Picasso: The Visionary

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.- Picasso

Picasso is unquestionably the most famous artist of the 20th Century. In his artistic life, lasting more than 75 years he created tens of thousands of works, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, original lithographs, etchings, linoleum cuts and ceramics. No single artist has had a greater influence on Modern Art and has changed art more profoundly in the 20th Century. Picasso has been described as having lived several lifetimes artistically. He created Cubism (with friend George Braque) and continued thereafter to develop his art with a velocity that is comparable to the pace and dramatic change of the 20th Century.

Picasso loved to tell the story of his birth. He was born October 25, 1881. The tiny baby was stillborn and not moving. After the usual prods and slaps the midwife believing the baby was dead began to comfort the mother. But the doctor, who in those days was smoking a cigar, blew cigar smoke in the baby's face, at which point the baby Picasso grimaced and let out a cry.

Pablo Picasso At 10 In Malaga.

Picasso with a young Brigitte Bardot. 

Picasso's full name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.

It is said that Picasso whose hatred of schools verged on phobia, began to draw before he could talk. His father who was also a painter, a professor of art and the curator of a local museum. is said to have nailed dead pigeons to the wall and obliged the young Picasso to draw perfect renderings of them. His first picture was painted in 1889 when he was 8 years old. 

"Le picador", a man riding a horse in a bullfight

Picasso's first painting.

1889

Painter and his model (Le paintre et son modele)

Oil on Canvas

1928

At thirteen Picasso produced his first oil painting and began to exhibit and sell his work.

At sixteen years old Picasso's father sent him to art school in Madrid. Then at eighteen Picasso traveled to Paris to study art. It was only a few short years later that Picasso changed the course of modern art.

Boy with a pipe

(Garcon a la pipe)

1905

Oil on Canvas

Bull

1946

Portrait of Picasso's first wife, whom he married in 1918 and separated from in 1927 but never divorced.

Portrait Olga dans un Fauteuil by Pablo Picasso, Picasso Museum

The Sailor

1938

Oil on Canvas

It is believed that Picasso painted 13,500 paintings or more over his lifetime.

Family of acrobats (Jugglers), Famille de saltimbanques (Les bateleurs) 1905

Partition, bottle of port, guitar, playing cards

1917

Oil on Canvas

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Pablo Picasso  

The Dream

1932

Oil on Canvas

Picasso draws in light 1949

Picasso’s “light drawings,” were made with a small electric light in a darkened room; in effect, the images vanished as soon as they were created — and yet they still live, six decades later, in Mili’s playful, hypnotic images. Many of them were also put on display in early 1950 in a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso   

Woman with child on the seashore (Femme et enfant au bord de la mer)

1921

Oil on Canvas

Head, Céret, spring 1913

Picasso died on April 8, 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."