Pablo Picasso was born a child prodigy in Malaga, Spain on October 25th, 1881, to a poor family.(1) His father was an art instructor. In 1891, the family moved to La Corufia, on the Atlantic coast.(2) Picasso joined his father’s ornamental drawing class and learned to make paintings look “realistic” at a very young age. He went to school for a short while in Barcelona and Madrid, but preferred spending time at El Museo Del Prado, than taking classes. “Picasso spent his adolescence associating with the group of Catalan modernists who gathered at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona.”(2) He moved to Paris in 1904, after traveling between Spain and France, and settled down with painters and poets with the same mentality as him. Picasso was going through a difficult stage in his life, from adolescent to adult, possibly contributing to the mentality behind his “Blue Period”.
The Blue Period lasted from 1899 until 1906, mostly comprised of melancholy paintings of clowns, vagrants, and prostitutes. This stage in his life was known as the Blue Period because all of the paintings in this period of time were painted strictly in blue, varying in shade. The painting, “The Old (Blind) Guitarist” (1903), was a dedication to a friend because of Picasso’s mourning. The Blue Period expressed a depressed period in Picasso’s life in which inspiration seemed little. Works from this period include: "Self-Portrait" (1901), "La Vie" (1903), “Femme En Bleu” (1901), and “The Tragedy” (1903).
The Rose Period from 1904-1906 was all about paintings of the same nature as the blue period; it’s just that the paints used new colors besides blue to give a warm feeling, like delight. “His subject matter remained much the same, but his tones were warmer, or rosier, and the atmosphere of his paintings was gayer.” Paintings began to change in color, shade, and tone, which began the roots of the Rose Period. The Rose period evolved from Picasso’s many mistresses in his life, because they were his main inspiration. Picasso gained much from these women, their bodies letting the subject of his works thrive, but incidentally destroyed the lives of the many women he possessed. It almost seems as if Picasso used these women. “Jacqueline Roque and Marie-Thérese Walter committed suicide, and Olga Koklova and Dora Maar became somewhat insane.”(2) Works from the Rose Period include: “Harlequin Family” (1905), “Family of Saltimbanques” (1905), and “Lady with a Fan” (1905).
Picasso was greatly influenced buy Parisian artists, Pacific art, and “primitive” art of Africa, and led him to co-create cubism as we know it with Georges Braque. There were two periods of their major “Cubism” art. Some miscellaneous paintings from the beginning varied types of Cubism include: “Female Torso” (1908), “Self-Portrait with Palette”(autumn 1906), and “Gertrude Stein” (1906). “Demolishing the traditional conception of pictorial space, Picasso and Braque painted objects as facets of an analysis, rather than as unified objects; they wanted to paint as they thought, not as they saw”.(2) This was Analytical Cubism. Basically, Picasso took a picture apart with his mind, much like a shredder, then put the pieces back together. Analytical Cubism paintings include: “Accordionist” (1911), “Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde” (1910), "Factory at Horta de Ebro” (1909), and "Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler" (1910). A new era in the Cubist movement was the creation of Synthetic Cubism. “Here, the defining characteristic was collage, a technique never before used in fine art”.(2) Braque and Picasso had managed to tastefully merge newspaper clippings and other miscellaneous objects to finally create an accepted form of collage in the aristocratic-like society of fine art. The Synthetic Cubism paintings seem to have mainly instrumental themes, with newspaper clippings surrounding solid-colored, vibrant paints. Works include “The Italian Girl” (1917), and “Glass and Bottle of Suze” (1912).
Later in his life he began to experiment with other types of art, from surrealist to neo-classical. He didn’t have a specific style. The painting, “Olga Reading” (1920), displays the idea that Picasso didn’t just use one style. “Still Life on a Table” (1931) represents this philosophy of variation to his works, because it has no collage, no cubism, and solid colors with curvy lines. In his studio at Bateau-Lavoir, 13, rue Ravignan in Paris, he created all these fantastic works of art, until his death on April 8th, 1973. For ten years of his life, he had lived with a man named Françoise Gilot.(3) Picasso died most famous for his creation of Cubism.
(1) http://www.phxart.org/ElGreco_Picasso/elgreco_to_picasso_artists.html
(2) http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/picasso/summary.html
(3) http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/picasso_pablo.html
