Artistic Talent of Pablo Picasso - Essay Example

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a great artist born as the first son of Maria Picasso y Lopez and Don Jose Ruiz y Blasco on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, a small city in Andalusia region, Spain. He almost died on the day of his birth as he did not breath during delivery and the midwife declared him a still born. Dr. Salvador Ruiz, his uncle however blew the smoke of a cigar into Picasso’s nose and he revived. His parents were from minor aristocratic families and Jose Ruiz Blasco, Picasso’s father, was an art professor at the School of Crafts in San Telmo, Malaga and a painter. Additionally, he was a local art museum’s curator. He specialized in the middle-class paintings of his time, generally still lifes and landscapes (McNeese & Picasso 14). As a teacher of art, Picasso’s father was not making much money and his family experienced great financial problems. He therefore moved to La Coruna where he worked as a teacher in a fine arts secondary school called Instituto da Guarda. After four years, they moved again to Barcelona when his father got a teaching position in Barcelona’s School of Fine Arts. Picasso greatly identified with the city to the extent that people believed that he was born there. He enrolled at the School of Fine Arts and although he was younger than his fellow students were, his father was able to make him enrolled in advanced classes.When he was fifteen years old, Picasso’s work Science and Charity took an honorable mention at Madrid’s National Exhibition of Fine Arts. The painting later took a gold medal in a contest in Malaga. Later, his father took him to San Fernando’s Royal Academy in Spain, a very famous school of art although he soon dropped out as the formal schooling failed to interest him (Fandel 1895). It was from his father that Picasso learnt the basics of art. He started receiving formal instruction in drawing, art and other lessons from his father at the age of six or seven and he keenly took interest in those studies, which molded him into the artist he became (17). In fact, the story goes that his father gave him his own brushes and palette at the age of thirteen, vowing never to paint again when on his return from a walk in the city; he found Picasso having finished very richly and delicately one of his pigeon sketches (21). Soon, art obsessed him, even to the detriment of his other studies. As he grew up, Maria Picasso y Lopez, his mother for whom Picasso always had immense affection, professed a great faith in him and his artistic abilities. She claimed that Picasso had a great interest in paper and pencil and that he began drawing before even learning to talk. In fact, as Picasso struggled to develop a name and a career in the world of art, she gave him financial and moral support (McNeese & Picasso 16). In the year 1900, Picasso went to Paris, one of the then most significant centres of art in Western Europe, for the first time and since he loved the city, he lived there with Max Jacob, a friend who was a poet and a journalist. His living here would forever transform his artistic future as well as his art. Unlike his friend who worked in the day and slept at night, Picasso worked at night and slept during the day. He experienced hard moments and to keep himself warm, he burned several of his paintings (3). While in Paris, Picasso had an entertaining propensity and among his friends were such people as Gertrude Stein and Andre Breton (McNeese & Picasso 28). Plablo Picasso also had an active love life, which along with his art, always attracted his fans. His love life largely affected his paintings just as his personal life did. More often than not, along with a primary partner or a wife, he had several mistresses (5). In the year 1904, he started a relationship with Fernande Olivier who he has featured in a number of his Rose Period Paintings. Later, he left her and started another relationship with Marcelle Humbert, who he used to refer to as Eva. In his Cubist paintings appear his declarations of his love for her. In the year 1918, while he was designing a ballet called Parade for Sergei Diaghilev in Rome, Picasso married a woman ballet dancer/ ballerina from Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe. Her name was Olga Khokhlova and she introduced Picasso to high society life, which she was attached to. She bore him a son whom they named Paulo but their marriage did not work. This was because Picasso’s bohemian lifestyle often clashed with her socializing. The two separated when Picasso began a secret relationship with 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter. They however never filed for a divorce because the French Law necessitated that upon divorcing Khokhlova, Picasso should give half of his property to her. Picasso did not this and they therefore stayed separated until Khokhlova died in the year1955 (Ghare 18-21). The affair between Picasso and Maria-Therese lasted for long and she even bore him a daughter by the name Maia. Although she hoped that Picasso would one day marry her, Picasso never did. Four years