For here what seems most real is most false and what seems remote from everyday reality is perhaps the most real since it is least an imitation. After his experiments in the new medium of collage, Picasso returned more intensively to painting.
His work between and is generally regarded as the synthetic phase of the cubist development. The masterpiece of this style is the Three Musicians In this painting Picasso used the flat planes of his earlier style in order to reconstruct an impression of the visible world.
The planes themselves had become broader and more simplified, and they exploited color to a far greater extent than did the work of In its richness of feeling and balance of formal elements, the Three Musicians represents a classical expression of cubism.
The invention of cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of 20th-century art. Nevertheless, his activities as an artist were not limited to this alone.
As early as the first decade of the century, he involved himself with both sculpture and printmaking, two media which he continued to practice throughout his long career and to which he made numerous important contributions. Moreover, he periodically worked in ceramics and in the environment of the theater: in he designed sets for the Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau ballet Parade; in he sketched a theater interior for Igor Stravinsky's Pulcinella; and in he designed a curtain for the performance of Le Train Bleu by Jean Cocteau and Darius Milhaud.
In short, the range of his activities exceeded that of any artist who worked in the modern period. In painting, even the development of cubism fails to define Picasso's genius. About , and again in the early s, he turned away from abstraction and produced drawings and paintings in a realistic and serenely beautiful classical idiom.
One of the most famous of these works is the Woman in White Painted just two years after the Three Musicians, the quiet and unobtrusive elegance of this masterpiece testifies to the ease with which Picasso could express himself in pictorial languages that seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive.
By the late s and the early s surrealism had in many ways eclipsed cubism as the vanguard style of European painting. But his work during these years reveals many attitudes in sympathy with the surrealist sensibility. For instance, in his famous Girl before a Mirror , he employed the colorful planes of synthetic cubism to explore the relationship between a young woman's image and self-image as she regards herself before a conventional looking glass.
As the configurations shift between the figure and the mirror image, they reveal the complexity of emotional and psychological energies that prevail on the darker side of human experience. Another of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the s is Guernica Barr described the situation within which it was conceived: "On April 28, , the Basque town of Guernica was reported destroyed by German bombing planes flying for General Franco.
Picasso, already an active partisan of the Spanish Republic, went into action almost immediately. He had been commissioned in January to paint a mural for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair; but he did not begin to work until May 1st, just two days after the news of the catastrophe.
Guernica is an extraordinary monument within the history of modern art. Executed entirely in black, white, and gray, it projects an image of pain, suffering, and brutality that has few parallels among advanced paintings of the 20th century. No artist except Picasso was able to apply convincingly the pictorial language of cubism to a subject that springs directly from social and political awareness.
That he could so overtly challenge the abstractionist trend that he personally began is but another mark of his uniqueness. But his work never paused. To many critics and historians these recent works are not as ambitious as Picasso's earlier productions.
Picasso also came out publicly after the war as a communist. When he was asked why he was a communist in , he stated that "When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and aware of how poor people had to live. I learned that the communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the communists. Sometimes the communist cause was not as keen on Picasso as Picasso was about being a communist.
A portrait he painted of Joseph Stalin, the then recently deceased Soviet leader, caused a clamor in the Party's leadership. The Soviet government banished his works from their nation after having them locked in the basement of the Hermitage Museum in St.
Picasso appeared amused at this and continued on unaffected. Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he gave to of his earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona.
Read the whole story. When a Nazi officer saw Guernica he asked Picasso "Was you who did it? In all his life Picasso produced about , pieces, consisting of: 13, paintings, , prints and engravings, sculptures and ceramics and 34, illustrations - an impressive year career.
Picasso's iconic shirt is a Breton-striped shirt, which in became the official uniform for French seamen in Brittany. Picass was also a leader in fashion, and his Breton striped t-shirt was designed by Coco Chanel. The 21 horizontal stripes represent each of Napoleon's victories.
Picasso was the first artist to receive a special honour exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris in celebration of his 90 years. After ending his first marriage in , Picasso dabbled in poetry and later wrote two surrealist plays.
Between and Picasso wrote over poems that were mostly untitled except for an occasional date and location of where it was written. It was rumoured that Picasso predicted he'd be known more for his poetry than his paintings. Small groups of visitors are now allowed to view his final resting place, where he has lain since his death aged The raised burial mound is topped with his sculpture, Femme au vase. Contact Us Terms of Use Links. The picture embraces his spellbound love for Jacqueline.
Even into his eighties and nineties, Picasso produced an enormous number of works and reaped the financial benefits of his success, amassing a personal fortune and a superb collection of his own art, as well as work by other artists.
He died in , leaving an artistic legacy that continues to resonate today throughout the world. Voorhies, James. Karmel, Pepe. Picasso and the Invention of Cubism. New Haven: Yale University Press, The Ultimate Picasso. New York: Abrams, Olivier, Fernande. Edited by Marilyn McCully. Richardson, John, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. A Life of Picasso. New York: Random House, Rose, Bernice B.
Picasso: Masterworks from to Exhibition catalogue. Boston: Bullfinch Press, Rubin, William, ed. Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, Zervos, Christian.
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