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
He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Belief
I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Success & Failure, Achievement
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Computers, General, One liners, Questions, Technology, Humor
I do not seek. I find.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Creativity, Discovery
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Vision, Creativity
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Fashion
All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superflous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: The Artist
I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Wealth, Money
Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Individuality, Tyranny
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Talent
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Artists, Art, Nature, Arts
It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Apathy, Indifference
If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
—Pablo Picasso
One must act in painting as in life, directly.
—Pablo Picasso
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Progress
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Children, Inner-child, Art
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Genius
To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Imitation
I’m a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: The Artist, Drawing
Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Youth
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Painters, Art, Painting, Imagination
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite—that particular peach is but a detail.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Facts
Work is necessary for man. Man invented the alarm clock.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Work
Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
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