Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973,) fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso, also called (before 1901) Pablo Ruiz or Pablo Ruiz Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. A resident in France from 1904, his prodigious creativity and technical versatility made him the foremost figure in avant-garde art in the first half of the 20th century. He experimented with a wide range of styles and themes in his long career, most notably inspiring ‘Cubism.’
Born in Málaga, Picasso grew up in Barcelona. He showed artistic talent at an early age. In the early 1900s, he moved between France and Spain before settling in Paris in 1904. He experimented with many styles and produced his own original ones, reflected in his ‘Blue’ and ‘Rose’ periods. The paintings of Blue Period (1901–04) used melancholic blue shades to represent social outsiders. During his Rose Period (1905–06,) he represented circus performers and acrobats in hues of pink and gray. His rejection of naturalism and his focus on the analysis and reduction of form evolved into cubism (1908–14,) embodied in such paintings as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907.)
In the 1920s and 1930s, Picasso adopted a neoclassical figurative style and evolved into a semi-surrealist painter. He portrayed more violent and morbid works in paintings such as The Three Dancers (1935.) His celebrated Guernica (1937) was inspired by the destruction of the Basque village by German bombers at the request of General Franco’s nationalist government.
Picasso is equally renowned for his sculpture. He pioneered the use of assembled instead of modeled or carved materials. The most famous example is his Head of a Bull, Metamorphosis (1943,) which comprises a bicycle saddle and handlebars.
Picasso’s eccentric and expansive lifestyle, his wealth and womanizing, and his scrupulously documented artistic technique are well known. For the popular French documentary Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso; 1956,) he painted with specially formulated inks and destroyed most of those paintings with the intention that they exist only on film.
Picasso inspired numerous books, including Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1946) and Roland Penrose’s Portrait of Picasso (1957) and Picasso: His Life and Work (1958.) A comprehensive survey of his work is Christian Zervos’s Pablo Picasso: Oeuvres (21 vols., 1942–69.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Pablo Picasso
Youth has no age.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Youth
One must act in painting as in life, directly.
—Pablo Picasso
If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
—Pablo Picasso
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Success
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
—Pablo Picasso
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Style, Taste
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Action
When I was a child, my mother said to me,
If you become a soldier you’ll be a general.
If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.
Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
—Pablo Picasso
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
—Pablo Picasso
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Lies, Art, Artists
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Vision
I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Achievement, Success & Failure
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Inner-child, Art, Children
Every child is born an artist. The trick is to remain an artist.
—Pablo Picasso
We don’t grow older, we grow riper.
—Pablo Picasso
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Technology, One liners, Questions, Computers
If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Culture
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