Pablo Ruiz Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain on October 25, 1881 and lived until April 8, 1973. He was raised by his mother and father along with his two sisters. Even at a young age, Picasso’s artwork showed great potential. Enough to surprise and excite his father. “From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting” (“Pablo Picasso Biography). Picasso’s father was an artist as well as a professor at the School of Crafts, where Picasso eventually took collegiate classes with his dad as his instructor. After art school, Picasso decided to travel to Paris because he thought that it would be the perfect place for him to try out different styles and forms of art. While in Paris, Picasso perfected his widely known artistic styles: cubism and surrealism (“Pablo Picasso’s Early Life- Before 1901”).
In the creation of Picasso’s magnificent work of art, he utilized an immense canvas that measured 11 feet tall and 25.6 feet wide in order to fully capture the message he sought to convey: the destruction and hurt of war. For this work, Picasso painted in monochrome colors of black, grey, and white, along with some yellow and light blue with oil based paints. His careful choices of shade and color would ultimately help display the
Along with others at the time, Picasso identified himself as a pacifist- a person who believes that war and violence are unjustifiable. This belief is a very obvious influence on his painting which illustrates the cruelty and destruction of the war. Picasso expresses his discontent stance towards war and its outcome in this painting (Pablo Picasso’s Early Life- Before 1901”). Because of how influential Guernica was in the 20th century, it has “come to be an anti-war symbol and a reminder of the tragedies of war”