Spanish painter Pablo Picasso is credited with founding cubism and is currently the most well-known artist of the 20th century, according to a 2009 The Times poll.
Early Life and Adolescence
On October 25, 1881, the future genius was born in the Andalusian hamlet of Malaga. Jose Ruiz, his father, was an artist. Ruiz was compelled to seek a job as a caretaker at the local museum of fine arts as his art did not become well-known. His mother, Maria Picasso Lopez, was from a wealthy family of grape plantation owners, but because her father left the family and immigrated to America, she lived in poverty from an early age.
The first kid that José and MarÃa had was named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula. Francisco Ruiz y Picasso, Juan Nepomuceno MarÃa de los Remedios Crispin Crispignano de la SantÃsima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, which traditionally featured saints and relatives. The mother loved her son more than the other two girls in the family, Dolores and Conchita, who were born after Pablo.
The boy has great talent and handsomeness. He started helping his father paint canvases at the age of seven. When Pablo was thirteen, Jose let him finish a lot of the job and was astonished by how good he was. Following this occurrence, the father quit painting himself and gave the son all of his art tools.
Researches
The young man enrolled in Barcelona’s Academy of Arts the same year. Pablo had some trouble persuading the university’s faculty of his professional value. The young student moved to the esteemed Academy of San Fernando in Madrid after three years of study, having gained experience. There, he studied the methods of Spanish artists Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya, and El Greco for six months. Picasso painted “First Communion,” “Self-Portrait,” and “Portrait of the Mother” in this location.
Pablo left school to go it alone since he was too much of a free spirit and wayward personality to be inside the boundaries of the educational establishment. By then, he had become great friends with Carles Casagemas, an equally stubborn American student, with whom Pablo had made several trips to Paris.
During their first trips, the friends studied Japanese engravings, old Phoenician and Egyptian frescoes, and the paintings of Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Along with meeting members of the bohemian community, the young people also got to know wealthy collectors.
Production
Pablo started signing his own works for the first time under his mother’s maiden name, Picasso. A tragic event that occurred in 1901 and had an impact on the artist’s work was his buddy Carles’ suicide as a result of an unhappy love. Pablo painted a number of pieces that are commonly referred to as the first “Blue Period” in remembrance of this occasion.
The preponderance of blue and gray hues in the paintings can be attributed to the young man’s depression as well as his inability to afford oil paint in other hues. Picasso created the paintings “Old Jew with a Boy,” “Tragedy,” “Portrait of Jaime Sabartes,” and “Rendezvous.” An atmosphere of fear, sorrow, despair, and anxiety permeates each and every painting. The writing style becomes jagged and angular, and flat, stiff figures take the place of perspective.
Pablo Picasso chose to relocate to the French capital in 1904 despite his financial situation because he knew that new experiences and events would await him there. The artist’s second era of work, commonly referred to as “Pink,” was inspired by the move. Pablo Picasso’s residence had a significant impact on the plot and upbeat tone of his paintings.
The Medrano Circus, whose performers acted as models for the young artist, was located at the foot of Montmartre Hill. A whole sequence of paintings, including “The Actor,” “Seated Nude,” “Woman in a Shirt,” and “Acrobats,” were created in a span of two years. “Mother and Son,” “Comedian Family.” The most important painting from this era, “Girl on a Ball,” debuted in 1905. After eight years, the painting was transferred to Russia by I. A. Morozov, a philanthropist from Russia. “Girl on a Ball” debuted in 1948 and is still on display at the A. S. Pushkin Museum.
The artist increasingly drifts away from portraying nature in the traditional sense; instead, modernist motifs emerge in his work through the use of simple geometric shapes that serve as the object’s framework. Picasso’s painting of Gertrude Stein, a patron of the arts and admirer, demonstrates his intuitive approach to the new path.
Picasso created the painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” at the age of 28, and it is regarded as the forerunner to later works in the Cubist style. Pablo Picasso proceeded to explore the discovered direction despite receiving a lot of criticism for the portrait outfit, which featured nude beauty.
Starting in 1908, the works “Can and Bowls” , “Three Women” , “Woman with a Fan” , “Portrait of Ambroise Vollard” , “Factory in Horta de San Juan” , “Portrait of Fernande Olivier” , “Portrait of Kahnweiler” , “Still Life with a Wicker Chair” , “Bottle of Pernod” , “Violin and Guitar” showed up. The imagery in new works gradually becomes more abstractionist in nature and more like posters. Pablo Picasso finally starts to make a solid living despite the scandal thanks to the success of his paintings in the new style.
Pablo Picasso got the chance to work on Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons in 1917. Jean Cocteau recommended to the ballet master that the Spanish artist be the one to create the sketches for the new shows’ sets and costumes. Picasso temporarily relocated to Rome in order to pursue his career, where he met Olga Khokhlova, a Russian dancer and the immigrant officer’s daughter.
