Pablo Picasso despite being known worldwide as a painter, was an artist in the broadest sense of the word. In addition to painting, he worked among others the disciplines of drawing, sculpture and ceramics, but his most important contribution to the history of art was that he revolutionized the way in which the work of art is perceived by the public.
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His best-known work is Guernica , which is currently on display at the Reina Sofía Museum in the city of Madrid.
Biographical data
- Pablo Ruíz Blasco Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain, his father was also an artist.
- In 1895, the family moved to Barcelona where Picasso, at the age of 14, began his artistic studies and learned within academicism.
- He lived all his life on horseback between Spain and France, where he died on April 8, 1973.
The periods
- The Blue Period :
In this period his work was characterized by being strongly influenced by symbolism and all his paintings had blue tones and showed elongated and sad figures. It was between 1901 and 1904, when Picasso lived between Madrid, Barcelona and Paris.
- The Pink Period :
His works during this period are more cheerful and the colors are brighter with a predominance of earth tones and pink. He paints scenes where clowns and circuses appear. At this time of his life he lives in Paris and interacts with artists and bohemians.
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- The African or Proto-Cubist Period
In 1907 Picasso painted a large-format work that was to change the course of twentieth-century art, The Ladies of Avignon, where he reflected his influences up to that time: African and Iberian art and elements taken from El Greco and Cézanne. With it, Picasso eliminates everything sublime from tradition and breaks with realism and with the existing idea of the representation of the woman’s body.
- The Cubist Period
At this time Picasso takes a radical turn as an artist, leaving aside the figurative and looking for a pure form of painting. To do this, he begins to observe the objects in his workshop in an intellectual way and paints them reflecting the basic geometric figures. An example can be his work Woman sitting in a gray armchair. He was the founder, along with Georges Braque and Juan Gris, of Cubism.
- The Surrealist Period :
Picasso abandons the rigors of cubism at this time and returns to figurative. In this period his paintings show figures with distorted shapes and Picasso is interested in the monstrous and the mythological. He also makes sculptures out of wire and metal sheets.
- The expressionist period :
In the years of the Spanish Civil War (between 1936 and 1939) Picasso painted his most famous painting, Guernica. In it he shows his revulsion towards the horrors of war and the suffering of the civilian population. It is inspired by the victims of the German bombing on the city of Guernica, in the Basque Country.
