Picasso’s Paintings
Pablo Picasso’s gargantuan full name, which honors a variety of relatives and saints, is Pablo
Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima
Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in
Málaga, Spain.
Pablo Picasso remains renowned for endlessly
reinventing himself, switching between styles so
radically different that his life’s work seems to be
the product of five or six great artists rather than
just one. Of his penchant for style diversity, Picasso
insisted that his varied work was not indicative of
radical shifts throughout his career, but, rather,
of his dedication to objectively evaluating for
each piece the form and technique best suited to
achieve his desired effect. “Whenever I wanted
to say something, I said it the way I believed I
should,” he explained. “Different themes inevitably
require different methods of expression. This
does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a
matter of following the idea one wants to express
and the way in which one wants to express it.”
Art critics and historians typically break Pablo
Picasso’s adult career into distinct periods,
the first of which lasted from 1901 to 1904
and is called his “Blue Period,” after the color
that dominated nearly all of his paintings over
these years. At the turn of the 20th century,
Picasso moved to Paris, France — the cultural
center of European art — to open his own
studio. Lonely and deeply depressed over the
death of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas,
he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and
anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue
and green. Picasso’s most famous paintings
from the Blue Period include “Blue Nude,”
“La Vie” and “The Old Guitarist,” all three of
which were completed in 1903. Cubism was
an artistic style pioneered by Pablo Picasso
and his friend and fellow painter, Georges
Braque. In Cubist paintings, objects are broken
apart and reassembled in an abstracted form,
highlighting their composite geometric shapes
and depicting them from multiple, simultaneous
viewpoints in order to create physics-defying,
collage-like effects. At once destructive and
creative, Cubism shocked, appalled and
fascinated the art world. Picasso’s early Cubist
paintings, known as his “Analytic Cubist”
works, include “Three Women” (1907), “Bread
and Fruit Dish on a Table” (1909) and “Girl with
Mandolin” (1910). His later Cubist works are
distinguished as “Synthetic Cubism” for moving
even further away from artistic typicalities of
the time, creating vast collages out of a great
number of tiny, individual fragments.
These paintings include “Still Life with Chair
Caning” (1912), “Card Player” (1913-14) and
“Three Musicians” (1921). In the aftermath of
World War II, Picasso became more overtly
political, joining the Communist Party.
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