Pablo Picasso

Biography

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain on October 25th, 1881. He was the son of an art and drawing teacher and was such a brilliant student himself that at the age of only fourteen, he passed the entrance exam for the Barcelona School of Fine Arts. Today, no other artist is associated with the Modern Art movement than Pablo Picasso, so much so that his name is almost synonymous with 20th Century art.

During his lifetime as an artist, Picasso went through different periods of characteristic painting style, and for many he is considered the greatest art genius that ever lived. The Blue Period lasted from 1900 to 1904 and was characterised by the use of different shades of blue to underline the melancholy of his subjects which included half starved bodies. From here Picasso moved onto the Rose Period of 1905 to 1906 which moved away from blue tones to the more friendly pink tones and subjects taken from the world of the circus.

Picasso made several trips to Paris and moved there permanently in 1904. He met many famous artists and formed a particular bond with Henri Matisse that would develop into a lifelong friendship. Picasso was also inspired by the works of Paul Cezanne and together with George Braque and Juan Gris they developed the Cubist style, where subjects were reduced to basic geometric shapes.

In the later part of his career, Picasso was incredibly proficient and would often complete as many as three paintings in one day; however these at the time were believed to be worthless and dismissed. Douglas Cooper said that these works were “the incoherent scribbling of a frenetic old man”. After Picasso’s death in 1973, these later works were looked at once again by the critics and the once negative view changed to one of admiration as they realised that he had been working in a neo-expressionist style and as usual was decades ahead of his time.