following Picasso death, she hanged herself. Another regular friend and a lover of Picasso in 1930s and in the beginning of 1940s was Dora Maar, a painter and photographer who even documented the painting of the Guernica. In the year 1944, Picasso started another relationship with Francoise Gilot, a young art student with whom they had two children called Paloma and Claude. In Picasso’s life, Francoise was the first woman who left him in the year 1953 owing to his numerous infidelities, and this greatly disturbed him. He then had a six-week long affair with Genevieve Laporte, a beautiful young girl possibly on the rebound, before meeting another woman at Madoura Pottery where he painted and made ceramic art. Her name was Jacqueline Roque and as a way of revenging on Gilot, he married her in the year 1961and they remained together until the death of Picasso in 8 April 1973 (Ghare 22-27). To date, Picasso’s early drawings of simple objects like pigeons, horses, burros, and pictures of bullfights among others still survive. McNeese & Picasso explain that Picasso’s first oil painting was of a group of people watching a bullfighter on horseback at a bullfight. During this time, he was only eight or nine years old and he kept the painting all his life. When he was seventeen years old, Picasso made his first copperplate etching, which showed a bullfighter on horseback/picador in the bullring. Forgetting in his initial attempt that a reverse image would result from the print from the etching, he his picador was depicted with his lance in his left hand. However, Picasso dismissed the blunder naming the etching ‘The left handed one’/El Zurdo. Every day, Picasso’s interest and talent grew as he searched for interesting sites, which he severally sketched including La Coruna’s harbor, the endless beach, the surrounding countryside, the cityscape, among others and filled sketchpads and notebooks with numerous subjects. He also made many portraits of Lola, his sister, of his mother in profile by the use of crayons and pastels, among others (19-22). Ghare explains that based on their moods and styles, All Picasso’s paintings are usually classified into different periods. For example, there was the blue period, rose period, African influenced period, analytic cubism period and synthetic cubism period. One of Picasso’s most renowned paintings is the piece by the name Les Demoiselles dAvignon Les Demoiselles dAvignon, which he made of oil on canvas. I find this work particularly intriguing because it depicts his skill with brush and oils, as well as his mastery of the canvas. It also demonstrates his daring trait in artwork as well as his predilection for experimentation, which I believe made him outshine other artists of his time. In this piece, Picassos drew inspiration from artistic sources that were outside the accepted ones, leading to his most radical as well as revolutionary painting. As Moodbook.com records, the theme of the painting, which was ‘the female nude’, could not be more traditional, but his treatment of the painting is revolutionary. In this work, Picasso took even more liberties with human anatomy as compared to his 1906 Self-Portrait. The figures that he featured on the left in the painting appear flat, as if they have neither muscular nor skeletal structure. Seen from the front, their faces have noses in profile, while the eyes are radically simplified and asymmetrical. The contour lines that he used are incomplete. In addition, color juxtapositions, for instance between orange and blue, are deliberately unharmonious and strident. Moreover, the representation of space is irregular and disjointed. While African masks inspire the right side of the canvas, particularly in its oval forms and striped patterns, the left side is greatly Iberian-influenced. Such borrowings, which resulted into great distortion, simplification and visual incongruities, were deemed exceptionally daring in the year 1907. As for the figure at the bottom right for instance, the head turns in a way that is practically impossible for an anatomy/ in an anatomically impractical way. Important to note is the fact that these divergences proved so shocking that even fellow painters to Picasso reacted negatively this particular work: to Les Demoiselles dAvignon. In fact, a French painter by the name Matisse supposedly told Picasso that he was attempting to mock the modern movement (Moodbook.com 13). Conclusion Picasso Pablo was indeed a very prominent and distinct artist compared to other painters of his time and even after. He attained the highest stature in his time and indubitably set the standard for his generation. His talent and skill made paintings to be one of the greatest legacies of Western art. To date, his reputation is as high today as it has ever been. Works Cited Fandel, Jennifer. Pablo Picasso: Xtraordinary artists. Mankato, Minnesota: The Creative Company, 2005. Print. Ghare, Madhavi. Pablo Picasso Biography. 2009. Web. McNeese, Tim & Picasso, Pablo. Pablo Picasso: Great Hispanic heritage. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006. Print. Moodbook.com. Pablo Picasso. N.d. Web. Read More