FREE ESSAY ON PABLO PICASSO

PABLO PICASSO

Pablo Picasso
Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y (1881-1973), Spanish painter and sculptor, is considered one of the
greatest artist of the 20th century. He was a inventor of forms, innovator of styles and
techniques, a master of various media, and one of the most prolific artists in history.
He created more than 20,000 works.
Training and Early Work 
Picasso was Born in Malaga on October 25, 1881, he was the son of Jose Ruiz Blasco, an
art teacher, and Maria Picasso y Lopez. Until 1898 he always used his father's name,
Ruiz, and his mother's maiden name, Picasso, to sign his pictures. After about 1901 he
dropped "Ruiz" and used his mother's maiden name to sign his pictures. At the age of 10
he made his first paintings, and at 15 he performed brilliantly on the entrance
examinations to Barcelona's School of Fine Arts. His large academic canvas Science and
Charity (1897, Picasso Museum, Barcelona), depicting a doctor, a nun, and a child at a
sick woman's bedside, won a gold medal.
Blue Period 
Between 1900 and 1902, Picasso made three trips to Paris, finally settling there in 1904.
He found the city's bohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance
halls and cafes show how he learned the postimpressionism of the French painter Paul
Gauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis. The themes of the French painters
Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the style of the latter, exerted
the strongest influence. Picasso's Blue Room (1901, Phillips Collection, Washington,
D.C.) reflects the work of both these painters and, at the same time, shows his evolution
toward the Blue Period, so called because various shades of blue dominated his work for
the next few years. Expressing human misery, the paintings portray blind figures,
beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes, their somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of
works by the Spanish artist El Greco.
Rose Period 
Shortly after settling in Paris in a shabby building known as the Bateau-Lavoir ("laundry
barge," which it resembled), Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of many companions
to influence the theme, style, and mood of his work. With this happy relationship,
Picasso changed his palette to pinks and reds; the years 1904 and 1905 are thus called
the Rose Period. Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, which he visited
several times a week; one such painting is Family of Saltimbanques (1905, National
Gallery, Washington, D.C.). In the figure of the harlequin, Picasso represented his alter
ego, a practice he repeated in later works as well. Dating from his first decade in Paris
are friendships with the poet Max Jacob, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, the art
dealers Ambroise Vollard and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, and the American expatriate writers
Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, who were his first important patrons; Picasso did
portraits of them all.
Protocubism 
In the summer of 1906, during Picasso's stay in Gosol, Spain, his work entered a new
phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African art. His celebrated
portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905-1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) reveals
a masklike treatment of her face. The key work of this early period, however, is Les
demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), so radical in
style-its picture surface resembling fractured glass-that it was not even understood by
contemporary avant-garde painters and critics. Destroyed were spatial depth and the ideal
form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh, angular planes.
Cubism-Analytic and Synthetic 
Inspired by the volumetric treatment of form by the French postimpressionist artist Paul
Cezanne, Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque painted landscapes in 1908 in a
style later described by a critic as being made of "little cubes," thus leading to the
term cubism. Some of their paintings are so similar that it is difficult to tell them
apart. Working together between 1908 and 1911, they were concerned with breaking down and
analyzing form, and together they developed the first phase of cubism, known as analytic
cubism. Monochromatic color schemes were favored in their depictions of radically
fragmented motifs, whose several sides were shown simultaneously. Picasso's favorite
subjects were musical instruments, still-life objects, and his friends; one famous
portrait is Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1910, Art Institute of Chicago). In 1912, pasting
paper and a piece of oilcloth to the canvas and combining these with painted areas,
Picasso created his first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning (Musee Picasso, Paris).
This technique marked a transition to synthetic cubism. This second phase of cubism is
more decorative, and color plays a major role, although shapes remain fragmented and
flat. Picasso was to practice synthetic cubism throughout his career, but by no means
exclusively. Two works of 1915 demonstrate his simultaneous work in different styles:
Harlequin (Museum of Modern Art) is a synthetic cubist painting, whereas a drawing of his
dealer, Vollard, now in the Metropolitan Museum, is executed in his Ingresque style, so
called because of its draftsmanship, emulating that of the 19th-century French
neoclassical artist Jean-August-Dominique Ingres.
Cubist Sculpture 
Picasso created cubist sculptures as well as paintings. The bronze bust Fernande Olivier
(also called Head of a Woman, 1909, Museum of Modern Art) shows his consummate skill in
handling three-dimensional form. He also made constructions-such as Mandolin and Clarinet
(1914, Musee Picasso)-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 (1914, Museum of Modern Art), combining a silver sugar strainer with a painted
bronze sculpture, anticipates his much later "found object" creations, such as Baboon and
Young (1951, Museum of Modern Art), 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 (for
example, Paulo as Harlequin; 1924, Musee Picasso), 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 (1921, Museum of Modern Art), and works inspired by
mythology, such as The Pipes of Pan (1923, Musee Picasso). 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 (1927, Private Collection, Brussel)
and Seated Bather (1930, Museum of Modern Art).
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 Therese Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Maia in 1935. Marie Therese,
frequently portrayed sleeping, also was the model for the famous Girl Before a Mirror
(1932, Museum of Modern Art). 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.
Throughout Picasso's lifetime, his work was exhibited on countless occasions, in many
different places. 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.