Pablo Picasso

Even the most superlative adjectives somehow fail to adequately communicate Picasso's dominance of twentieth century art. Not only his ground-breaking, eminently innovative and influential art, but his self-created cult of personality helped Picasso to become a household name around the world. As Times art critic Robert Hughes stated,

"To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard form Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. "

Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881, with the inordinately weighty name Pablo Diego José Santiago Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Blasco y Picasso. For obvious reasons, the artist is known only as "Pablo. "

As a child, Picasso proved to be somewhat of an artistic prodigy, mastering artistic techniques and skills with amazing rapidity under the tutelage of his art professor father. The artist went on to study art at the Madrid Academy in 1897, but the moody and temperamental youth quickly grew frustrated in the academic environment and returned to Barcelona, where he frequented the cafes of intellectuals and artists. In 1900 the artist moved to Paris, where he was introduced to the innovations of contemporary artists, including post-Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, which had an impact on his artistic evolution.

During the early Parisian years Picasso inhabited a small maid's room on the boulevard Voltaire with the journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped the artist to learn French. The two young men lived in grim poverty, and Picasso found himself forced to burn his own art works just for the heat. Frustrated with his lack of success, Picasso travelled between Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid.

In 1904 Picasso finally decided to put down roots in the City of Lights, taking a room on the rue Ravignon. At the same time, Picasso met and began a fusional relationship with Fernande Olivier, who serves as a model for several paintings of the Rose period, but who was quickly discarded for Eva Gouel once the artist began to achieve some critical and financial success. The famous Ma Jolie is in some ways a kind of testament to Picasso's love for Eva. In 1905, Picasso met and befriended avant-garde poet and art critic Apollinaire, who put Picasso in touch with several of his important patrons as well as Georges Braque, Picasso's partner in launching Cubism. During this period Picasso also befriended influential figures such as Gertrude Stein and the Fauve artists Henri Matisse and André Derain.

Two years after Eva Gouel succumbed to terminal illness in 1915, Picasso went to Rome to do set design for Diaghilev's ballet "Parade," where he met Igor Stravinsky and began a romantic relationship with ballerina Olga Khokhlova, who he married in 1918.

True to his womanizing tendencies (the artist had two wives and four children with three different women), in 1927 Picasso struck up an affair with 17 year old Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom he had a child in 1935, which proved to be the final nail in his marriage. In 1936, Picasso began a relationship with the woman who would be his companion for the rest of his life, Yugoslavian photographer Dora Maar.

Picasso's artistic evolution can be categorized into relatively clearly defined periods, which are, in chronological order, the Blue Period, the Rose Period, the African Period, Analytic Cubism, and Synthetic Cubism.

Blue Period (1901-1904):
As the name suggests, the blue period is characterized by dominating tones of blue, and subjects such as the travails of the poor, infirm and alone. The depressive, melancholy spirit permeating this period was the direct result of the suicide of Picasso's best friend, Casagemas. The most notable works representing this period include The Old Guitarist of 1903 and The Frugal Repast of 1904, which constitute some of Picasso's most famous and best loved paintings.

Rose Period (1905-1906):
The rose period is typified by a lighter palette and spirit. Perhaps influenced by the bright colors of the Fauvists he began to befriend (Matisse and Braque), Picasso began to treat new subjects of circus performers, harlequins and acrobats, depicted in soft pinks and terracottas.

African Period (1907-1909):
During his African period, Picasso was fascinated by so-called "primitive" arts, especially African masks, and his art evidences this influence in the simplified, angular forms and muted palette of browns and reds. Perhaps the most influential painting of the twentieth century, Desmoiselles d'Avignon, was executed at the beginning of this period, in 1907.

Analytic, Synthetic Cubism (1909-1912, 1912-1919):
Thanks in a large part to Picasso's own myth-mongering, it was long thought that Picasso single-handedly created the Cubist movement, and his partner Braque was a mere follower. In reality, Braque was as much of an innovator as Picasso in developing this, one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of western art, a style that joyfully smashes the laws of perspective and space. The artists engage the spectator in an intellectual game, whereby the viewer is required to deduce the painting's subjects with fragments of form, each depicted from a different perspective.