Pablo Picasso

Beethoven “There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
– Pablo Picasso

 

No artist before Pablo Picasso, and arguably no artist since, has seen the level of notoriety in his or her lifetime that Picasso did. Pablo Picasso, born October 25, 1881 in Spain, was said to be a child prodigy. Though he is most famous for cubism, Picasso painted in a number of styles such as realism, caricature, classicism, and surrealism.

The Blue Period is the most famous of Picasso's periods; it dates from 1901 to 1904 and is characterized by a predominantly blue palette and subjects focusing on outcasts, beggars, and prostitutes. Perhaps the most famous painting from the Blue Period is The Blind Man’s Meal. Already launched into fame by his various styles, Picasso’s Cubism quickly shook up the art world. Cubism is essentially trying to capture the subject from all possible vantage points at the same time by turning 3 dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining. The style was created by Picasso along with his great friend Georges Braques.

Picasso discovered ancient Iberian sculpture from Spain and Africa and began to incorporate the simplified forms he found in these sculptures into his most famous and infamous piece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907. Although he spent many years in France, Picasso was in Spain during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The Republican government asked him to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the world exposition in Paris, for which he painted the renowned oil Guernica in 1937. Picasso was undoubtedly influenced by the total destruction by bombs of the town of Guernica in the Basque country.

Much is overlooked when it comes to Picasso. Many people do not realize that he was also a sculptor (see the photo with this article) and a printmaker. A noted womanizer and sexist, he had contempt for women artists and women as a whole referring to them as "goddesses or doormats". He has rarely received any criticism for this, save for some ardent feminists in obscure texts. Despite his all too human frailties, prodigy or not, Picasso was one of the greatest painters of his time.

 

This Lemonade Profile was written by baya620, an Artistic Lemonade contributing writer.

 

 

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The photo used with this article was taken by Jonas Ericson; it shows Picasso's statue "Head of Female" in Halmstad, Sweden.

 

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