Great Personalities

Pablo Picasso

It was almost midnight on 25 October, 1881, when the artist who was to alter the whole course of art history was born at Malaga, in Spain. The infant was called Pablo Ruiz Picasso. His father’s name was Don Jose` Ruiz Blasco and his mother was Maria Picasso Lopez.

Painting and Education

There was no doubt that the young Picasso learned a great deal about painting, and about art in general from his father, who was also a painter, though not a notably gifted one. Even before he could speak Picasso had begun to express himself with a pencil, and as a baby, would sit for hours contentedly drawing spirals on sheets of paper or pieces of cardboard. Later, he delighted to draw pictures in the sand of Malaga beaches. By the time he was fourteen he was to be a master of classical drawing. When Picasso’s father obtained a high post at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts, in 1894, the whole family came to live there. Here, Pablo Picasso began painting in earnest. He was influenced in his early day’s paintings by Daumier, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. In the summer of 1897 a collection of the young man’s paintings were exhibited in Barcelona, and soon afterwards Picasso entered the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. On the first day he astonished the professors there by executing drawings of staggering brilliance. Two years later, after somewhat erratic career at the Academy, he returned to Barcelona where he lived and worked spasmodically until moving to Paris in 1904. Here, on the south western slopes of Montmatre he was to live for the next five years among artists and writers, enjoying to the full, the gay life of a typical French Bohemian. Here, he painted the wonderful pictures of his Blue and Rose periods, pictures populated with beggars and circus folk.

One of the Greatest Artists

From 1904 until his death, France had been the home of this Spanish-born painter, although, much to the chagrin of the French Government, he had always refused to take up French citizenship. He remained fundamentally, and at heart, a proud and passionate Spaniard.
He was a sculptor and an etcher as well as a painter. The genius of the little Spaniard was boundless. When the Russian Ballet left Paris for a tour of Madrid and Barcelona, Picasso went with it, and in Spain in 1918 he married the Russian ballerina, Olga Koklova. Soon afterwards, they returned to Paris. Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism; sculpture, ceramics, stage d‚cor and costume design; the arts of college and poster design; of etching and book illustrations; he was master of them all. Indeed, it would be true to say that his work is the focal point and fountain head of all that is meant by the art of the twentieth century. Since Leonardo, no artist ever displayed so rare and wide a range of talents.
Picasso was certainly the most revolutionary painter the twentieth century has known. The changes that he brought about are every bit as startling and influential as those wrought by the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci transformed the flat, two-dimensional character of medieval painting into the concept of three-dimensional realism which, until the coming of Picasso, was to compromise the traditional form upon which the whole edifice of European art was based.

Death

Much of Picasso’s life in France was spent near the sea. From the localities of Cannes, Dinard, and Antibes, he drew some of the most vital strands of his inspiration. But inspite of his increasing fame and a considerable accumulation of wealth, by the year of 1932, his marriage ended.
Picasso threw himself harder than ever into his work. He painted, made sculpture, and even wrote poetry that won the acclaim of many distinguished French writers. In 1954 he married Jacqueline Roque.
In 1970, Picasso gave to the Museo in Barcelona a huge collection of his drawings and paintings covering a wide period of time.
Picasso died on 8 April 1973. He was 92. His last years were embittered by a series of unsuccessful court auctions to prevent publication of a scathingly critical autobiography. At the time of his death the artist was reputed to be worth between five and six hundred million pounds. But the value of his genius will remain incalculable...
-From
“100 GREAT MODERN LIVES”