1981.

Picasso was well aware of a political dimension to art.

“What do you think an artist is? …he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

— Pablo Picasso

The Dove of Peace by Picasso

Another key painting of Picasso was his simple bird drawing a symbol of peace. Picasso donated it the Soviet-backed World Peace Congress of 1949. It was telling of a new phase in Picasso’s art – the power of simplicity. Picasso was a member of the French Communist Party until his death.

Abundant in artistic inspiration, Picasso was remarkably prolific. His total artistic work numbered close to 50,000. This included 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, and roughly 12,000. He died at the age of 91.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Pablo Picasso”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net , 2/11/2007. Last updated 17th March 2017.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Pablo picasso (1881–1973).

Marble head from the figure of a woman

Woman in Green

Pablo Picasso

The Blind Man's Meal

At the Lapin Agile

Gertrude Stein

Bust of a Man

Woman in an Armchair

Standing Female Nude

Still Life with a Bottle of Rum

Man with a Hat and a Violin

Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table

Woman in White

Nude Standing by the Sea

Reading at a Table

The Dream and Lie of Franco II

Faun with Stars

Head of a Woman

James Voorhies Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The artistic genius of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled magnitude. His prolific output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes that convey myriad intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages. His creative styles transcend realism and abstraction, Cubism , Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. Born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881, Picasso studied art briefly in Madrid in 1897, then in Barcelona in 1899, where he became closely associated with a group of modernist poets, writers, and artists who gathered at the café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), including the Catalan Carlos Casagemas (1880–1901).

Living intermittently in Paris and Spain until 1904, his work during these years suggests feelings of desolation and darkness inspired in part by the suicide of his friend Casagemas. Picasso’s paintings from late 1901 to about the middle of 1904, referred to as his Blue Period, depict themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair. In The Blind Man’s Meal ( 50.188 ) from 1903, he uses a dismal range of blues to sensitively render a lonely figure encumbered by his condition as he holds a crust of bread in one hand and awkwardly grasps for a pitcher with the other. The elongated, corkscrew bodies of El Greco (1540/41–1614) inspire the man’s distorted features.

Picasso moved to Paris in 1904 and settled in the artist quarter Bateau-Lavoir, where he lived among bohemian poets and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Max Jacob (1876–1944). In At the Lapin Agile ( 1992.391 ) from 1905, Picasso directed his attention toward more pleasant themes such as carnival performers, harlequins, and clowns. In this painting, he used his own image for the harlequin figure and abandoned the daunting blues in favor of vivid hues, red for example, to celebrate the lives of circus performers (categorically labeled his Rose Period). In Paris, he found dedicated patrons in American siblings Gertrude (1874–1946) and Leo (1872–1947) Stein, whose Saturday-evening salons in their home at 27, rue des Fleurus was an incubator for modern artistic and intellectual thought. At the Steins he met other artists living and working in the city—generally referred to as the School of Paris —such as Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Painted in 1905–6, Gertrude Stein ( 47.106 ) records Picasso’s new fascination with pre-Roman Iberian sculpture and African and Oceanic art. Concentrating on intuition rather than strict observation, and unsatisfied with the features of Stein’s face, Picasso reworked her image into a masklike manifestation stimulated by primitivism. The influence of African and Oceanic art is explicit in his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York), a painting that signals the nascent stages of Cubism. Here the figure arrangement recalls Cézanne’s compositions of bathers, while stylistically it is influenced by primitivism, evident by the angular planes and well-defined contours that create an overall sculptural solidity in the figures.

The basic principles of Analytic Cubism (1910–12), with its fragmentation of three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional picture plane, are embodied in Still Life with a Bottle of Rum ( 1999.363.63 ), painted in 1911. The techniques of Analytic Cubism were developed by Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque (1882–1963), who met in 1907. Picasso’s Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table ( 49.70.33 ) of 1912 is an early example of Synthetic Cubism (1912–14), a papier collé in which he pasted newsprint and colored paper onto canvas. Picasso and Braque also included tactile components such as cloth in their Synthetic Cubist works, and sometimes used trompe-l’oeil effects to create the illusion of real objects and textures, such as the grain of wood.

