Pablo Picasso
Biography And Paintings Of Spanish Artist Pablo Picasso, Founder Of Cubism

Life (La Vie) (1903). From
Picasso's Blue Period.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Pablo Picasso, the inventor of Cubism, is regarded by art critics as the seminal artist of the twentieth century, and one of the greatest in the entire history of art. Influenced by French Impressionism, he nevertheless rejected Matisse's view of the primary importance and role of colour, and focused instead on new pictorial ways of representing form and space. This led him, in association with Georges Braque, to evolve an entirely new Cubist movement, which rapidly became the cutting edge of modern art.

Picasso's art works illustrated a number of differing styles, especially expressionism - and spanned a number of periods including, the Blue Period, the Rose Period, his epoque negre and Cubism. Supreme examples of his fine art painting include Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Guernica, and Weeping Woman.

Despite his association with Cubism and modern abstract art of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso remained a creature of the nineteenth century. Arguably, both his art and his thinking are essentially a product of nineteenth century Romanticism and Expressionism. The Romantic movement refers to a cultural style that began at the end of the eighteenth century - a period that was dominated by the Enlightenment, a mood and value-system that arose from scientific advances and believed in reason and rationalization. The romanticists reacted against this rational approach by emphasizing the value of emotions, aesthetics and imagination. In the visual arts, like painting, this led the artist away from copying nature and towards self-expression, a process which, in Picasso's case, led to the full-blown expressionism of his Blue and Rose periods, contemporary with German Expressionism of the 1900s. The final stage of this development would be abstract art, in which Pablo Picasso's Cubism would play a pivotal role.

Pablo Picasso's first forty years as a painter can be divided into relatively clear but overlapping periods. These are his Blue Period (c.1901–1904), his Rose Period (c.1905–1907), his African-influenced Period (epoque negre) (c.1907), Prototype Cubism (c.1908–1909), Analytical Cubism (c.1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (c.1912–1919).

Blue Period (c.1901-4)

During his blue period, and influenced by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas, he portrayed the world of the Parisian poor. These austere melancholy paintings of prostitutes and beggars, painted in shades of blue and blue-green, with a white El-Greco-style funereal skin color (such as La Vie, The Old Guitarist, The Frugal Repast, The Blindman's Meal, Celestina). His early days in Paris were marked by poverty, which may have contributed to the melancholy and subject matter of his art.

Rose Period (c.1905-7)

During the rose period Picasso started using a lighter palette with orange, tender fawns and pinks, making his canvases more cheery. One reason for this brighter approach was his warm relationship with Fernande Olivier, as well as his increased exposure to French painting and other artists. Indeed, Picasso's Parisian studio attracted several of the major figures of the avant-garde art world at this time, including Matisse, Braque and Gertrude Stein.

However, although there is a noticeable uplift in colour in his Rose Period, with pinks and light browns replacing some of the blue, Picasso's melancholy style did not evaporate with the end of his Blue Period. For example, Acrobat and Young Harlequin still displays sadness although no mourning. In fact, many of Picasso's contemporaries did not distinguish between a blue and a rose period but regarded the two as one single era. But the Rose Period marks the end of his realist figure painting. From hereon, his painting would take on a more intellectual style - more concerned with form rather than realism - as he moved towards Cubism.

African Period (c. 1907)

Picasso's African-influenced Period (époque negre), during which he was inspired by African artifacts, begins with the two figures on the right in his painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which were inspired by African artifacts.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was a landmark painting in the development of modern art which signalled a radical departure from the artistic ideas of the preceding ages and heralded the coming of a new artistic movement (Cubism) as well as the birth of modern abstraction. The influence of Paul Cezanne and African sculpture is visible in its fragmented forms and unprecedented distortions.

The painting depicts five prostitutes in a brothel in the Avignon Street of Barcelona, portraying them from several angles, which became one of the characteristic features of Cubism. The picture marked a fundamental break with the principles of traditional naturalistic art - in particular, it rejected the use of perspective - and was an entirely different way of painting. Picasso's predecessors - whether painting portraits or landscapes - remained focused on portraying nature as they saw it, whereas in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Picasso sought to represent three dimensional objects on a flat two dimensional canvas.

The relative lack of roundedness in the forms and the jigsaw-like fragments indicate the abstract direction that his painting was now taking. Meanwhile, another painter was having similar thoughts: his name was Georges Braque. the two met in Paris in 1908 and collaborated closely for several years.

Prototype Cubism (c.1908-9)

In 1908, influenced by Paul Cezanne's geometric-style landscape paintings of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Picasso and Braque executed a series of landscape paintings that were very similar to Cezanne's, both in their colours (dark greens, light browns) and simplified geometrical shapes. They painted houses in the form of 3-D cubes. It was these paintings that the French art critic Louis Vauxelles was referring to in 1909, when he used the expression 'bizarreries cubiques', which led to the adoption of the word Cubism. This style was then further refined and duly evolved into Analytical Cubism.

Analytical Cubism (c.1909-12)

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910) was one of the first full-blown examples of the new austere Analytical Cubism. In this painting, Picasso disassembled a human figure into a series of flat transparent geometric plates that overlap and intersect at various angles. Now, suddenly all the 'cubes' of the earlier proto-type Cubist painting have disappeared.

Analytical Cubism is the most austere and intellectual stage of the movement. During this period, the forms of the objects portrayed are fragmented into a large number of small intricately hinged opaque and transparent planes that fuse with one another and with the surrounding space.

Synthetic Cubism (c.1912-19)

During his Synthetic Cubism phase, Picasso's forms became larger and more representational, with flat, bright decorative patterns replacing the earlier, more austere compositions. New techniques adopted by Picasso in his art of this period included the pasting of cut paper fragments (eg. wallpaper or pieces of newspaper) into compositions, marking the first major use of collage and papier collé in fine art. Examples of his Cubist works at this time include: Still-Life with Chair-Caning, and The Guitar. By this period, the new style had caught on with a number of other talented Cubist painters.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-9) prompted his second landmark painting, Guernica. This painting depicts the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. It is an immense black and white mural measuring 11 feet in height and 23 feet in width. It portrays a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness, without adverting to its immediate causes.

Guernica was originally exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. It was then, at Picasso's request, entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City until it was eventually returned to Spain in 1981. A copy of Picasso's Guernica (in browns as well as back and white) is displayed in the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room.

In 1947 Picasso moved to the South of France where he laboured consistently in sculpture, ceramics, and in the graphic arts, producing thousands of superb drawings, illustrations, and stage designs. He created a large public art mural for the UNESCO building in Paris, as well as the Chicago Picasso - now one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago - and produced brilliant variations on the works of other masters, including Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet Delacroix and Velázquez. He died in 1973.

Picasso's paintings hang in modern art galleries and museums around the world, while three of his pictures have sold for more than $50 million - Boy with a Pipe, ($104 million, 2004); Dora Maar with Cat ($95.2 million, 2006); Femme aux Bras Croises, ($55 million, 2000). As well as providing some of the most influential paintings of the twentieth century, Picasso's inventive gifts led him to work in many other fields including drawing, sculpture, lithography, linocutting, ballet-decor and ceramics.

• For more biographies of great painters, see Old Masters and Famous Artists.
• For information about famous sculptors and painters in Ireland, see: Irish Visual Art

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