Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Málaga
Málaga
Pablo Picasso is possibly the greatest artist of the twentieth century. An inventor of forms, an inventor of techniques, a painter, a printmaker, a sculptor, a ceramist . . . He was a brilliant artist in all his facets, an inexhaustible source of creativity who many others followed for decades, and a solid asset for investors and Art collectors.
Picasso’s genius became apparent very early, when he was just a child. His father was a Fine Arts professor, and right away he recognized young Pablo’s innate talent. At the age of 10, he was already signing his first paintings and at 15 he passed the entrance exam for the Barcelona School of Fine Arts.
He took his first trip to Paris shortly after his nineteenth birthday, and there he discovered a bohemian climate that captivated him from the very first moment. He returned to the capital of Art three times in the next three years, until in 1904, he settled there permanently. In Paris, young Picasso took in the post impressionist ideologies of Paul Gauguin and the theories of Symbolism of the Nabis esthetic. Edgar Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec also held a great influence for him, with their scenes of cabarets and dance halls.
During that period, beggars, alcoholics, prostitutes and other people on the edges of society attracted the Spanish artist, whose elongated human figures, in the style of El Greco, deeply affect the spectator with their intense predominance of blue tones. Hunger, cold and human misery are crudely portrayed, and the tremendous tenderness of his blue tones gave the name to the first period of his artistic career.
Picasso met Fernande Olivier, his first love, in Paris, and that relationship was to mark the beginning of what later came to be called the Rose Period (1904-1905). At that time his interest as a painter was focused on the world of the circus, and he turned Harlequin and the Comedy of Art into his alter ego. His friendships with Guillaume Apollinaire, inventor of Surrealism, Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, art dealers who had so much to do with making his work known, and Gertrude and Leo Stein, rich art collectors who set themselves up as the Spanish painter’s patrons, all date from this period.
In 1906 Picasso travelled to Gosol, a small town in the Catalan Pyrenees mountains, where he spent a summer with Fernande. His palette underwent a new transformation, as well as his brushstrokes and rhythm of composition. The growing attraction he felt for primitive African art, brought forth what a year later would be the great revolution of the twentieth century: “The Young Ladies of Avignon,” a work in which for the first time the representation of space in the traditional manner is obviated in favor of focusing on the analysis of shapes from multiple perspectives. Cubism was born.
Until 1912, Picasso travelled the paths of Analytic Cubism together with Georges Braque, but then he swung toward Synthetic Cubism, a movement also joined by Juan Gris, another Spanish artist living in Paris. He spent almost 10 years experimenting with all types of pictorial techniques, during which time Picasso surprised everyone with his spectacular collages made of clippings cut from a variety of materials and pasted on canvas.
Picasso was an artist who was able to revolutionize painting on several occasions during his life. He also never doubted going back to classical tradition for this purpose. At first he was interested in Surrealism, a very powerful cultural trend in the 1920s, although it was not until 1932 when, thanks to Expressionism, he became famous all over the world. It was a period of upheaval in Spain, and the Republican government had named him director of the Prado Museum at the height of the Civil War. He would have like to exhibit the “Guernica,” there. It was his most famous painting, painted in 1937 to denounce the brutality of War at the International Exhibition in Paris.
After a 80-year artistic career, the body of Picasso’s work was vast. Suffice to say that his widow and children found more than 70,000 pieces in the various houses they inherited after the master’s death. He is the most famous and popularly known artist of all time, even most people outside the art world know who he was, and all the great museums fight for his works every time they come to auction. In the end, he was responsible for the most important changes to take place in the Art world throughout the twentieth century.
Picasso’s genius became apparent very early, when he was just a child. His father was a Fine Arts professor, and right away he recognized young Pablo’s innate talent. At the age of 10, he was already signing his first paintings and at 15 he passed the entrance exam for the Barcelona School of Fine Arts.
He took his first trip to Paris shortly after his nineteenth birthday, and there he discovered a bohemian climate that captivated him from the very first moment. He returned to the capital of Art three times in the next three years, until in 1904, he settled there permanently. In Paris, young Picasso took in the post impressionist ideologies of Paul Gauguin and the theories of Symbolism of the Nabis esthetic. Edgar Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec also held a great influence for him, with their scenes of cabarets and dance halls.
During that period, beggars, alcoholics, prostitutes and other people on the edges of society attracted the Spanish artist, whose elongated human figures, in the style of El Greco, deeply affect the spectator with their intense predominance of blue tones. Hunger, cold and human misery are crudely portrayed, and the tremendous tenderness of his blue tones gave the name to the first period of his artistic career.
Picasso met Fernande Olivier, his first love, in Paris, and that relationship was to mark the beginning of what later came to be called the Rose Period (1904-1905). At that time his interest as a painter was focused on the world of the circus, and he turned Harlequin and the Comedy of Art into his alter ego. His friendships with Guillaume Apollinaire, inventor of Surrealism, Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, art dealers who had so much to do with making his work known, and Gertrude and Leo Stein, rich art collectors who set themselves up as the Spanish painter’s patrons, all date from this period.
In 1906 Picasso travelled to Gosol, a small town in the Catalan Pyrenees mountains, where he spent a summer with Fernande. His palette underwent a new transformation, as well as his brushstrokes and rhythm of composition. The growing attraction he felt for primitive African art, brought forth what a year later would be the great revolution of the twentieth century: “The Young Ladies of Avignon,” a work in which for the first time the representation of space in the traditional manner is obviated in favor of focusing on the analysis of shapes from multiple perspectives. Cubism was born.
Until 1912, Picasso travelled the paths of Analytic Cubism together with Georges Braque, but then he swung toward Synthetic Cubism, a movement also joined by Juan Gris, another Spanish artist living in Paris. He spent almost 10 years experimenting with all types of pictorial techniques, during which time Picasso surprised everyone with his spectacular collages made of clippings cut from a variety of materials and pasted on canvas.
Picasso was an artist who was able to revolutionize painting on several occasions during his life. He also never doubted going back to classical tradition for this purpose. At first he was interested in Surrealism, a very powerful cultural trend in the 1920s, although it was not until 1932 when, thanks to Expressionism, he became famous all over the world. It was a period of upheaval in Spain, and the Republican government had named him director of the Prado Museum at the height of the Civil War. He would have like to exhibit the “Guernica,” there. It was his most famous painting, painted in 1937 to denounce the brutality of War at the International Exhibition in Paris.
After a 80-year artistic career, the body of Picasso’s work was vast. Suffice to say that his widow and children found more than 70,000 pieces in the various houses they inherited after the master’s death. He is the most famous and popularly known artist of all time, even most people outside the art world know who he was, and all the great museums fight for his works every time they come to auction. In the end, he was responsible for the most important changes to take place in the Art world throughout the twentieth century.