Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
REBEL WITH A CAUSE
“Success is dangerous. One starts to copy oneself and copying oneself is more dangerous than copying others. This leads to sterility.”
—Interview with Pablo Picasso, Vogue magazine, November 1956.
Rumored to have started drawing before he could speak, Pablo Picasso’s genius was evident at an early age. His father, a struggling artist, gave his son lessons and enrolled him in a prestigious Madrid art academy when he was 16. The institution’s rigidity, however, stifled the budding artist, and he dropped out after a short time. Already a rebel, Picasso would continue to defy convention for the remainder of his career in favor of creating innovative, compelling art—often to the chagrin of critics and peers.
In 1900, Picasso moved from Spain to Paris. Inspired by the city’s Avant-Garde cultural scene, he began pushing the boundaries as no artist had before. One such example is Les Desmoiselles d’ Avignon (c. 1907), a painting of five nudes inspired by the Barcelona brothels Picasso had seen as a young man. In addition to the unsavory subject matter, critics were equally outraged by the painting’s primitive, tribal-inspired characteristics and Picasso’s use of fragmented, geometric shapes to grossly distort the faces and bodies rendered in the disturbing scene. And though the painting drew fierce condemnation (prompting Picasso to hide it for a decade), it ultimately opened the door to an entirely new artistic form: Cubism.
Irrespective of one’s like or dislike of his work, Picasso’s artistic brilliance cannot be denied. His bold methods and resolute philosophies across multiple mediums, including drawing, painting, sculpture, and collage, helped establish him as one of the most influential artists of all time. —RJR
Notable works: Three Muscians, 1921; The Dream, 1932; Guernica, 1937.
I hope you didn't think that I'd forgotten to include the great Pablo Picasso !