Biography of Pablo Picasso | Spanish painter | Sahir Studio

Biography of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter. "The Dove of Peace", "Guernica", "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", are some of his most important works. He was one of the creators of "Cubism", one of the most outstanding art movements of the 20th century.

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881. He was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, professor of Art History and drawing, passionate about painting, and Maria Picasso y López.

As a boy, Picasso showed his talent for the arts and received encouragement from his father. His first drawings represented bullfights. At the age of 14, he joined the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. In 1896 his father rented a studio for his son.

That same year, his canvas “First Communion” was accepted by the Barcelona Municipal Exhibition. The painting “Dois Patos” was sent by his father to an exhibition in Malaga, receiving the first official award from the painter.

In 1897 Pablo Picasso was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando, Madrid, but soon rejected the traditional forms of the school and returned to Barcelona.

In 1900, Picasso traveled to Paris and met with a Catalan industrialist who rented a studio for the artist and put him in contact with a painting dealer, who held the first exhibition of the painter, on June 24, 1901, doing great success.

Phases and works of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was seduced by Paris and influenced by the Impressionist Style  started to adopt it in his works, with the typical brushstroke of pure pigment instead of smooth modeling, as in the work The Flower Seller (1901) , Glasgow Art Gallery, Scotland.

Suddenly, his work becomes monochromatic. The blue begins to invade his canvases, it is the blue of sadness that appears in the melancholic portraits of his Blue Stage (1901-1904) , as in the screen O Velho Guitarrista  (1903).

Picasso divided his time between Barcelona, ​​Madrid and Paris, but in 1904 he settled permanently in the famous Bateau Lavoir, which he shared with Juan Gris, Van Dongen and others.

Gradually, Picasso freed himself from the melancholy Blue Phase and entered the Pink Phase  (1905-1907) . At this stage the main themes are the circus figures and women. They are from that period: "The Young Harlequin", "The Young Man with Pipe" and The Saltimbancos Family, (National Galery, Washington), all from 1905.

In 1906, Pablo Picasso began to work on the canvas Le Demoiselles d'Avignon  (1907) , where he abandoned the mannerism of the two previous phases and with geometric shapes eliminated the spatial depth.

It was the starting point of his research that resulted in “Cubism”, which together with Georges Braque sought new answers to the question of portraying the real three-dimensional world on a flat screen.

Within Cubism's proposals, Picasso went through several phases. The initial works of Analytical Cubism , as they are known, generally depict single figures or still lifes using a limited range of shades of gray and brown, where the figures are decomposed and rearranged, as in the canvas Nu (1910), Tate Gallery, London.

The next step comes to almost total elimination of the object, where abstraction prevents the real view of the painted object, is Synthetic Cubism , when letters and words appear in the paintings, as in O Aficionado (1912), Kunstmuseum, Basel.

In 1917, with his friend Jeane Cocteau, he traveled to Italy, where he made the sets and costumes for the ballet Parade, with music by Erik Satie and choreography by Serguei Diaghilev.

In Rome, Picasso meets Olga Khoklova and on July 12, 1918 he marries her in Paris. In 1921 his first son, Paulo, is born.

Its cubism still extends until the 1920s, but already something stylized with in Trois Masques Musiciens (1921), Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In the 1930s, rhythmic, curvilinear forms appear, which foreshadow dramatic representation as in the huge mural “Guernica” (1937), National Museum of Art Rainha Sofia, Madrid.

The work evokes the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica Spanish Civil War, German planes bomb the Basque city of Guernica. The work was exhibited in the Spanish pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris.

Although more famous as a painter, Pablo Picasso also produced prints and sculptures. In the late 1940s, he started to produce ceramics.

In 1954 he married Jaqueline Roque and in 1959 he bought the castle of Vauvenargues, in the south of France, where he took up residence.

His last paintings were executed with vigor in a simplistic style as in the work  Portrait of Jaqueline Roque (1954).

Pablo Picasso died at Notre-Dame-de Vie, in Mougins, France, on April 8, 1973.