We explain who Pablo Picasso was, what his most notable works were and why he is a central figure in the history of contemporary Western painting.
Picasso was one of the most important painters in the history of contemporary art.
Who was Pablo Picasso?
Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, draftsman, sculptor and writerconsidered the creator of Cubism along with the French Georges Braque (1882-1963) and one of the central figures of European avant-garde art. His paintings are among the most significant in the history of 20th century art and exerted a significant influence on many later artists and movements.
Picasso’s work It covered many techniques, such as oil painting, drawing, engraving, ceramics, stage design and theatrical costume design.and even briefly ventured into literary writing. His pieces are part of the largest collections and museums in the world.
Picasso, moreover, was a A devotee of pacifism and an active communist militantwho provided refuge during his residence in Paris to many leftist artists and thinkers who were persecuted in their countries of origin. For this reason, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1965.
Birth and youth of Picasso
Pablo Picasso, whose full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, He was born on October 25, 1881 in the Spanish city of MalagaHe was the eldest of three children of María Picasso López and her husband José Ruiz y Blasco, a drawing professor at the San Telmo Academy of Fine Arts.
Pablo demonstrated his talent for art from a very early age. Under the tutelage of his father, he made his first drawings at the age of eight. and, shortly after, his first oil painting: The yellow picador (1890), in which he illustrated a bullfight that took place in his hometown.
The following year, the family had to move to La Coruña, in Galicia, where his father had found a job at the local school of Fine Arts. In this new city, Picasso ventured even more freely into art, to the point of holding his first solo exhibition at just thirteen years of age.He also began publishing illustrations and cartoons in various local magazines and newspapers.
In 1885 Picasso’s family moved to Barcelona, where his father worked as a painting teacher at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts. The young painter was admitted there after passing the entrance exam at the age of 14. His talent was such that he was allowed to skip the initial two levels of the institution..
Picasso lived in Barcelona for nine years, during which he developed his first academic paintings, such as The first communion (1896) and Science and charity (1897). This last work participated in the General Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1897 and, later, in the Provincial Exhibition of Malaga in the same year.
This early exhibition opened the doors to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, where he enrolled that same year. However, his experience in Madrid was neither satisfactory nor long-lasting. The Madrid academy was too conservative for his ambitions and, in 1899, he returned to Barcelona..
From “Pablo Ruiz” to “Picasso”
The Yellow Picador, also called The Little Picador, was Picasso’s first painting.
After his return to Barcelona in 1899, Pablo He distanced himself from his father’s legacy and from 1901 onwards he began signing his paintings solely as “Picasso”abandoning his father’s surname.
At that time he began to frequent the café The Four Cats (“The Four Cats” in Catalan), where he met other modernist painters who, like him, They had their sights set on Paris and led a bohemian lifestyle.among them Carles Casagemas Coll (1880-1901), with whom he maintained a close friendship.
In fact, Together with Casagemas he visited Paris for the first time in 1900.and there they attended the Universal Exhibition and learned about the work of the Frenchman Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), which was of great importance to Picasso.
After his return to Barcelona, The young painter had his first encounters with anarchist thought and got to know the poorest neighborhoods of the city firsthand.The climate of decadence was widespread, especially after the loss of the last Spanish colonies in Asia and America.
All this, added to the sudden suicide of his friend Casagemas in 1901, marked Picasso’s artistic imagination during his so-called “blue period” (1901-1904), during which he continued to come and go from Barcelona to Paris. In the French capital he visited the Saint-Lazare women’s prison to paint the inmates.and devoted himself to portraying vagabonds. During this period, he also produced several portraits of his deceased friend, such as Casagemas in his coffin (1901).
Paris and Picasso’s “pink period”
Picasso settled in Paris in 1904, the city where he lived most of his life.
In Paris, Picasso lived in Bateau-Lavoir, in the Montmartre district.where he became friends with the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918).
There he began his “pink period” (1904-1907)in which a monochromatic palette of earth tones, ceramic colours and pinks predominated. In 1904, he also began a romantic relationship with the model Fernande Olivier (1881-1966), with whom he lived a stormy, violent and jealous relationship for seven years.
