Pablo Picasso Essay

Benjamin Stone

June 18th, 2015

20th Century Art

Professor Krasner

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was an acclaimed Spanish-French Painter in the late 19th and mid 20th century. Pablo Picasso's works can be seen in museums everywhere throughout the world today. He is best known for co-making the cubism style. His most renowned masterpieces were conceivably The Old Guitarist, which was in his Blue Period and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which was in his Cubism Period. Picasso was a popular painter, as well as did some model and printmaking also. He is better known for his depictions instead of his figure.

He attended Barcelona's School of Fine arts. At15 he was a well rounded painter. He was inspired early on by the city of Paris, where he became inspired by the sketchy style of works by Manet, Gustave Courbet and Toulouse-Lautrec. For the next 5 years, he began moving forth and back between France and Spain as France gave him so much inspiration during his time spent there. In his life he went through many phases and styles including realism, caricature, but more significantly the Blue period and Rose period.

One of the most significant periods of Picasso’s life had began, the Blue period. This period saw a decrease in his choice of ranges of color, to a single dark and oppressive blue. He painted everything in blue as a sign of sadness from when his best friend died. Instead of Picasso observing people as he had done before this period, he now treated his models with a lot of compassion. He stopped painting café scenes but started to imagine figures standing rigid and silent against an empty background. ‘Child with a Dove’, painted at the end of 1901, is the first of the series of canvases that comprised his “Blue period”. The next movement for Picasso was his Rose period, this was another significant period in Picasso’s life. He started to paint in brighter colors, which dominated the paintings along with the light blues and roses. His subjects were circus performers and clowns. Therefore, he drew people happy things along with lots of circus scenes with circus animals. In 1905, his work took a turn, as they became male and female figures, seen in front view or in a distinct profile, somewhat like the Old Greek Art. He was also inspired by the caricature like artworks of Henri Rousseau.

The ancient Iberian sculpture from Spain, which was African art was what paved the way for Picasso to become well known for his technique of cubism, He incorporated simplified forms of the source into striking portraits. This formed the forms of what he saw, to what he was thinking. His first cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon in 1907 shook up the art world. Although, he was a little scared of his painting and showing it, he did not show it until 1916. Picasso and George Braque a close friend of his then

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