In 1897, Pablo was admitted as an advanced student to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid.
Career
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1904
Picasso, photographed by Ricard Canals.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1912
Villa les Clochettes, Sorgues, France
Picasso in front of his painting, "The Aficionado" (Kunstmuseum Basel), at Villa les Clochettes, summer of 1912.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1917
2 Rue Edouard Colonne, 75001 Paris, France
Pablo Picasso and scene painters, sitting on the front cloth for Léonide Massine's ballet "Parade", staged by Sergei Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes", at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1946
Pablo Picasso, holding a piece of sculpture. Photo by George Konig.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1948
al. Jerozolimskie 3, 00-495 Warsaw, Poland
Stanisław Lorentz guides Pablo Picasso through the National Museum in Warsaw in Poland during the exhibition, titled "Contemporary French Painters and Pablo Picasso's Ceramics".
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1950
Vallauris, France
Picasso in his studio in Vallauris, France.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1953
Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy
Pablo Picasso, photographed by Paolo Monti, during an exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1955
Cannes, France
Pablo Picasso in front of one of his paintings at home in Cannes. Photo by George Stroud.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1955
Cannes, France
Pablo Picasso in his villa "La Californie" in Cannes, on September 29, 1955. Photo by George Stroud.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
1962
Pablo Picasso
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso in his early years
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, standing in his studio, in the 1920's. Photo by Hulton Archive.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
Portrait of Pablo Picasso, smoking a cigarette, standing in front of his 1917 painting of his first wife, Olga. The photo was taken approximately in 1935.
Gallery of Pablo Picasso
Cannes, France
Pablo Picasso at his home in Cannes approximately in 1960.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples (later known as the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples)
International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples (later known as the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples)
International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples
International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples
Pablo Picasso and scene painters, sitting on the front cloth for Léonide Massine's ballet "Parade", staged by Sergei Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes", at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris.
Stanisław Lorentz guides Pablo Picasso through the National Museum in Warsaw in Poland during the exhibition, titled "Contemporary French Painters and Pablo Picasso's Ceramics".
Portrait of Pablo Picasso, smoking a cigarette, standing in front of his 1917 painting of his first wife, Olga. The photo was taken approximately in 1935.
Pablo Picasso was a notable Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and stage designer, who lived and worked in France for the most part of his adult life. Pablo was one of the most outstanding and most influential artists of the 20th century. Besides, he was a co-founder of Cubist movement.
Background
Ethnicity:
Picasso was of Spanish, Italian and Basque descent.
Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain, into a middle-class family. He was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. Don José Ruiz y Blasco was a painter, who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds. Besides, Ruiz held the post of a Professor of Art at the School of Crafts and that of a curator of a local museum. It's worth noting, that his ancestors were minor aristocrats.
Pablo had two sisters - Lola and Conchita, the latter of whom died of diphtheria at the age of 7.
Education
It was in 1891, that Pablo's family relocated to A Coruña, where his father, Don José Ruiz y Blasco, was appointed a Professor at the School of Fine Arts. They remained there almost four years. It was there, in A Coruña, that Pablo, at the age of 14, began studying at the School of Fine Art. Under the academic instruction of his father, he developed his artistic talent at an extraordinary rate.
In 1896, Pablo's family moved to Barcelona, where Picasso easily gained entrance to the School of Fine Arts. A year later, he was admitted as an advanced student to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid; he demonstrated his remarkable ability by completing in one day an entrance examination, for which an entire month was permitted.
However, Pablo found the atmosphere at the academy stifling and he soon left for Barcelona, where he began to study historical and contemporary art on his own. At that time, Barcelona was the most vital cultural center in Spain, and Picasso quickly joined the group of poets, painters and writers, who gathered at the famous café Quatre Gats.
During 1893, the juvenile quality of Pablo's earliest work falls away, and, by 1894, his career as a painter can be said to have begun. Despite being a teenager, he had the technique to appropriate any style and the insight to know, which styles were important.
In 1900, Picasso made his first visit to Paris, staying there for three months. In 1901, he made a second trip to Paris, and Ambroise Vollard gave him his first one-man exhibition. Although the show was not financially successful, it did arouse the interest of the writer Max Jacob, who subsequently became one of Picasso's closest friends and supporters. For the next three years, Picasso stayed alternately in Paris and Barcelona.
At the turn of the century, Paris was the center of the international art world. In painting it had spawned such masters, as Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Each of these artists practiced advanced, radical styles. In spite of obvious stylistic differences, their common denominator lay in testing the limits of traditional representation. While their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction. In effect, they implied, that painting need not be predicated upon the values of Renaissance illusionism.
