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
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Goals, Goal, Action
What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn’t everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Faces, Reality, Face
We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Little Things, Things
Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts, Nature
Give me a museum, and I’ll fill it.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art, Give
When you are young and without success, you have only a few friends. Then, later on, when you are rich and famous, you still have a few … if you are lucky.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Friendship
Beauty?.. To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Beauty
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art, One liners, Arts, Artists
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
—Pablo Picasso
Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Censorship
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Prophecy, Vision
Picasso’s mother held great ambitions for him when he was a child. She instructed him: If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as Pope”. Instead,” Picasso quipped, “I became a painter and became a Picasso”.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: General, Great, The Artist, Pain
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Taste, Style
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
The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Inspiration, The Artist
It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Indifference, Apathy
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: Drawing, The Artist
Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Youth
It is personality with a penny’s worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Genius
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Childhood, Youth
The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
—Pablo Picasso
When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.
—Pablo Picasso
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Genius
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Art
It is your work in life that is your ultimate seduction.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Purpose
I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful?. One must speak of problems in painting!
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Beauty
I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: Money, Wealth
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso
Topics: One liners, Humor, Questions, General, Technology, Computers
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