Overview
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881. The son of an art teacher, Picasso studied in Barcelona. Here he met a number of avant-garde Catalan artists at the Café Els Quatro Gats.
Barcelona’s Barrio Chino was a poor area of town populated by a number of prostitutes and alcoholics who provided Picasso with the models and themes for his Blue Period (1901–1905). This period was so named because blue was the prevailing colour in his paintings during these years. The paintings were melancholic, depicting a miserable and destitute section of society.
After settling in Paris, from 1904–1906 Picasso developed his Rose Period, again named after the prevailing colour of his work. These paintings were more peaceful than those of the Blue Period. This time the circus formed the basis for themes and subjects, and the paintings are full of circus acrobats, actors, thieves and animals.
During 1906 Picasso developed an interest in Primitivism, a style inspired by non-naturalistic African masks and carvings. The greatest expression of this interest was in the semi-abstract Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).
Picasso met George Braque in 1907 and the pair worked closely together up until 1914, both contributing to the development of Cubism, a style characterised by the reduction of three-dimensional objects into planes and surfaces. Around this time Picasso introduced collage elements into his work such as glued fabric and paper, and he continued to employ cubist techniques in his work until 1921.
His paintings in the early 1920s were elegant, neo-classical works, but after 1925 the figures and objects depicted evolved into more bizarre and distorted forms. During this period Picasso exhibited with the Surrealists and his work was highly influential among followers of this movement.
Following two visits to Spain Picasso became increasingly drawn to the bullfight and the Minotaur, a man with a bull’s head. These images formed the central theme of Picasso’s most famous work Guernica (1937), a large mural expressing the artist’s horror of war. It was painted in a few weeks, after German aircraft bombed the village of Guernica, in the Basque region of Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. Most of the village’s inhabitants were killed. Picasso exhibited Guernica in the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair, but never returned to Spain again.
During the Second World War Picasso remained in Paris until 1944, producing a number of portraits, sculptures and still-lifes which powerfully evoke the wretchedness of the times. After the war Picasso’s work became more relaxed and less preoccupied with death and destruction.
Moving to the south of France, Picasso experimented with new media, turning out a large number of engravings and lithographs, as well as an enormous collection of posters, woodcuts, lino-cuts, pottery, ceramics and sculpture.
From 1948–51 Picasso was active in the Peace Movement, illustrating a poster with the symbol of a dove for the 1949 Congress of the World Peace Movement held in Paris.
Picasso’s late works are diverse and uneven in quality, and include a series of re-interpretations of famous paintings, originally created by French and Spanish artists, some as early as the seventeenth century. Picasso died in 1973, aged ninety-two.
Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and his influence can be seen in the paintings of New Zealand artists such as Frances Hodgkins and Colin McCahon.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database.