Pablo Picasso
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"Art is not the application of a canon of
beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any
canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs."
Picasso is considered to be one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Pablo Ruiz Picasso (full name Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso) was born on the 25th October, 1881 in Malaga in Spain. He was the first son of Jose Ruiz y Blasco  and
Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father was a painter and a professor of
art at the School of Crafts and the curator of a local museum.
Picasso learnt the basics of art from his father. Picasso also
attended the Academy of Arts in Madrid, but dropped out within a
year of joining it. While he showed great artistic promise growing
up, Picasso really began to thrive creatively once he moved to Paris
in the early 1900s. There he was exposed to works of other artists
and developed friendships with some of them, including Georges
Braque. He made his first trip to Paris in 1900 and loved the city.
He lived with a friend Max Jacob who was a journalist and a poet.
Max worked in the day and slept in the night, while Picasso slept
during the day and worked during the night. Those were hard times
for Picasso and he burned many of his paintings to keep himself
warm. In 1901, Picasso started a magazine called ‘Arte Joven’ in
Madrid with his friend Soler. He completely illustrated the first
edition of the magazine. It was at this point that he began to sign
his paintings as simply "Picasso" . While in Paris, Pablo Picasso
had a propensity for entertaining and had among his friends people
such as Andre Breton and Gertrude Stein. Picasso also had an active
love life and usually had several mistresses along with a wife or a
primary partner. |
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 With
a career that spanned more than seven decades, Picasso's work is
often categorized into different periods and associated with a
number of artistic movements. From 1899 to 1900 was a period
where Picasso was creating paintings in a Modernist style which
emerged due to his influence and exposure to the works of
Rossetti and Edvard Munch. His early years in Paris (1901-1904)
coincide with his Blue period. It is called the blue
period because most of his paintings were in shades of blue and
blue-green and also because of his general mood at this time. The
subjects of these paintings were prostitutes and beggars .Blindness and destitution were an integral
part of this theme of paintings. It was also during this time,
that he began using the image of a harlequin, in checkered
clothing, as his personal motif in his paintings. One of the famous paintings by Pablo Picasso during this period was
‘La Vie’ . It is an important
work from the blue period and stand almost 2 meters tall. The
scene of three adult figures and one baby is set in the artist's
studio, with two incomplete nude studies in the background. The
male nude figure is said to be of Picasso's friend Carlos
Casagemas. Casagemas committed suicide after being rejected by
his lover. La Vie is a painting that has been discussed and
interpreted by many art critics and writers, but Picasso never
gave his own personal interpretation of the painting. Pablo
Picasso reworked the painting several times and did several
studies for La Vie. It is also the largest and most complex work
from the blue period. |
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 "Art
is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents,
never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared.
Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art".This was followed by his Rose period. While Pablo Picasso's Blue Period is far more popular with the general public today, his Rose Period is of greater art-historical importance. During his Rose Period, Pablo Picasso would, for the first time in his career, develop his cubism style that would make him the most important artist of the 20th century. The Rose Period started in 1904, a year in which Picasso alternated paintings in the "blue style", dark colored (often blueish) and downbeat, with paintings made in his "rose style", which are somewhat more optimistic in mood and brighter colored (often using the color pink). So 1904 is a transitional year and belongs neither truly to the blue period, nor to the rose period. Picasso's paintings became cheerful with the use of orange and pink colors. There were many harlequins featured in this time period also.. It was this style of Cubism—the style in which the artist breaks down his or her subjects into geometric shapes—that put Picasso in the spotlight. One of his paintings in this style Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) shocked critics and friends alike when it was exhibited. The painting depicts five prostitutes in a brothel from Avinyó street in Barcelona. The eye-catching painting is one of Picasso's most famous, widely considered to be a seminal work in the early development of Cubism. |
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