| Facts/Data
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Birth
1881 (Malaga, Spain)
Death
1973 (Mougins, France)
Lived/Active
Spain/France
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Often Known For
cubist painting and printmaking
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 A painter and printmaker who revolutionized western art, Pablo Picasso
was born in Spain and lived most of his life either there or in
France. His father was an art teacher, and the young Pablo grew
up in an artistic environment. By the age of fourteen, he was an
accomplished draftsman, and in 1900 at age nineteen, he made his first
trip to Paris. There he studied the Old Masters and Classical
sculpture and also was exposed to the paintings of Impressionists and
Post Impressionists.
Between 1901 and 1904, his work was dominated by a blue palette, which
has led to this time being called his "Blue Period". Blue, for
him, was to symbolize the ". . . suffering-frequently hunger and cold,
the hardships he experienced while attempting to establish
himself." (Arnason, 125) By 1905, his 'Rose or Circus
Period' was beginning, and also later that year, he became doing
painting reflective of a growing interest in African masks. By
1907, he painted what is regarded as his first masterpiece and as the
first Cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Although he said: "I think about Death all the time.
She is the only woman who never leaves me." (Walther) His relationships
with 'live' women influenced much of his artwork. It is thought
that his switch from 'blue' to 'rose', that is from depression to
happiness, was determined by his meeting Fernande Olivier, allegedly
his first serious female relationship. He lived with her for
seven years. From that time, he did numerous portraits of wives,
children and mistresses.
In 1908, Picasso began working in Paris with Georges Braque
(1882-1963), and together until 1914 and the beginning of World War I,
they created collages and the first phase of Cubism that included still
life and portraits. They worked so closely together that many
scholars are unable to tell some of their work apart or to determine
which of them contributed certain concepts.
Picasso went to Rome from 1914 to 1918 to do set designs and costumes
for the Russian Ballet and during this time also did some realistic
painting and drawing, and printmaking emerged as a major part of his
art as a result of the time he spent drawing. His graphic art,
which actually dated to 1905, was diverse as he was ever looking for
new modes of expression, and he did etchings, drypoint, linocuts,
woodcuts, aquatints and sometimes combinations. In Rome, he met
his first wife, Olga Koklova, a Russian ballet dancer.
In the early part of the 1920s, he did abstract figurative work that
was so grotesque in distortion that it set the stage for his
participation in Surrealist exhibitions in Europe. Also the
experimentation with figurative shapes led him to sculpture, an
interest he had expressed earlier.
The 1920s are regarded as one of the most productive periods of
Picasso's career. He did paintings with vivid coloration
expressing his ". . .total experience of curvilinear cubism and
classical idealism." (Arnason, 393) In 1927, he began a
relationship with seventeen-year-old Marie Therese Walther, and in 1936
with Dora Maar, a photographer. In 1937, inspired by the Spanish
Civil War, he painted Guernica, which is regarded as one of his
landmark paintings and certainly one that carried a strong message of
human suffering during wartime.
During the World War II years, Picasso did a lot of modeling in clay
and creating of assemblages with found objects, and many of the pieces,
especially after the War, expressed his sense of humor. Also
after the War, he began creating with ceramics, and he was very
productive with printmaking. His female companion, beginning
1943, was Francoise Gilot, a painter, with whom he had two children,
Claude and Paloma. His last female relationship was with
Jacqueline Roque, whom he met in 1953 and married in 1961.
Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 91. The last
eight years of his life had been difficult because of prostate
problems, but he continued to be productive. Of him, it was
written in Time magazine, May 26, 1980: "To the end . . .
Picasso remained Picasso; an indefatigable worker, a lover of mischief
and pranks, quirky, increasingly aloof, mercurial, yet often remarkably
generous and warm."
Sources:
H.H. Arnason, History of Modern Art, p. 125
Ingo F. Walther, Picasso, 1999, Cologne, Germany
Time magazine, May 26, 1980
Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art
http://www.artelino.com/articles/picasso.asp
Archives of Phoenix Art Museum Docent Files: "Picasso"
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Biography from Rogallery.com:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
b. 1881, Málaga, Spain; d. 1973, Mougins, France
Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. The son of an academic painter, José Ruiz Blanco, he began to draw at an early age. In 1895, the family moved to Barcelona, and Picasso studied there at La Lonja, the academy of fine arts. His visit to Horta de Ebro from 1898 to 1899 and his association with the group at the café Els Quatre Gats about 1899 were crucial to his early artistic development. In 1900, Picasso’s first exhibition took place in Barcelona, and that fall he went to Paris for the first of several stays during the early years of the century. Picasso settled in Paris in April 1904, and soon his circle of friends included Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gertrude and Leo Stein, as well as two dealers, Ambroise Vollard and Berthe Weill.
