Pablo Picasso (1881-1973: Spain/France)
Picasso is generally considered the greatest artist of the 20th century. Primarily a painter and sculptor, he was an inventor of forms, an innovator of techniques, and a master of various media.
Picasso’s artistic ability manifested itself at the age of 10 (his first exhibition was at the age of 13). He achieved success in Madrid and Barcelona, then as a young man set off for Paris, when a painting of his was accepted at the Exposition Universelle. He returned to Spain two months later when the suicide of a friend apparently helped bring about Picasso’s “blue period,” a time when that color became dominant in paintings of powerful expressiveness, often of Barcelona street people.
When Picasso moved permanently to Paris in 1904, his blue period gave way to the “rose period,” with paintings of colors of pottery, flesh, and the earth itself.
Next he turned to “cubism,” in which the artist presents a new kind of reality that breaks away from perspective and illustration, showing multiple views of an object on the same canvas. Cubism proclaims an analytic process of fracturing objects and space, light and shadow.
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was controversial in its treatment of female bodies and their mask-like faces (influenced by African art), as well as the subjects of the painting (Avignon was a street of brothels in Barcelona).
Picasso remained in Paris through both world wars, and became associated with the Surrealism art movement that emerged between the wars. It presented ideas of metamorphosis, distortion, and reading one thing for another. His mural painting Guernica, named for a Basque town in Spain bombed by Fascists in 1937, with its horrific images of war, condemned the useless destruction of life.
Picasso is known for his many relationships with women, and the self-identification in his art with figures such as harlequins, minotaurs and centaurs. He continued to be an extraordinarily productive artist in his later years, designing ballet costumes and text illustrations, and working in lithography. He was one of the most prolific artists in history, creating more than 20,000 works, many selling for extremely high prices even during his lifetime.
Art for Dummies, Chapter 15: “Modern Art: The bold, the beautiful, and the not-so-beautiful,” Thomas Hoving
Copyright © 1997, Thomas Hoving; Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written this commentary. According to Amazon.com, “Like most of the books in the For Dummies series, this one isn't, really. It's a delightful, erudite romp, cleverly and clearly designed to allow the art-curious reader to correct for a nearly universal deficit in American education.”
Pablo Picasso
Photo: IRC. (2005). Retrieved May 18, 2006, from unitedstreaming
The artist at a Paris exhibit of his pottery (1948 photo).
Photos of Paintings
Scan by Mark Harden; Used with permission.
Early Work: Self-portrait (1899-1900)
Blue Period: The Old Guitarist (1903)
Rose Period: Boy with a Pipe (1905)*
Cubism: Gertrude Stein (1906)
Cubism: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
Late Work: Guernica (1937)
* sold in 2004 at auction for $104 million, the second highest amount ever paid for a painting
Pablo Picasso
Video: 15 minutes
Arts4All (2004). Retrieved May 18, 2006, from unitedstreaming
Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic and ceramic artist Pablo Picasso is considered one of the most dynamic and influential artists of the 20th century. Picasso's Parisian studio attracted the major figures of the avant-garde, including artists and writers such as Matisse, Braque, Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein.
