Biography of Pablo Picasso

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

Education

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) started to paint when he was eight years old. Like many children he would make drawings, but these were very different to today's children's drawings. According to psychology studies, by nature its not a child's intention to accurately depict a natural object and today children are left to draw freely. When Picasso was young, children would be expected to try to draw as closely to nature as possible, just like mature artists would draw and paint, in the age preceding abstract art. From the age of five on, Pablo would get drawing lessons at school, in Malaga. Children were taught to make drawings based on simple geometric forms, to which more detail was added until an accurate image of the subject resulted. This highly systematic approach to art would develop Picasso's remarkable sense of space and geometry and lay a foundation for the ease with which he would later be able to characterize an object with a single line.

1.Self-portrait, 1896

creative spanish artist

As Picasso's father was an art teacher, he would take full control of Pablo's education in art. He gave him lessons and sent him to schools where he was working as a teacher himself. As such, Picasso's father was ubiquitous in Pablo's life, both at home and in school. Remarkably, in his first two major paintings, The First Communion (1896) and Science and Charity (1897), Pablo includes the (rather uninspired) portrait of his father.

As an artist, Pablo's father would specialize in painting animals, the least valued genre in his time. The most valued genres were history pieces (paintings that would depict scenes from popular history), as well as portraitism and under the influence of his father, Pablo Picasso would concentrate on these subjects. Pablo's father would even use his influence with local newspapers to promote his son's work, as well as with jury members of art contests, in which Pablo participated.

In 1891 Picasso's father got a new job at the art school Instituto da Guarda in La Coruna, to where the family moved and in 1892 Pablo joined his father at the Instituto da Guarda as a student. For three years Pablo would enjoy a classical art education which started with the copying of basic forms. The use of geometric forms was used to create a simplified form of the natural object and by using that basis, more detail was added in several highly systematic stages.

In 1895 his father was appointed at the art academy La Lonja in Barcelona, where again he was joined by Pablo. Picasso's father promoted Pablo's independence by renting him a studio in Barcelona.

With the financial aid of his uncles, Pablo goes to study in Madrid at the end of 1897. In La Coruna and Malaga Pablo had already received a thorough education and because Madrid had nothing new to offer him, he decided to quit mid-1898.

2.Family

Pablo Picasso's father, Don Jose, descended from an old, wealthy family from the provence Leon (North-West of Spain) and his mother, Dona Maria was from Andalusia and of Arabic descent. Pablo had two younger sisters: Dolores, or Lola (1884 - 1958) and Concepcion (1887 - 1891), called Conchita, the latter died at the age of four. Pablo would begin to sign his artworks with Pablo Ruiz (after his father), but from 1900 on he would use his mother's last name: Picasso.

As the myth goes, Don Jose was so impressed with the ability of the young Pablo that in 1894 he gave his painting gear to Pablo and would never paint again himself. The myth is so persistent that it's wearth mentioning, but actually Don Jose would continue to paint until his death.

Picasso's relationship with his parents became strained when he quit his studies, and neither would they forgive him for walking over the avant-garde camp.

3.Career

Picasso dropped out of school in Madrid not be because he thought he didn't have anything to learn anymore, but because the teachers in Madrid couldn't help him solve the technical problems he had. It was the young Picasso's aim to become a classical painter, like Velasques or Rembrandt, but no matter Caricatures, 1898 how good he was for a sixteen year old, he couldn't match the old masters.

Composition was a weak point of his and would always remain so. For a genius, his natural ability to arrange the details of a painting such that they fitted into, and contributed to, the painting as a whole, was fairly limited. That's one reason why Picasso never produced a "grand opus", an extraordinary masterpiece that stands out above everything else; to appreciate Picasso as the master he was, one has to look at his oeuvre as a whole.

His critical thinking and unique power to analyze art was showing already at the age of sixteen when he realized that he would not progress in Madrid. His decision to quit his studies resulted in a severe crisis for the young Picasso, whose education had always been guided, and his art nurtured, by his father. He became severely ill with scarlet fever, spent fourty days in quarantine and then, from summer 1898 to spring 1899, he would stay with Manuel Pallares in Horta de Ebro.

In 1896 Picasso's painting The First Communion had been included in a large exhibition in Barcelona, that served to present contemporary Catalan art (Catalan refers to Catalonia, the Spanish provence that has Barcelona as it's capital). This was an honor for the fifteen year old Picasso, even though he didn't win a prize. Then, with his painting Science and Charity, Picasso participated in a prestigious exhibition in Madrid. Even though these exhibitions were partly due to his father's connections, they made the young Picasso a known and recognized artist in Spain. This would enable Picasso to declare his independence and start his career, not even seventeen years old.

Due to the success of The First Communion and Science and Charity, Picasso would have been faced with the challenge of living up to expections. Realizing that Madrid's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the center of Spanish classicism, could not help him to progress, he moved back to Barcelona, which stood for avant-garde and innovation. From Picasso's point of view this changing of sides, from traditionalism to avant-garde, was not a deliberate choice. He would have preferred to continue his education in Munich (then a center of academic traditionalism) over moving to Paris. For the young Picasso Paris stood for "modern nonsense such as pointillism", as he would say. His return to Barcelona was a matter of convenience, as he had Science and Charity, 1896 connections neither in Munich nor Paris, but he would soon be immersed in Barcelona's avant-garde artistic scene. There, among other things, he would be exposed to the wondrous architecture of Antoni Gaudi.

4.Personal life

In the early 20th century, Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In 1904, in the middle of a storm, he met Fernande Olivier, a Bohemian artist who became his mistress. Olivier appears in many of his Rose period paintings. After acquiring some fame and fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva Gouel. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915.

After World War I, Picasso made a number of important relationships with figures associated with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris and others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Parade, in Rome; and they spent their honeymoon in the villa near Biarritz of the glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errazuriz. Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant on the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo, [22] who would grow up to be a dissolute motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova's insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso's bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev's troup, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several drawings of the composer.

In 1927 Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth.

The two remained legally married until Khokhlova's death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Therese Walter and fathered a daughter with her, named Maya. Marie-Therese lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso's death. Throughout his life Picasso maintained a number of mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women.

The photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.

5.Death

Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. His final words were «Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink any more.» He was interred at the Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline Roque prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline Roque took her own life by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.

Размещено на Allbest