SECTION 4
We're now going to spend some time, class, talking about the most revolutionary, the most prodigious artist in the history of Modem Western art. Do you know who I'm talking about?Of course-it's Pablo Picasso. He was the artist who invented Cubism, he was the artist who invented collage, and he was the artist who experimented with more styles and media than probably any other artist in history, with the possible exception of Leonardo da Vinci.And what I'm passing out to you now are figures of some of Picasso's most famous and most revolutionary paintings.
Picasso was born Spain in 1881,and he died in France in 1973,so his life spanned most of the development of what we call Modern art.He was an amazing child. He began studying art very early,under his father,who was in fact an art teacher,and in 1897,at the age of sixteen,he entered the Royal Academy of Arts in Madrid. In fact,he passed their entrance examination in a single day,even though applicants were given a month to do this.
But after only a year there,he felt bored and stifled, and he dropped out. He went back to Barcelona, where he hung out with the other artists and musicians In the cafes for a while,and then he visited Paris, where he had a chance to see the works of such radical artists as Seurat,Monet,Cezanne, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec-all of whom were, in their own unique ways, going beyond the realistic values of Renaissance illusionism. Picasso lived in Paris and Barcelona alternately for several years, from 1900 to 1904, and then he set up a permanent studio in Paris.
1901 to 1904 is known as Picasso's "Blue Period",when he was a starving artist and sometimes had to burn his own drawings to keep warm. All his paintings during this period were done in sad shades of blue, and they depicted thin, depressed figures, paupers and homeless people. If you look at the handout I gave you, you'll see an example of his Blue Period-The Old Guitarist, painted in 1903. Not a very happy looking fellow, is he?
From 1904,then, to 1905, Picasso passed through his "Rose Period", when he began to use warmer, more tender colors-pinks and beiges-and his subjects became circus performers and harlequins and clowns. You can see his most famous painting from this period on the sheet-his "Family of Saltimbanques",from 1905.You'll notice, though, that this quiet group of circus performers still look alienated and uncommunicative, though they are treated more kindly than he treated the old guitar player.