Pablo Picasso, a renowned and most influential artist of 20th century and regarded as one of the best artists ever lived in this world, as of 2015, he was the top rank holder artist in terms of the selling price of his paintings. He was born on 25 October 1881, in Malaga, Spain. He was taken to a middle-class family. His father’s occupation was painting and had expertise in naturalistic depictions of games and birds. His father, for most of his life, worked as a professor of art and curator of a local museum.
Picasso’s full name is “Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de Los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz y Picasso,” that is quite-big, and tongue twister as it contains 23 words, and this series of names was for honoring various relatives and saints. Pablo showed immense passion and interest in drawing in his early childhood. According to ho parents, the first he spelled was “piz, piz” a short term of Spanish word lapiz which means “pencil.” At the age of seven years, he started learning figure drawing and oil painting from his father. When Picasso was 13 years, his father noticed him painting him, his incomplete painting of a pigeon and after seeing Pablo’s precision in technique and style, he realized that his son had surpassed him and he vowed to give up drawing.
Picasso was traumatized due to his 7-year-old sister’s death in 1895, and hence his family shifted to Barcelona. He was enrolled in Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, the prestigious art school of the country. He disliked the formal instructions. Hence he stopped attending classes. In 1900, Pablo made his first trip to the art capital of Europe, Paris. Where he met Max Jacob, who was a poet and journalist, In the struggling days both Max and Pablo shared an apartment in which Max slept at night and Pablo at day and worked at night that was the severity of poverty which they faced. They burned much of Pablo’s work to keep the small room warm.
From 1901, his artistic career began to rise, his paintings gained popularity as the time passes and he developed many ways and techniques for his artwork, pictures by him in the different period had differences in color, way, and movements .some of the periods are given below;
Blue period (1901-04): in this period his paintings were rendered in shades of green-blue and blue colors and rarely use of other colors, beggars and prostitutes were the frequent subjects used by Picasso in this period.
Rose period (1904-06): in this period, his paintings had lighter tone and style using pink and orange colors, and subjects of painting were circus people, harlequins and acrobats. In this period he met a Bohemian artist in France, who became his mistress.
African art and primitivism (1907-09): in this period he was influenced by Iberian sculpture and African artifacts, and he produced the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon painting, which he exhibited publicly in 1916 only. And other works of this period include Three Women (1908) and Nude with Raised arms (1907). Experience gained by him in this period leads him to the Cubist period.
Analytic cubism (1909-12): this form of style Picasso developed with the help of Georges Braque and used the Brownish and neutral colors. In Suspicion of theft of Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum, Picasso was arrested and later given clean-chit.
Synthetic cubism (1912-19): this form of art is a further development of the genre of cubism, in which artwork is produced from an assemblage of paper cuttings, newspaper pages, and different forms. And this form of art is called Collage art. In 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova.
Neoclassicism and surrealism (1919-29): Picasso went to Italy in February 1917. It was the period of World War I, he produced artwork in Neoclassical style. Picasso revived his attraction to eroticism and primitivism by surrealism. And in 1927, Picasso met and had a long-standing affair with 17-year old Marie-Therese Walter. After this affair his marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation, Picasso never divorced her because he didn’t want to give away his half property to her as alimony. Picasso also didn’t marry Marie Walter and she hanged herself four years after Pablo’s death in 1973.
Later life and work :
During World War II, Germans occupied the Paris and Picasso remained there, and his artistic style was not fit with the Nazi ideal of art. Hence he didn’t exhibit any of his artwork during this time.
In 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Pablo turned 63, and he began a romantic affair with a 40 years younger art student than him, named Francoise Gilot. The couple had two children, Claude, and Paloma Picasso. Gilot accused Picasso of abusive treatment, and she left him taking the children with her. Later Picasso married Roque, and also he had several affairs with women of even greater age.
Also, Picasso was a great sculptor, he built “The Chicago Picasso,” for which he was to be paid $100,000, but he donated this amount to the people of Chicago.
According to information revealed in 2003, Picasso was denied French citizenship on the ground of his extremist ideas related to communism.
In 1944, Pablo joined the French Communist Party and attended the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of peace, Poland, for which he was awarded Stalin Peace Prize in 1950 from Soviet government. And he 1962 he was given Lenin Peace Prize. About communist once he stated that “I have joined a family and like all families, it is full of shit.”
In his whole life span, he produced approximately 50,000 artworks, which includes paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and prints.
Many paintings produced by him rank among the most expensive painting in the auction history of the world. Some of the painting details are given below:
- Garcon a la pipe sold for US$104 million, in May 2004
- Dora Maar au Chat, sold for US$95.2 million, in May 2006
- Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, sold for $106.5 million, in May 2010
- Women of Algiers, sold for US$179.3 million, in May 2015
- Femme Assie (1909), sold for $63.4 million, in June 2016
Personal life and Legacy
Throughout his life Pablo had several affairs besides of his spouses, he was married twice and had four children by three women, named as Paulo (with Olga Khokhlova), Maya (with Marie -Therese -Walter), Claude and Paloma (with Francoise Gilot). In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Picasso was closest to his famous lover Dora Maar, who was a painter and photographer by profession, and it is said that Maar documented painting of Guernica.
Picasso is remembered as the most celebrated artist ever lived in this world; more of his artwork has been stolen than any other artist in the world. Several film and plays have featured his life and art. in 2003, a museum named as “Museo Picasso Malaga” was opened by Picasso’s relatives dedicated to him at his birthplace, Malaga, Spain.