Biography of Pablo Picasso | The great Spanish painter revolutionized all the art forms of the 20th century
Biography of Pablo Picasso
The great Spanish painter revolutionized all the art forms of the 20th century and was able to maintain its historical and social commitment.
Outstanding figure
as an artist and as a man, Picasso was actor and inimitable creator of
the various currents that revolutionized the art of the 20th century,
from Cubism to neofigurativa sculpture, engraving or etching to craft
ceramics or the scenery for ballets. His
vast work in number, variety and talent, stretches more than
seventy-five years of creative activity, which the painter he wisely
combined with love, politics, friendship and an exultant and contagious
enjoyment of life.
Pablo Picasso
Famous since youth,
admired and requested by the famous and powerful, was essentially a
Spanish easy, healthy and generous, endowed with a formidable ability to
work, in love with the Bohemian neighbourhoods of Paris, the
Mediterranean sun, of the bulls, the ordinary people and beautiful
women, hobby which grew without fainting.
Pablo Diego José Ruiz
Picasso, then known by her maiden name, was born on October 25, 1881, in
the No. 36 of the plaza de la Merced in Malaga, as eldest son of the
marriage formed by the Basque painter José Ruiz Blasco and the
Andalusian María Picasso López. The father was a Professor of drawing at the Provincial School of Arts and crafts, known as school San Telmo. Early
childhood of Pablo passed between the economic difficulties of the
family and a close relationship between father and son, both grown with
devotion. The child was one school less than
discreet, very lazy and very distracted, but with early facility for
drawing, which don José stimulated.
In 1891 the family moved to La Coruna, at the Instituto da Guarda are required the services of the father as a teacher. Paul
started his pictorial essays, and three years later his father and
first teacher gives his own brushes and easels, admired to the talent of
his son. In 1895, Ruiz Blasco obtains an as teacher at the Escola d'Arts i Oficis de la Llotja in Barcelona. Paul resolves to one day test exercises planned for one month, and is admitted to the school. In 1896, only fifteen years, installed its first workshop in the Silver Street of Barcelona.
Two years later, obtained an honorable mention at the great exhibition in Madrid for his work science and charity, still an academic realism, in which the father has served as a model for the figure of a physician. The
distinction stimulates it to render opposition to the course in advance
at the Academia de San Fernando, while his works, influenced by El
Greco and Toulouse-Lautrec, earn new medals in Madrid and Malaga.
In 1898 made his first individual exhibition in Els Quatre Gats of Barcelona. Finally, in the autumn of the year 1900 makes a visit to Paris to see the Universal exhibition. There sells three drawings to the art dealer Petrus Mañach, who offers 150 francs monthly to all his work for one year. Paul is a professional artist, and decides to sign only with the maternal surname. In
1901 he co-edits in Madrid the ephemeral art young magazine, and in
March traveled again to Paris, where he met Max Jacob and begins what
will be then called his 'blue period'. The
following year he exhibited his first Parisian exhibition at the Berthe
Weill Gallery, and in 1904 decided to move permanently to the French
capital.
Picasso and Miró in the Spanish Pavilion
the international fair of Paris (1917)
Picasso is installed at the
famous Bateau-Lavoir, number 13 of the street Ravignan (today plaza
Hodeau), variously shared accommodation for artists without white, among
others the also Spanish Juan Gris. There, Paul locks friendship with Braque, Apollinaire, and falls in love with Fernanda Olivier. Three
years paints and draws without ceasing, yielded to the influence of
Cézanne, while made with Braque guidelines of analytical Cubism, whose
great experimental work, the young ladies of Avignon, is painted by Picasso in 1907.
Soon ensues the
astonishment and the scandal before a deformed style that breaks all the
canons and is gaining new adherents, while his bold inventor exhibited
in Munich (1909) and New York (1911). Paul has
found a new partner in Marcelle Humbert, and always followed by Braque,
cast to invent synthetic Cubism, which brings them to the edge of
abstraction (in his extensive and diverse work, Picasso never would
leave the figuration). Soon after, it moves from Montmartre to Montparnasse, and opens his exhibitions in London and Barcelona.
