Pablo Picasso

Posted by Winnie Melda on February 21st, 2019

Pablo Picasso was a painter, sculptor, ceramist, printmaker, playwright, poet, and stage designer, who lived between 1881 and 1973. He was a renowned artist of the nineteenth century, and he is known for taking part in founding the Cubist movement, the co-invention of collage, the invention of the constructed sculpture, and many styles that he aided in developing during his artistic life (The Met Museum, 2000). The few of the famous works developed by this artist include the proto-Cubist Les demoiselle’s d’Avignon, and Guernica, a portrayal of Guernica’s bombing by the Italian and Italian troops at the behest of the Spanish government during the civil war of Spain.

Picasso exhibited an extraordinary talent I art in his early years as he painted in a naturalistic way via his childhood and adolescence.  Picasso’s artistic work has affected the development of modern as well as contemporary art with a high magnitude. He managed to produce over 20,000 items including painting, drawings, ceramics, theater sets, costumes, and sculptures that portray a myriad of social, intellectual, political, and amorous messages (Fernández Granell, 1981).  The creative styles of this artist transcend abstraction and realism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Neoclassicism.  He studied art briefly bin Madrid in the year 1897 and Barcelona in the year 1899 where he started taking part in a group of modernist writers, poets, and artists who collected art at The Four Cats, as the Catalan Carlos Casagemas.  During the first ten or so years of the 20th century, Picasso changed his style as he started experimenting with a variety of theories, techniques, and ideas.

While living in Paris and Spain, Picasso’s work during those years suggests the feeling of darkness and desolation inspired partly by the suicide of Casagemas, who was his intimate friend (Mallén & Inglada, 2009). His paintings from 1901 onwards to about 1904 referred to as the Blue Period depicted the themes of poverty, despair, and loneliness.  From 1903, referred to as The Blind Man’s Meal, Picasso leveraged a dismal range of the blue color to sensitively produce a lonely figure exhibiting his condition whereby he holds a crust of bread with one hand and then awkwardly grasping a pitcher with the other hand. His paintings of the corkscrew and elongated bodies inspired the distorted figures of man.

Picasso was motivated in 1906 by the work of Henri Matisse, and he then started to explore radical styles, initiating a rivalry between the two artists who in the end were paired by critics as the pioneers of modern art.   Picasso’s work has been categorized into periods. The most commonly accepted periods of his work include the Blue Period, the Rose Period, the African-influenced Period, Analytic Cubism, and Synthetic Cubism, also called Crystal Period.  Much of his work accomplished between 1910 and 1920 is mainly in neoclassical style, while the one accomplished in the mid-1920s falls under the Surrealism.  Picasso was distinctly prolific throughout his long life, and he achieved a universal recognition and immense fortune that saw him become one of the bets artists and public figures of the 20th century.

While Picasso moved to and settled in Paris in the year 1904, he was inspired by the bohemian poets, writers like Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob. That made Picasso direct his attention towards the development of more pleasant themes like carnival performers, clowns, and harlequins.  His painting seemed to use his image for the harlequin figure as he also abandoned the daunting blues to more vivid hues such as red, to celebrate the lives of the circus performers. At the Steins, Picasso met other artists who were living and working therein such as Henri Matisse.  He concentrated on intuition instead of strict observation, and he was dissatisfied with the way Stein’s face appeared thus reworking her image into something looking like a mask.  He was also influenced by the African and Oceanic art, and that is evident in his masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a painting that forms the basis of the nascent phases of Cubism.

By the early 1930s, Picasso turned to sinuous contours and harmonious colors that evoked the overall biomorphic sensuality.  He started painting the scenes of women showing dropping heads a striking voluptuousness that showed renewed optimism as well as liberty.  In this work, a young woman, known as Marie-Therese Walter, must have probably inspired him. His work of 1934, Girl Reading at a Table utilizes expressive qualities of gentle curves and gentle colors to show Marie-Terassie sitting at oversized tables, attempting to insinuate the youth and innocence (McCully, 2016).  Even though he was living in France, he was deeply distraught concerning the outbreak of the Spanish war of 1936. He responded with powerful emotive series of pictures like The Dream and Life of Franco that lead to the enormous mural Guernica.  That painting was Picasso’s contribution to the Spanish Pavilion during the Exposition Universal in Paris

In the late 1940s, Picasso’s creative imagination waned. He continues to paint and Music Ceramics.  The international fame of Picasso increased because of the large exhibitions that he did in Landon, Paris, and Venice, as well as in the Tokyo, Japan in 1951and in Lyon, Milan, Sao Paulo, and in Rome, 1953. The museum in the New York City where over 100,000 works of art were displayed received numerous visitors for the first month after it was established in the year 1957 (Mallén & Inglada, 2009). That kind of exhibition helped to solidify the prominence of the museum as well as the private connections in the US, Europe, and Japan which also vied to get Picasso’s works.  Even in his late 90s, he continued to produce an enormous number of artworks and him, in turn, reaped the financial benefits for his works, amassing a personal fortune as well as a superb collection of his art, and the work of other artists.

In contrast to the complexity of Synthetic Cubism, the later paintings of Picasso displayed simple and childlike imagery that were an outcome of a crude technique (Wattenmaker, 1993). Picasso one time remarked upon passing some school kids in during his old age, “I had the ability to draw even when I was as young as these kids; I could draw like Raphael although it had to take me a lifetime to practice drawing them.” There is an epitome he created for his later work entitled, “Self Portrait Facing Death,” where he used a crayon and a pencil, one year before his death (Mallén & Inglada, 2009).  That autobiographical theme was drawn from a crude technique and seems like something between a human being and an ape that has a green face and a pick hair. Nevertheless, the expression in his eyes captured the wisdom, uncertainty, and fear of his life and it is an unmistakable work of an expert at the peak of his powers.

Even in his later years, Picasso continued with his artistic work and ambitious schedule superstitiously believing that this work would keep him alive. He later died in 1973 in Mougins, France having reached an age of 91 years.  However, his legacy has endured even long after his death. Needless to say, Pablo Picasso is none of the most celebrated artists and one of the most influential painters in the history of the 19th century because of his mastery, creativity, and profound empathy. These are qualities that can single him out as a revolutionary artist.  He is also remembered for endlessly reinventing himself, shifting between different styles that his works appear to be the outcome of five or six of the greatest artists instead of just one (Aix, 1994).

Of Picasso’s penchant styles of diversity, he emphasized that his varied work did not indicate radical changes throughout his career, but, instead, it indicates a dedication for objectively assessing for every piece the form and the approach that was most appropriate to achieve the desired effect. He says, (Whenever I wanted to speak something, I had to say it bets way I believed I should.” “Doubtless, different themes call for the application of different styles of expression. That does not evolution or progress; it is about following a concept one wants to express and the manner in which he wants to express it“(Biography.com, 2017).

References

Biography.com. Pablo Picasso, 2017. Retrieved on April 26,2017. 

Fernández Granell, Eugenio. Picasso's Guernica: the end of a Spanish era. Michigan: Umi Research Press, 1981.

Mallén, Enrique, and Rafael Inglada. A Concordance of Pablo Picasso's Spanish Writings. Edwin Mellen Press, 2009.

McCully, Marilyn. Pablo Picasso: Spanish artist, 2016. 

The Met Museum. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), 2017. 

Wattenmaker, Richard J., ed. Great French paintings from the Barnes Foundation: impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern. Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in write my essay online if you need a similar paper you can place your order from write my essay for me services.