Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga. His parents are Maria Picasso and art teacher José Ruiz Blasco. He took his world-famous surname from his mother. Picasso began painting at a young age with great interest in his fathers job.
In 1891, he attended the School of Fine Arts in La Coruna with great success. Later he went to Madrid and took advantage of academic circles. He has gained a unique style in a short period of time.
His first visit to Paris, the art capital, was around September 1900. After a short stay in the workshop of his painter friend Nöftnel, he returned to Madrid. On his return to Paris, he managed to enter the art scene there. He especially made friends with Coquiot and Mark Jacop. In a year or two, his workshop became the meeting place for emerging and growing artists.
In this peaceful environment, his art has entered to “pink period” from “blue period”. In 1906, he met Braque and Derain, and they began a pre-cubism work together. He spent the summer of 1909 at Horta de San Juan, drawing cubist landscapes and exhibiting them at Vollard. His works rapidly became the focus of cubism. In 1912-1914, Picasso’s cubist paintings gained great fame in France and abroad. His works had an important place in international exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne and Munich.
He did not participate in the 1914 War and stayed in Paris. This was a lonely and painful period for him. He lost Eva in 1915. In 1917, he could not withstand Jean Cocteau’s insistence and went to Italy to make the decorations of the Parade Ballet.
He was about the meet his future wife there, Olga Koklova. After that they married in July 1918. While in Italy, Picasso discovered the deep and striking aspect of classical art.
In 1923, he resumed his sculpture works which he had left for a long time. In 1936, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was on the side of the republicans
Between 1946 – 1948, he went to Antibe and his clay and ceramic works achieved a real success there.
Picasso’s most outstanding aspect is his ability to realize simple yet infinite aspirations at the height of emotion and style. His passion for life and emotional tension makes him separated from other artists. With Picasso, for the first time in the art of painting, only truth and logical elements to cover the truth were included in art. Therefore, the appearance similarity between the real and the drawn does not matter to him. It is not necessary to turn to the depth of nature to search for causes and impressions.
Emotional breakthroughs inside him are enough to interpret his impressions. Picasso does not search, he finds. Picasso does not see, he thinks.
The color he used were bright and the surfaces were wide. He used a stressed technique in his figures, delimited by heavy contours, directed to the style of punctuation by brush strokes. Picasso is the only person who has had the same youth power, the same freshness, the same search tension and the same warm passion until the last years of his life.
Picasso has proved how effective art is. He has become an icon by resisting the war with his reflections on his canvas. He criticized the fascist dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco in “Dream and lie of Franco” and he criticized the Civil War in Spain in Guernica. Picasso, in fact, turned to communism. An information released in 2003 revealed that he had been denied French citizenship in 1940 for “excessive communist attitudes.”
During an exhibition, a German general asked him by showing Guernica, “Did you do this painting?” and Picasso replied, “No, you did”.
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