In 1914, with war, become tragedies: Braque and Apollinaire are mobilized, and Marcelle died suddenly this autumn. Paul leaves practically Cubism, and seeks other artistic paths. They are found in 1917, when by Jean Cocteau met Diaghilev, he entrusts him the decorations of the ballet Parade of Eric Satie. The
end of the war brings you a new love, the dancer Olga Clochlova, and
also a new headache: the death of Apollinaire resulted from a serious
wound in the head. He married Olga in 1918, and until 1925 works in various ballets that runway to its pictorial evolution.
An old portrait of her
mother, painted in 1918, will be worth to him the millionaire award
Carnegie of 1930, which allows you to purchase a grand country villa in
Boisgelup, and passed more than one year traveling in Spain. Then he returned to sculpture and has an affair with Teresa Walter, he was born their first daughter, Maya. The Clochlova starts a scandalous trial to get the divorce, which the judge refuses to grant. Jilted, Picasso falls for Dora Maar.
At the outbreak of the
Civil War, Picasso supports firmly the Republican side, and symbolically
accepted the direction of the Prado Museum, while in 1937 painting Guernica in Paris. Two years later is a great anthological exhibition at the Museum of modern art in New York. Depressed
by the triumph of the national and the subsequent occupation of France
by the nazis, passes most of the second world war working on their
refuge of Royan.
In 1944, he joined the French Communist Party and unveils 77 new works in the Salon d'Automne. After it gets excited by lithography and the young and beautiful painter Françoise Guillot, live with that until 1946. Thus begins their stage of Vallauris, where he works on his magnificent ceramics. With Françoise have two children: Claude, born in 1947, and Paloma in 1949.
In 1954, the indefatigable
old man is fascinated by a mysterious teenage girl of delicate profile
and long blond hair named Sylvette D., who agrees to pose for him in
Exchange for one of the portraits, your choice. Complies
with the treatment and its result produces some of the works most known
and reproduced the painter, as the famous profile of Sylvette in green
armchair.
If the fascination with the
Ethereal Sylvette had been Platonic, did not have the same complexion
their attraction by Jacqueline Roqué, young of extraordinary beauty
which took as a partner in 1957, a year before painting the gigantic
mural for UNESCO. Fertile miracle of art and life, Picasso will continue creating, loving, working and living intensely to death in 1973. He
left after of the largest and richest personal artistic work of our
century, and a fabulous heritage that led to bitter disputes to be a
being of Pacific name: Dove, her daughter.
Timeline of Pablo Picasso
1881 | Born in Málaga. |
1895 | He moved with his family to Barcelona. |
1898 | First solo exhibition at Els Quatre Gats, in Barcelona. |
1900 | First trip to Paris. |
1901 | Starts the blue period, so called by the predominance of the shades of blue and characterized by its pessimistic sign theme: human misery and marginalization are represented with slightly elongated figures. |
1904 | He settled definitely in Paris. The pink, more vital, period in which predominates the thematic circus begins. |
1907 | PT Les demoiselles d'Avignon, so revolutionary conception that the box is rejected even by painters and art critics. |
1908 | First Cubist paintings. |
1912 | First Papiers collés or collages. |
1925 | Although he never joined the surrealist movement, there are the first signs of the influence of this current in his works. |
1931 | He works on his first sculptures. |
1937 | The Guernicapainting, mural inspired by the bombing of this Basque city, for which outlined more than 60 preparatory sketches. |
1944 | It joins the French Communist Party. |
1946 | He began a stage dedicated to ceramics. |
1958 | He paints the mural the fall of Icarus for the building of the Unesco, in Paris. |
1961 | Installed in Mougins. |
1973 | Died in Mougins. |
Works by Pablo Picasso
The Spanish painter Pablo
Picasso summarizes all changes and the scientific, social and symbolic
meanings of the pictorial art of the 20th century. It is the key to painting and in general of the art of our time. They
are obvious morphological contributions, the revolution of forms in his
work, but more significant is its relationship with society and the
time in which they lived. On the first aspect, is the representative figure from Cubism; in the second, one of the peaks of expressionism, while it will never appear between their groups and will act independently.