His style developed from the Blue Period (1901–04) to the Rose Period (1905) to the pivotal work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the subsequent evolution of Cubism from an Analytic phase (ca. 1908–11), through its Synthetic phase (beginning in 1912–13). Picasso’s collaboration on ballet and theatrical productions began in 1916. Soon thereafter, his work was characterized by neoclassicism and a renewed interest in drawing and figural representation. In the 1920s, the artist and his wife, Olga (whom he had married in 1918), continued to live in Paris, to travel frequently, and to spend their summers at the beach. From 1925 into the 1930s, Picasso was involved to a certain degree with the Surrealists, and from the fall of 1931 he was especially interested in making sculpture. In 1932, with large exhibitions at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, and the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the publication of the first volume of Christian Zervos’s catalogue raisonné, Picasso’s fame increased markedly.
By 1936, the Spanish Civil War had profoundly affected Picasso, the expression of which culminated in his painting Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid). Picasso’s association with the Communist Party began in 1944. From the late 1940s, he lived in the South of France. Among the enormous number of Picasso exhibitions that were held during the artist’s lifetime, those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1939 and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1955 were most significant. In 1961, the artist married Jacqueline Roque, and they moved to Mougins. There Picasso continued his prolific work in painting, drawing, prints, ceramics, and sculpture until his death April 8, 1973. |
Biography from Artistic Gallery:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 (Pablo Ruiz y Picasso), 1881-1973, French painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and ceramicist who worked in France; the foremost figure in 20th-centuray art. Leader of the School of Paris, he was known for his technical virtuosity, originality, and prolificacy.
Admitted to the Royal Academy of Barcelona at 15, he later moved to Paris, where he remained until 1947, then moving to the South of France. His early works, e.g., Old Woman (1901; Philadelphia Mus. Art), show the influence of Toulouse Lautrec.
His production is usually described in series of overlapping periods. In his melancholy blue period such works as The Old Guitarist (1903; Art Inst., Chicago) depicted, in blue tones, the world of the poor. His rose period is characterized by a lighter palette and subjects from the circus. In 1907, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d' Avignon (Mus. Mod. Art, N. Y.C.), the most significant work in the development of Cubism and abstraction, and a herald of analytic cubism.
In the synthetic phase of cubism (after 1912), his forms became larger and more representational, e.g., The Three Musicians (1921; Mus. Mod. Art, N. Y.C.). In the 1920s he also introduced collage. His second landmark work was Guernica (Reina Sofa, MadridCentro de Arte Reina Sofa), an impassioned condemnation of war and fascism.
In his later years, Picasso turned to creations of fantasy and comic invention. Working consistently in sculpture, ceramics, and the graphic arts, he continued to explore his personal vision until his death at 91.
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Biography from Ella Walton Richardson Fine Art:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
While originally from Malaga, Spain, Pablo Picasso nurtured his artistic talents in Barcelona as a youth before moving to France in 1906, where he tapped into the nerve of the Parisian art community alongside Braque and Matisse and joined later by Miro and Chagall. Within the context of this creative environment and with war and social uprising always on his doorstep, Picasso cut new paths, experimented with virtually every medium available to him, and ultimatly created work that was nothing less than revolutionary and captivating. Throughout his long artistic a career, the bulk of his energy was devoted to depicting the human form in thought-provoking and often unorthodox ways. Nowhere, in his massive body of art more apparent than among his graphic works.
Pablo Picasso, a great draftsman and a master of the line , expressed "the graphic arts are...my favorite medium of expression." The process of printmaking requires a balance of mastery and inventiveness and Picasso possessed both. He was imaginative with the use of traditional methods and was able to coax out new and inventive techniques to further is artistic intent in printmaking. Phillippe de Montebello, former Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explained, "Picasso, the foremost painter and sculptor of our century, is also its greatest printmaker. The more he is studied the more one percieves how intimately related are the life and the images he created, Nowhere in his oeuvre is this better demonstrated than in his prints."
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