Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973)

Spanish artist

In 1916, at thirty-five years old, Pablo Ruiz Picasso compared himself with a tenor who reaches a note [Page 1200]higher than the one written in the score (Podoksik 1996, 19). His self-assessment, while unabashedly boastful, serves as a fitting metaphor for the magnitude of his influence on both modern and contemporary art. Picasso felt constrained by the aesthetic conventions of the classical tradition, and he eventually rebelled against them, creating highly original styles and techniques that better captured the confusion and alienation we now associate with the twentieth century. Through his multifaceted contributions in the media of painting, sculpture, graphics, and collage, Picasso is largely responsible for forming our visual perceptions of our modern, technologically advanced world.

Picasso at work at his home in southern France in October 1950. He is working on both paintings and ceramics and exploring the use of nontraditional materials such as shovels and bicycle handles.

Bettmann/Corbis; used with permission.

Born 25 October 1881 in Malága, Spain, Picasso was a prodigy who could draw before he could speak. “My first drawings could never have been shown at an exhibition of children's drawings,” he wrote. “I lacked the clumsiness of a child, his naivety. I made academic drawings at the age of seven, the minute precision of which frightened me” (Walther 1993, 8). His parents recognized their son's talents and encouraged him in his artistic ambitions. He received his formal training first from his father, who was an art teacher at the School of Fine Arts in La Coruña (1892–1895), and later at “La Lonja” school of art in Barcelona (1895–1897) and the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid (1897–1898). During these formative years he rapidly mastered the painting techniques of the ancient and Spanish masters, astonishing his teachers with phenomenal accuracy. Picasso would soon cast off the traditional painting techniques he perfected during these early years, but he would later return to them, rearranging and mixing traditional techniques with his own aesthetic innovations.

The young painter first traveled to Paris in 1900 where he admired and studied works by the Impressionists, most notably Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pierre Bonnard. While living there, he frequented Parisian cafés and clubs, scenes of which frequently became the subject matter of his works. For a brief time, he painted decorative, lively representations of Paris night life. But after the suicide of painter and close friend Carlos Casagemas, a fellow Spaniard with whom he had shared his studio, Picasso's paintings shifted in mood from gaiety to melancholy. “The Absinthe Drinker” (1901), which portrays a lonely woman sitting in a café with her glass of green absinth, marks the beginning of this shift. While still honoring the Impressionist fascination with bright, festive color, the absinth drinker is strikingly somber, underscoring life's more tragic dimensions. “The Burial of Casagemas,” painted the same year, marks Picasso's entrance into the Blue Period (1901–1904), a time in which poverty, death, and suffering became central themes. The figures represented are desperate and often pathetic, and were painted almost exclusively in varying shades of blue and green.

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