Pissasso - introduction

      Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y (1881-1973), Spanish painter and sculptor, generally considered the greatest artist of the 20th century. He was unique as an inventor of forms, as an innovator of styles and techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history. He created more than 20,000 works. Born in Malaga on October 25, 1881, Picasso was the son of Jose Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher, and Maria Picasso y Lopez. Until 1898 he always used his father's name, Ruiz, and his mother's maiden name, Picasso, to sign his pictures. Throughout Picasso's lifetime, his work was exhibited on countless occasions. Most unusual, however, was the 1971 exhibition at the Louvre, in Paris, honoring him on his 90th birthday; until then, living artists had not been shown there. Picasso died in his villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie near Mougins on April 8, 1973

      As the son of a professor of art, Picasso's talent for drawing was recognized at an early age. An advanced student at the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts from the age of 14, he experimented in his youth with nearly all of the avant-garde styles current at the turn of the century, an early demonstration of his lifelong ability to assimilate aesthetic ideas and to work in a variety of styles.
      For Picasso, the meaning of art was to be derived from other works of art, and not directly from nature. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's work had a significant impact on his early paintings, as did the work of Paul Cézanne. Their influence, among others', can be detected in the paintings of Picasso's "blue period" (1901-04), which was stimulated by his exposure to life and thought in Paris, where he made his home after 1904. His use of blue as a motif was apparently derived from the symbolic importance of that color in the contemporary romantic writings of Maurice Maeterlinck and Oscar Wilde, whose work often derived its force from depictions of madness or illness.



      Although his palette and subject matter changed when he entered (1904) what is called his "rose period," during which he painted harlequins and circus performers in a lighter and warmer color scheme, an underlying mood of spiritual loneliness and lyrical melancholy that marked his "blue" paintings was retained. These paintings, however, do display a classical calm that contrasts clearly with the nervous expressionism of the blue period.



      After 1908, Picasso joined with Braque and other like-minded artists to explore the representation of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface by means of overlapping planes. This early phase of the cubist movement, often called analytical cubism. In the course of his visual analyses, Picasso found that those fragments of naturalistic pictorial space and forms that remained were becoming less and less apparent. By 1912, he, Braque, and Juan Gris were introducing real materials such as chair caning and wallpaper--either the actual materials or painted facsimiles--into their works in what came to be known as collage. This synthesis or reconstitution of reality, called synthetic cubism, proved to be of fundamental importance to the development of modern art. Theoretical cubism soon became too formalized and dogmatic for Picasso.

During the 1920s he alternated cubist-inspired works with depictions of monumental and classically modeled figures. Subsequently, through the 1930s, he added certain aspects of surrealism to his work, including the use of the double image to create a shifting frame of reference and the idea of one object being metamorphosed into another.
     Yet another change in Picasso's style is evident in more somber and less fanciful still lifes, urban views, and portraits he executed while remaining in Paris during World War II. After the war he moved to the south of France, where he became interested in the classical cultural tradition of the Mediterranean. Mythological daydreams of nymphs, satyrs, fauns, and centaurs soon filled his works. The postwar years also marked a period of daring experimentation in lithography and ceramics. Although he had made prints throughout his career, he did not concentrate on that field until the late 1940s, when he embarked on a series of innovations that resulted in a reevaluation of printmaking as a means of expression.
       Picasso's work of the 1950s and '60s consisted for the most part of a reiteration of the themes and styles he had developed previously, although he never stopped experimenting with new materials and forms of expression. At the time of his death, he was universally recognized as the foremost artist of his era.