After World War I (1914–18), Picasso reverted to traditional styles, experimenting less with Cubism. In the early 1920s, he devised a unique variant of classicism using mythological images such as centaurs, minotaurs, nymphs, and fauns inspired by the classical world of Italy. Within this renewed expression, referred to as his Neoclassical Period, he created pictures dedicated to motherhood inspired by the birth of his son Paulo in 1921 (his first of four children by three women). Woman in White ( 53.140.4 ) of 1923 shows a woman clothed in a classic, toga-like, white dress resting calmly in a contemplative pose with tousled hair, eliciting a tender lyricism and calming spirit of maternity. Toward the end of the 1920s, Picasso drew on Surrealist imagery and techniques to make pictures of morphed and distorted figures. In Nude Standing by the Sea ( 1996.403.4 ) of 1929, Picasso’s figure recounts the classical pose of a standing nude with her arms upraised, but her body is swollen and monstrously rearranged.

By the early 1930s, Picasso had turned to harmonious colors and sinuous contours that evoke an overall biomorphic sensuality. He painted scenes of women with drooping heads and striking voluptuousness with a renewed sense of optimism and liberty, probably inspired by his affair with a young woman (one of Picasso’s numerous mistresses) named Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909–1977).  Reading at a Table ( 1996.403.1 ) from 1934 uses these expressive qualities of bold colors and gentle curves to portray Marie-Thérèse seated at an oversized table, emphasizing her youth and innocence.

Although still living in France in the 1930s, Picasso was deeply distraught over the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He reacted with a powerfully emotive series of pictures, such as  Dream and Lie of Franco ( 1986.1224.1[2] ), that culminated in the enormous mural Guernica (1937; Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid), painted in a grisaille palette of gray tones. This painting, Picasso’s contribution to the Spanish Pavilion in the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris, is a complex work of horrifying proportion with layers of antiwar symbolism protesting the fascist coup led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

From the late 1940s through the ’60s, Picasso’s creative energy never waned. Living in the south of France, he continued to paint, make ceramics, and experiment with printmaking. His international fame increased with large exhibitions in London, Venice, and Paris, as well as retrospectives in Tokyo in 1951, and Lyon, Rome, Milan, and São Paulo in 1953. A retrospective in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957 garnered a massive amount of attention, with over 100,000 visitors during the first month. This exhibition solidified Picasso’s prominence as museums and private collectors in America, Europe, and Japan vied to acquire his works.

In Faun with Stars ( 1970.305 ) from 1955, Picasso returned to the mythological themes explored in early pictures. Again, incorporating life experience into his painting, he evoked his infatuation with a new love, a young woman named Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986), who became his second wife in 1961 when the artist was seventy-nine years old. Picasso symbolized himself as a faun, calmly and coolly gazing with mature confidence and wisdom at a nymph who blows her instrument to the stars. The picture embraces his spellbound love for Jacqueline.

Even into his eighties and nineties, Picasso produced an enormous number of works and reaped the financial benefits of his success, amassing a personal fortune and a superb collection of his own art, as well as work by other artists. He died in 1973, leaving an artistic legacy that continues to resonate today throughout the world.

Voorhies, James. “Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pica/hd_pica.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Karmel, Pepe. Picasso and the Invention of Cubism . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso . New York: Abrams, 2003.

Olivier, Fernande. Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier . Edited by Marilyn McCully. New York: Abrams, 2001.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso . 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1991–96.

Richardson, John, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. A Life of Picasso . 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1991.

Rose, Bernice B., and Bernard Ruiz Picasso, eds. Picasso: 200 Masterworks from 1898 to 1972 . Exhibition catalogue. Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2002.

Rubin, William, ed. Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective . Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980.

Zervos, Christian. Pablo Picasso . 33 vols. (catalogue raisonné). Paris: Cahiers d'Art, 1932–78.

