All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. He was born in 1881 Malaga, Spain. His father was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. As an artist himself, he early noticed his son’s talent. According to Pablo’s mother, his first words were “piz, piz”, a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for ‘pencil’.
From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. On one occasion the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son’s technique, an apocryphal story relates that father felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him. Parents sent sixteen year old Pablo to study in Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, but he didn’t like formal instructions and soon quit his studies. In 1900 Pablo Picasso went to Paris for the first time. He made many friends there and was impressed by the works of Manet, Gustave Courbet, Toulouse-Lautrec.
Picasso’s work is divided into periods :
- The Blue Period (1901-1904), which were sad looking paintings using blue and blue-green colours.
- The Rose Period (1904-1906), which was a more happy style with orange and pink colours.
- The African-influenced Period (1907-1909)
- The Cubism Period (1909- 1919). He is famous for being the co-founder of Cubism which is a style of painting where objects of the painting subject are broken up and re-painted in an abstract form.
- Classicism and surrealism period represents Guernica (1937).
Pablo Picasso died in 1973 in Mougins, France. Some of his paintings are amongst the most expensive in the world.
