Pablo Picasso: Painter, Playwrite, Sculptor, Printmaker, Ceramicist and an Stage Designer

Pablo Picasso was one of the most influential artists, who applied a diverse range of styles in his artwork throughout his career. One of the most innovative was the Cubist Movement, attributed to Picasso and George Braque, is where subjects or objects are broken into pieces and then put back together in an abstract form. Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain on October 25, 1881. Picasso’s parents were Jos© Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López and he had three sisters. Their names were Conchita Picasso and Lola Picasso. Conchita died in 1895 from diphtheria when she was seven and it traumatized Picasso. Picasso’s father, Jos© Ruiz y Blasco, was an artist and professor at the School of Fine Arts. His mother, María Picasso y López, was an artist as well. In 1891, Picasso being ten years old, the family moved to A Coruña where The School of Fine Arts hired Ruiz to be a professor (Greenfield, Howard. Pablo Picasso: An introduction. Follett, 1971). They spent four years there where Ruiz felt his son surpassed him as an artist at the age of thirteen and reportedly vowed to give up painting (https://www.pablopicasso.org). Picasso graduated from Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, Spain. After graduating, he moved to Paris, France.

While he was in Paris he went through his Blue Period. The Blue Period of Picasso is the period between 1900 and 1904, when he painted pictures usually using blues and greens, sometimes using warm colors. An example of this is the painting, The Old Guitarist. Some paintings from his Blue Period are his most famous pictures, although he had difficulty selling them at the time. Picasso had spent a few difficult years with no fixed studio and little artistic success. Many experts feel that the work he had produced during his Blue Period, seemed to reflect his experience of relative poverty (https://www.pablopicasso.org/blue-period.jsp). After Picasso’s Blue Period was his Rose period in 1904. The Rose Period was about love, joy, and romance. This was also one of Picasso’s brighter periods. In 1904, Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a French artist, and model who became his muse and mistress. Olivier is credited for partially inspiring Picasso’s artistic transition from the cold, somber tone of the Blue Period to the increased warmth and lightness of the Rose Period (https:www.masterworksfineart.com/artists/pablo-picasso/rose-period). With his Rose Period, Picasso favored a lighter and warmer choice of colors. He chose subtle, idealized forms, and more cheerful subjects, such as circus performers. Picasso became fascinated with the fairground and circus performers and began to convey these saltimbanques and harlequins within his works. Picasso observed the saltimbanques firsthand at the Cirque Medrano and in the streets and the outskirts of Paris, where a migrant community of acrobats, musicians, and clowns often entertained passing spectators(https://www.masterworksfineart.com/artists/pablo-picasso/rose-period).

In 1917, Pablo Picasso joined the Russian Ballet, which toured in Rome; during this time he met Olga Khoklova, who was also a ballerina. Picasso and Olga got married in 1918 and returned to Paris. The marriage didn’t last long and they split up in 1935. Olga came from nobility, and an upper-class lifestyle, while Pablo Picasso led a bohemian lifestyle, which caused conflicts. Although the couple separated, they remained officially married, until Olga's death, in 1954 from cancer (https://www.pablopicasso.org/picasso-biography.jsp). In 1961, he married a woman by the name of Jacqueline Roque. They had a very happy marriage until Picasso died. Thirteen years later Jacqueline still mourned the loss of her husband and killed herself in 1986. One of Picasso’s most famous artworks were from the Cubism Period. In cubism, the artist breaks up his elements of his subject and dissects or analyzes them (Greenfield, 93). Pablo Picasso moved toward abstraction, leaving minimal recognizable objects of the real world while providing the artist's interpretation of the subject within the frame. The pioneers of this technique were Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Picasso, but used his own geometric style in his work. Picasso didn't so much facet natural objects but used the geometry of Braques' paintings to create a style that was abstract in essence (https://www.biography.com/people/pablo-picasso-9440021).

A difference between Picasso and another famous artist that was into cubism, Piet Mondrian, was that Picasso didn’t give up on the third dimension. A time period Picasso worked in was the 1940s. During this time WWII was going on. That meant things in France were very limited. Picasso worked with anything at hand, including pieces of wood, bones, wine–bottle caps, scraps of paper, cigarette packets and even a bicycle saddle and handlebars that he used to create a lifelike head of a bull. When canvas was not available he painted on planks and hardboard, or as can be seen in Head of a woman, November 1941, on newspaper where the stark, black outlines seem to echo the austerity and bleakness of war-torn Paris(https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/picasso/education/ed_JTE_TWY.html). Paris, France was only one a few of the places Picasso worked in. As a boy, we know he worked in Malaga, Spain, where he was born and was introduced to art through his parents. Picasso had his first exhibit at the age of 13 and later quit art school so that he could experiment full-time with modern art style (https://www.history.co.uk/this-day-in-history/25-october/pablo-picasso-is-born-in-malaga-spain).

The college that Picasso attended was Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Barcelona. Barcelona had a profound effect on the teenage artist. The bustling industrialist Catalan capital was in a period of huge growth, embracing progressive ideas about art and society as it raced towards the 20th century. The always prolific artist created thousands of sketches and paintings with the city as his muse (https://www.barcelona-life.com/barcelona/picasso). Picasso spent most of his life in France where he discovered his Blue Period, Rose Period, and his Cubism Period. Picasso had met both of is wives here, created many paintings, and also died here. He died in Mougins, France on April 8, 1973, from congestive heart failure. Even though Picasso isn’t alive his paintings still live to tell the tale. Some of Picasso’s biggest pieces of art were Jacqueline with Flowers, The Blue Room, Child with a Dove, and Portrait of Dora Maar. In the painting, Jacqueline with Flowers Picasso is painting a picture of his second wife, Jaqueline. She’s posing on a chair with her arms crossed with her hair in a bun staring out the window. This shows that she was staring out of a window probably thinking about something.

The Blue Room painting shows a woman standing in tub washing. It shows that she’s in her room bathing, so we think that she may live in a small apartment. This picture was painted during the Blue Period. We know this because the picture is filled with different shades of mainly just blue and green. The Child with a Dove is a painting that visualizes a young girl in a white dress holding a dove against her chest. And it shows only the girl, a ball on her left, and only grass and sky in the background, and the dove. The Portrait of Dora Maar shows a woman, Dora Maar, sitting in a seat. She poses with her one hand holding her head. She has short black hair and is wearing a dress. Something Picasso did on purpose was the woman’s eyes. In the painting, he made her left eye red and her right eye green. One of his greatest pieces was 1937's Guernica, painted during WWII. This painting symbolizes pain and sorrow during the war. It shows people, and animals filled with fear. Pablo Picasso went through different periods (such as the Blue Period, the Rose Period, and the Cubism Period) throughout his career, and he reinvented himself and his artwork in form, style, and subject. Pablo Picasso was one of the most influential artists, whose work is timeless and inspired many other artists.

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