Additional Essays by James Voorhies

• Voorhies, James. “ Europe and the Age of Exploration .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) and the Spanish Enlightenment .” (October 2003)
• Voorhies, James. “ Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ School of Paris .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in Naples .” (October 2003)
• Voorhies, James. “ Elizabethan England .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and His Circle .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Fontainebleau .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Post-Impressionism .” (October 2004)
• Voorhies, James. “ Domestic Art in Renaissance Italy .” (October 2002)
• Voorhies, James. “ Surrealism .” (October 2004)

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Pablo Picasso

Oct 25, 1881 - apr 8, 1973, artist highlights, slideshow auto-selected from multiple collections, 6 artists who made cubism popular, when picasso put down his brushes and painted with light instead, if you like pablo picasso, you'll love rodolfo nieto, discover this artist, related works from the web, guernica (1937), www.wikidata.org guernica - wikidata, dove (1949), en.wikipedia.org dove (picasso) - wikipedia, the old guitarist (1904), www.wikiart.org the old blind guitarist, 1903 - pablo picasso - wikiart.org, les demoiselles d’avignon (1907), www.wikiart.org the girls of avignon, 1907 - pablo picasso - wikiart.org, the weeping woman (1937), en.wikipedia.org the weeping woman - wikipedia, girl before a mirror (1932), www.wikiart.org girl in front of mirror, 1932 - pablo picasso - wikiart.org, girl on the ball (1905), www.wikiart.org girl on the ball, 1905 - pablo picasso - wikiart.org, le rêve (1932), en.wikipedia.org le rêve (picasso) - wikipedia, portrait of dora maar (1937), www.wikiart.org portrait of dora maar, 1937 - pablo picasso - wikiart.org, two girls reading, exchange.umma.umich.edu two girls reading (deux enfants lisant) - exchange, “are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it”, more artists, vincent van gogh, claude monet, 1,300 items, paul cézanne, paul gauguin, gustav klimt, more art movements, 21,306 items, 2,268 items, 1,142 items, 2,416 items, more mediums, 32,222 items, 54,416 items, 31,632 items, 41,493 items, 10,869 items, 105,314 items.

• World Biography

Pablo Picasso Biography

Born: October 25, 1881 Malaga, Spain Died: April 8, 1973 Mougins, France Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist

The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso was one of the most productive and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism (an artistic style where recognizable objects are fragmented to show all sides of an object at the same time), he established the basis for abstract art (art having little or no pictorial representation).

Early years

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain. He was the eldest and only son with two younger sisters, Lola and Concepción. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a professor in the School of Arts and Crafts. Pablo's mother was Maria Ruiz Picasso (the artist used her surname from about 1901 on). It is rumored that Picasso learned to draw before he could speak. As a child, his father frequently took him to bullfights, and one of his earlier paintings was a scene from a bullfight.

In 1891 the family moved to La Coruña, where, at the age of fourteen, 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, Spain, in 1896, Picasso easily gained entrance to the School of Fine Arts. A year later he was admitted as an advanced student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Spain. He demonstrated his remarkable ability by completing in one day an entrance examination for which an entire month was permitted.

Picasso soon found the atmosphere at the academy stifling, and he 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 Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats). Between 1900 and 1903 Picasso stayed alternately in Paris, France, and Barcelona. He had his first one-man exhibition in Paris in 1901.

Paris at the turn of the twentieth century

At the turn of the twentieth century Paris was the center of the international art world. In painting it was the birthplace of the impressionists—painters who depicted the appearance of objects by means of dabs or strokes of unmixed colors in order to create the look of actual reflected light. While their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction.

Picasso set up a permanent studio in Paris in 1904. His studio soon became a gathering place for the city's most modern artists, writers, and patrons.

Picasso's early work reveals a creative pattern which continued throughout his long career. Between 1900 and 1906 he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary (modern) painting. In doing so, his own work changed with extraordinary quickness.

Blue and pink periods

The years between 1901 and 1904 were known as Picasso's Blue Period. Nearly all of his works were executed in somber shades of blue and contained lean, melancholy, and introspective (concentrating on their own thoughts) figures. Two outstanding examples of this period are the Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).

In the second half of 1904 Picasso's style took a new direction. In these paintings the color became more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with reddish and pink tones dominating the works. Thus this period was called his Pink Period. The most celebrated example of this phase is the Family of Saltimbanques (1905). 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 influenced by the late paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).

The face in Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) 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 Paris, 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

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is generally regarded as the first cubist painting. The faces of the figures are seen from both front and profile positions at the same time. Between 1907 and 1911 Picasso continued to break apart the visible world into increasingly small facets of monochromatic (using one color) planes of space. In doing so, his works became more and more abstract. Representation gradually vanished from his painting, until it became an end in itself—for the first time in the history of Western art.

