Pablo Picasso

PABLO PICASSO
Artist
Born: 1881 Malaga, Spain
Died: 1973 Mougins, France

The artistic genius of Pablo Picasso has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled magnitude. His prolific output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes that convey a myriad of intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages. His creative styles transcend realism and abstraction, Cubism, Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism

Born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881, Picasso studied art briefly in Madrid in 1897, then in Barcelona in 1899, where he became closely associated with a group of modernist poets, writers, and artists who gathered at the café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats), including the Catalan Carlos Casagemas (1880–1901).

Living intermittently in Paris and Spain until 1904, his work during these years suggests feelings of desolation and darkness inspired in part by the suicide of his friend Casagemas. Picasso's paintings from late 1901 to about the middle of 1904, referred to as his Blue Period, depict themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair. The influence of African and Oceanic art is explicit in his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a painting that signals the nascent stages of Cubism. The basic principles of Analytic Cubism (1910–12), with its fragmentation of three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional picture plane, are embodied in Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, painted in 1911.

The techniques of Analytic Cubism were developed by Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque, who met in 1907. Picasso's Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table of 1912 is an early example of Synthetic Cubism (1912–13), a papier collé in which he pasted newsprint and colored paper onto canvas.

Although still living in France in the 1930s, Picasso was deeply distraught over the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He reacted with a powerfully emotive series of pictures, such as The Dream and Lie of Franco, that culminated in the enormous mural Guernica, painted in a grisaille palette of gray tones. This painting, Picasso's contribution to the Spanish Pavilion in the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris, is a complex work of horrifying proportion with layers of antiwar symbolism protesting the fascist coup led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Even into his eighties and nineties, Picasso produced an enormous number of works and reaped the financial benefits of his success, amassing a personal fortune and a superb collection of his own art, as well as work by other artists. He died in 1973, leaving an artistic legacy that continues to resonate today throughout the world. 

Sourced from James Voorhies, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pablo Picasso Painting Live
 

SOURCE: Youtube