Pablo Picasso Essay

Pablo Picasso

At the age of 19, Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris in the year 1900, and with only a few years he established himself as a dominant figure in the modern art movement. Seven years later he produced the artworks that helped launched Cubism, this brought about a revolution in artistic expression that are still being created today. Pierre Daix once wrote “His inventiveness in the domain of form was prodigious and has haunted the imagination of painters unceasingly, leaping across whole generations, from surrealists to abstract expressionists, to pop art and the generation of 1980’s”.

Picasso changed our way of seeing through a long life of staggering productivity. This Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and ceramist continually enchanted and outrage the world with his prodigious talent and revolutionary new vision. The world, which was constantly evolving around Picasso, was a constant influence to his artworks and frightening images of war, destruction and people are shown through his art.

Throughout the eras of Picasso’s life muses have played a large role in his life and have been shown through many of his artworks. In total Pablo Picasso has had eight women that have been through his life and helped been shaped and changed by Picasso’s personality and behavior. Each women in Picasso’s life have been shown in a different stylistic manner. In the early years of his life Olga Khokhlova were shown in a realistic process before Picasso created the new movement of abstract cubism. While his next muse Marie-Therese Walter was shown in a more distorted depiction with her curvaceous figure being one of the more prominent trait in the artworks that she was involved in. Each woman in Picasso’s life have been shaped and distorted different and thus been unique.

The first wife that Pablo Picasso had was Olga Khokhlova who he met in Rome. She was a dancer in a Russian ballet company where Picasso met her as he was designing its sets and costumes. In 1918, Picasso has shown his Spanish roots through the stunning figurative portrait of Olga in an Armchair. As with his previous lovers, Fernande and Eva, he reinstates traditional realistic, aesthetic methods to contemplate beauty and its relationship to art.

Olga peacefully sits with a likeness to a doll, looking wistfully at the audience. At Olga’s insistence that she wanted to be able to recognize herself, Picasso painted her in a classical style. There is precision in the drawing, and light and shade are treated in a traditional, realistic manner. Though this is a realistic painting, Picasso has played with the dimension of depth, which is absent to the point that Olga appears not to be sitting in her armchair, but rather ‘superimposed’ on it. In a similar way, the pattern on the seat is made to look like wallpaper stuck on. The painted backdrop of the chair and the colorful, half-opened fan diminish the severity of the black clothing and Olga’s tightly bound black hair. The blue-green shading around Olga’s form almost seems unfinished as though they shading was meant to blend into the background but didn't.

In 1932, Picasso began a new series of paintings, which were a sequence of female figures, that were mostly nude but for the occasional piece of clothing. Throughout this series almost all of them were shown to be asleep. The main model for these paintings was Marie-Therese Walter, who three years late became the mother of the artist’s daughter, Maia. Through his new muse of Marie-Therese, Picasso found tranquility, which contrasted his dominating mood that had inspired the figures of the preceding years. These new artworks were fresh and show a naïve sensuality.

The Dream shows the figure of a young woman asleep in a chair, this was one of the earliest paintings in the series and was filled with a sensual charm that adds an erotic appeal of the young woman so candidly expressed. The fresh and vibrant colors give a sense of wakefulness but the

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