MikeLiveira's Space: Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso

(25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the Bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces at the behest of the Spanish nationalist government during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

more info at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

http://www.pablopicasso.org/

Pablo Picasso is probably the most important figure of 20th century, in terms of art, and art movements that occurred over this period. Before the age of 50, the Spanish born artist had become the most well known name in modern art, with the most distinct style and eye for artistic creation. There had been no other artists, prior to Picasso, who had such an impact on the art world, or had a mass following of fans and critics alike, as he did.

The Blue Period (1901-1904)

The somber period within which Picasso both personally experienced poverty and its effect on society right around him is characterized by paintings essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. Picasso's works during this period depict malnutrition, prostitution, and the posthumous portraits of friend Carlos Casagemas after his suicide, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie.

La Vie (1903) portrayed his friend's inner torment in the face of a lover he tried to murder.

The Rose Period (1904-1906)

Fitting to the name, once Picasso seemed to find some small measure of success and overcame some of his depression, he had a more cheery period featuring orange and pink hues and the playful worlds of circus people and harlequins. Picasso met a bohemian artist named Fernande Olivier who became his lover. She subsequently appeared in many of these more optimistic paintings.
American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein became great fans of Picasso. They not only became his chief patrons, Gertrude was also pictured in his Portrait of Gertrude Stein, one of his most famous portraits.

African Influence (1907-1909)

For Picasso, the seminal moment was the Paul Cezanne retrospective held at the Salon d'Automne, one year after the artist's death in 1906. Though he previously had been familiar with Cezanne, it was not until the retrospective that Picasso experienced the full impact of his artistic achievement. In Cezanne's works, Picasso found a model of how to distill the essential from nature in order to achieve a cohesive surface that expressed the artist's singular vision. In about the same time, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists. In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends start blending the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cezanne and Gauguin.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was Picasso's first masterpiece. The painting depicts five naked women with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly upturned tabletop. In this painting, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting by adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane.

When Les Demoiselles d'Avignon first appeared, it was as if the art world had collapsed. Known form and representation were completely abandoned. Hence it was called the most innovative painting in modern art history. With the new strategies applied in the painting, Picasso suddenly found freedom of expression away from current and classical French influences and was able to carve his own path. Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Cubism (1909-1919)

During this period, the style Georges Braque and Picasso developed used mainly neutral colors and was based in they're "taking apart" objects and "analyzing them" in terms of their shapes.

Cubism, especially the second form, known as Synthetic Cubism, played a great role in the development of western art world. Works of this phase emphasize the combination, or synthesis, of forms in the picture. Colour is extremely important in the objects' shapes because they become larger and more decorative. Non-painted objects such as newspapers or tobacco wrappers, are frequently pasted on the canvas in combination with painted areas - the incorporation of a wide variety of extraneous materials is particularly associated with Picasso's novel technique of collage.

This collage technique emphasizes the differences in texture and poses the question of what is reality and what is illusion in painting. With his use of color, shape and geometrical figures, and his unique approach to depict images, Picasso changed the direction of art for generations to come.

Classicism, Surrealism, and Sculpture

With an unsurpassed mastery of technique and skill, Picasso made his first trip to Italy in 1917 and promptly began a period of tribute to neoclassical style. Breaking from the extreme modernism he drew and painted work reminiscent of Raphael and Ingres.

This was just a prelude before Picasso seemingly effortlessly began to combine his modernist concepts with his skill into surrealist masterpieces like Guernica, (1937), a frenzied and masterful combination of style that embodies the despair of war.Guernica is considered as the most powerful anti-war statement of modern art.

It was done to showcase Picasso's support towards ending war, and a condemnation on fascism in general. From the beginning, Picasso chooses not to represent the horror of Guernica in realist or romantic terms. Key figures - a woman with outstretched arms, a bull, an agonized horse - are refined in sketch after sketch, then transferred to the capacious canvas, which he also reworks several times. Dark color and monochrome theme were used to depict the trying times, and the anguish which was being suffered. Guernica challenges the notions of warfare as heroic and exposes it as a brutal act of self-destruction. The works was not only a practical report or painting but also stays as a highly powerful political picture in modern art, rivaled by a few fresco paintings by Mexican artist Diego Rivera.