Biography of Pablo Ruiz y Picasso

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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso

A short biography of a famous painter and sculptor

A male born in 1881, died in 1973- Pablo Picasso was one of the most famous painters of the 1900's.

As the son of a professor of art, Picasso's talent for drawing was recognized at an early age. An advanced student at the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts from the age of 14, he experimented in his youth with nearly all of the "avant-garde styles" current at the turn of the century.

He also became known for his sculpture , drawings, graphics, and ceramics works. In some way he was the artist most characteristic of this century, because he responded to changing conditions, moods, challenges so intensely and so rapidly. His "searching style" made him the leader in expressing the complexity of the 1900's.

For Picasso, the meaning of art was to be derived from other works of art, and not directly from nature.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's work had a significant impact on his early paintings, as did the work of Paul Cezanne. Their influence, among others, can be detected in the paintings of Picasso's "blue period" (1901-1904), which was stimulated by his exposure to life and thought in Paris, where he made his home after 1904.

In works such as The Old Guitarist (1903; Art Institute, Chicago) he created "evocative portrayals" of blind, impoverished, or despairing people in a blue palette. His use of blue as a motif was apparently derived from the symbolic importance of that color in the contemporary romantic writings of Maurice Maeterlinck and Oscar Wilde, whose work often "derived its force from depictions of madness or illness." Although his palette and subject matter changed when he entered (1904) what is called his "rose period," during which he painted harlequins and circus...