If you think about modern art, Picasso is probably the first name that pops into your head. Art today wouldn’t be the same without him! Pablo Picasso had a very long and interesting life.
On October 25, 1881, in Malaga in southern Spain, an art teacher and his wife had a baby boy. They named him after many saints and relatives: Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. This is his full name! So he just wrote “Picasso” to sign his works.
Pablo could draw before he could talk. His first words were “Piz! Piz!” That’s baby talk in Spanish for lapiz, which means “pencil.” He started drawing and creating pieces of art from the very beginning of his life.
As a little boy, he often went to bullfights with his father. Pablo’s first known oil painting was of a bullfight. He was only about eight years old when he did it. It’s called Picador. Everyone thought Pablo was a very promising young artist—and they were right.
Here you can see also one of the first his works – Pigeons.
Here you can see a drawing of a bullfight and pigeons together.
When Pablo was thirteen, his farther was so dominated by Pablo’s dazzling and vivacious talent that he gave his son all his brushes and paints and never painted again. In his new school in Barcelona Pablo skipped the basic courses and went right to the advanced ones, amazing the teachers!
Pablo’s career really began when he was sixteen. He did a painting called Science and Charity. His father and sister Lola were his sitters. Lola was shown green around the gills in bed. Pablo’s father posed as the doctor at her bedside. He managed to capture the sitters’ transient expression. For this, he was awarded a prize at an exhibit in Madrid where Pablo beat some of the best artists in Spain!
What we can see in this phase of his life is that in the beginning he created in realism and he also studied basic artist’s skills, perspective and everything connected with that. I want to point out that just because many people who see his works in modern styles like cubism, find them childish and often say that it’s simple to paint like that. No, he did a lot of work to become a great modern painter he was. Moreover, he made a step to become special, not just an excellent student and a realist painter like many others, but to create sth new.
Pablo skipped classes a lot because his teachers wanted him to copy other paintings and statues, to conform to the taste of that time, he thought this way of teaching was useless and old-fashioned, and spent lots of time with a bunch of artists, poets, and writers at a café called (“The Four Cats”). They called themselves “Modernistes”— modern artists. One of them was Carles, his old art school friend, with whom they went to Paris.
They had very little money so their apartment had no furniture. But Pablo found the solution of this problem, he painted furniture and bookcases on the walls. Then it didn’t look so bare. He even painted a safe on the wall as if they had valuable things to put in it. But the apartment didn’t matter. They were in Paris! It was the center of the art and fashion world, which gave them motivation, inspiration and some fame.
But then Carles died and Picasso owing to deep despair started painting in blue colours sitting in his native city. Later, this time became known as Picasso’s Blue Period (1901 – 1904).
No one bought such depressing pictures except some close friends and supporters. Pablo’s dad and a lot of his friends were sure Pablo was headed in the wrong direction with his strange blue paintings. But did Pablo listen? No. He did what he wanted!
When he moved back to Paris, the city he was so inspired by, he became happier, besides he met a new girlfriend there and as many of us know, women had a great role in his life and art. This facts made him feel tickled pink.
This time in Pablo’s life is called the Rose Period, but his paintings had many colors. Not just pinks.
Around this time, Pablo was meeting lots of interesting people for him in Paris. They thought he was interesting, too. He was intense and complicated. He could be very charming and his curiosity, energy, intellect, and originality caught people’s attention.
Then Pablo realized that he didn’t have to paint exactly what he saw. He could paint what he imagined. This led to a turning point for Pablo and for the history of modern art!
In 1907, Pablo painted the biggest painting he had ever done: eight feet tall and eight feet wide. It showed five women, one whose head looked like it was on backward. The painting was called Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.
The painting was really wild by the standards of the day. The five women in the painting look very angular and distorted. The effect of light and shadow is rendered with cubes. They seem to be breaking into pieces. But He combined forms and colours into harmonious unity. He was trying to paint the women from more than one angle at a time as if the viewer was seeing them from many different sides all at once. They are arranged rather asymmetrically and the contours are emphasized purposely. These people are painted with moving sincerity like in many his works. People thought the painting should look more real. No one had ever done a painting like it. Creating it changed Pablo's understanding of painting. Pablo had taken many months to paint this picture. He had done many, many sketches for it (eight hundred and nine!). He knew he was breaking with the tradition. But critics didn’t make an estimate of it. Pablo put it away and didn’t show it again for nine years. It was fun to get the attention, but his feelings were hurt. Today it has been called the first modern twentieth century painting and has become an unsurpassed masterpiece. Picasso had found a new way of seeing. It was something new and Picasso continued following this idea.
A close friend, the artist Georges Braque and Picasso found that they thought alike. They worked together so closely that Pablo said, at times, they couldn’t tell who had painted which painting. Pablo never again worked so closely with another artist. Braque and Picasso did still life paintings, landscapes, and portraits. They both used only a few colors and broke up objects in the paintings into cubes and geometric shapes. They were trying to paint their subjects from all sides at once. Together, they were developing their own new style of painting —CUBISM!
Of all the important artwork that Pablo created in his life, it was cubism that made him famous. At first people were shocked by cubism. They had never seen anything like it. But soon people realized they liked it!
They created the revolutionary new style in which everything is reduced to geometric patterns, cubes.
There are several phases of cubism.
The first official phase of the movement is known as ANALYTIC CUBISM. This period is characterized by chaotic paintings of fragmented subjects rendered in neutral tones. The fractured forms often overlap with one another, displaying the subject from multiple perspectives at once.
SYNTHETIC CUBISM
Synthetic Cubism is the movement's second phase. During this time, Picasso, Braque, Gris, and other artists simplified their compositions and brightened their color schemes.
Nowadays, cubism is considered to be one of the modern movements and is quite popular.
Picasso, having invented a new style, didn’t stop on it and moved on. I mean that later he worked in other different styles like classic or something similar to it, surrealism. He said he was just using the style that best suited the subject. Free handling was the main thing in his art as I think. He made paintings, posters, sculptures in stone and metal, ceramics, drawings, collages, prints, poetry, theater sets, costumes, and more. Picasso’s art could be serious or playful, childlike or realistic, colorful or dark, simple or complex. Picasso kept thinking of new ideas all his life. He was creative and skilled. Picasso made all kinds of art and plenty of it. He worked hard every day for more than eighty years. Some people say he created 50,000 pieces of art! He must have had tons of energy.
He lived through two world wars, the invention of electricity, telephones, radio and TV, movies, automobiles, and airplanes. By the time he died at age ninety-one, he was the richest artist in history. Through his art, Picasso sent powerful messages about politics, society, peace, and love. He was always in advance of his time and was never in a state of torpor. Picasso’s gift to the world was his art, but he also showed how a creative life could be if you live with energy, originality, and passion!