The creative genius of the Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, changed art completely. For Picasso, what he saw with his eyes was only the starting point for his imagination to portray the image in radical ways.
Picasso was born in Malaga in Spain and studied art in Barcelona and Madrid. In 1903, he moved to Paris to start his own studio and, subsequently, he spent most of his life in France. Initially, he was a conventional artist who painted realistic pictures. But he soon developed his own distinctive style and continued to experiment. In 1901, he entered what is known as his ‘Blue Period’. Feeling lonely and depressed over the death of a close friend, he painted pictures of poverty, desperation and anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue and green. Subsequently, he fell in love and gained a financial backer, his mood improved and he entered his ‘Rose Period’ in 1904.
In 1907, Picasso broke the mould. He produced a painting unlike anything that anyone had ever painted before. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was a startling abstract portrayal of five nude prostitutes. They were distorted with angular geometric shapes and sharp blotches of blues, greens and greys. This one painting changed the direction of art. It was the start of Cubism, an artistic style pioneered by Picasso and his friend and fellow painter, Georges Braque. Cubism was a destructive and creative movement in which the artist does not paint realistic or recognisable images, but uses shapes, such as cubes and triangles, to break apart and reconstruct a subject from several viewpoints simultaneously.
His styles continued to change and burst into new forms. He became a leader in the Surrealist movement. He used colours and shapes not to please audiences but to shock and disturb them. His famous painting Guernica, in 1937, was a terrifying portrayal of the horrors of war. It represented the bombing of the town of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso was a master in many art forms. He produced drawings, lithographs, etchings, sculptures, pottery, ceramics and stage designs. He continued to work and produce art prolifically until his death in Mougins in France in 1973.
Picasso is, unquestionably, the most celebrated, revolutionary and influential painter of the twentieth century. He reinvented himself continually with radically different styles, so much so that some critics consider him to be five separate artists rather than one.
Master the current methods and then replace them with something extraordinary. Picasso was an excellent classical painter but, after he had mastered the skill, he eschewed convention and developed his own methods. Not once, but several times.
Believe in your own genius and apply it prolifically and in different media. Picasso said, ‘Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.’
DID YOU KNOW?… Picasso rarely paid a bill. His signature was so valuable to collectors that a cheque bearing it was kept often for its value rather than cashed. If he took his friends to a restaurant, he would pay sometimes simply by signing the bill.