Picasso

1. Picasso Guernica. 1937. Oil on canvas. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

2. Paulo, Picasso's Son, as Harlequin. 1924. Oil on canvas. Musée Picasso, Paris, France

3. Outline • Introduction • Part I. His life • Part II. Evolution of his style • Part III. Cubism • Conclusion • References

4. Introduction • Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y (1881-1973), Spanish painter, the most important artist of the 20th century • A long-lived and highly prolific artist, he experimented with a wide range of styles and themes throughout his career • Among Picasso’s many contributions to the history of art, his most important include pioneering the modern art movement called cubism, inventing collage as an artistic technique, and developing assemblage (constructions of various materials) in sculpture • Though Spanish by birth, Picasso lived most of his life in France, in Paris and in the South

5. Part I. His life • Picasso born Pablo Ruiz in Malaga, Spain. He later adopted his mother’s maiden name—Picasso—as his own • Picasso’s father, who was an art teacher, quickly recognized that his child Pablo was a prodigy • Picasso studied art first privately with his father and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in La Coruña, Spain, where his father taught • After Picasso visited Paris in October 1900, he moved back and forth between France and Spain until 1904, when he settled in the French capital • In 1918 the dancer Olga Koklova and Picasso married • With the birth of his son Paolo in 1921, he again and again returned to Mother and Child theme

6. Part I. His life • In 1936 he met Dora Maar, a Yugoslavian photographer. Later, during the war, she became his constant companion • During the wartime he met a young woman painter, Françoise Gillot, who would later become his third official wife • He and Gilot had a son, Claude, and a daughter, Paloma, and both appear in many of his late works • Picasso and Gilot parted in 1953. Jacqueline Roque, whom Picasso married in 1961, became his next companion. They spent most of their time in the south of France • On April 8, 1973 he died, at last. Picasso was buried in the grounds of his Chateau Vauvenargues

7. Portrait of Dora Maar. Oil on canvas. 1937. Musée Picasso, Paris, France

8. The Bull. State II and State XI. 1945. Lithography. The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA Part II. Evolution of his style

9. a. The Blue and Rose periods • 1901-1906 • In 1901 Picasso’s friend Casagemas committed suicide • Picasso started to use almost exclusively blue and green. “I began to paint in blue, when I realized that Casagemas had died” Picasso • Caught with restlessness and loneliness, he constantly moved between Paris and Barcelona, depicting in blue isolation, unhappiness, despair, misery of physical weakness, old age, and poverty • By 1905 Picasso lightened his palette, relieving it with pink and rose, yellow-ochre and gray

10. b. Cubism • 1907-1917 • “Negro period”: In 1907 after numerous studies and variations Picasso painted his first cubistic picture - “Les demoiselles d’Avignon”. Impressed with African sculptures at ethnographic museum he tried to combine the angular structures of the “primitive art” and his new ideas about cubism • “Analytical” cubism: he gives up central perspective, splits up forms in facet-like stereo-metric shapes • “Synthetic” or “Collage” cubism: composing still life of cut-and-pasted scraps of material, with only a few lines added to complete the design; These collages led to synthetic cubism: paintings with large, schematic patterning, such as “The Guitar”

11. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA

12. c. Between Two Wars • 1917-1936 Classicism and Surrealism • After cubism Picasso returned to more traditional patterns • In 1923 Picasso composed The Pipes of Pan, the most important painting of his “classicist period” • His work after 1927 is fantastic and visionary in character • His Woman with Flower of 1932 is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse, distorted and deformed in the manner of surrealism, which was so fashionable at the time • Paintings and draws of bulls, either dying or snorting furiously and threatening both man and animal alike: being Spanish, Picasso had always been fascinated by bull fights

13. d. Wartime Experience 1937-1945 • The Spanish government had asked Picasso to fulfill a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition • His gigantic mural Guernica has remained part of the collective consciousness of the twentieth century • In 1940 when Paris was occupied he held an action: handed out photos of Guernica to German officers. When asked “Did you do this?” he replied, “No, you did”. • With his Charnel House of 1945 Picasso concluded the series of pictures, which he started with “Guernica”. • In 1981, after forty years of exile in New York, the picture found its way back to Spain

14. e. The Late Works. 1946-1973 • In 1944 after liberation of Paris he joined the Communist Party, became an active participant of Peace Movement • in 1949 the Paris World Peace Conference adopted a dove created by Picasso as the symbol of peace movements • In 1955 Picasso bought “La Californie”, a villa near Cannes and Picasso bought Chateau Vauvenargues, near Aix • Picasso’s use of simplified imagery, the way he let the unpainted canvas shine through, his emphatic use of lines, and the sketchiness of the subject. “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them”, Picasso said in 1956

15. Conclusion • Because of his many innovations, Picasso is widely considered to be the most influential artist of the 20th century • Its innovations gave rise to a host of other 20th-century art movements, including futurism in Italy, suprematism and constructivism in Russia, de Stijl in the Netherlands, and vorticism in England • Cubism also influenced German expressionism, dada, and other movements as well as early work of the surrealists (Surrealism) and abstract expressionists (Abstract Expressionism) • In addition, collage and construction became key aspects of 20th-century art

16. References • http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso.html • http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761569324 • http://www.paris.org/Musees/Picasso/ • http://www.musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr/picasso/index_picasso.html • http://cgfa.floridaimaging.com/picasso/index.html