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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Picasso :: Biography and Books"
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Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish-born French painter. He was one of the originators of Cubism and devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed to development of Modern and Abstract Art in the 20th century.
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Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish-born painter, sculptor and stage designer. He was one of the originators of Cubism and established the basis for abstract art. He was an international celebrity and one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
Pablo Picasso was born Pablo Blasco (25 Oct. 1881) in Málaga, Spain, the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. Picasso's father was a painter and a professor in the School of Arts and Crafts. It was from his father that Picasso had his first art training. In 1897, Picasso entered as an advanced student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, where he never finished his college-level course.
Picasso's work is often categorized into ‘periods’. The years between 1901 and 1904 are known as Picasso's ‘Blue Period’. In this period he depicted the world of the poor. Subjects were often prostitutes and beggars and these melancholy paintings are executed in somber shades of blue and blue-green. Examples of this period are: Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).
From 1904, Picasso started to change his style and created more cheery pictures with harlequins and acrobats. For these paintings he used more reddish and pink tones and subjects drawn from circuses. A good example of work from the ‘Rose Period’ (1904–06) is the Family of Saltimbanques (1905).
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is regarded as the most important work in the development of Cubism. The figures on the painting are seen from different points of view at the same time. They are forced to submit to multiple and dissected perspectives by being reduced to a series of broad, intersecting planes. Picasso’s friends and fellow artist were shocked when they viewed it in his studio. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was not exhibited in public until 1937.
From 1907 Picasso continued to dissect his paintings into small facets of monochromatic planes of space, a new style that broke away from the use of perspective. Together with Georges Braque, Picasso's closest colleague, he took objects apart and ‘analyzed’ them in terms of their shapes. This period until 1912 was Picasso’s ‘Analytic Cubism Period’.
In his period of Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919) his forms became broader and more simple, and flat, bright decorative patterns replaced the earlier, more austere compositions. The masterpiece of this style is the Three Musicians (1921). The invention of cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of 20th-century art.
The Spanish Civil War inspired Picasso to his most famous work; Guernica (1937). He was commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World’s Fair and created a large canvas that represented the massacre of Gernika, Spain. It is executed entirely in black, white, and gray, and projects an image of pain and suffering, and the inhumanity and hopelessness of war.
Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in his huge gothic 35-room villa in Mougins in the south of France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his own possession, as he had kept off the art market what he didn't need to sell. His estate tax to the French state was paid in the form of his works. These works are now in the Musée Picasso in Paris.
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