Picasso Guernica. 1937. Oil on canvas.

Picasso
Guernica.
1937. Oil on
canvas.
Museo
del
Prado, Madrid,
Spain
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Paulo,
Picasso's Son,
as Harlequin.
1924. Oil on
canvas. Musée
Picasso, Paris,
France
2
Outline
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Introduction
Part I. His life
Part II. Evolution of his style
Part III. Cubism
Conclusion
References
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Introduction
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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
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Part I. His life
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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
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Part I. His life
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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
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Portrait of Dora Maar. Oil
on canvas. 1937. Musée
Picasso, Paris, France
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Part II. Evolution of his style
The Bull. State II and State XI. 1945. Lithography. The Museum
of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA
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a. The Blue and Rose periods
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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
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b. Cubism
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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 cutand-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”
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Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon. 1907.
Oil on canvas.
Museum
of
Modern
Arts,
New York, NY,
USA
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c. Between Two Wars
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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 MarieThérèse, 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
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d. Wartime Experience 1937-1945
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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
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e. The Late Works. 1946-1973
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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
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Conclusion
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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
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References
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http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso.html
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.as
px?refid=761569324
http://www.paris.org/Musees/Picasso/
http://www.musees-nationauxalpesmaritimes.fr/picasso/index_picasso.html
http://cgfa.floridaimaging.com/picasso/index.html
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