Picasso and Colescott

Picasso and Colescott

Considered by many to be the greatest artist of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso was definitely was the most prolific, creating over 20,000 works of art. He was the most influential inspiring almost every artist that has seen his works. Picasso also created more styles than any other artist did. He created at least six different styles by being an inventor of forms, an innovator of styles and techniques, and a master of various media.

For Picasso it all began when he was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881, as the son of an art professor at the local academy. He knew his calling at a young age. He started painting at the age of 10. At age 11 he began attending his father's classes and was painting live models a year later. The family moved to Barcelona when his father accepted a teaching position at the school of fine arts in 1895. Picasso scored highly on the entrance examinations and was soon enrolled. Picasso's formal art training ended at the age of 16 when he withdrew from classes at the Royal Academy at San Fernando in Madrid after becoming seriously ill.

In 1901 following the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas, Picasso abandoned Post Impressionist styles and began his blue period. This period concentrated on human misery and desolation portraying blind figures, beggars, alcoholics, prostitutes, and other social outcasts. The figures were withdrawn in seriously simplified and elongated bodies that are reminiscent of El Greco. Reduced to poverty himself by this time, Picasso moved back to Barcelona to live with his parents where he painted La Vie, the epitome of the blue perio

In 1904 Picasso returned to Paris where he met Fernande Olivier, the first long-term engagement, and also one of the first of many companions to influence the theme, style, and mood of his work. With the happy relationship, Picasso's paintings went from blue to pinks and reds. Many of the figures were from the circus, erotic love scenes, and depicting family life.

In 1906 Picasso's work entered a new phase influenced by Greek, Iberian, and African art. His portrait of Gertrude Stein reveals a mask-like face. In 1909 Picasso shocked fellow artists with his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, so radical in style that contemporary Avante-grade painters and critics did not understand it. Its surface that resembled fractured glass destroyed spatial depth and the ideal form of the female nude. The painting was so unsettling to Picasso that he did not display it for about a decade.

Building upon Paul Cezannes' volumetric treatment of forms, Picasso and Georges Braque painted landscapes in a style that one critic described as being made of little cubes giving birth to Cubism. Cubism was developed in stages. Analytic cubism between 1908 and 1911 dealt with breaking down form and analyzing it. Synthetic cubism from 1912 to 1924 was more decorative, but the shaped remained flat. He constructed images from prior mental ideas shifting from perpetual to conceptual ...