Biography of Picasso
Pablo Picasso was born October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain,
the son of Jose Ruiz Blasco, and art teacher, and Maria Picasso y Lopez.
His talent was manifested early in his life-he was already painting by age 10, and by
age 15, had gained admittance to Barcelona's School of Fine Arts. After two years,
he transferred to a school in Madrid.
In 1901, after winning prizes for
various works (Science and Charity, 1897, Customs of Aragon, 1898), Picasso
set up a studio in Montmartre. Before this time, he had always been signings his paintings
using both his mother's (Picasso) and father's (Ruiz) names but now he changed, and from 1901
on, he used only Picasso to sign art. By now, Picasso was a master of the traditional forms
of art, and was employing the neo-Impressionist ideas of the schools of Degas, Vuillard,
and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Picasso's Blue Period was from 1901-1904.
This was a period of mourning for Picasso, over his dead friend,
Casamegas, who had committed suicide over a lost lover. During this period of Picasso's
painting, he used the color blue, in different shades, uniformly in all of his paintings,
thus the name of the period. His paintings expressed human misery and sadness, and were
dominated by blind figures, alchoholics, prostitutes, beggars, and the miserable. The period was
culminated with the painting of
La Vie, and was followed by the start of the
Rose Period.
In the Rose
Period(1904-1906), Picasso recovered from the misery of the blue period with bright colors,
and happy subject matter. During this time, Picasso met Fernande Olivier, with whom he started a
relationship. She would be his inspiration and model for many works in the coming years.
In the years to come, Picasso began a journey into what would eventually evolve
into Cubism with the Protocubism movement. In Protocubism, Picasso destroyed spatial
depth, and began making "flatter" looking images. This is illustrated in
Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, and in
Self Portrait with Palette, 1906.
Picasso's Analytic Cubism movement
began in 1908, when he was inspired by the volumetric treatment of form by Cezanne. Along with
French artist George Braque, Picasso painted in a style described by a critic as being made up of
"little cubes". From this came the term, Cubism. In Analytic Cubism, Picasso and Braque were concerned
with the breaking down and analysis of forms. They used mostly monichromatic schemes in their
representations of radically fragmented scenes, showing several sides of the image simultaneously.
An example of this is Houses on the Hill
, 1909.
Picasso marked the change into the second stage of Cubism, Synthetic
Cubism in 1912, with the creation of his first collage, Still Life with Clair Caning.
This stage of Cubism was characterized by a wider usage of color and decoration, although shapes
in the paintings remained flat and fragmented. Picasso also created several Cubist sculptures,
like Head of a Woman, 1909,along with various constructions made from different materials.
During World War I, Picasso went to Rome, where he met his wife to be, Olga
Kokhloven. During the early 1920's, Picasso created tranquil, neoclassical pictures featuring heavy figures,
along with works inspired by mythology. In the early 1930's, Picasso met Marie Therese, who bore him a daughter, Maya, in
1935. Marie had an affect on some of Picasso's paintings during this time, lending to them sweeping
curves and expressing an underlying eroticism. In 1935, Picasso produced a major work,
Minotauromachy, which combined the imagery of a bullfight along with a minotaur; many call this
mural the single most important work of the 20th century.
In 1937, Picasso was commisioned by the Spanish government
to produce a mural about the Spanish Civil War. Picasso produced a rendition of the bombed out town of
Guernica, in which he used symbols
and imagery to portray the horrors of war. It is considered by many to be one of Picasso's
most dominant and signifigant works.
During World War II, Picasso's works took on a
more somber tone, featuring death many times as the main subject. Picasso spent most of this time in Paris,
and after the war ended, he joined the Communist party.
As a special honor to him, on
his 90th birthday, many of Picasso's works were displayed in the Louvre, Paris. This was the first time that a living artists
works had been hung in the famous museum. During his later years, he worked with all manner of media to produce art,
welding, and poetry. Working til the end, he produce dover 20,000 works during his lifetime.
Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 92, in his villa near Mougins, France.
Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973
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