Pablo Picasso Biography - Facts about Picasso
Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain on the 25th of October 1881. Pablo’s parents were middle class and it was his father, an art-teacher, who introduced the young Picasso to the wonderful world of art. Throughout his early years and adolescence Picasso, something of a rebel, painted in a realistic manner. In later life he would experiment with new ideas, theories and techniques. He is best known for the wide variety of styles found in his work and for founding the Cubist movement. Cubism was a revolutionary artistic accomplishment which brought him immense fortune and universal renown so much so that he became the best known artist of the twentieth century.
Picasso first studied art under the tutelage of his father in Madrid. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona provides examples of his early works. In the years between 1893 and 1894 the juvenile qualities of Picasso’s earliest works fall away and his career as a painter begins. In the First Communion (a large work that depicts his sister, Lola) the academic realism is apparent. In 1896 at the age of 14, Picasso painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot called ‘one of the greatest paintings in the history of Spanish paintings’.
During his adolescence Picasso frequented the Barcelona cafes where the intellectuals gathered before going to Paris, the capital of art, where he absorbed and was greatly impressed by the works of Toulouse Lautrec, Manet and Gustave Courbet. During the years 1899 – 1904 Picasso went back to Spain and then returned to France before once again returning to Spain.
Picasso went through an extraordinary number of styles before he struck upon Cubism. These included caricature, realism, the Blue Period and the Rose Period. During the Blue Period his works were characterized by subjects focusing on outcasts, prostitutes and beggars using a predominantly blue pallet. It was during this time that he also produced his first sculptures. A most poignant work, La Vie, of The Blue Period currently resides in the Cleveland Museum of Art and was created in memory of the Spanish poet, Casagemas, a great childhood friend of Picasso’s who committed suicide. Although the oil painting started life as a self portrait, Picasso’s features eventually became those of his lost friend. Other works from The Blue Period include The Blind Man’s Meal (1903) and the Woman with a Crow (1903).
In The Rose Period which began around 1904 Picasso’s subjects included clowns, harlequins and circus people and his palette became much brighter with the paintings dominated by pinks, light blues, rose and beiges. One of the most premier works of this period is the extremely large and beautiful Family of Saltimbanques (1905) which is currently the National Gallery in Washington DC. It depicts a group of circus workers set in a one dimensional space. The Harlequin subject became a personal symbol for Picasso typically rendered in chequered patterned clothing.
Between 1909 – 1912 Picasso and Georges Braque developed Analytic Cubism using monochrome brownish colors and neutral tones. Picasso and Braque took apart objects and analysed them in terms of their shapes. By 1912-1919 Synthetic cubism, a development of the genre marked the first use of collage in fine art.
Throughout his lifetime Picasso was prolific. Estimates have placed the total number of artworks he produced at 50,000. This includes 12,000 drawings, 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 2880 ceramics and numerous rugs and tapestries. When he died on the 8th of April 1973 he still had most of his paintings in his possession, as he had only sold what he needed to sell. He also had a fine collection of artworks by other painters, including works by Henri Matisse. Picasso’s death duties were paid in the form of his artworks which are now owned and displayed at Musee Picasso in Paris. The Museo Picasso Malaga, Spain was inaugurated by relatives of Picasso in 2003 and was dedicated to Picasso and his birthplace.
When Picasso died at the age of 91 in April 1973, he had become one of the most famous and successful artists of his time. His career had spanned most of the 20th century and he had taken part in some of the most important art movements of the century. A creator of a vast number of paintings, sculptures, drawings, etchings, constructions and ceramics, his natural talent and versatility seemed boundless as he passed effortlessly from one medium to another and from one style to the next. His ability to promote himself and his work was without precedent, contributing to a general shift during the twentieth century in the public perception of the artist, from the instinctive creative genius to the careful controller of artistic personae and guises. The art historian Sam Hunter once wrote that ‘Picasso’ was the man and the artist, has cast a spell on his age. Picasso was and still is seen as magician by writers and critics’, a metaphor that captures both the sense of an artist who is able to transform everything around him at a touch and a man who can transform himself, elude us, fascinate and mesmerize us and then disappear. His enduring fascination rests on this protean element in his character and, as his life and work continue to invite countless scholarly interpretations and exhibitions of his work continue to attract thousands of visitors.
An artist’s life is not always seen as integral to his or her work: we feel that great work can stand alone. Picasso’s canvas art certainly does this to a striking extent but at the same time he is one of the most autobiographical of artists. He once claimed ‘the way I paint is my way of keeping a diary’, suggesting a close relationship between art and life. Picasso’s life was a long and varied one, encompassing many different locations and home, several wives and mistresses and their children, as well as important and influential relationships with other artists, poets and writers around him. Indeed throughout his life Picasso’s paintings reflected his surroundings and environment, his changing domestic circumstance and his perceptions of his own appearance and abilities. As one style succeeded, another constant theme in Picasso’s work was his own life, making him one of the most human and approachable of artists. He was always drawn, in one way or another to, to the basic things around him, to what he knew best.
Picasso took both his mother and fathers name but later dropped his father’s surname to become simply Pablo Picasso. His father was a painter and art school teacher and Picasso started to draw at an early age. In 1891 the family moved to La Coruna and a year later Picasso was accepted in to the School of Fine Arts and Applied Arts there, where his father had been a professor. Aged 13, he produced his first oil paintings including portraits of his family and in 1895 he began to exhibit and sell his work on a small scale. The same year the family moved again to Barcelona, where Picasso entered art school.
Barcelona would be an important centre for Picasso for the next few years. There he would make his first artistic friendships and allegiances, with Paul Pallares, Carlos Casagemas and Jaime Sabartes. By the turn of the century Picasso had come to associate with the artists and writers of El Quatre Gats in Barcelona, the Four Cats tavern that provided a meeting place for like minded Catalan artists who looked towards the avant-garde ferment in Paris. Picasso had been producing large religious paintings, such as First Communion or Science and Charity, but in his new bohemian circle he began to contribute drawings to Catalan journals, to design posters and flyers and to make portraits of his new friends and fellow youthful artists, some of which were shown at Els Quatre Gats in his first solo exhibition in 1900.
Pablo Picasso Quotes
"Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?"
"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. "
"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. "
"Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions. "
"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. "
"If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme. "
"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. "
"My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso. "
"One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail. "
"One must act in painting as in life, directly. "
"Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen. "
"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. "
"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun. "
"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. "
"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
"The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? "
"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. "
"They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better. "
"To draw you must close your eyes and sing. "
"To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture. "
"Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter? "
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