At fourteen, he was doing portraits of his family in an adult, masculine, Spanish style. He painted an excellent, still extant profile of his mother, who was handsome and loving and his favorite, and a tortured, psychologically brilliant full-face portrait, also still preserved, of his bearded, middle-aged father, who is holding his head in his hand and frowning, without focus, in worry and disappointment.
The elaborate examinations were ordinarily spread over a month they included drawing a male nude from a life-class model , but he completed them in one day and, furthermore, won first place over all the adult competitors. Once admitted to the school, he paid very little attention to its classes. In Madrid, as in Barcelona, he immediately deserted the classes as if they were cemeteries. For him, academic art was dead; he was alive.
Later in , an important formative event occurred. What he learned in Catalonia, living among the peasants, was the totality of their poverty. The Catalan experience was also the basic background for his ultimate joining of the French Communist Party. Disappointingly enough, the Picasso side, which Pablo chose to feature, yields nothing farther back than a photograph of his great-grandmother. He died there of yellow fever, or perhaps in mysterious circumstances—the family was never sure.
Possibly because Pablo was more strongly attached to his mother than to his father, possibly because her name was the prettier, and certainly the rarer, of the two, or possibly because he himself was already violently drawn toward the arbitrary and unprecedented, the young rebel, to the chagrin of the Ruiz clan, who were thus lost to posterity as well as to future world fame , chose to be known and to paint from then on as a Picasso. The young Picasso made four assaults upon Paris, that alluring European art citadel, before he was able to enter and remain.
The first was a visit of only two months, in , at the age of nineteen, with the permission and assistance of his parents, who, with difficulty, paid his railway fare. A third sally followed in , and finally, in , he slipped in permanently, like an unrecognized explosive foreign body. He came to rest in the battered old Montmartre tenement called the Bateau-Lavoir because it looked like one of the Seine laundry boats , and there he stayed maturing for five years, rapidly growing into his first period of importance in France.
More is known about Picasso and his career than has been discovered and recorded about any other painter of our time—indeed, of any time. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Today, at seventy-five, he still functions in periodic concentrations of his remorseless energy. His large head is now an impressive almost bare cranium, from which his bright, jet-black eyes, rather like the bold eyes of a bull, peer out with unabated attention.
Excessive in himself, he has always inspired hyperbole in others as the only logical method of dealing with his special case. Everything ferments in him—his thoughts, sensations, and memories. Nothing stays quiet. He has always naturally expressed himself in extremes and contrasts. He attaches himself only to what is essential; what is minor will follow. He never loses his strength by diluting himself. He does not vacillate, is never long discouraged.
He uses tenacity rather than patience. He is the sworn enemy of any and all systems and has no sense of law. He is a tireless analyst; he follows the scent of an idea as if it were an intrigue. He is interested in everything and completely absorbed by some things. He has more curiosity than a thousand million women. Physically, Picasso has always been abnormally alert.
His eyes are inordinately quick at seizing and noting details, and he likes to pamper his extraordinarily acute sense of smell. In his early, impoverished Montmartre days, whenever as rarely happened he had a hundred francs to invest in pleasure, he would buy a big bottle of eau de cologne for Fernande Olivier, the first and most historic of his many public Paris attachments.
His reaction to music, however, has always been nil, aside from a fondness for Spanish-gypsy guitar playing and songs. His gestation of an idea for a picture is so rapid that its very brevity keeps it from exhausting him. When he starts to work, nothing distracts him and everything disturbs him. A woman approached the artist as he sketched in a park. Would he draw her portrait?
Of course. Pleased with the result, she asked:. Close Menu Home. Not letting the influence of other masters hold you back. If Picasso had decided to keep to the beaten track , he would certainly have achieved considerable success.
He was a great drawing artist and a very talented imitator. This is evident by one impressive story. The joke was so convincing that one of the most serious of the Paris art magazines , on getting hold of a photograph of the telephoning odalisque , solemnly reproduced it as a genuine Matisse.
They change the world and change the view of a person or even of the whole mankind on this world. Picasso was never ashamed of "regressing to his childhood" In fact , many great painters loved to joke and fool around.
