Picasso 1853

Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter, died in 1973 at the age of 91. But I really think he was the world "youngest" artiest, it is because when he picked up palette and brushes pencil even was at his nineties, everything into his eyes, just like the first time he saw them, so we have always found his work very interesting and unique. He has a style all his own and, I believe that this was what made him so famous and at the same time controversial. Among Picasso's many contributions to the history of art, his most important include pioneering the modern art movement called cubism, inventing collage as an artistic technique, and developing assemblage (construction of various materials) in sculpture. All of these proofs that he is and has to be the most important artist of the 20th Century. §Early life and work Picasso was born Pablo Ruiz in Malaga, Spain. He later adopted his mother's more distinguished maiden name-Picasso-as his own. Though Spanish by birth, Picasso lived most of his life in France. Picasso's father, who was an art teacher, quickly recognized that his child Pablo was a prodigy. Picasso studied at first privately with his father and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in a city of Spain, where his father taught. At the age of 10 he made his first paintings, his early drawings, such as Study of a Torso, After a Plaster Cast (1894-1895) demonstrate the high level of technical proficiency he had achieved when he was 14. In 1895 his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, after his father obtained a teaching post at that city's Academy of Fine Arts. Picasso was admitted to advanced classes at the academy after he completed in a single day the entrance examination that applicants traditionally were given a month to finish. In 1897 Picasso left Barcelona to study at the Madrid Academy in the Spanish capital. Dissatisfied with the training, he quit and returned to Barcelona. §The Blue Period During his lifetime, the artist went through different periods of characteristic painting styles. Shortly after moving to Paris from Barcelona, Picasso began to produce works that were suffused in blue. This particular pigment is effective in conveying a somber tone. The psychological trigger for these depressing paintings was the suicide of Picasso's friend Casagemas. Between Blue Period 1901 and 1902, Picasso made three trips to Paris, finally settling there in 1904. He depicted the world of the poor. He found the city's bohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance halls and cafés show how he learned the postimpressionism of the French painter Paul Gauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis. The Blue Period work is quite sentimental, but we must keep in mind that Picasso was still in his late teens, away from home for the first time, and living in very poor conditions. Picasso's Blue Room (1901, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) shows his evolution toward the Blue Period, so called because various shades of blue dominated his work for the next few years. These melancholy paintings (such as The Old Guitarist, 1903; Art Inst. of Chicago) are among the most popular art works of the century. §The Rose Period Rose Period Shortly after settling in Paris in a shabby building known as the Bateau-Lavoir ("laundry barge," which it resembled), Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of many companions to influence the theme, style, and mood of his work. With this happy relationship, Picasso changed his palette to pinks and reds; the years 1904 and 1905 are thus called the Rose Period. Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, which he visited several times a week. His subjects are saltimbanques (circus people), harlequins, and clowns, all of whom seem to be mute and strangely inactive. At the time, Picasso's Parisian studio attracted the major figures of the avant-garde at this time, including Matisse, Braque, Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein. He had already produced numerous engravings of great power and began his work in sculpture during these years. One such painting in this period is Family of Saltimbanques (1905, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.).

