Pablo Picasso’s name and art is recognizable across the globe. His art is so famous that even folks with hardly any interest in the art world know his name, and have probably seen at least one of his paintings before. Widely considered to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Picasso is a staple in any discussion of art history.
The Spanish artist is best known for helping create and inspire Cubism, a visual art style in which subjects are painted with geometric forms in a highly abstract way. While Picasso’s name has become synonymous with Cubism, it was actually another artist who gave the movement its name. The term was coined by French art critic Louis Vauxcelles after seeing landscape paintings by French artist Georges Braque. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the paintings “cubes.”
While it was Braque’s paintings that inspired the term, it was Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon that really broke ground and revolutionized art. Painted in 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a large oil painting that depicts five nude female prostitutes from a brothel in Barcelona. Instead of being highly-realistic and conventionally feminine, the women are angular and masculine.
The influence of African Art, which Picasso discovered in May or June of 1907 at the ethnographic museum in Paris’ Palais du Trocadér, can clearly be seen on two of the women who have African-mask-like faces.
The primitive, abstract, and flat two-dimensional nature of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon went against everything that Western art stood for and accepted at that time. In rejecting the long-held belief that art should imitate nature and traditional techniques of perspective, Picasso’s art forced people to think of beauty in an entirely different way. The abstractness and distortion of his art showed that there are multiple viewpoints, rather than only one. In later years, Picasso’s cubist works became more abstract, to the point where the subject of the painting is not easily discernible and looks simply like overlapping planes and facets in muted colors.
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In addition to Cubism, Picasso’s other major innovation was the use of collage, in which he pasted pieces of printed or colored paper to his paintings. The term “collage,” coined by Picasso and Braque, is derived from the French word “coller,” which means glue. Picasso made a series of collages from 1912 to 1913.
In his collage The Letter, he pasted a real stamp onto a depicted letter. For Still-life with Chair-caning, he attached a printed oil-cloth that looked like a chair-caning pattern and surrounded it with a continuous loop of rope, which acted as the frame. Picasso’s collages not only further toyed with dimension and perspective but also showed that common, everyday objects can be used in high art.
Picasso is also known for his sculptures, drawings, and, in his later years, involvement with the Surrealist movement. His Guernica painting, which depicts the horrific destruction of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, was painted during his Surrealist period. As showcased by Guernica, he was not afraid to show that he supported freedom from oppression causes, which garnered him more admirers. He supported the Spanish forces fighting Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and refused to leave Paris during the German occupation of World War II.