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Pablo Picasso Arts

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in twentieth-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937).

Pablo Picasso Paintings

The Spanish Artist, Pablo Picasso was born in the city of Malaga in the Andalusian region of Spain. Some Pablo Picasso Paintings rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. Pablo Picasso Paintings are often categorized into several periods, the Blue Period (1901 - 1904), the Rose Period (1905 - 1907), the African-influenced Period (1908 - 1909), Analytic Cubism (1909 - 1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912 - 1919).

In 1939–40 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, under its director Alfred Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major and highly successful retrospective of his principal works up until that time. This exhibition lionized the artist, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.

Although some may dispute it, the career of Pablo Picasso is very nearly Twentieth-Century painting in a nutshell. So pervasive was this man's influence that he could be said to have been a driving force in the progression of art in this century. At the age of 19, he arrived in Paris, thoroughly trained in the academic traditions of Spanish art. The year was 1901. He was like a blank canvas propped up on the easel of a new century.

Picasso's Blue Period encompasses works from 1901 to 1904 and beyond the obvious colour reference there was a strong influence from El Greco and Toulouse-Lautrec. His Rose period follows from 1905 to 1908 in which his works were lighter in spirit as well as in colour. Shortly thereafter his interests turned to African art, though art historians have stopped short of burdening us with an "African Period". Les Demoiselles d' Avignon of 1907, however, was a merging of these two periods. And as a direct outgrowth of this painting, came Analytical Cubism (1909-1912), from which sprung Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919), and an almost endless array of other, lesser known "isms" used by art historians to try and further compartmentalize and analyse a career that, as it evolved, gradually came to defy analysis. The same could be said for the evolution of Twentieth Century art.

Cubist Sculpture

Picasso created cubist sculptures as well as paintings. He also made constructions—such as Mandolin and Clarinet from odds and ends of wood, metal, paper, and nonartistic materials, in which he explored the spatial hypotheses of cubist painting. His Glass of Absinthe, combining a silver sugar strainer with a painted bronze sculpture, anticipates his much later “found object” creations, such as Baboon and Young, as well as pop art objects of the 1960s.

Realist and Surrealist Works

During World War I (1914-1918), Picasso went to Rome, working as a designer with Sergey Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He met and married the dancer Olga Koklova. In a realist style, Picasso made several portraits of her around 1917, of their son, and of numerous friends. In the early 1920s he did tranquil, neoclassical pictures of heavy, sculpturesque figures, an example being Three Women at the Spring, and works inspired by mythology, such as The Pipes of Pan. At the same time, Picasso also created strange pictures of small-headed bathers and violent convulsive portraits of women which are often taken to indicate the tension he experienced in his marriage. Although he stated he was not a surrealist, many of his pictures have a surreal and disturbing quality, as in Sleeping Woman in Armchair and Seated Bather.

Paintings of the Early 1930s

Several cubist paintings of the early 1930s, stressing harmonious, curvilinear lines and expressing an underlying eroticism, reflect Picasso's pleasure with his newest love, Marie Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Maïa in 1935. Marie Thérèse, frequently portrayed sleeping, also was the model for the famous Girl Before a Mirror. In 1935 Picasso made the etching Minotauromachy, a major work combining his minotaur and bullfight themes; in it the disemboweled horse, as well as the bull, prefigure the imagery of Guernica, a mural often called the most important single work of the 20th century.

Guernica
Picasso was moved to paint the huge mural Guernica shortly after German planes, acting on orders from Spain's authoritarian leader Francisco Franco, bombarded the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish civil war. Completed in less than two months, Guernica was hung in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of 1937. The painting does not portray the event; rather, Picasso expressed his outrage by employing such imagery as the bull, the dying horse, a fallen warrior, a mother and dead child, a woman trapped in a burning building, another rushing into the scene, and a figure leaning from a window and holding out a lamp. Despite the complexity of its symbolism, and the impossibility of definitive interpretation, Guernica makes an overwhelming impact in its portrayal of the horrors of war.

World War II and After

Picasso's palette grew somber with the onset of World War II (1939-1945), and death is the subject of numerous works, such as Still Life with Steer's Skull and The Charnel House. He formed a new liaison during the 1940s with the painter Françoise Gilot who bore him two children, Claude and Paloma; they appear in many works that recapitulate his earlier styles. The last of Picasso's companions to be portrayed was Jacqueline Roque, whom he met in 1953 and married in 1961. He then spent much of his time in southern France.

Late Works: Recapitulation

Many of Picasso's later pictures were based on works by great masters of the past—Diego Velazquez, Gustave Courbet, Eugene Delacroix, and Edouard Manet. In addition to painting, Picasso worked in various media, making hundreds of lithographs in the renowned Paris graphics workshop, Atelier Mourlot. Ceramics also engaged his interest, and in 1947, in Vallauris, he produced nearly 2000 pieces.

Throughout Picasso's lifetime, his work was exhibited on countless occasions. Most unusual, however, was the 1971 exhibition at the Louvre, in Paris, honoring him on his 90th birthday; until then, living artists had not been shown there. In 1980 a major retrospective showing of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Picasso died in his villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie near Mougins on April 8, 1973.