PICASSO, PABLO (RUIZ Y)

born Oct. 25, 1881, Mlaga, Spain died April 8, 1973, Mougins, Fr. Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque) of Cubism. Even Picasso's earliest drawings (c. 1890), executed when he was about 10 years old, showed an exceptional technical facility. When the family moved to Barcelona in October 1895, Picasso attended La Lonja, the school of fine arts there (1896), and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid (1897). In October 1900 he made the first of three visits to Paris, where he established himself finally in April 1904. During the intensely creative years 18991905, Picasso's style varied considerably. At the start, he used strong colours in a Postimpressionist manner (190001). Then he painted predominantly in blue (the so-called Blue Period; late 1901spring 1904). Until mid-1901 his principal subjects were lively scenes of popular and bourgeois life (cabarets, racecourses, dance halls, etc.); toward the end of 1901, however, Picasso's world became that of the suffering victims of society: prostitutes, beggars, drunkards, etc. In 1904 his gloom lifted, and he looked freshly at humanity with tenderness and admiration and adopted warmer colours and a more harmonious, classical style of draftsmanship; during this Rose Period, his favourite subjects were dancers and acrobats, particularly the Harlequin figure of the commedia dell'arte. Between the end of 1906 and the spring of 1907, while influenced by the painting of Paul Czanne, by Greco-Iberian art, and by African sculpture, Picasso produced a painting later called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon that constitutes a violent break with tradition. This painting pointed the way toward Cubism, a new pictorial style that Picasso and his friend Braque began to develop side by side and in close friendship. They disregarded the conventional means used for creating an illusion of reality, such as one-point perspective, chiaroscuro, and the definition of form and colour by light, aiming instead to represent objects more conceptually by breaking them into geometrical units, or small cubes, and by depicting a single object on the same canvas from a multiplicity of angles. Picasso was to continue elaborating and perfecting this style until about 1925. Simultaneously, from about 1915 onward, he began to work in the opposite direction, depicting figures of a subtly detached classicismlinear, sculptural, and monumental. After 1925 Picasso began to depict emotionally charged bodies and heads whose dislocations give rise to double images and pictorial metaphors. A private Surrealist vocabulary of powerful symbols (e.g., the Minotaur) emerged in the 1930s to express his personal dilemmas and distress. Picasso's interest in sculpture, dormant since 1905, revived at this time. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 inspired the great and harrowing mural painting Guernica (1937), the first reference in his work to political events. In 1944 Picasso joined the Communist Party, and in 1949 his Dove lithograph was adopted as the symbol of the World Peace Congress. In the postwar years much of Picasso's work centred on the themes of war and peace and man's right to leisure and peaceful relaxation. After 1955 the theme of the artist and his magic powers assumed great importance in his work. Picasso's powerful inventive gifts led him to work in many fields. He produced (191724) some famous decors for Sergey Diaghilev's Russian ballet company (e.g., Parade, Le Tricorne, Pulcinella). He also made significant technical innovations in lithography and linocutting and produced a great quantity of painted pottery.