Picasso’s art represented the optimistic time in his life; he briefly strayed from cubism and produced several canvases that evoked the spirit of classical realism. First among these are “Portrait of Olga in an Armchair,” “Bathers,” “Women Running on the Beach,” and “Paul Picasso’s Child Portrait.”
Surrealism in Art
Pablo Picasso went back to his previous bohemian lifestyle after realizing he could no longer live the life of a wealthy bourgeois. His first surrealist picture, “Dance,” completed in 1925, served as a catalyst for change. The dancers’ warped forms and the overall gloominess permeated the artist’s work for a considerable amount of time.
Picasso depicted his discontent with his personal life in his sexist paintings “Mirror” and “Girl in front of a mirror.” Pablo had an interest in sculpture in the 1930s. The pieces “Man with a Bouquet” and “Reclining Woman” were displayed. Creating engravings to serve as images for the writings of Aristophanes and Ovid was one of the artist’s experiments.
Era of War
Pablo Picasso lived in Paris throughout the years of the Spanish Revolution and War. The Spanish government commissioned the artist to produce the black-and-white canvas “Guernica” in 1937 for the World Exhibition in Paris. In the spring of 1937, German aircraft totally destroyed a little village located in northern Spain. The collective pictures of a dead soldier, a distraught mother, and people hacked to bits expressed the national agony. Picasso used the image of the Minotaur bull, with its big, apathetic eyes, as his emblem for war. The canvas has been housed at a Madrid museum since 1992.
The paintings “Crying Woman” and “Night Fishing in Antibes” first emerged at the close of the 1930s. Picasso chose not to leave German-occupied Paris during the war. Despite living in a small space, the artist kept up his work. His paintings “Still Life with a Bull’s Skull,” “Morning Serenade,” “Slaughterhouse,” and sculpture “Man with a Lamb” all deal with death and violence.
The Time After The War
Paintings by the artist from the post-war era evoke the thrill of life once more. Picasso worked with the artists Paloma and Claude Already to produce a cycle of life-affirming panels for a private collection, which served as the personification of the vibrant colors and images.
During this time, Picasso’s favorite theme became Greek mythology. Picasso developed an interest in ceramics, which was another medium in which the master’s paintings were embodied. The “Dove of Peace” painting was painted by the artist in 1949 for the World Peace Congress. The master also produced variations in the Cubist style based on the subjects of historical artists such as Velazquez, Goya, and Manet.
Individual life
Picasso was deeply in love with someone from an early age. Models and dancers were the young artist’s muses and girlfriends. In Barcelona, the young Pablo Picasso studied and fell in love for the first time. The girl was employed at a cabaret and went by Rosita del Oro. The artist met Fernando in Madrid, and the two were devoted friends for a number of years. The young guy met Marcelle Humbert, a tiny who everyone nicknamed Eva, in Paris by chance; however, the couple’s untimely demise kept them apart.
Pablo Picasso marries Olga Khokhlova while he is employed by a Russian ballet company in Rome. The couple moved to a home by the sea after being married in a Russian church outside of Paris. The family was able to have affluent bourgeois lifestyles thanks to the girl’s dowry and the proceeds from the sale of Picasso’s artwork. Olga and Pablo welcomed their first child, a son named Paulo, three years after their marriage.
Picasso soon grows tired of the privileged life and returns to being a free artist. He starts dating Marie-Therese Walter, a young girl, and separates from his wife. Picasso never acknowledged Maya, the daughter born in 1935 from this extramarital affair.
The next inspiration for the master during the war was the Yugoslavian citizen Dora Maar, a photographer whose creations inspired the artist to explore novel forms and subjects. Possessing a substantial collection of Picasso paintings that she held onto to the end of her life, Dora is remembered in history. She is particularly well-known for her “Guernica” photos, which show the painting’s full creation process in detail.
The artist met Françoise Gilot after the war, and she added delight to his creations. A son named Claude and a daughter named Paloma were born. However, Jacqueline left the master in the early 1960s due to his persistent infidelity. An average saleswoman named Jacqueline Roque served as the 80-year-old artist’s final inspiration and second formal bride. She greatly influenced Pablo’s social circle and was an idol to him. Thirteen years after Picasso passed away, Jacqueline killed herself because she could not bear to be apart from him.
Demise
Picasso dedicated his entire career to painting portraits of women in the 1960s. Jacqueline Roque, his former spouse, served as a model for the artist. Pablo Picasso possessed multiple personal palaces and a multimillion dollar wealth by the time of his death.
A museum bearing the genius’s name opened in Barcelona three years before to his passing, and another in Paris a decade later. Picasso produced almost 80,000 paintings, more than a thousand sculptures, collages, sketches, and prints during the course of his lengthy creative career.
On April 8, 1973, the 92-year-old genius passed away from pneumonia.