Olivier was the model and inspiration for many of Picasso’s works from this period, which are among the most highly valued of his career.These include: The Avignon ladies (1906) and some sculptures of cubist tendency, such as Head of a woman (Fernande) (1909).
In 1906, Picasso spent the summer in Gósol, Catalonia, where he came into contact with Spanish primitivism, present in popular culture. This aesthetic was an important ingredient in his later cubist work..
Upon his return from Gósol, Picasso met one of his most important friends and artistic partners: the Frenchman Georges Braque (1882-1963)with whom he began the Cubist movement a little later. Braque, Picasso and Henri Matisse (1869-1954) met frequently during those years and shared an interest in the work of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), from whom they acquired a new sense of volume and perspective.
During this period, Picasso also studied African art and borrowed some of the features of its ancestral masks and designs, which is evident in the faces of The Avignon ladies. This painting, one of the best known of his pink period, was inspired by the prostitutes of the street of the same name in Paris and constituted Picasso’s turning point with respect to all his previous work..
Some authors claim that Picasso had a “green period” around 1908, characterised by geometric still lifes and a marked influence from Cézanne. This period would have come to an end with Picasso’s study of African art and his subsequent foray into Cubism.
Picasso and cubism
Cubism developed in two stages: the analytical and the synthetic.
From 1908 onwards, Braque and Picasso devoted themselves to a new pictorial trend, which was of great importance for the avant-garde art of the 20th century: Cubism. This trend broke with traditional styles of representation of space, moving away from realistic perspective and embracing a multiple point of view.geometrically impossible.
Initially, Cubism produced works with little color, in which everyday objects were reinterpreted, known as analytical cubism either airtight (1909-1912); later, his works became much more abstract and geometric, resulting in the synthetic cubism (1912-1915).
The difference can be seen by comparing Horta houses (1909) or Woman with mandolin (1910) by Picasso and Braque respectively, typical of the initial stage, with their later works Man’s head with hat (1912) and Violin and glass (1912).
The early Cubist works of Braque and Picasso were understood simply as “geometric art”, despite their intention to break with the Renaissance conception of art. In fact, this new language of pictorial expression was not always well received: Matisse, for example, who was in charge of the jury at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, rejected the landscapes sent by Braque and called them “Cubist”, unintentionally giving the new style his name..
The collaboration between Braque and Picasso was not only intense between 1910 and 1911, but also successful. Both painters were extremely prolific during this period, encouraging each other to undertake Cubist portraits and to participate in exhibitions in Europe and the United States. In one of them, in New York, Picasso met Eva Gouel (1885-1915), the second of his muses.with whom he began a relationship in 1912, after separating definitively from Fernande.
In 1912, Braque and Picasso began to explore collage, incorporating paper and other materials into their pieces. The elements chosen could vary, but they began to be of a marked industrial nature as the movement entered its synthetic stage, and this opened the door to sculpture. The first of these works by Picasso was Guitar (1912), made in New York with cardboard, string and wire.
Cubism was widely recognized in Europe and the United States and soon had many followers, such as Juan Gris (1887-1927), Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and Albert Gleizes (1881-1953). The arrival of the First World War (1914-1918), however, dispersed this group of artists, many of whom had to march to the front lines.
Picasso in the war and postwar period
Picasso remained in France during the First World War.
By 1915, Picasso’s life had changed dramatically. He had become an internationally recognized artist and, Despite the war, he remained artistically active, producing cubist portraits and still lifes.as well as pointillist, mannerist and neoclassical works. However, in December of that same year, his new muse, suffering from tuberculosis, died.
At that time, Picasso frequented a new circle of avant-garde artists, led by the French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau. (1889-1963). And in 1916, together with Cocteau and another friend of the painter, the musician Erik Satie (1866-1925), he undertook the design of the sets and costumes for the Russian ballets of Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929).
During the following years Picasso traveled through Italy, together with Satie, Diaghilev, Cocteau and other artists, as part of the production of the ballet For theDuring this time he met the dancer Olga Jojlova (1891-1955), with whom he began a romance and ended up marrying in Paris in 1918. Three years later, the couple’s only son, Paulo, was born.
The end of the “Great…