Quite the contrary — there are not so many artists who become dead serious when it comes to their work. Pablo Picasso poses as Popeye. Picasso often said that he admired primitive art and drawings made by children. Once he said: " When I was their age I could draw like Raphael , but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.
Most artists know that it is almost impossible for a person who already knows all the drawing rules to accurately imitate a picture drawn by a child. Only children fully possess the omnipotence of the beginner , who does not yet know "how it should be done.
Bather with beach ball Pablo Picasso. Moreover , Picasso never took himself too seriously. He did not allow himself to "succumb to stardom" and turn into a venerable master , who constantly utters words of wisdom. He liked masks and playing dress-up , often received guests while wearing unusual outfits , enjoyed taking pictures of himself taking a bath or dancing in front of his paintings , wearing night-clothes. At the premiere of the film The Mystery of Picasso at the Cannes Film Festival , the artist , who was usually seen in shorts , sandals and a vest , suddenly appeared wearing a formal suit and a bowler hat.
Picasso never stopped seeking for inspiration At least one thing in Picasso really fell under the conventional image of an artist: there was always a terrible mess in each of his studios. It was part of the creative process. The artist was surrounded by African sculptures , bronze statues , ceramics , musical instruments with torn strings and , of course , paintings — his own ones and those created by others.
Despite his fame and fortune , Picasso was quite modest in everyday matters and very stingy. Probably , it was due to the impoverished Parisian youth that Pablo spent in the windswept "Washhouse Boat" "Bateau-Lavoir" , where he had to live in a tiny dirty room and earn money for food and paint by hook or by crook.
Once Picasso was asked about the choice of colors for his paintings of the blue period. He replied that he simply had no other paints. Of course , now it is impossible to determine whether the artist spoke the truth or was just joking around. Nevertheless , the ability to create something , using a very limited set of materials is a valuable skill. Still , Picasso was never short of themes.
He constantly absorbed everything that could be "remelted" into an art piece: ideas and conversations , spied scenes and interesting types , emotions and fantasies. Picasso worked very quickly. Usually , it took him a brief glimpse of an idea to paint a picture. But sometimes , especially when it came to very important for him canvases , the work could take up to several months.
He wanted to create something as impressive as that painting , but at the same time something unique. In an attempt to take a new look at Western painting methods , Picasso filled several drawing-books with sketches. He decided to turn to the very beginnings , i. African sculptures and works by Native Americans , which he saw in the Museum of Ethnography in Paris , impressed him with a completely different approach to form.
Those were not the attempts to recreate the world around us , but rather the symbolic , almost shamanistic view of it. A serious and prematurely world-weary child, the young Picasso possessed a pair of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him destined for greatness. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope,'" he later recalled. Though he was a relatively poor student, Picasso displayed a prodigious talent for drawing at a very young age.
Picasso's father began teaching him to draw and paint when he was a child, and by the time he was 13 years old, his skill level had surpassed his father's. Soon, Picasso lost all desire to do any schoolwork, choosing to spend the school days doodling in his notebook instead.
I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping. In , when Picasso was 14 years old, his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he quickly applied to the city's prestigious School of Fine Arts. Although the school typically only accepted students several years his senior, Picasso's entrance exam was so extraordinary that he was granted an exception and admitted.
Nevertheless, Picasso chafed at the School of Fine Arts' strict rules and formalities, and began skipping class so that he could roam the streets of Barcelona, sketching the city scenes he observed. However, he again became frustrated with his school's singular focus on classical subjects and techniques. Inspired by the anarchists and radicals he met there, Picasso made his decisive break from the classical methods in which he had been trained, and began what would become a lifelong process of experimentation and innovation.
Picasso remains renowned for endlessly reinventing himself, switching between styles so radically different that his life's work seems to be the product of five or six great artists rather than just one. Of his penchant for style diversity, Picasso insisted that his varied work was not indicative of radical shifts throughout his career, but, rather, of his dedication to objectively evaluating for each piece the form and technique best suited to achieve his desired effect.
This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it. Art critics and historians typically break Picasso's adult career into distinct periods, the first of which lasted from to and is called his "Blue Period," after the color that dominated nearly all of his paintings over these years.
At the turn of the 20th century, Picasso moved to Paris, France — the center of European art — to open his own studio. Lonely and deeply depressed over the death of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas, he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue and green.
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