Pablo Picasso and his paintings
Pablo Picasso, in full Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso.
Pablo Picasso is probably the most important figure of 20th century, in terms of art, and art movements that occurred over this period. Before the age of 50, the Spanish born artist had become the most well known name in modern art, with the most distinct style and eye for artistic creation. There had been no other artists, prior to Picasso, who had such an impact on the art world, or had a mass following of fans and critics alike, as he did.
Pablo Picasso was born in Spain in 1881, and was raised there before going on to spend most of his adult life working as an artist in France. Throughout the long course of his career, he created more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and other items such as costumes and theater sets. He is universally renowned as one of the most influential and celebrated artists of the twentieth century.
Picasso Early Life
His baptized name is much longer than the Pablo Picasso, and in traditional Andalusian custom honored several saints and relatives. His father was a painter and a professor of art, and was impressed by his son's drawing from an early age. His mother stated at one time that his first words were to ask for a pencil. At the age of seven Picasso begin receiving formal training from his father. Because of his traditional academic training.
In 1891 at ten years old, the family moved to A Coruna where School of Fine Arts hired Ruiz to be a professor. They spent four years there where Ruiz felt his son surpassed him as an artist at the age of 13 and reportedly vowed to give up painting. Though paintings by Ruiz still seem to have been generated years later.
Picasso and his family were horrified when his seven year old sister died of diphtheria in 1895. They relocated to Barcelona and Ruiz began working at its School of Fine Arts. He persuaded officials there to let his son take an entrance exam for an advanced class and Picasso was admitted at the age of just 13. At the age of 16 he was sent to Spain's foremost art school in Madrid, the Royal Academy of San Fernando. Picasso disliked the formal instructions and decided to stop attending his classes soon after he arrived. He filled his days inside Madrid's Prado, which displayed paintings such as Francisco Goya and El Greco.
The body of work Picasso created throughout his lifetime is enormous and spans from his early childhood years until his death, creating a more comprehensive record of his development than perhaps any other artist. Being the official beginning of his career. That date is said to be 1894, when Picasso was just 13. At the age of 14 he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a striking depiction that has been referred to as one of the best portraits in Spanish history. And at age 16, Picasso created his award-winning Science and Charity
.
The Blue Period (1901-1904)
The somber period within which Picasso both personally experienced poverty and its effect on society right around him is characterized by paintings essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. Picasso's works during this period depict malnutrition, prostitution, and the posthumous portraits of friend Carlos Casagemas after his suicide, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie. La Vie (1903) portrayed his friend's inner torment in the face of a lover he tried to murder.
The Rose Period (1904-1906)
Fitting to the name, once Picasso seemed to find some small measure of success and overcame some of his depression, he had a more cheery period featuring orange and pink hues and the playful worlds of circus people and harlequins. Picasso met a bohemian artist named Fernande Olivier who became his lover. She subsequently appeared in many of these more optimistic paintings.
American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein became great fans of Picasso. They not only became his chief patrons, Gertrude was also pictured in his Portrait of Gertrude Stein, one of his most famous portraits.
African Influence (1907-1909)
For Picasso, the seminal moment was the Paul Cezanne retrospective held at the Salon d'Automne, one year after the artist's death in 1906. Though he previously had been familiar with Cezanne, it was not until the retrospective that Picasso experienced the full impact of his artistic achievement. In Cezanne's works, Picasso found a model of how to distill the essential from nature in order to achieve a cohesive surface that expressed the artist's singular vision. In about the same time, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists. In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends start blending the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cezanne and Gauguin.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was Picasso's first masterpiece. The painting depicts five naked women with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly upturned tabletop. In this painting, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting by adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane.
Cubism (1909-1919)
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 weight and structure around 1907. And they ultimately set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he deconstructed the conventions of perspective that had dominated Renaissance art. During this period, the style Georges Braque and Picasso developed used mainly neutral colors and was based in they're "taking apart" objects and "analyzing them" in terms of their shapes.Cubism, especially the second form, known as Synthetic Cubism, played a great role in the development of western art world. Works of this phase emphasize the combination, or synthesis, of forms in the picture. Colour is extremely important in the objects' shapes because they become larger and more decorative.
