Who is Pablo Picasso? Pablo Picasso's Life, Pablo Picasso's Biography | Emre Şengün |Graphic Design, Guitar, Exlibris, Piant, Illustration, Photo, Flamenco

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Famous Painter Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso’s full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 8 April 1973). He was a Spanish painter and sculptor. He was one of the most famous artists of 20th century. Picasso and Georges Braque founded the Cubist movement. According to the Guinness World Records Book, Picasso was a very productive painter who has 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints, 34,000 book paintings, 1.200 sculptures and 3.200 ceramics and 7.000 drawings. In 1973, total value of his artworks are estimated as 750 million $.

Life of Pablo Picasso

Picasso was born on 25 October 1881, in Malaga, Spain. He was the first child of Italian origin Maria Picasso Lopez and Jose Ruiz Blasca who works as a teacher in the important art institutes of Spain and also as a curator in a museum. Having a close brush with death for the first time on his day of birth, midwife thought he was dead and started to care his mother, but since his uncle was a doctor, Don Salvador imperturbably saved Picasso‘s life at the last moment. In 1884, his sister Dolores, and in 1887, Concepcion were born. Picasso’s family were really into arts. He also had painter relatives. His first word was “piz”, which is short for the Spanish word Lapiz, which means pencil, and this was the sign of Picasso’s interest in painting.

His close interest with paper and pencil started in those ages. Picasso who had his first education from his father, later continued his education in Academia de San Fernando. Picasso spent his first 10 years of life in the town he was born, in Malaga, and his family were having financial difficulties. But when his father got a job offer from north Spain with a better payroll, they moved to the state center in the Atlantic coast, which they were going to live there for 4 years. In 1894, his sister Concepcion died because of diphtheria. This incident had a big influence on Picasso’s life and art.

At the age of 13, Picasso who took his father as an example, became a painter who impresses everyone with his artworks. His father Jose Ruiz Blasca was so impressed with his pigeon painting that, he gave his painting tools to his son, embraced that he is a mature artist now and never painted again.

In the beginning of 1895, Ruiz Blasco family moved to Barcelona and even though Picasso didn’t have a proper education, he got admitted to the famous Llotaja Art Institute at the age of 14. In his education period, he really gave weight on pattern exercises. Overflowing with creative ideas in the time he spent in Barcelona, Picasso met modernists and rich bourgeois families in that period, and he became friends with Carles Casagemas who was going to have an important role in the development of his painting language. Picasso became one of the most famous painters in Barcelona and his first large size oil painting was exhibited in the most important exhibition of Barcelona. In 1897, after a summer vacation spent in Malaga, Picasso moved into his new workroom in Madrid, and he got admitted to one of the most famous art institutes of Spain. Picasso initially copied and used master painters’ styles, but later he got inspired by these paintings and started to create his own style.

Picasso who opened up his first personal exhibition in Gallery Volland and visited Paris for the first time in 1900, took yet another turn with the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Picasso was reflecting his experiences with shades of blue, which he called this period as Blue Period and he was leaning on topics like elderliness, poorness and death. His paintings like Dama en Eden Concert (1903), La Vida (1903), Lasdoshermanas (1904) belongs to that period. In his Blue Period paintings, sadness and melancholy were dominant. Actually, the color of the sky, blue was his favorite color since his childhood, and he used this color in this first period paintings to express strong emotions and sadness. In this period, Picasso also sculpted his first sculptures. One of the biggest artists of that era, Rodin’s seeing his artwork added a new dimension to his life and he start to work on plastic arts. Prominent artwork of this period was La Vie (1903) which is now exhibited in the Cleveland’s Museum of Art. Blue Period was between the years of 1901-1903.

Picasso who moved to Paris in 1904, was living with journalist and poet Max Jacob who was going to teach him French, and he was going to meet Fernande Olivier in those days, whom he was going to marry later. Days in Paris were the precursor of the beginning of Picasso’s new period. After the Blue Period, another period that he used yet another main color mostly and that reveals the soul of the painting: Rose Period.

Picasso started to lay importance on lines and patterns rather than the color, his composition type became more aesthete, and his preferred colors were grey-rose ochre and brown shades. In this period, acrobat and clown figures were more common in his paintings, and the reflection of sadness was lightened. Circus people, clowns were his new heroes. One of the most important pieces of this period was Family of Saltimbanques (1905) which is exhibited in The National Gallery in Washington. Other artworks in the Pink Period were Lady with a Fan (1905), Harlequin Family (1905) and Woman with Loaves (1906). Plain and angled arrangement of the figures in this period was the precursor of the birth of Cubism.

After 1905, Picasso’s works started to be more classical. He was highly influenced by Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau who lived in the same period and his journey of Cubism started also in that period. At the end of 1906, Picasso was becoming famous not only for painting and texture, but also for sculpture and gravure. This period was the period that Picasso showed his paintings only to his close friends and this situation continued until he completed his first Cubist paintings.

