Pablo Picasso (Fall 2012)
For my Historpedia paper, I am focusing on the history force of art and new ideas. I am writing about the artist, Pablo Picasso. I have always been interested in art and I feel like the history of art has been changing through time. The reason why I am writing about Picasso is because he is one famous artist through history and also, his style of art is really unique. The first time I heard about Picasso was through the movie Toy Story, where Mr. Potato Head put all his pieces in the wrong place and called himself, "Picasso". From that day on, I was curious who this Picasso was. Even until this day, I haven't answer that question. I've seen his art, his face, but not his story.
Pablo Picasso's real name is Pablo Ruiz y Picasso. He was born on October 25, 1881 and was a famous Spanish painter, sculptor, and draughtsman. He is one of the most recognized figures in the 20th century because of his paintings that portray the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. During wartime, it was the time where Picasso had focused more and more of his art on. He based most of his paintings on war. His painting towards the war is really symbolic because it brings the calmness to people. Picasso remained neutral during the war, he didn't choose any side. He was living in France during that time, and all he focused on was his paintings only.
Picasso's paintings are so popular that they helped him rise to the top. Picasso chose the classical paintings. His drawings aren't really fancy, they're plain and simple, but with great meanings. For example, his famous painting, "The Three Dancers" depicts sex, love, and death. Through his paintings, it explores a variety range of sexual impulses, the practice of human beings, and desire. All of Picasso's painting tells about his imagination and mainly, his personal experience about life.
His early life wasn't that bad. After Picasso was born, his first word was "Piz", a short word for "Lapiz" meaning pencil in Spanish. Because of this, Picasso's father thought it was a sign that Picasso will be born to be an artist. While Picasso was growing up, his father have taught how to draw and paint, but by the time Picasso was around 13 years of age, Picasso was already way better than his father. Whenever Picasso go to school, he would always doodle around on his notebook and could care less about school. Since he wasn't paying attention to school work, Picasso was called "a bad student" and the teachers would have to send him to detention. Picasso didn't see this punishment bad. He said "for being a bad student, they would send me to the 'cells' and I loved it when they sent me there, because I could take a pad of paper and draw nonstop."
George Braque was the first one to invent cubism. By 1910, Picasso decided to try something new that was new to the art world, cubism. What Picasso did was he implemented the idea of cubism and use to his advantage. What is cubism? Cubism is a style of art and how it is recognized is due to their flattened and two dimensional arts. Cubist paintings are purposely non-realistic and geometrically because when looking at a vantage point, it will bring the whole picture together. It allows people to see the art at every different angle. As years go by, the cubism movement evolved through time. Graphic elements, color and texture were added to make the pictures more appealing. Cubism is the only style that actually allows artists to see art as an entirely different way to depict real-life objects.
Art isn’t the only thing that Picasso loves. Picasso also loves women. He had countless of relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, prostitutes, and muses. With this bad habit, he turned out to have two wives, Olga Khokhlova and Jacqueline Roque. Through his time, he only had four children, Paul, Paloma, Maya, and Claude. Olga and Picasso were close to getting a divorce, meaning Picasso will lose half of his money to Olga. Picasso really didn’t care about the money, but turns out he will also be losing half of his art and that was too much for Picasso to bare. With that, Picasso continue to pain and never gave up. During his time, he had two important periods of his life, the blue period and the rose period. What the blue period is a depressing time where all of Picasso’s art is used with the color blue and is also symbolic because how he came from a poor family, using one color saved money. Even with one color, he still manages to rise to the top. During the rose period, it is when Picasso started to experiment with more colors other than blue. He used more colors that will make his art more appealing and help transform his art into something way better.
Picasso is most famous for the money, women, and the fame, but that’s not why he was important. He’s important because he made amazing art that transform the 20th century. As the style of art slowly changes through time, Picasso’s legacy still lives on. Popular artistic style these days are surrealism, realism, abstract, impressionism, and more. Art is being combined with technology these days for example 3D. Making films 3D, making everything into technology-like stuff. I feel like art these days are starting to lose touch. For example, anime is becoming a popular thing now. I haven’t seen a lot of drawings/paintings now. The only place I would see them is in museums or in an art gallery. Art is slowly changing and new ideas are started to develop as the world slowly changes. Picasso soon died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 91. His art, his style, his name, will keep living on.
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