The growth of this process is evident in all of Picasso's work between 1907 and 1911. Some of the most outstanding pictorial examples of the development are Fruit Dish (1909), Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), and Ma Jolie, also known as Woman with a Guitar (1911–12).

Collages and further development

About 1911 Picasso and Georges Braque (1882–1963) began to introduce letters and scraps of newspapers into their cubist paintings, thus creating an entirely new medium, the cubist collage. Picasso's first, and probably his most celebrated, collage is Still Life with Chair Caning (1911–1912).

After Picasso experimented with the new medium of collage, he returned more intensively to painting. In his Three Musicians (1921), the planes became broader, more simplified, and more colorful. In its richness of feeling and balance of formal elements, the Three Musicians represents a classical expression of cubism.

Additional achievements

Picasso also created sculpture and prints throughout his long career, and made numerous important contributions to both media. He periodically worked in ceramics, and designed sets, curtains, and interiors for the theater.

In painting, even the development of cubism fails to define Picasso's genius. About 1915, and again in the early 1920s, he turned away from abstraction and produced drawings and paintings in a realistic and serenely beautiful classical style. One of the most famous of these works is the Woman in White (1923). Painted just two years after the Three Musicians, the quiet and unobtrusive (not calling attention to itself) elegance of this masterpiece testifies to the ease with which Picasso could express himself pictorially.

One of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the 1930s is Guernica (1937). This work had been commissioned for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair. It depicts the destruction by bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39; the military revolt against the Spanish government). The artist's deep feelings about the work, and about the massacre (a mass killing) which inspired it, are reflected in the fact that he completed the work, that is more than 25 feet wide and 11 feet high, within six or seven weeks.

Guernica is an extraordinary monument within the history of modern art. Executed entirely in black, white, and gray, it projects an image of pain, suffering, and brutality that has few parallels. Picasso applied the pictorial language of cubism to a subject that springs directly from social and political awareness.

Picasso's politics

Picasso also declared publicly in 1947 that he was a Communist (someone who believes the national government should control all businesses and the distribution of goods). When he was asked why he was a Communist, he stated, "When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and aware of how poor people had to live. I learned that the Communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the Communists." But sometimes the Communist cause was not as keen on Picasso as Picasso was about being a Communist. A 1953 portrait he painted of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) caused an uproar in the Communist Party's leadership. The Soviet government banished his works.

Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the 1939 victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975), he gave eight hundred to nine hundred of his earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona. To display these works, the Palacio Aguilar was renamed the Picasso Museum and the works were moved inside. But because of Franco's dislike for Picasso, Picasso's name never appeared on the museum.

Picasso was married twice, first to dancer Olga Khoklova and then to Jacqueline Roque. He had four children. He was planning an exhibit of over two hundred of his works at the Avignon Arts Festival in France when he died at his thirty-five-room hilltop villa of Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins, France, on April 8, 1973.

The discovery of cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of twentieth-century art. Throughout his life he exhibited a remarkable genius for sculpture, graphics, and ceramics, as well as painting. His is one of the most celebrated artists of the modern period.

For More Information

Cowling, Elizabeth. Interpreting Matisse, Picasso. Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso. Edited by Molly Stevens and Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.

Olivier, Fernande. Picasso and His Friends. New York: Appleton-Century, 1965.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso. New York: Random House, 1991.

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Art History and Artists

Pablo picasso.

• Occupation: Artist
• Born: October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain
• Died: April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France
• Famous works: The Pipes of Pan, Three Musicians, Guernica, The Weeping Woman
• Style/Period: Cubism , Modern Art

• His full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. Wow!
• His mother once told him when he was a child that "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope."
• In the 1930s Picasso became fascinated with the mythical creature the Minotaur. This creature had the body of a man and the head of a bull. It appeared in many of his pieces of art.
• He produced over 1,800 paintings and 1,200 sculptures.
• Many of his paintings have been sold for over $100 million!
• He was married twice and had four children.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

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A short biography of pablo picasso, develop your reading skills. read the following text and do the comprehension questions, 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.

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.

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.

