Art

Picasso, Papa of Cubism

Pablo Picasso is the artist most commonly mentioned when we talk about modern art. His paintings, sculptures, ceramics and prints number in the thousands. He created modern art for 75 years, noted for works such as The Dream, Child Holding a Dove and Boy with a Pipe.

Pablo Picasso, though controversial and sometimes viewed as a charlatan has been mentioned by literally all art critics as the painter that dominated and had the most influence on art in the twentieth century.

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga Spain in 1881. His father was a drawing and art teacher and quickly recognized his son’s artistic brilliance. Pablo attended the Barcelona School of Fine Arts at the young age of 14 and still managed to skip some elementary art classes.

Picasso went through many changes in his life time that are reflected in his art. He evolved his style from early blue period all the way to his flagship style- Cubism.

The art movement known as Cubism was initiated by Picasso. Its subjects were broken and reassembled in strange and abstract ways. Fragmentation through geometric forms expressed painting in an entirely new way. Depth isn’t shown in this art form, instead, planes of indistinguishable area. This was the beginning of truly avant-garde and abstract art.

Woman and Dove and The Red Armchair are but a few of the great reproductions of this father of cubism.

One of his most moving paintings was painted in 1937. Guernica was a protest against a Spanish Civil War air raid on a village in Basque. Guernica is huge, painted on canvas using only black, grey and white.

Since Picasso died in France in 1973, Spain has yearned to reclaim its most famous 20th-century artist. Picasso never set foot in his homeland since 1934 mainly because of his nemesis, Dictator Gen. Francisco Franco. While his paintings are in museums and collections around the world, there are still relatively few in Spain itself.