Portrait of Picasso (1906)
His stylistic and thematic
evolution draws an exciting itinerary, which amazes the diversity of
records, multiple possibilities the pictorial language has to portray to
society or the problems of an era.
Blue and pink stages
Its early stages correspond to the figurative art. In the so-called Blue period
dominates a pathetic sentiment, expressed with a single colour which
was possibly inspired by ideas discussed in the tertulia modernist
Barcelona of "Els Quatre Gats". Installed in Paris, leaned decidedly by blue monochrome to highlight the melody lines in a sample of mourners characters. The
Picasso of twenty years seems moved by the suffering and portrays a
world of beggars and blind of emaciated bodies and heads due.
In the next stage, the rose period, gradually combines the friendlier tones to capture the world of the circus with its jugglers and acrobats. If you compare the frugal meal
of the blue period portraits or scenes from circus to the rose period,
are perceived, beyond the differences between sympathetic sadness and a
certain serenity accepted, deepening in the observation of the man and
the social environments. His life in the Parisian
"Bateau Lavoir" had the same intensity as the Barcelona modernist
cenacles, and those experiences were carried to the fabric.
Cubism
Picasso would happen within a few years of expressive forms at the level of symbolic forms. The revolution began with Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), manifesto of the art of the 20th century, whose gestation Picasso demanded a months work. Several
notebooks of notes and changes in the composition and the figures led
to the women's group, where human corporeality and the faces were
intensified through deformation.
The influence of African
art and the legacy of Iberian art led Picasso to rehearse this new
Anatomy full of omens terrible, as if it buceara not yet explored levels
of human reality. It was the manifesto of
cubism, running that would occupy the painter activity during ten years,
although its geometric conquests disappearing in all subsequent
production.
Classicism, surrealism, expressionism
The drama of the Cubist figures chimed perfectly with the disasters of the war. At the end of the war, Picasso, without abandoning Cubism (as seen in three musicians
of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, from 1923), starts the stage
called Classicist, characterized by the representation of the movement
in the sets for the ballets Russes of Diaghilev.
Three musicians
1925 changed the theme and some authors speak of surrealistic phase. Indeed, in some works seem to approaching trials of dream-like representation. Not
hiding his analytical pupil threatening phenomena, including the rise
of fascism, but on the other hand I knew that most of the inhabitants of
the cities lived in degraded environments. To express the experiences of fear or insecurity towards the future starts deformations that characterized to expressionism. It
is the period of the metamorphoses, based first in curves and ellipses
soothing, then angles and energetic strokes that translate a tormented
spirit.
The climax of expressionist tension will be reached during the Spanish civil war. Guernica is, rather than a specific scene, a symbol, which is waived to colour and chromatic range is reduced to a kind of grisaille. The flames, the Warrior died with the flower in his hand, the wounded horse, are symbols of the pain of the war. Sat figures express the pain as a snarl. And a scream, more than one articulated Word, come to witness this work.
During World War II insists dramatic issues, such as steer skull
(1942), combining the pain of war in the occupied France and which the
artist feels for the death of his friend, the sculptor Julio González. After the war begins a period of calm in the Picasso art. It is time the pigeons and the balconies open to the blue of the Mediterranean. Although the war of Korea put a parenthesis to these idyllic views with new testimonies about the cruelty and suffering.
To rise to the occasion
Clear is the historical dimension in the work of the great Spanish painter; because its goal is not coded in search of beauty but in testifying and clarify the major social processes. Well
said once: "the artist works on himself and his time, working to give
clarity to his conscience and his contemporaries of himself and of his
time". The harmonious form of other centuries of art reflected a harmonic conception of man; torn Picasso shape translates the suffering of the people of our time.
In the midst of their
symbols and their unceasing renewal, it is possible to detect a
constant, the sensitivity for the time, reflected in the alternating
periods of calm and dramatic. But at all times kept alive Picasso his painful obsession with the man who suffers. From
the blue blind to the cries of the expressionist paintings is constant
compassionate meditation on the artist on his contemporaries.