A brief introduction to Picasso’s life, historical evaluation of Picasso, how did Picasso die?
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish painter, main representative of French modern painting.
Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881. "Picasso" is his mother's surname. His father is a painting teacher. Picasso began to study painting formally under the guidance of his father at the age of seven. From a young age, he showed talent for painting. At the age of 14, Picasso was admitted to the Barcelona Art School with excellent results. A year later, his oil painting "Science and Charity" won the award at the "National Art Exhibition" held in Madrid. The painting then won a gold medal in a local competition in Malaga.
At the age of 16, Picasso was successfully admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Ferdinando. Because he was not used to formal training, he stopped attending the academy soon after enrolling. Instead, he visited the Prado Museum, studied the paintings of Goya and Velázquez, and used Greco's technique to paint beggars and urban poor. Due to the poverty of life and the suicide of his classmate, the young painter Kazaremas, the characters in Picasso's paintings are full of despair. Their faces and limbs are slender, and the color is a dark and cold dark blue. This period (1901-1904) is called the "Blue Period". Representative works include "Celestina", "The Old Man Playing the Guitar", "The Abandoned" and "Life".
In April 1904, Picasso left Spain and settled in Paris. After arriving in Paris, he rented a studio in the "Floating Laundry" apartment in the Montmartre district, where artists and poets lived. In the autumn of this year, Picasso met the female painter Fernandez Olivier, and they lived together until 1911. Olivier described the 23-year-old Picasso: "Short, dark, strong, diligent, active, with a pair of melancholy, deep, keen, strange eyes that are almost always staring; vulgar, womanly hands, shabby clothes , covered with dirt, and his long and shiny hair was scattered on his smart and stubborn forehead. He looked half like a painter and half like a craftsman..."
Picasso felt very happy with Olivier, which was fully reflected in his works. Not long after they met, Picasso entered the "Rose Red Period" (to 1906). Although the characters in the work are still a little melancholy, they are no longer as desolate as in the "Blue Period". The characters are also a bit beefier, with groups of family figures replacing individual gangsters and beggars. Picasso loved to watch traveling circuses with his friends. He used the "mural-style flat painting method" to express the silent male and female clowns on the screen. Representative works at this time include "The Satim Bunker Family", "Girl Standing on the Ball" and "Woman with a Fan".
In the summer of 1906, Picasso spent a period of time in Guessol, Spain, and began to paint female nudes that were full of blockiness and distorted and difficult to distinguish, such as "combing hair", "nude with red background" and " Bathroom". Picasso began to pay attention to formal issues at this time, which is reflected in two famous portraits, namely "Portrait of Gertrut Stein" and "Self-Portrait". In these two works, the entire inner world of the characters is expressed in a purely sculptural way. At the end of 1906 and the spring of 1907, Picasso painted an unfinished painting. This painting uses a very challenging but inconsistent form of expression, which is "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". It is the product of a combination of post-Impressionist painters Cézanne and El Greco, Iberian art and African art. The rift between the modeling techniques of this important twentieth-century Western art work and traditional Impressionism was so great that most people at the time did not understand it. Even Picasso's companions, Andre Derain, the young French painter who despised idols the most, and the anarchist critic Flix Vernan couldn't understand it. Kang Wheeler, a young art dealer, admired this painting very much. He bought all the sketches for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But Picasso refused to sell the painting itself, rolled it up, and did not officially exhibit it until many years later.
This period (1906-1909) was Picasso's "black period", and his representative works include "Nude with Curtain".
At the same time, Picasso and the French painter Braque painted many landscapes and still lifes in the winter of 1908. They strive to abstract volume and space from nature and represent objects with a small plane. Picasso once said, "Nature and art are two different things. Through art, we express concepts that are different from nature." The purpose of artistic creation is “not just to reproduce reality for the sake of reproducing reality, but a more important purpose is to express the various possibilities and complexities of reality.” The critic Louis Vuxell and the painter Matisse said that this kind of painting was made of "little cubes", which later became known as "Cubism". During the summer of 1909, Picasso painted many landscapes in San Juan de Horta, a small Spanish village in the Ebro Valley, reducing the colors on his palette to only subtle browns and gray-greens. At this time, the Cubist techniques were very obvious, that is, decomposing objects into a number of basic geometric shapes (such as cubes), eliminating all superfluous things, and not using traditional perspective to draw. Picasso painted the representative works "Reservoir", "Horta's Factory", "Portrait of Ann Volard" and "Portrait of Daniel Henry Cornwheeler" during the "Analytical Cubism Period" (1909-1911) From now on, I will be closer to using geometric abstract expression methods to describe objects. In the summer of 1911, his images became increasingly fragmented and difficult to distinguish, and printed words appeared (the only clue connecting the images with reality).
In 1911, after Olivier left Picasso, Picasso lived with Eva Guell. Picasso called her "Eve" and wrote her name on some of his still life paintings. In the same year, Picasso followed Braque and began to use the "collage" method to create artworks. He used commercial paper to imitate wood grain or marble grain, and also used newspapers, matchboxes, cigarette boxes, etc. to post various pictures. This technique marked the transition from "analytical Cubism" to "synthetic Cubism" (1912-1914). During the "synthetic cubism period", various symbols replaced traditional, recognizable real images. He tried to use the harsh sculptural effect of these symbols to increase the expressiveness of emotion and reduce the value of description. Representative works at this time include "Still Life with Cane Chair", "Portrait of a Girl" and "Woman in Armchair".