§Sculpture Picasso discovered ancient Iberian sculpture from Spain, African art, and Gauguin's sculptures. Slowly, he incorporated the simplified forms he found in these sources into a striking portrait of Gertrude Stein, finished in 1906 and given by her in her will to the Metropolitan Museum. She has a severe masklike face made up of emphatically hewn forms compressed inside a restricted space. (Stein is supposed to have complained, "I don't look at all like that," with Picasso replying, "You will, Gertrude, you will.") This unique portrait comes as a crucial shift from what Picasso saw to what he was thinking and paves the way to Cubism. §The Beginning of Cubism In late 1906, Picasso started to paint in a truly revolutionary manner. Inspired by Cézanne's flattened depiction of space, and African art, working alongside his friend Georges Braque, he began to express space in strongly geometrical terms. These initial efforts at developing this almost sculptural sense of space in painting are the beginnings of Cubism. §The Cubism Period We can see the change from his early paintings, he distorted real objects into flat planes and cubes. He wanted us to see all sides of an object in space. He used the elements of color, shape, and line, and repeated the cubes, lines, and colors with variations. Other painters used construction paper and oil pastels to construct their art. Picasso used oil paint and canvas to make his. People stared to cognize this kind of sculpture as a name "cubism". Cubism is broken down into two distinct styles: Analytical and Synthetic. ØAnalytical Cubism (1907-1912) By 1907,Picasso and Braque had developed Cubism into an entirely new means of pictorial expression. In the initial stage, known as Analytical Cubism, objects were deconstructed into their components. In some cases, this was a means to depict different viewpoints simultaneously; in other works, it was used more as a method of visually laying out the FACTS of the object, rather than providing a limited mimetic representation. The aim of Analytical Cubism was to produce a conceptual image of an object, as opposed to a perceptual one. At its height, Analytical Cubism reached levels of expression that threatened to pass beyond the comprehension of the viewer. Staring into the abyss of abstraction, Picasso blinked...and began to start putting the pieces of the object back together An example of this is Houses on the Hill , 1909. ØSynthetic Cubism (1912-1914) Picasso marked the change into the second stage of Cubism, Synthetic Cubism in 1912, he took the conceptual representation of Cubism to its logical conclusion by pasting an actual piece of oilcloth onto the canvas. This was a key watershed in Modern Art. By incorporating the real world into the canvas, Picasso and Braque opened up a century's worth of exploration in the meaning of Art. Some of the finest Synthetic Cubist work, both visually and conceptually, are the collages. These works were characterized by a wider usage of color and decoration, although shapes in the paintings remained flat and fragmented. Creation of his first collage, Still Life with Clair Caning, 1912 In this period, Picasso also created several Cubist sculptures, like Head of a Woman, 1909, along with various constructions made from different materials. The Cubist movement in painting became a major influence on Western art. Every progressive painter, whether French, German, Belgian, or American, soon took up Cubism, and the style became the dominant one of at least the first half of the 20th century. In 1913, in New York, the new style was introduced at an exhibition at the midtown armory - the famous Armory Show - which caused a sensation. The Cubist was a movement that transformed the history of twentieth-century art. And, as we say, Cubism -- after Picasso --

the world never looked the same again. §During the war The collaboration between Picasso and Braque was ended by the First World War. After the war, Picasso, reflecting society's disillusionment and shock with the technological horrors of the war, reverted to a Classicist mode of representation. At the same time, however, he was continuing to push Cubism into new paths. During the '30s Picasso became tangentially connected with the Surrealist movement. §Picasso and Guernica At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso was appointed the director of the Prado. In January, 1937, the Republican government asked him to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the world exposition in Paris. Spurred on by a war atrocity, the total destruction by bombs of the town of Guernica in the Basque country, he painted the renowned oil painting in monochrome. With no doubut,this is the artist's landmark painting Guernica, a protest against the barbaric air raid against a Basque village.Guernica. is composition was a grouping of human and animal forms being destroyed by bombs during the war. He was so outraged by the death of these innocents that he put his soul into this enormous work. People can look to this painting as an expression of sorrow for the tragic loss of life in all wars. In Guernica, Picasso used symbolic forms as well. §Conclusion Pablo Picasso created thousands of works in his lifetime. And he was not only a very prolific printmaker, but also a very diverse one in the use of a great variety of different techniques. He created lithographs, etchings, dry points, lino cuts, woodcuts and aquatints. Always on the search for something new, he experimented a lot with these techniques. Some of Picasso's graphic works are combinations of several techniques. Through out history, never have a painter has so many kinds of forms, from naturalism to expressionism, from classicism to romanticism, then turned back to realism; Never have a artist created so many kinds of art, sculpture, ceramic, lithography, play writing, and poetry. As a special honor to him, on his 90th birthday, many of Picasso's works were displayed in the Louvre, Paris. This was the first time that a living artists works had been hung in the famous museum. Pablo Picasso had backward view on life and people. He saw things out of order, or upside down. He painted this way and influenced people to paint, this type of influence could have only came from one person, Picasso. His paintings in every-day life to enrich our lives. We also use them to enjoy ourselves, and to see how this man's imagination made art just that much better. Picasso described himself as a poet who had gone wrong: "When I was a child, my mother said to me, 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." But I think the last sentence should have changed and also the recognized truth is "I became a painter and would always to be the most important artist in 20th century as Picasso". References: Brassai Conversations With Picasso Patrick O'Brian Picasso: A Biography Herbert Read A Concise History OF Modern Painting www,webmuseum.com