In 1914, at the height of synthetic Cubism, its co-inventor Pablo Picasso began once again to draw and paint in a naturalistic manner. Three years later, when he was working for Diaghilev on the ballet "Parade", the number of these naturalistic works increased. This was, however, Picasso's second 'classical' period, for the Rose period of 1905-6 was in many respects a first run. Indeed the peculiar evolution of Picasso's classicism serves as a reminder that the wartime and post-war 'call to order' was not a new phenomenon, produced by the war, but a resurfacing within the avant-garde of a classicist movement which had been dominant at the beginning of the century, and whose own origins went back as far as the post-Impressionist 'call to order' of the 1880s. Viewed from this perspective, Picasso's Cubism could be seen as a kind of temporary interruption within the continuity of his classicism. Less perversely, it could be seen as another form of classicism - a revolutionary, 'abstract' form of classicism. This was, in effect, the line taken by those critics and artists, such as the Purists, who wanted to bring system and order to Cubism through referring back to the 'constants' of Greek art and its Roman followers. For more, please see: Classical Revival in modern art .
Classical Academic Training
Picasso had a thorough training in academic art at a very young age. His first teacher was his father, himself a painter, but in 1892 Picasso enrolled in the art school in La Coruna where the family had moved the previous year. By 1894 he was executing accomplished academic drawings from antique casts, and when his father accepted a teaching post at the La Llotja school of art in Barcelona the following year, he had no difficulty in gaining admittance to the advanced classes. 'Science and Charity' (1897, Museu Picasso, Barcelona) was a precocious essay in academic moral narrative, and won official honours when it was exhibited in Madrid and Malaga. After a brief period at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Picasso abandoned his studies, and by the spring of 1899, back in Barcelona, he had become a regular at the bohemian cafe and art centre Els Quatre Gats, and was painting and drawing in the abstract, Symbolist style of Catalan Modernista artists like Santiago Rusinol and Ramon Casas. There he met the critic and philosopher Eugeni d'Ors, future theorist of Catalan Noucentisme, and, among many others, Julio Gonzalez and Manolo. Through these contacts Picasso became conversant with Parisian modern art, and his work began to resemble that of Toulouse-Lautrec, Forain and Steinlen.
From Blues to Harlequin and Saltimbanque subjects
In October 1900 Picasso made his first trip to Paris. He had a debut exhibition the following year at the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, and met the poet and critic Max Jacob, who became a lifelong friend. In Barcelona in 1902 the dominant blue tonality of his recent canvases was confirmed, and Parisian night-life subjects yielded to tragic scenes of beggars and prostitutes. In the spring of 1904 Picasso left Barcelona and settled in a dilapidated building in Montmartre, nicknamed the Bateau-Lavoir, where there was a thriving artists' community. From this point on he returned to Spain relatively rarely, and although he continued to mix with the large group of expatriate Spaniards in Paris, he also became a close friend of Apollinaire, Andre Salmon and Maurice Raynal. He made frequent visits to the nearby Cirque Medrano, and gradually the blue tonality of his work gave way to a predominant pink, and Harlequin and Saltimbanque subjects began to dominate his repertoire. Simultaneously the 'gothic' character of his Blue period gave way to a style derived from classical art, a change that owed much to his contacts with Apollinaire and with Jean Moreas, founder of the Ecole Romane which was dedicated to the revival of the art of classical antiquity
Picasso's Inventive Approach to Classicism
Since the end of the First World War Picasso had been the subject of many critical studies. (The first substantial monograph, by his old friend Maurice Raynal, was published in Munich in 1921 and in Paris the following year.) His consecration as a living great master came in 1932 with the huge retrospective exhibition held in Paris at the Galeries Georges Petit, which afterwards travelled to the Kunsthaus in Zurich. In the same year the first volume of Christian Zervos's catalogue raisonne of the paintings and drawings was published, and in 1933 Bernard Geiser produced a catalogue raisonne of the engravings and lithographs. In 1936, on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso was elected director of the Prado Museum in Madrid. His opposition to Franco was expressed directly in the suite of satirical etchings, 'The Dream and Lie of Franco', and in metaphorical terms in the great mural, entitled Guernica, which he painted for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Exposition Internationale of 1937. In Guernica (Prado, Madrid), as in so many of his other most important works of the inter-war years, Picasso's typically free and inventive approach to the classical tradition finds expression once again for although the style is essentially that of synthetic Cubism, the imagery, the composition and even the drawing make use of a variety of classic sources, including paintings of The Massacre of the Innocents by Guido Reni (1575-1642) and Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). The classical tradition remained for him a stimulus and a resource; but his immersion in it never involved uncritical imitation, and his own powers of creativity were never crippled by the weight of its authority.
Death
Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France from pulmonary edema and heart failure, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner.Pablo Picasso Net Worth: Pablo Picasso was a Spanish artist who had a net worth of $500 million dollars at the time of his death.