In 1914, when Picasso was enthusiastically using fragments of wallpaper to create "Rococo" cubist works, the First World War broke out. The war broke up the camp of avant-garde artists in Paris; the poet Apollinaire went to the front line, and Braque and others also went their separate ways. In 1917, the young French writer Cocteau encouraged Picasso to leave Paris and collaborate with the Russian Ballet Company led by Sergei Diaghilev to tour Italy. Picasso designed the curtain, stage scenery and costumes for the company's "Parade" and met the company's ballet dancer Olga Kirklova. During this period, Picasso turned to classicism and painted many paintings with obvious classical style features and a strong sense of sculpture. This period is called the "neoclassical period", and its representative works include "Three Bathing Girls by the Spring" and "Women Running on the Beach". There were also some Cubist-style works at this time, such as "Three Musicians" and "Guitar on the Table in Front of the Window."
In 1923, Picasso met Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism. In 1925, Picasso participated in the first Surrealist exhibition with his large oil painting "Three Dancers" (known as "Convulsive Beauty"). In the next 10 years, Picasso painted many abstract paintings and engaged in sculpture creation. Picasso's representative works in painting at this time include: "Seated Bather" and the colorful oil paintings "Girl in front of the Mirror", "Dream" and "Sitting" showing his new female companion Marie-Thérèse Walter. "Woman with a Wear". Representative works of sculpture include: "Women in the Garden" and "Characters" welded with iron sheets, "Slender Woman" organized with erected wooden frames, huge bronze "Women's Head" and "Girl Holding an Apple". Women".
After 1936, Picasso stood in the ranks of the people, actively participated in anti-fascist social activities, and opposed the fascist civil war launched by Franco in Spain. He readily accepted his appointment as director of the Prado Art Museum by the Popular Front ***, which was besieged in Madrid, to show his support for the Popular Front. He also donated 400,000 francs from the sale of paintings to the Popular Front to help the poor. At this time, he created the etching etching "Franco's Dreams and Lies", which violently criticized Franco's reactionary regime.
On April 26, 1937, Franco, with the support of the Nazis, sent bombers to blow up the small town of Guernica, killing more than 2,800 innocent people. After Picasso heard the news in Paris, he was filled with anger. In less than two months, he painted the famous giant mural "Guernica" for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Exposition. The whole painting is painted in black, white and gray. The women, dead children, corpses of soldiers, burning houses and horses pierced by spears (symbolizing the people) in the painting are all a bloody representation of fascist crimes. accusation. In the 1940s, Picasso agreed to loan the painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He stated that he would never cooperate with Franco and that once Spain regained democracy and freedom, the painting would return to its homeland. During the Second World War, he sent postcards of this painting to Germans who visited his studio. In early 1981, "Guernica" was moved to the Prado Palace Museum in Madrid for display in accordance with Picasso's wishes.
During World War II, Picasso and his new girlfriend Dora Maar lived in Paris under German occupation. He refused the favor that the fascist German ambassador to France intended to treat him over coal. Regardless of the danger, he publicly attended the funeral of the famous poet Jacob who was persecuted to death by the fascists. Many of Picasso's close friends, such as writers Paul Agua and Louis Aragon, are Communists. They were not afraid of sacrifice in the fight against the Nazis, and his heroic struggle deeply moved him.
After the liberation of Paris in October 1944, Picasso joined the French ***. He believes that "joining *** is the inevitable result of my entire life and all my work." Inspired by this political belief, Picasso created three works in the early 1950s, "The Massacre in Korea" and "War" and "Peace" to oppose the war of aggression. Picasso believed that artists should care about political life and that artistic works should play a role in fighting enemies. He once wrote: "What kind of person do you think an artist is? A big fool? A painter only has eyes? A musician only has ears? A poet only has a heart organ...? On the contrary, an artist is also a political person As a character, he should always pay attention to tragic and intense events and react from all aspects. How can he not care about others, how can he isolate himself from the rich life with an attitude of escaping reality? No, Painting was not created to decorate a house, it was a weapon to resist and fight the enemy.” In August 1948, Picasso and Eluard attended the "Conference for World Peace" held in Poland and spoke at the meeting. The following year, at the request of the Congress for the Defense of World Peace held in Paris, he chose a lithograph depicting a dove and presented it to the Congress. This became the world-famous "Peace Dove".
In 1945, the Matisse-Picasso exhibition was held in London. After 1946, Picasso lived with Fran?ois Gilot, and gave birth to his second son Claude and second daughter Paloma in 1947 and 1949. From 1950 to 1961, Picasso created a series of interpretation paintings based on famous ancient paintings. Such as imitating Courbet's "Women on the Seine", imitating El Greco's "Portrait of the Painter" and imitating Velasquez's "La Menina". In addition, Picasso also participated in the filming of three films about his creation and life in 1953, 1956 and 1959, and produced a large number of ceramics in the village of Valaris. In 1958, he also produced a large mural symbolizing the struggle between good and evil for the UNESCO Building in Paris.
In 1961, Picasso married Jacqueline Roque. In June of the same year, they moved to Mugan. During his last ten years at Mougan, Picasso produced hundreds of love-themed prints.
On April 8, 1973, Picasso died of emphysema in Mougan at the age of 92. He was extremely diligent throughout his life. He began to learn printmaking technology at the age of 60 and pottery at the age of 70. He has made outstanding contributions in the fields of oil painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and ceramics. According to statistics, Picasso's self-preserved works include: 1,885 oil paintings, 7,089 sketches, 1,228 sculptures, 3,222 pottery pieces, 30,000 prints, 100 illustrations and manuscripts, plus those sold during his lifetime. , gave away sketches and lost works that were burned for warmth during the poverty period in Paris. The total number of works he created in his lifetime is about 80,000. In addition, he also wrote poems and plays, leaving an extremely rich cultural heritage for mankind.
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