Source: Wikipedia

Comprehension:

• Picasso was born in France. a. True b. False
• His father taught him to paint. a. True b. False
• All his children are by the women he married. a. True b. False
• All his children attended the funeral. a. True b. False

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Pablo Picasso Biography

Pablo Picasso, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, was a born genius whose prodigious work took the world of art by storm. From a young age, Picasso dedicated his time to drawing and painting, surpassing the talent and skills of his father by the age of 13. He went on to diversify his artistic pursuits, including sculpting, ceramic designing, and stage designing. Picasso’s groundbreaking contribution to art was the development of Cubism, which broke the classical dominance of content over form. Through his iconic work ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,’ Picasso gave birth to the modern art movement of the 20th century.

Quick Facts

• Born Country: Spain
• City: Málaga, Spain
• Died on: April 8, 1973
• Place of death: Mougins, France
• Died At Age: 91
• Spouse/Ex-: Jacqueline Roque (m. 1961– 1973), Olga Khokhlova (m. 1918; d. 1955)
• Father: Don José Ruiz y Blasco
• Mother: María Picasso y López
• Children: Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, Paloma Picasso, Paul Joseph Picasso
• Partner: Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Marie-Thérèse Walter
• Ancestry: Italian Spanish
• Notable Alumni: Real Academia De Bellas Artes De San Fernando
• Cause of Death: Pulmonary Edema
• Education: Real Academia De Bellas Artes De San Fernando
• 1950 – Stalin Peace Prize
• 1962 – Lenin Peace Prize

Childhood & Early Life

Pablo Picasso was born on 25 October 1881, in Málaga, Spain, to Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His father was a painter and arts teacher by profession.

While at school, Picasso’s brilliance as a painter overshadowed his poor academic records. Mentored by his father, he surpassed his old man in terms of skill and talent by the age of 13.

In 1895, his family relocated to Barcelona, Spain. The move proved to be fruitful for him as he got an opportunity to enroll at the prestigious ‘School of Fine Arts.’ However, strict rules laid down at the school frustrated him. He began skipping classes to wander on the streets of Barcelona, sketching whatever he observed.

In 1897, he moved to Madrid to attend the ‘Royal Academy of San Fernando.’ However, the rules and formal instructions irked him to such an extent that he stopped attending classes. He moved around the lanes of Madrid, observing and painting what appealed his vision. He visited the Prado museum to see paintings by famous Spanish painters.

Returning to Barcelona in 1899, he found himself to be a part of a group of artists and intellectuals who made their headquarters at a cafe called, El Quatre Gats. It was during this time that he moved away from his classical methods to indulge avant-garde art.

With Paris deemed as the world center for avant-garde art, it was only natural for him to relocate to the city. At the dawn of the new century, he moved to Paris to be at the epicentre of the world of art.

He opened an art studio in Montmartre, Paris. Despite being a teenager, he had the technique to come up with any style, and the insight to know the importance of each style.

Historians have separated his works from different periods. As such, from 1901 to 1904, his works were categorized under ‘Blue Period.’ Just as the name suggests, most of his works from this period were marked by sombre paintings in shades of blue and bluish-green, only intermittently having shades of other colors.

He applied various techniques during his period, starting from the blurred technique to divisionism and expressionism. The subject that he chose ranged from poverty and isolation to anguish and melancholy. Some of his famous paintings from this period include, ‘Blue Nude,’ ‘La Vie,’ and ‘The Old Guitarist.’

Succeeding the ‘Blue Period’ was the ‘Rose Period’ which lasted from 1904 to 1906, during which the color pink dominated most of his works. Most of his paintings depicted people working at the circus, acrobats, and harlequins. Additionally, his works showcased the warm relationship that he shared with Fernande Olivier.

In contrast to the ‘Blue Period,’ paintings which came during the ‘Rose Period’ were of happy and upbeat nature with optimism and spirit of buoyancy apparent in them. This style was predominantly seen in his earlier works from 1899 and 1900.

In 1907, he, along with his friend Georges Braque, came up with a remarkable work that none until then had ever painted. Consisting of sharp geometric shapes, ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ showcased five nude prostitutes, abstracted and distorted, with glaring blotches of blues, greens, and grays. The work became the precursor and inspiration of ‘Cubism,’ an artistic style that the two invented.

The main technique behind Cubist works was breaking up and reassembling of objects in abstracted form, highlighting their composite geometric shapes, and depicting them from multiple viewpoints simultaneously in order to create physics-defying, collage-like effect.

