Description
About me
a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,[3][4] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.
Work / Education
Pablo Picasso was the most dominant and influential artist of the 1st half of the 20th century. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism, he also invented collage and made major contribution to Surrealism. He saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics. Finally, he was a famously charismatic personality, the leading figure in the Ecole de Paris. His many relationships with women not only filtered into his art but also may have directed its course, and his behavior has come to embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.
Picasso rejected Matisse's view of the primary importance and role of colour, and focused instead on new pictorial ways of representing form and space. Influenced by novelties of Cézanne, and also by African sculpture and ancient Iberian art, he started to lend his figures more structure, and to deconstruct the conventions of perspective that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. This led him (alongside with Georges Braque) to evolve an entirely new Cubist movement, which rapidly became the cutting edge of modern art. At the same time, Picasso himself rejected the label "Cubism," especially when critics began to differentiate between the two key approaches he pursued - Analytic and Synthetic.
In the 1920s and 1930s Picasso adopted a neoclassical figurative style. As he matured he worked on his own versions of canonical masterpieces by artists such as Poussin, Ingres, Velazquez, Goya, Rembrandt, and El Greco.
