Pablo Picasso: Multiple artistic lives

Sarah Abdeen

This year marks the death of Pablo Picasso, 46 ​​years old, yet his influence is still evident in 20th-century art.

Picasso experimented with and invented various forms of technical techniques during his 92 years of life, until he was a sculptor, ceramic artist, printer, and writer at times.

Picasso's many contemporary art schools, he had a major role in creating cubism school with his French artist George Brac. He has appeared in films and biographies of his contemporaries. He died on 8 April 1973.

The early years of Picasso 1881-1900
Although he lived most of his life in France, he was not a Spanish-born. He was the first child of his parents. He first grew up in a Catholic family, but at the end of his life declared himself an atheist.

His father began to teach him oil painting when he was seven years old, and Picasso was a good student and diligent. He then enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona at the age of 13.

In 1897, Picasso began his studies at the Madrid Academy of Art and toured the exhibitions studying the works of Velásquez, Goya and other Spanish artists.

The middle years of Picasso's life were 1900-1940
In 1900 Picasso visited Paris for the first time, sharing the house with the poet and journalist Max Jacob, and the two lived in great poverty. In 1901, he founded with his friend Francisco Assis Soller a literary magazine entitled "Young Art", which includes articles and caricatures that sympathize with the poor. At about that time, he began to sign his work as Picasso instead of Pablo Ruiz Picasso.

Blue Phase
The blue stage of Picasso's art extended from 1901 to 1904. During this time it was mainly painted in shades of blue only, with touches of warm brown colors in the middle of the blue.

Art historians attribute the blue period to Picasso's depression after the suicide of one of his friends. Even the recurring themes of that period are blindness, poverty and loneliness.

The pink stage
The pink phase lasted from 1904 to 1906, and the paintings were saturated with pink tones, and were less sad and warmer than blue stage paintings. Clowns, circus players and roses are among the most recurrent themes of the period. Picasso's painting was one of his best-selling works at that stage: the boy and the pipe.

Picasso and Cubism School
Picasso worked with his friend the French artist George Brac to create the beginnings of the Cubism movement in art, which depicts shapes like disjointed objects, in intricate geometric shapes.

Picasso then tried to integrate human forms in the context of Cubic paintings, after he was satisfied with the silent nature such as the painting "Girl with Mandolin", and completed his most famous paintings in that period related to Cubism.

From 1919 to 1929 there was a major shift in Picasso's style, and he presented classic works that completely contradict his earlier cubism works, and then began to rethink his inclination to the primitive arts and cave drawings painted by the first man such as the Three Dancers.

During the 1930s, Picasso's work reflected the Spanish Civil War, such as his famous painting "Gernica", a unique portrayal of war and its horrors, and the growing violence in wartime. The mythic minotaur became the main theme in the Picasso cartoons.

During the Second World War, Picasso remained in Paris under German occupation, tolerated the Gestapo, continued to create paintings, sometimes wrote poetry poems, and finished writing two plays, Desire pours out of the tail, The Four Young Girls.

Picasso's influence on art
Picasso's influence is one of the most important influences on the 20th century's fine arts course. He mixed different styles of art, created entirely new interpretations of art, as well as being the most important force in the development of cubism and raising the collage to the fine arts.

Picasso followed his intuition with a lot of courage and self-confidence without a desire for tradition, and could be considered a rare phenomenon in the world of art where diverse culture, anarchism, as the embodiment of a whole artistic life in one person.

Picasso's most important paintings
Naked Blue 1902: One of the main pieces of Picasso's march, painted after the death of one of his tragically close friends, is one of the blue stage paintings that proved his talent in highlighting the deepest feelings using one color.

1932: Picasso's oil paintings in 1932, when he was 50, depicting his beloved Marie-Therese Walter at the age of 24, showing Picasso's very simplified style in contrasting colors. It was sold at Christie's Auction House for $ 48.8 million in 1997 unexpectedly.

1937: A series of paintings of weeping women, a continuation of the tragedy portrayed in Picasso's epic painting Gernica. Focusing on the image of the weeping woman, Picasso did not directly portray the effects of the Spanish war, but rather pointed to a unique global picture of suffering. The painting came at the end of a series of prints and paintings by Picasso protesting the war.

The Gherinka 1937 The Girinka may have been Picasso's most famous work, but it is certainly his strongest political statement, drawing it as an immediate reaction to the Nazi bombardment of Gernick during the Spanish Civil War.

Work has gained a tremendous status and has become a constant reminder of the tragedies of war, a symbol of anti-war and the embodiment of peace. When Picasso finished it, it was shown all over the world in short tours, and was a reason to draw the world's attention to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.