Picasso was an artist born on Oct.25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain. At age 15 he was admitted to the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. Impatient under formal training the young Picasso went to Paris in 1900. There, tough constantly near starvation, he became infatuated with the street life of Montmartre, and made many studies of the city’s poor.
Between 1900 and 1906 he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary painting, from impressionism to Art Nouveau.
Suddenly, the 20-year-old painter moved toward a symbolism of pathos and misery inspired by the Spanish painter El Greco. This was his Blue Period, so called because most of these paintings were dominated by various shades of blue, heigthening their mood of isolation and despair.
After 1904 the brooding depression of the Blue Period changed to a quiet melancholy, and the colors of his paintings became more natural, delicate and tender in its range, with many redish and pink tones. This period is thus called the Pink Period.
After 1906, under the influence of Cezanne, Iberian sculpture and African sculpture, Picasso began to paint in a more radical style. The human figures and their surrounding space are reduced to inter- secting planes which imply a multiple, dissected view of the world. The faces of the figures are seen simultaneously from frontal and profile positions, and their bodies are forced to submit to Picasso’s abstract pictorial language.
Arts Essays