The Cubist style employed by him in his works became a revolutionary movement in the art world. Some of his memorable paintings of this era include ‘Three Women,’ ‘Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table,’ ‘Girl with Mandolin,’ ‘Still Life with Chair Caning,’ and ‘Card Player.’

The changing panorama of the world, which was at the juncture of ‘World War I,’ brought about the next change in his art form. From the abstract and the distorted form, he moved to depicting the sombre reality of the world in his works.

Some of his neoclassical works that depict his return to realism from 1918 to 1929 include ‘Three Women at the Spring,’ ‘Two Women Running on the Beach,’ ‘The Race,’ and ‘The Pipes of Pan.’

An avid believer of experimentation and innovation, he did not remain stuck with classicalism for long and caught up with a new philosophical and cultural craze which was known as ‘Surrealism.’

The harlequin was replaced by minotaur as the common motif in his work and the works of other Surrealist painters. His most outstanding and notable work from this time period was the ‘Guernica.’

‘Guernica’ stands as a testament for the brutality, inhumanity, and vicious nature of war. Painted in 1937 after the devastating aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica, it remains the greatest anti-war painting of all time. It has shades of black, white, and gray and illustrates several human-like figures in various states of anguish and terror.

At the end of ‘World War II,’ he turned to politics. He joined the ‘French Communist Party’ and attended the ‘World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace’ in Poland. However, critical comments attracted by his Stalin painting lessened his interest in politics, though he remained a loyal member of the ‘Communist Party.’

Personal Life & Legacy

An ardent womanizer, he had a number of relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, muses, and prostitutes. He was married twice. In 1918, he married a ballerina named Olga Khokhlova. The couple, who was blessed with a son, parted ways in 1927. However, they were not legally divorced and the marriage ended only in 1955 after Khokhlova’s death.

While being married to Khokhlova, he was in a romantic relationship with Marie-Therese Walter. He fathered a daughter from the relationship.

He married Jacqueline Roque in 1961, at the age of 80. With her, he had two children.

He breathed his last on April 8, 1973, in Mougins, France. His mortal remains were later interred at the Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence.

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Pablo Picasso - Biography

No other artist is more associated with the term Modern Art than Pablo Picasso. He created thousands of paintings, prints, sculptures and ceramics during a time span of about 75 years. For many Picasso is the greatest art genius of the twentieth century. For others he is a gifted charlatan. Undisputed is the fact that he influenced and dominated the art of the twentieth century like no other modern artist.

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For copyright reasons we cannot show you any pictures of Picasso art works on this web site. biography on this page and on a continuation page.

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain, as the son of an art and drawing teacher. He was a brilliant student. He passed the entrance examination for the Barcelona School of Fine Arts at the age of 14 in just one day and was allowed to skip the first two classes. According to one of many legends about the artist's life, his father, recognizing the extraordinary talent of his son, gave him his brushes and palette and vowed to paint never again in his life.

Blue and Rose Period

During his lifetime, the artist went through different periods of characteristic painting styles. The Blue Period of Picasso lasted from about 1900 to 1904. It is characterized by the use of different shades of blue underlining the melancholic style of his subjects - people from the grim side of life with thin, half-starved bodies. His painting style during these years is masterly and convinces even those who reject his later modern style.

During Picasso's Rose Period from about 1905 to 1906, his style moved away from the Blue Period to a friendly pink tone with subjects taken from the world of the circus.

After several travels to Paris, the artist moved permanently to the "capital of arts" in 1904. There he met all the other famous artists like Henri Matisse , Joan Miro and George Braques. He became a great admirer of Henri Matisse and developed a life-long friendship with the master of French Fauvism .

Inspired by the works of Paul Cezanne, he developed together with George Braque and Juan Gris developed the Cubist style. In Cubism, subjects are reduced to basic geometrical shapes. In a later version of Cubism, called synthetic cubism , several views of an object or a person are shown simultaneously from a different perspective in one picture.

Picasso and Guernica

In 1937 the artist created his landmark painting Guernica , a protest against the barbaric air raid against a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso's Guernica is a huge mural on canvas in black, white and grey which was created for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World's Fair in 1937. In Guernica , Picasso used symbolic forms - that are repeatedly found in his works following Guernica - like a dying horse or a weeping woman.