Picasso emerged within this complicated and uncertain artistic situation in 1904, when he set up a permanent studio in an old building, called the Bateau Lavoir. There, he produced some of his most revolutionary works, and the studio soon became a gathering place for the city's vanguard artists, writers and patrons. This group included the painter Juan Gris, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire and the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein.
Picasso's early work reveals a creative pattern, which persisted throughout his long career. Between 1900 and 1906, he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary painting, from Impressionism to Art Nouveau. In doing so, his own work changed with unprecedented quickness, revealing a spectrum of feelings, that would seem to lie beyond the limits of one human being. In itself this accomplishment was a mark of Picasso's genius.
The "Moulin de la Galette" (1900), the first painting Picasso executed in Paris, presents a scene of urban café society. With its acrid colors and sharp, angular figures, the work exudes a sinister, discomforting aura. The rawness of its sensibility, although not its superficial style, is characteristic of many of his earliest works.
Historians have separated Picasso's works into different periods. As such, from 1901 until 1904, was the Blue period. Just as the name depicts, most of his works were marked by sombre paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only intermittently having shades of other colors. He applied various techniques during this period, starting from the blurred technique to Divisionism and Expressionism. The subject he chose ranged from poverty and isolation to anguish and melancholy. Some of his famous paintings of this period include "Blue Nude", "La Vie" and "The Old Guitarist".
In the second half of 1904, Picasso's style exhibited a new direction. For about a year, he worked on a series of pictures, featuring harlequins, acrobats and other circus performers. The most celebrated example is the "Family of Saltimbanques" (1905). Feeling, as well as subject matter, has shifted here. The brooding depression of the Blue Period has given way to a quiet and unoppressive melancholy, and the color has become more natural, delicate and tender in its range, with a prevalence of reddish and pink tones. Thus, this period was called his Pink Period.
In terms of space, Picasso's work between 1900 and 1905 was generally flat, emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the painting surface. Late in 1905, however, he became increasingly interested in pictorial volume. This interest seems to have been stimulated by the late paintings of Cézanne, ten of which were shown in the 1905 Salon d'Automne. In Picasso's "Boy Leading a Horse" (1905) and "Woman with Loaves" (1906) the figures are vigorously modeled, giving a strong impression of their weight and three-dimensionality. The same interest pervades the famous "Portrait of Gertrude Stein" (1906), particularly in the massive body of the figure. But the face of the sitter reveals still another new interest: its mask-like abstraction was inspired by Iberian sculpture, an exhibition of which Picasso had seen at the Louvre in the spring of 1906. This influence reached its fullest expression a year later in one of the most revolutionary pictures of Picasso's entire career, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907).
"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is generally regarded as the first cubist painting. Under the influence of Cézanne, Iberian sculpture and African sculpture (which Picasso first saw in Paris in 1907), the artist launched a pictorial style more radical, than anything he had produced up to that date. The human figures and their surrounding space are reduced to a series of broad, intersecting planes, which align themselves with the picture surface and imply a multiple, dissected view of the visible world. The faces of the figures are seen simultaneously from frontal and profile positions, and their bodies are likewise forced to submit to Picasso's new and radically abstract pictorial language.
Paradoxically, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" was not exhibited in public until 1937. Very possibly the picture was as problematic for Picasso as it was for his circle of friends and fellow artists, who were shocked, when they viewed it in his Bateau Lavoir studio. Even Georges Braque, who, by 1908, had become Picasso's closest colleague in the cubist enterprise, at first said, that "to paint in such a way was as bad as drinking petrol in the hope of spitting fire". Nevertheless, Picasso relentlessly pursued the implications of his own revolutionary invention. Between 1907 and 1911, he continued to dissect the visible world into increasingly small facets of monochromatic planes of space. In doing so, his works became more and more abstract; that is, representation gradually vanished from the painting medium, which correspondingly became an end in itself - for the first time in the history of Western art.
The evolution of this process is evident in all of Picasso's work between 1907 and 1911. Some of the most outstanding pictorial examples of the development are "Fruit Dish" (1909), "Portrait of Ambroise Vollard" (1910) and "Ma Jolie" (also known as "Woman with a Guitar", 1911-1912).
About 1911, Picasso and Braque began to introduce letters and scraps of newspapers into their cubist paintings, thus giving birth to an entirely new medium, the cubist collage. Picasso's first, and probably his most celebrated, collage is "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1911-1912). The oval composition combines a cubist analysis of a lemon and a wineglass, letters from the world of literature and a piece of oilcloth, that imitates a section of chair caning; finally, it is framed with a piece of actual rope.
