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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Essay on Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso Essay Example

Pablo Picasso was born in the Spanish coastal town, of Malaga on October 25, 1881. His father, Jose Ruiz Blasco, was an art teacher. His mother was Maria Picasso y Lopez. Picasso almost died at birth because of breathing problems. They say his uncle blew cigar smoke in his face and he was able to breathe. Picasso was a genius by the time he was ten years old, which was when he painted his first picture. He painted many paintings and the first of these paintings were focused on bullfighting, because he was exposed to bullfighting at the age of three. Pablo did very poorly in school, especially in math. He would always draw pictures in class instead of paying attention to the teacher. He also had a very short attention span, which they later found out was caused by dyslexia.

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When Picasso turned 15, he entered the Barcelona’s School of Fine Arts, where his father was an art teacher. That is where he really learned to paint. He was accepted to the school by passing an exam that took him one day. The same exam took most students weeks to complete. Soon after entering the school he won a gold medal for his very realistic painting of a doctor, a nun, and a child at a sick woman’s bed entitled, “Science and Charity”. There was a rumor that one day Pablo’s father asked him to finish the pigeons in a picture he was working on. They say Pablo painted them so well that his father put down his paint brush and never painted again. His father realized the talent that his son had.

In 1899 Picasso quit his academic studies and joined the circle of young avant-garde artists and writers who gathered at the local tavern. There they worked on all styles of art. In 1900 Picasso had his first solo exhibition, which his included many different styles of art. Beginning in 1900, Picasso began traveling back and forth to Paris before settling there in 1904. While in Paris he began painting pictures from the streets of Paris and Barcelona. He would pick a scene that he liked and he would sit down and paint it. Between 1900 and 1901 he began to paint with bright, unmixed colors. Some of his subjects for this new style of painting were scenes of the Parisian nightlife, such as the dance hall Le Moulin de la Galette.

Picasso’s most important early exhibition took place in 1901 at the Ambroise Vollard. There he displayed paintings and drawings of a large variety of styles. It was a huge success for Picasso, especially in the financial part of it. He was offered many spots for poster and magazine illustrations. One critic said it was the debut of a “brilliant newcomer.” Beginning in 1901 Picasso’s work took a dramatic turn. First, he started painting pictures that represented the recent suicide of his best friend Casagemas. Picasso’s style of painting became very dark and gloomy, and he was mainly using different shades of blue for all of his work. During Picasso’s blue period he also began painting intimate portraits of his Bohemian friends in Paris.

In the spring of 1904 he finally found a place and settled in Paris. In 1905 Picasso began painting images of fairgrounds and circus performers. This new phase he was into was called the rose period. He was observing acrobats, musicians, and clowns on the streets and wherever he could find them. Using all different styles of painting he would always portray the figures at rest, in warm domestic settings. Some of his more famous paintings during this period include, Family of Saltimbanques, and Woman with a Fan.

Picasso’s work was starting to become very well known by famous collectors. A man named Ambroise Vollard purchased some of Picasso’s paintings at a very high price. Being financially secure Picasso was starting to do a lot of traveling. He went to Spain and spent the entire summer in a small remote village, where he starting painting nude images.

In 1908 Picasso’s discovered cubism, which was the use of small cubes to make something big, like landscape paintings. This style made it possible to see multiple sides of an object at the same time. Some of the things he would paint were musical instruments, still life, and his friends. One of his most famous paintings during this time was his portrait of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. He was also very interested in Negro sculptures.

Picasso was really getting into the abstract side of art. He was starting to break his paintings into all different sections, almost like a broken mirror. Some examples of these works are, “Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table”, and “Head of a Woman”. Next Picasso developed the new style called “Collage”, which was developed from cubism. In 1912, he created his first collage by pasting paper and oilcloth to the canvas and then painting some things on it also. He called it, “Still Life with Chair Caning.” It consisted of Oilcloth along the canvas, some newspaper, glass, a pipe, and a lemon. He decided to call this style of art synthetic cubism. This process basically included taking something in reality apart and making it into something totally different and out of the ordinary. Picasso really was interested in the Collage style art, because it was very exciting to him. This new style that he created really shocked the art community and created a whole new art form that everyone enjoyed.

While World War I was going on Picasso decided to go to Rome to work as a designer for the Diagheliv Ballets Russes. He was responsible for setting up the sets for the different Ballets they had going on. While in Rome he met a women named Olga Koklova. They fell in love and got married right away. Because of Koklova, he was able to associate with some big-time art enthusiasts. That ended up getting him a lot of good jobs. In 1924 they had their fist son who was named, Paulo.

In the late twenties, Picasso started painting pictures of heavy neoclassical figures. After a while he and Olga started having some marital troubles. After that his whole style on painting changed. He started painting pictures of disfigured women. He would take all of their body parts apart and put them back together in a very abstract way.

In 1927 he and Koklova broke things off and he met Marie Therese Walter. Picasso fell in love and they decided to move away together. Marie gave birth to their baby daughter Maya in 1935. After he grew out of his abstract phase he went back to painting bullfighting scenes and combined them with a Minotaur theme.

Most people will agree that Picasso’s most popular painting of his time was a huge Mural called Guerica, which was inspired by the war. It took him over two months to finish it, and it was displayed in the Spanish Pavilion in 1937. The painting was an outrage on what the war was doing to everyone. As the war went on Picasso’s paintings became more and more sad and depressing. Death became the subject for many of his paintings.

Picasso met his next love, Francoise Gilot, who was also a well-known artist. They lived together for eight years, and had two children together. At this time Picasso was wanting to create some peace in his life, and one could see it in his paintings. He started painting pictures of doves, fauns and other things.

In 1947 he started into ceramics and sculpture. In that year he created over 2000 ceramics. He also started doing a lot of work with bronze and other metals.

Many years later he began to grow sick. In his last day’s he painted many self-portraits, and his final portrait represented his death. Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973.

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