Why is pablo picasso well known

During the s, Picasso's works such as his well-known Guernica , a unique depiction of the Spanish Civil War, reflected the violence of war time. The menacing minotaur became a central symbol of his art, replacing the harlequin of his earlier years.

Some of the time, he wrote poetry, completing more than works between and After Paris was liberated in , Picasso began a new relationship with the much younger art student Francoise Gilot. Together, they produced a son, Claude, in , and a daughter, Paloma, in Their relationship was doomed like so many of Picasso's previous ones, however, due to his continual infidelities and abuse. He focused on sculpture during this era, participating in an international exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in He subsequently created a commissioned sculpture known as the Chicago Picasso , which he donated to the U.

In , at the age of 79, the artist married his second and last wife, year-old Jacqueline Roque. She proved to be one of his career's greatest inspirations. Picasso produced more than 70 portraits of her during the final 17 years he was alive. As his life neared its end, the artist experienced a flurry of creativity. The resulting artworks were a mixture of his previous styles and included colorful paintings and copper etchings.

Art experts later recognized the beginnings of Neo-Expressionism in Picasso's final works. As one of the greatest influences on the course of 20th-century art, Pablo Picasso often mixed various styles to create wholly new interpretations of what he saw. He was a driving force in the development of Cubism, and he elevated collage to the level of fine art.

With the courage and self-confidence unhindered by convention or fear of ostracism, Picasso followed his vision as it led him to fresh innovations in his craft. Similarly, his continual quest for passion in his many romantic liaisons throughout his life inspired him to create innumerable paintings, sculptures and etchings.

Picasso is not just a man and his work. Picasso is always a legend, indeed almost a myth. In the public view he has long since been the personification of genius in modern art. Picasso is an idol, one of those rare creatures who act as crucibles in which the diverse and often chaotic phenomena of culture are focussed, who seem to body forth the artistic life of their age in one person.

Contact Us Terms of Use Links. All Rights Reserved. Toggle navigation Pablo Picasso. Pablo Picasso Biography. The Old Guitarist. Girl Before a Mirror. The Weeping Woman. La Vie portrayed his friend's inner torment in the face of a lover he tried to murder. Fitting to the name, once Picasso seemed to find some small measure of success and overcame some of his depression, he had a more cheery period featuring orange and pink hues and the playful worlds of circus people and harlequins.

Picasso met a bohemian artist named Fernande Olivier who became his lover. She subsequently appeared in many of these more optimistic paintings. American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein became great fans of Picasso. They not only became his chief patrons, Gertrude was also pictured in his Portrait of Gertrude Stein , one of his most famous portraits. For Picasso, the seminal moment was the Paul Cezanne retrospective held at the Salon d'Automne, one year after the artist's death in Though he previously had been familiar with Cezanne, it was not until the retrospective that Picasso experienced the full impact of his artistic achievement.

In Cezanne's works, Picasso found a model of how to distill the essential from nature in order to achieve a cohesive surface that expressed the artist's singular vision. At about the same time, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists. In France, Henri Matisse , Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends start blending the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cezanne and Gauguin.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was Picasso's first masterpiece. The painting depicts five naked women with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks.

The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly upturned tabletop. In this painting, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting by adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane.

When Les Demoiselles d'Avignon first appeared, it was as if the art world had collapsed. Known form and representation were completely abandoned. Hence it was called the most innovative painting in modern art history. With the new strategies applied in the painting, Picasso suddenly found freedom of expression away from current and classical French influences and was able to carve his own path. Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. And they ultimately set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he deconstructed the conventions of perspective that had dominated Renaissance art. During this period, the style Georges Braque and Picasso developed used mainly neutral colors and was based in they're "taking apart" objects and "analyzing them" in terms of their shapes.

Cubism, especially the second form, known as Synthetic Cubism, played a great role in the development of western art world.

Works of this phase emphasize the combination, or synthesis, of forms in the picture. Non-painted objects such as newspapers or tobacco wrappers, are frequently pasted on the canvas in combination with painted areas - the incorporation of a wide variety of extraneous materials is particularly associated with Picasso's novel technique of collage.

This collage technique emphasizes the differences in texture and poses the question of what is reality and what is illusion in painting. With his use of color, shape and geometrical figures, and his unique approach to depict images, Picasso changed the direction of art for generations to come.

With an unsurpassed mastery of technique and skill, Picasso made his first trip to Italy in and promptly began a period of tribute to neoclassical style. Breaking from the extreme modernism he drew and painted work reminiscent of Raphael and Ingres. This was just a prelude before Picasso seemingly effortlessly began to combine his modernist concepts with his skill into surrealist masterpieces like Guernica , , a frenzied and masterful combination of style that embodies the despair of war.

Guernica is considered as the most powerful anti-war statement of modern art. It was done to showcase Picasso's support towards ending the war, and condemnation on fascism in general. From the beginning, Picasso chooses not to represent the horror of Guernica in realist or romantic terms.

Key figures - a woman with outstretched arms, a bull, an agonized horse - are refined in sketch after sketch, then transferred to the capacious canvas, which he also reworks several times. It's hard to imagine a visual record of the 20th century without Pablo Ruiz Picasso. With his bold shapes and characteristic angles, the Spanish artist captured everything from the horrors of war to the boundless possibilities of the human form.

Even those unfamiliar with the intricacies of modern art history can likely identify a few of his best-known paintings -- particularly those in his signature cubist style. However, during Picasso's long life -- he died in at age 91 -- he is estimated to have completed 13, paintings and around , prints and engravings. Pablo Picasso captured on October in Mougins, France.

A comprehensive retrospective of his work and the numerous artistic traditions it spanned, is a massive undertaking. His artworks are also coveted inclusions in private collections worldwide. Here are seven of Picasso's most famous paintings, in order of completion:.

The figure depicted -- gaunt and cross-legged -- appears exhausted as he slumps over his brown guitar. The oil-on-panel painting is from Picasso's "blue period," which saw him restrict himself to shades of blue as he explored themes of poverty and suffering. Did you know? Completed: Where to see it: Private collection. And while the figure in the oil-on-canvas portrait is clothed in blue, the background features happier shades of ochre and pink. While hardly bubbling over with joy, the boy strikes a more upbeat image than that of the downtrodden figures from the blue period.

He even wears a headpiece of flowers, with more flowers appearing in the background. Picasso painted this not long after he moved to the Montmartre section of Paris, which attracted the likes of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Art critics were taken aback , with some not considering the painting among Picasso's best efforts.