Picasso started to use three dimensional forms on top of each other on a level area and to process the human anatomy different than how it looks. Picasso, together with his close friend Georges Braque, started the Cubist Movement which started in 1907 and marked an era in the art history. First example of Picasso’s Cubist sense of art was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) tableaux. His most famous paintings in this period were Man with a Pipe (1911), Still Life Bamboo Chair(1912) made by collage technique, and Bottle, Glass and Violin (1912). Since his artwork and Georges Braque’s artwork on the same movement were similar, it was difficult to distinguish their works from each other. General properties of Cubist paintings were geometry and the use of geometric shapes. Illustrated objects were either simplified to create geometric forms or divided into geometric shapes. Another feature of Cubism was to transfer a three dimensional object into a two dimensional surface, and for this purpose, Picasso were dividing objects to its lateral surfaces and trying to show each of them on a two dimensional surface. For the same reason, people in his portraits were illustrated both from profile and front. Starting from the year 1910, Picasso and Braque were taking the Cubist movement to a next level. In this first phase, objects were divided into pieces, known as Analytic Cubism. The purpose here was reflecting the reality of it rather than imitating it, and the important artworks of this period were: The Guitar Player (1910), Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), Accordionist (1911) and Aficionado (1912). And in 1912, with the partnership of Picasso and Braque, Cubist movement took another step, Synthetic Cubism. In this phase that transferring of the real world to the canvas was considered on an extreme point, little pieces were really important. Some of the paintings of the painter in the Synthetic Cubism phase were Guitar and Violin (1912), Glass and Bottle of Suze (1912), Clarinet and Violin (1913) and The Italian Girl (1917).

Picasso who ended his partnership with Braque in the time of World War I, started to reflect post-war communal subversion and the horror created by the technological terror on his paintings he returned to his classical line. In these years that he lived with Jean Cocteau in Rome, Picasso started to work as a stage decorator and soon after he met dancer Olga Kokhlova, he got married again. Picasso painted many portraits of both his son Paulo and his wife, and in 1930s he started to get influenced by the surrealism.

Picasso who he met and fell in love with Marie-Therese in the January 1927, couldn’t get on well with his wife Olga. He painted countless portraits of Therese and he continued this affair for years. His marital conflict with Olga became beyond bearing and he had a child named Maya from his girlfriend Maria-Therese. But since Olga doesn’t want to break up with him, Picasso was always overwrought and having trouble focusing on his work. In one of his letters, he wrote “This is the worst time of my life” and he walked away from everyone and started to write poems. Picasso purchased a mansion near Paris in 1931 and built a gravure and sculpture atelier with the encouragement of his friends Louis Fort and Gonzales.

The situation of the Guernica town after it was bombed by Germans in 27 April 1937 highly affected the painter. Picasso named the piece that he completed after this incident as Guernica. There was an interesting event about this issue. While Picasso was just about to complete Guernica in his atelier, a German commander came in and after he stared at the painting for a long time, he asked Picasso if he painted it. In response, famous painter said “No, you did it”. Guernica was considered as the most famous painting of Picasso. This tableaux that symbolizes the German bombardment during the Spain Civil War, was reflecting the inhumane, hopeless and ignominious side of the war. This painting that was exhibited in the The Museum of Modern Art in New York for many years, wasn’t exhibited in his country, Spain according to his will. It’s because Picasso wasn’t satisfied about the democracy in Spain. Painting could only returned to his homeland in 1981 and exhibited in Cason del Buen Retiro. When Reina Sofia Museum was opened in 1992, Madrid, Guernica was placed as the most important piece of this museum. Some of the important paintings of Picasso in this phase were Woman Flower (1946), Portrait de Sylvette (1954) and Don Quixote (1955).
Picasso was against the war for his whole life but he always had to live with the war, and one of his close friends, Max Jacob was killed in the Jewish concentration camp by the Germans. Picasso started to live with the painter he knows for two years, Françoise Gilot in the fall of 1945, they moved to South France and he painted countless portraits of his lover Françoise.

In 1949, when he was asked by the Communist Party that he was a member of, to make a poster for the Peace Congress in Paris, he painted the pigeon picture which is now the symbol of peace, and his work covered the walls all over the cities of Europe. After Claude, he named his second child from Françoise Gilot as Paloma, which means pigeon in Spanish. Picasso continued his political activities until Hungary’s invasion by the Soviets in 1956. Picasso was very productive and in Vallauris that he has been living in since 1948, he got interested in ceramics and pottery, and produced many creative artworks in this field. Even though he was 70 years old, he was a happy, lively and vibrant painter. But when Françoise left him by taking away his 2 children, he returned to his old depressive days. Overwhelmed by the journalists who watch himself as if he was a movie star, he started to live a secluded life with his new girlfriend Jacqueline Roque in his villa called La Californie on the edges of Cannes, and he started to meet with only his close friends.

He married Jacquelin Roque in 14 March 1961 and moved to a farm on a hill near the small town Mougins, which is 8 kilometers away from Cannes. On 1 May 1970, while his latest works were exhibited in the Papal Palace in Avignon, he donated all of his early works to the Picasso Museum opened up in Barcelona with the help of his friend Jaime Sabarte.

The painter who achieved the immortality while he was alive, passed away on 8 April 1973. Picasso who had his most productive period on last 20 years of his life, is one of the most important artists of 20. Century without a doubt. In the movie Surviving Picasso which revealed his stormy relationships and artistic character, famous actor Anthony Hopkins played the role of Picasso. It is also rumored that he gave one of his painting as a gift to Ara Güler, who was lucky enough to take a portrait photo of him.