NAVIGATIONALL ARTISTS
Pablo
Ruiz Picasso (October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973) was a Spanish
painter and sculptor. Known for cubism, the style he helped create, his
art is some of the most well known of the 20th Century. Picasso’s
work spans over seven decades and thousands of pieces. He is one of the
most prolific and influential artists of the 20th century.
Picasso's father, Jose Ruíz, was also an artist from whom the young
Picasso received his first art training. Pablo attended the carpenter
schools at which his father taught and as an early teen passed the entrance
exam to the School of Fine Arts with ease. Though he studied at Academia
de San Fernando in Madrid, he did not finish – leaving before completing
even one year. He was a rebellious youth and moved back and forth between
Barcelona and Paris several times between the years 1899 and 1904.
These years also represent his first “period”, the Blue Period,
and a time when the young Picasso ceased to sign his full name choosing
instead to sign his work only “Picasso”. The Blue
Period (1901 – 1904) is characterized by images containing shades
of blue and a feeling of melancholy and despair presumably caused by the
recent death of a friend. Paintings such as “The
Old Guitarist” and “The
Tragedy” with their gaunt and miserable subjects make for powerful
pieces.
The Blue Period gave way to
the Rose Period with its more cheerful subject matter and soon Picasso
was experimenting with what would become cubism along with fellow artist
and creator Georges Braque, a French painter and sculptor. Cubism, an
important abstract art movement in the early 1900s, attempts to show the
subject matter from many viewpoints using an abstracted form and random
angles. His works “Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon”, one of his earliest cubist pieces and
arguably one of the best, is a fantastic example of the artistic genre.
Pablo Picasso’s work stretches across many decades and he continued
his work well into old age. In the 1950s, nearing his seventies, he changed
his style and began to interpret the works of some of the master artists
including Manet and Delacroix. At the age of 85, he created a maquette
or bozzetto (a small scale model) of a huge sculpture for the city of
Chicago unveiled in 1967. In the last years of his life, ever changing
his style, he became even more prolific creating 100s of images through
paintings and etchings. Even in the end, Picasso was ahead of his time.
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. - Pablo Ruiz Picasso
