BIOGRAPHY

Pablo Picasso was born October 25, 1881. His artistic ability manifested itself at a very young age. In fact, Picasso created his first painting, El picador, when he was 5 years old, and, at 13, he had his first exhibition. At 14, Picasso moved to Barcelona with his family, where he attended the Academia de Barcelona. After two years, Picasso moved to Madrid where he spent his time recording the life that surrounded him, in the cafes, on the streets and in the Prado museum, where he became acquainted with various famous Spanish paintings. During this time, Picasso started to copy the style of famous Spanish artists, like Goya and El Greco.

Some time later, Picasso traveled to Paris with a friend who, a short time later committed suicide. After this tragic event, Picasso began his 'blue period.' This period, which lasted several years, was characterized by Picasso's exclusive use of various shades of blue in his artwork. Toward the end of 1904, the sadness and darkness that had heretofore characterized his work began to disappear, giving way to his 'rose period.' During this period, Picasso met and became involved with a woman named Fernande Olivier. She became the impetus for the transition to a more colorful period in his life.

In the summer of 1906, Picasso entered a radically different era in his painting than his previous periods. The representative painting of this period is Les demoiselles d'Avignon. This painting gives the appearance that you are looking through broken glass at the women of the painting. Thus, inspired by this new form of painting angular planes and the like, Picasso and Georges Braque created a new artistic movement called cubism, a movement which would play an extremely important role in Picasso life until his death.

Although cubism was important art of Picasso's life, he did not exclusively paint in that style alone. In the years before his death on April 8, 1973, Picasso created several thousand works of art, including paintings, sculptures, ceramics and poetry. Some of these works were cubist, while others were classical. Still others were surrealist in nature, even though Picasso was never a member of this group. Picasso believed that his works would help him live forever.

The first major epoch in Picasso's life was the blue period. As stated in the Biography section above, this phase was characterized by the exclusive use of various shades of blue in his works. The exclusive use of one color to create the overarching mood of a work was a symbolist technique used by many artists at the end of the 19th century. During this period, Picasso depicted a suffering, despairing humanity. In order to portray his version of reality he regularly painted people who were going through hard times; the elderly and the poor. He also painted couples deprived of all happiness whose grave melancholy was colored with a cold monochromatic blue. The painting Brooding Woman is a good but extreme example of this epoch.

After several years, Picasso started to grow out of his blue period phase and started to use more color, thus starting his rose period. The rose period was characterized by several different things. First, several of his paintings from this epoch contained a variation on one specific theme: a woman being watched while she sleeps. The first of these paintings was Meditation. A second important characteristic of this period was the important role of animals in his paintings. Picasso frequently included dogs, monkeys, horses, crows and goats in his works of this era. Other figures that Picasso commonly painted were harlequins and performers in circus attire.

Circa 1908, Picasso started his cubist phase. The artistic movement of cubism can be broken up into two subcategories. The first phase of cubism was called 'analytic cubism.' As the name suggests, Picasso and the co-creator of this movement, Georges Braque, were interested in analyzing forms. During this phase, which lasted from 1908 and 1911, combinations of monochromatic colors were favored in representations of various themes. These themes were fragmented to the extent that all of their various sides were shown simultaneously. The favored themes of Picasso during this period were musical instruments, objects in nature and his friends. In 1912, Picasso began the second phase of cubism, known as 'synthetic cubism,' by painting Still Life with Chair Caning. This phase of cubism was more decorative and more abstract than its analytic phase. Color played a much more important role in this phase although the figures remained fragmented. Preferred figures included nature and heads. During this phase of cubism, Picasso suggested that one object could be transformed into another. For example, in some paintings, Picasso used curves to paint parts of musical instruments, like guitars, but at the same time, they resembled ears.

One important work that has long been Picasso's most famous is Guernica, a painting in the tradition of cubism. Guernica was painted during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. During the war, Picasso was moved to paint an enormous mural after German warplanes bombed the village of Guernica. The painting expressed Picasso's outrage by employing imagery of bulls, dead horses, dead soldiers, and a mother and her children all killed by the bombing. Guernica had an overwhelming impact on many subsequent war themed artwork.

PAINTINGS

Pablo Picasso's Guernica