EYE-LIKEY: picasso

picasso

Picasso unplugged

artist in his studio

Picasso is unquestionably the most famous artist of the 20th Century. In his artistic life, lasting more than 75 years he created tens of thousands of works, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, original lithographs, etchings, linoleum cuts and ceramics. No single artist has had a greater influence on Modern Art and has changed art more profoundly in the 20th Century. Picasso has been described as having lived several lifetimes artistically. He created Cubism (with friend George Braque) and continued thereafter to develop his art with a velocity that is comparable to the pace and dramatic change of the 20th Century.

Picasso with a young Brigitte Bardot.

Pablo Picasso

b. 1881, Málaga, Spain; d. 1973, Mougins, France

In 1895 the family moved to Barcelona, and Picasso studied there at La Lonja, the academy of fine arts. His visit to Horta de Ebro from 1898 to 1899 and his association with the group at the café Els Quatre Gats in about 1899 were crucial to his early artistic development. Picasso’s first exhibition took place in Barcelona in 1900, and that fall he went to Paris for the first of several stays during the early years of the century. Picasso settled in Paris in April 1904, and his circle of friends soon included Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gertrude and Leo Stein, as well as two dealers, Ambroise Vollard and Berthe Weill.

His style developed from the Blue Period (1901–04) to the Rose Period (1905) to the pivotal work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the subsequent evolution of Cubism from an Analytic phase (ca. 1908–11) to its Synthetic phase (beginning in 1912–13). Picasso’s collaboration on ballet and theatrical productions began in 1916. Soon thereafter, his work was characterized by neoclassicism and a renewed interest in drawing and figural representation. In the 1920s the artist and his wife, Olga (whom he had married in 1918), continued to live in Paris, to travel frequently, and to spend their summers at the beach. From 1925 to the 1930s Picasso was involved to a certain degree with the Surrealists, and from the fall of 1931 he was especially interested in making sculpture. In 1932, with large exhibitions at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, and the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the publication of the first volume of Christian Zervos’s catalogue raisonné, Picasso’s fame increased markedly.

By 1936 the Spanish Civil War had profoundly affected Picasso, the expression of which culminated in his painting Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid). Picasso’s association with the Communist Party began in 1944. From the late 1940s he lived in the south of France. Among the enormous number of exhibitions that were held during the artist’s lifetime, those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1939 and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1955 were most significant. In 1961 the artist married Jacqueline Roque, and they moved to Mougins.

Picasso continued his prolific work in painting, drawing, prints, ceramics, and sculpture until his death in 1973 at the age of 91.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.-picasso

Give me a museum and I'll fill it. -picasso

Bettina Graziani and Picasso his Cannes studio, 1955

Ceramic, Yan Pitcher, 1952

guernica

1937

11 ft X 25.6 ft

Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anit war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour helped bring the spanish civil war to the world's attention.

Hollywood Studio Boss Darryl F. Zanuck with Portrait

by Picasso

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. -picasso

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. -picasso

Picasso draws in light 1949

LIFE photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso in Vallauris, France. He showed Pablo some photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates jumping in the dark.

Picasso was immediately inspired, these photos were the result.

This series of photographs, known ever since as Picasso’s “light drawings,” were made with a small electric light in a darkened room; in effect, the images vanished as soon as they were created — and yet they still live, six decades later, in Mili’s playful, hypnotic images. Many of them were also put on display in early 1950 in a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.