Picasso

AlexBai Bai 1
Teacher Mr. Tierney
AVI4M1-01
14 December 2014 Pablo Picasso Born in a poor family in southern Spain on October 25, 1881, Pablo Picasso is one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century. His impressive artistic talent and inexhaustible inspiration made him a legendary figure in the 20th century.

As the greatest art genius in the 20th century, Pablo Picasso had done 37000 artworks, which includes 1885 oil paintings, 7089 sketches, 2000 prints, and 6121 lithographs. Picasso’s representative works are "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", "Kahn Weiler like" "bottle, glass and violin '', “Guernica”, and '' dove of peace." Picasso had four paintings in the list of the top 10 highest auction price paintings. In an opinion poll he had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest artist of the 20th century. And he is the first artist seen his works collected into the Louvre alive. Once, Picasso's father found he was painting an unfinished sketch of a pigeon. After observing the precision of his son's technique, Picasso's father realized that his 13 years old son has surpassed him, and he swore that he will never paint again.

Picasso is a genius painter. Most of Picasso’s paintings have rich styling, which means the use of space color and line. 20th century is a fast changing world, and this century belongs to Picasso. After the age of 30, Picasso entered one after another restless exploration period. Just like his personal life, his works are lack of consistency, continuity and stability. He did not have fixed ideas like many other artists, which made his art fickle and elusive. The world never had an artist who restructured art like Picasso. Picasso had many influential paintings, and “Guernica” was one of them. Picasso completed the painting of “Guernica” in 1937. The medium of the painting is oil on canvas. “Guernica” is primarily a war painting, offering a visual account of the devastating and chaotic impact of war on civilians. In this Bai 2 painting, people are screaming, crying and escaping from the bombing, some people are still alive, but some already dead. Humans and animals jumbled together into a background of broken hard-edged geometric shapes, reminiscent of Cubism. Compare to Picasso's other paintings in his Blue and Rose Periods the predominant color of “Guernica” is mostly black, which might symbols death. Picasso's Guernica is most likely influenced by Francisco de Goya, a Spanish artist who often painted war paintings. 1906 to 1909 was Picasso's African Period. During this period Picasso's Style which was strongly influenced by African sculpture and traditional African masks. “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” is an oil painting painted in 1907. "Demoiselles d'Avignon" was a name given by the French poet André Salmon. The painting was originally called "Le Bordel d'Avignon". The painting was influenced by Paul Cezanne's “The Bathers”. Picasso stroke out two men figures in the painting and only kept the five women figures. The reductionism and contortion of space in the painting was incredible, and dislocation of faces explosive. This painting exposed the true genius and novelty of Picasso's passion. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Three figures in the painting exhibit facial features in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the other two are shown with African mask features. Picasso's African Period laid a solid foundation for the Cubist revolution. Picasso made valuable contributions to art throughout his entire life. Pablo Picasso was born in a poor family in southern Spain. His father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. The family moved to A Coruna in 1891, because Picasso's father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. At the age of 7, Picasso’s father started to train him about sketch and painting. And during the trainings Picasso showed that he had thoroughly grasped naturalistic conventions at a very young age. In 1895, Picasso's 7 year old sister Conchita died of diphtheria. And Picasso was traumatized by her death. After some incomplete sessions of art school in Barcelona Bai 3 and Madrid, Picasso spent his adolescence associating with the group of Catalan modernists who gathered at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. From there he moved to Paris, where he quickly found likeminded poets and painters. His work began to attract serious critical attention and praise by the time he was twenty. His first mature work was around 1901, which is classified as his Blue Period. He painted anecdotal scenes of clowns, vagrants, and prostitutes, all in tones of blue. Important early works include his "Self- Portrait" (1901) and "La Vie" (1903). As the time moved forward, Picasso’s painting developed, and he met the right people in Paris. In 1904, he met Oliver a Bohemia model and they fell in love, and his Rose Period began. His subject matter remained much the same compare to his Blue Period, but his tones were warmer, rosier with orange and pink colors, and the atmosphere of his paintings was gayer. And Olivier appears in many of his Rose Period paintings. This is sometimes called Picasso's Rose Period, but really there was no marked technical change between this and the Blue Period. Picasso's African influenced Period was during 1907 to 1909 and formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows. During 1909 to 1912 Picasso and Georges Braque developed Cubism. Cubism is one of the most radical restructuring of the way that a work of art constructs its meaning. Cubism is a term that was derived from a reference made to geometric schemes and cubes. Cubism has been known as the first and the most influential of all movements in 20th century art. Before Picasso did any cubism paintings, there were works exhibiting a raw intensity and violence due to his reading of nonwestern art aligned with European primitivism. This contrasting position provided the dynamic for Picasso’s work. In his paintings such as Mother and Child, Picasso showed the fetishistic and simplifying aspects of primitivism. In his paintings Picasso used bright hues and subdued grays and earth colors. And he found out that shapes could have meaning and identities by their arrangement. Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France. And he was buried in the grounds of a châteauin the village of Vauvenargues in the south of France. But his contribution for art secured his immortality Bai 4 Pablo Picasso a genius artist in the 20th century, made tremendous contributions to art throughout his entire life. Throughout his life, he created hundreds and thousands of paintings with different styles, from Surrealist to neo-classical, shows that his artistic vitality transcends any one style. When people asked about the secret of his artistic creation, he replied "People don't realize what they have when they own a picture by me. Each picture is a phial with my blood. That is what has gone into it." Pablo Picasso is a real genius.