After his experiments in the new medium of collage, Picasso returned more intensively to painting. His work between 1912 and 1921 is generally regarded as the synthetic phase of the cubist development. The masterpiece of this style is the "Three Musicians" (1921). In this painting Picasso used the flat planes of his earlier style in order to reconstruct an impression of the visible world. The planes themselves had become broader and more simplified and they exploited color to a far greater extent, than did the work of 1907-1911. In its richness of feeling and balance of formal elements, the "Three Musicians" represents a classical expression of cubism.
Despite the fact, that the invention of Cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of 20th-century art, his activities as an artist were not limited to this alone. As early as the first decade of the century, he involved himself with both sculpture and printmaking, two media, which he continued to practice throughout his long career and to which he made numerous important contributions. Besides, he worked in ceramics from time to time and in the environment of the theater. For example, in 1917, he designed sets for the Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau's ballet "Parade"; in 1920, he sketched a theater interior for Igor Stravinsky's "Pulcinella"; and in 1924, he designed a curtain for the performance of "Le Train Bleu" by Jean Cocteau and Darius Milhaud. In short, the range of his activities exceeded that of any artist, who worked in the modern period.
In painting, even the development of cubism fails to define Picasso's genius. About 1915, and again in the early 1920's, he turned away from abstraction and produced drawings and paintings in a realistic and serenely beautiful classical idiom. One of the most famous of these works is the "Woman in White" (1923). Painted just two years after the "Three Musicians", the quiet and unobtrusive elegance of this masterpiece testifies to the ease, with which Picasso could express himself in pictorial languages, that seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive.
By the late 1920's and the early 1930's, Surrealism had in many ways eclipsed Cubism as the vanguard style of European painting. Launched by André Breton in Paris in 1924, the movement was not one, to which Picasso was ever an "official" contributor in terms of group exhibitions or the signing of manifestos. But his work during these years reveals many attitudes in sympathy with the surrealist sensibility. For instance, in his famous "Girl before a Mirror" (1932), he employed the colorful planes of Synthetic Cubism to explore the relationship between a young woman's image and self-image as she regards herself before a conventional looking glass. As the configurations shift between the figure and the mirror image, they reveal the complexity of emotional and psychological energies, that prevail on the darker side of human experience.
"Guernica" (1937) is another of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the 1930's. The artist's deep feelings about the work and about the massacre, which inspired it, are reflected in the fact, that he completed the work, that is more than 25 feet wide and 11 feet high, within six or seven weeks. "Guernica" is an extraordinary monument within the history of modern art. Executed entirely in black, white and gray, it projects an image of pain, suffering and brutality, that has few parallels among advanced paintings of the 20th century. No artist except Picasso was able to apply convincingly the pictorial language of Cubism to a subject, that springs directly from social and political awareness. That he could so overtly challenge the abstractionist trend, that he personally began, is another mark of his uniqueness.
After World War II, Picasso was established as one of the Old Masters of modern art. But his work never paused. In the 1950's and 1960's, he devoted his energies to other Old Masters, producing paintings, based on the masterpieces of Nicolas Poussin and Diego Velázquez. To many critics and historians, these recent works are not as ambitious as Picasso's earlier productions.
Picasso kept busy all of his life and was planning an exhibit of 201 of his works at the Avignon Arts Festival in France, when he died.
Profile of a Young Girl (Girl with Red Flower in Her Hair)
Seated Woman in Green
Self-Portrait
Still Life (The Dessert)
The Absinthe Drinker
The Corrida
The Death of Casagemas
The 'Divan Japonais'
The Greedy
The Pool of Tuileries
The Sun King
Woman at a Fountain
Religion
Though baptized a Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist.
Politics
Soon after hostilities of the Spanish Civil War began, the Republicans appointed Picasso "director of the Prado, albeit in absentia", and "he took his duties very seriously", according to John Richardson, supplying the funds to evacuate the museum's collection to Geneva. The war stimulated the painter to create his first overtly political work. He expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco and fascists in "The Dream and Lie of Franco" (1937), which was produced "specifically for propagandistic and fundraising purposes".
It was after World War II, that Picasso came out publicly as a communist. In 1944, he joined the French Communist Party and attended the International Peace Conference in Poland. When he was asked why he was a communist in 1947, he said: "When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and aware of how poor people had to live. I learned, that the communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the communists."
Sometimes, the communist cause was not as keen on Picasso as Picasso was about being a communist. A 1953 portrait he painted of Joseph Stalin, the then recently deceased Soviet leader, caused a clamor in the Party's leadership. The Soviet government banished his works from their nation after having them locked in the basement of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Picasso appeared amused at this and continued on unaffected. Despite the fact, that the Communist Party criticized his portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic and this criticism cooled Picasso's interest in Soviet politics, he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death.
Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the 1939 victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he gave 800 to 900 of his earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona. For his part, Franco's feelings about Picasso were reciprocated. In 1963, Picasso's friend, Jaime Sabartés, gave 400 works from his "Picasso" collection to Barcelona. To display these works, the Palacio Aguilar was renamed the Picasso Museum and the works were moved inside. But because of Franco's dislike for Picasso, Picasso's name never appeared on the museum.
It's also worth noting, that, in 1940, Picasso applied for French citizenship, but it was refused on the grounds of his "extremist ideas, evolving towards communism". This information was not revealed until 2003.
It's important to say, that Picasso was a pacifist. His outcry for peace was expressed in large-scale painting, "Guernica" (1937), created after the German bombing of this Spanish city. This powerful composition, showing the brutal inhumanity of war, became his most famous work and turned him into a political celebrity.
Views
In his paintings, Picasso used colour as an expressive element, but relied on drawing, rather than subtleties of colour, to create form and space. From the beginning of his career, Picasso displayed an interest in subject matter of every kind and demonstrated a great stylistic versatility, that enabled him to work in several styles at once. Picasso never relinquished the objects of the real world as subject matter.
Quotations:
"Everything you can imagine is real."
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
"Art is the lie, that enables us to realize the truth."
"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."
"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die, having left undone."
"The chief enemy of creativity is good sense."
"It takes a very long time to become young."
"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."
"Bad artists copy. Good artists steal."
"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
"I do not seek. I find."
Personality
Picasso was a famously charismatic personality. His many relationships with women not only filtered into his art, but also may have directed its course, and his behavior has come to embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.
Pablo is the subject of the songs "Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)" by Wings, "Pablo Picasso" by Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers and "Picasso and Me" by Gretchen Peters (which is written from the point of view of Picasso's cat). He is also mentioned in the song "Big Wedge" by former Marillion singer Fish (a UK Top 40 single in 1990) and Jay-Z's "Friend or Foe" from his 1996 debut album "Reasonable Doubt".
The British rock star, David Bowie, was nicknamed "The Picasso of Pop" because of the similarity between his influence on pop music and Picasso's influence on the art world.
Physical Characteristics:
Pablo was 1,63 m tall.
Interests
Artists
El Greco
Connections
A lifelong womanizer, Picasso had countless relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, muses and prostitutes. During his lifetime, he was married only twice and had four children with three women. Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballet dancer of noble descent, was his first wife, whom he married in 1918. The two separated their ways in 1927, but not before being blessed with a son, Paulo. However, they were not legally divorced and the marriage ended only in 1955 after Khokhlova's death.
While being married to Khokhlova, Pablo began a long-term relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter. Their relationship produced a daughter, Maya. Walter committed suicide after Picasso's death.
In 1961, at the age of 79, Pablo married his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, who was also his muse.
Between marriages, in 1935, Picasso met Dora Maar, a fellow artist, on the set of Jean Renoir's film, "Le Crime de Monsieur Lange", released in 1936. The two soon embarked upon a partnership, that was both romantic and professional. Their relationship lasted more, than a decade, during and after which Maar struggled with depression. The two parted ways in 1946, three years after Picasso began having an affair with a woman, named Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two children - son Claude and daughter Paloma. The couple went separate ways in 1953.
In his early years, Pablo was also romantically inloved with such women, as Eva Gouel and Fernande Olivier.
Pablo Picasso: Meet the Artist
"Pablo Picasso: Meet the Artist" takes young readers on an interactive journey through the remarkable life of the legendary Spanish painter. This engaging book uses a multitude of lift-the-flaps, cutouts and pull tabs to explain how his art evolved over his lifetime - from his earliest painting at age seven to the great masterworks of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and "Guernica".
Picasso and the Painting, That Shocked the World
This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is filled with heartbreak and triumph, despair and delirium, all of it played out against the backdrop of the world's most captivating city.
A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906
As he magnificently combines meticulous scholarship with irresistible narrative appeal, Richardson draws on his close friendship with Picasso, his own diaries, the collaboration of Picasso's widow Jacqueline and unprecedented access to Picasso's studio and papers to arrive at a profound understanding of the artist and his work.
1991
Pablo Picasso
This book, written by Hajo Düchting, not only provides a solid background on Picasso's monumental body of work, but also offers entertaining anecdotes, historical context and a fresh perspective on an enigmatic and endlessly compelling figure.
International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples (later known as the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples),
USSR