Guernica was exhibited at the museum of Modern Art in New York until 1981. It was transferred to the Prado Museum in Madrid/Spain in 1981 and was later moved to the Queen Sofia Center of Art, Madrid in 1992. Picasso had disallowed the return of Guernica to Spain until the end of the rule of Fascism by General Franco.

Bibliography

• Ingo F. Walther, "Picasso", Benedikt Taschen Verlag GmbH, 1999, Koeln, ISBN 3-8228-6371-8

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Spanish Artist

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso, Pablo Ruiz, Pablo Ruiz Picasso

Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso, formerly called (before 1901) Pablo Ruiz or Pablo Ruiz Picasso, (born October 25, 1881, April 30, 1881 – 8, 1973, Mougins, France), Spanish painter, sculptor, painter, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (and Georges Braque) of Cubism.

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The central theme of Picasso’s work is still alive and well, and the myth continues to fade — a reminder of the life of a “frustrated” Spaniard with “stinging” eyes who believed in the myth that work could keep him alive. For nearly 80 years in 91, Picasso devoted himself to the production of art that played a significant role and coincided with all modern art development in the 20th century.

Health and Work

The Early Years

Pablo Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of art, and Maria Picasso López. His extraordinary painting ingenuity began to manifest at the beginning of the 10th century when he became a student of his father in A Coruña, where the family moved in 1891.

From then on, his ability to explore what he was learning and develop new descriptive techniques allowed him to surpass his father’s skills. In A Coruña, the father passed his wishes on to his son, giving him models and supporting his first show when he was 13 years old.

The family moved to Barcelona in the fall of 1895, and Pablo enrolled in a local art school (La Llotja), where his father took his last position as professor of art. The family had hoped that their son would succeed as a painter, and by 1897 his reputation in Spain finally seemed natural; that same year, his painting Science and Charity, whose father was a model doctor, was awarded a prestigious award in Madrid at the Fine Arts Exhibition.

The Spanish capital was the next obvious step for a young artist who aimed to gain the recognition and fulfilment of family expectations. Pablo Ruiz rightly travelled to Madrid in the fall of 1897 and entered the Royal Academy of San Fernando.

But learning the ins and outs of stupidity, he spent more and more time recording his own life. In restaurants, on the streets, in brothels, and in Prado, where he found Spanish paintings. He wrote: “The Art Gallery is beautiful. Velázquez first class; from El Greco’s beautiful heads, Murillo does not satisfy me in all his photos. “

The works of those and other artists will capture Picasso’s imagination at different times during his long career. Goya, for example, was a musician whose works Picasso was copied from Prado in 1898 (portrait of bullfighter Pepe Illo and Caprichos painting, Bien tirada está, depicting Celestina [buyer] inspecting socks.).

Those same characters reappeared in his late work — Pepe Illo in a series of recorded texts (1957) and Celestina as a voyeuristic self-portrait. Especially in the series etchings and recordings known as Suite 347 (1968).

Picasso became ill in the spring of 1898 and spent most of his year in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro with his Barcelona friend Manuel Pallarès. When Picasso returned to Barcelona in early 1899, he was a changed man: he had lost weight; he had learned to live in an open area; he spoke Catalan; and, most importantly, he had decided to drop out of his art school training and reject his family plans for his future.

He even began to show a limited selection of his mother’s surname and often signed his works P.R. Picasso; he had abandoned Ruiz entirely by the end of 1901.

In Barcelona, Picasso walked between a circle of Catalan artists and writers with their eyes fixed on Paris. Those were his friends at the Els Quatre Gats restaurant (“The Four Cats,” named after Chat Noir [“The Black Cat”] in Paris), where Picasso had his first Barcelona show in February 1900, and it was a series of themes. There are 50 images (in mixed media) on display.

In addition, there was a black, flexible “modernista” painting, Last Moments (later painted above), depicting a priest’s visit to the bedside of a terminally ill woman. a work received in the Spanish part of Exposition Universelle Paris that year.

Eager to see his work in the area and see firsthand Paris, Picasso went with his studio partner Carles Casagemas (Illustration of Carles Casagemas [1899]) to conquer, if not Paris, at least on the corner of Montmartre.

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