Picasso

Jp. A. Calosse

• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781904310808
• eBook ISBN: 9781781605912
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to artist's tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy concentration drawing spirals with a sense and meaning known only to himself. At other times, shunning children's games, he traced his first pictures in the sand. This early self-expression held out promise of a rare gift. Málaga must be mentioned, for it was there, on 25 October 1881, that Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born and it was there that he spent the first ten years of his life. Picasso's father was a painter and professor at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts. Picasso learnt from him the basics of formal academic art training. Then he studied at the Academy of Arts in Madrid but never finished his degree. Picasso, who was not yet eighteen, had reached the point of his greatest rebelliousness; he repudiated academia's anemic aesthetics along with realism's pedestrian prose and, quite naturally, joined those who called themselves modernists, the non-conformist artists and writers, those whom Sabartés called "the élite of Catalan thought" and who were grouped around the artists' café Els Quatre Gats. During 1899 and 1900 the only subjects Picasso deemed worthy of painting were those which reflected the "final truth"; the transience of human life and the inevitability of death. His early works, ranged under the name of "Blue Period" (1901-1904), consist in blue-tinted paintings influenced by a trip through Spain and the death of his friend, Casagemas. Even though Picasso himself repeatedly insisted on the inner, subjective nature of the Blue Period, its genesis and, especially, the monochromatic blue were for many years explained as merely the results of various aesthetic influences...

Table of contents

• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• 1. The Embrace, 1900.
• From childhood to Cubism
• 2. Le Moulin de la Galette, 1900.
• 3. Self-Portrait, 1901.
• 4. Harlequin and his Companion, 1901.
• 5. The Absinthe Drinker, 1901.
• 6. The Absinthe Drinker, 1901.
• 7. The Burial of Casagemas, 1901.
• 8. The Burial of Casagemas (Evocation), 1901.
• 9. Portrait of the Poet Sabartés (The Glass of Beer), 1901.
• 10. Self-Portrait, 1901.
• 11. The Visit (Two Sisters), 1902.
• 12. Portrait of Soler, 1903.
• 13. The Soler’s, 1903.
• 14. Old Jew and a Boy, 1903.
• 15. Poor people on the Seashore (The Tragedy), 1903.
• 16. Head of a Woman with a Scarf, 1903.
• 17. Life, 1903.
• 18. Celestina, 1904.
• 19. Boy with a Dog, 1905.
• 20. Tumblers (Mother and Son), 1905.
• 21. Young Acrobat on a Ball, 1905.
• 22. Family of Saltimbanques (Comedians), 1905.
• 23. Family of Acrobats with a Monkey, 1905.
• 24. Naked Boy, 1905.
• 25. Spanish Woman from Majorca, 1905.
• 26. Self-portrait with a Palette, 1906.
• 27. Nude (Half-Length), 1907.
• 28. Woman (Half-Length), 1906-1907,
• 29. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.
• 30. The Dance of the Veils (Nude with Drapery), 1907.
• 31. Composition with a Skull, 1907.
• 32. Friendship, 1908.
• 33. Woman with Fan (After the Ball), 1908.
• 34. Nude in a Landscape (The Dryad), 1908.
• 35. Bathers, 1908.
• 36. Three Women, 1908.
• 37. Peasant Woman (Full-Length), 1908.
• 38. Pitcher and Bowls, 1908.
• 39. House and Trees (House in a Garden), 1908.
• 40. Pot, Wineglass and Book, 1908.
• 41. Bowl with Fruit and Wineglass (Still Life with Bowl of Fruit), 1908-1909.
• 42. House in a Garden (House and Trees), 1909.
• 43. Lady with a Fan, 1909.
• 44. Queen Isabeau, 1908-1909.
• 45.Woman with a Mandolin, 1908-1909.
• 46. Factory in Horta de Ebro, 1909.
• 47. Woman Seated in an Armchair, 1909-1910.
• 48. Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1910.
• 49. Bottle of Pernod and Wineglass (Table in a Café), 1912.
• 50. Violin, 1912.
• 51. Musical Instruments, 1913.
• 52. Bowl of Fruit with Bunch of Grapes and Sliced Pear, 1914.
• 53. Portrait of a Young Girl (Woman Seated Before a Fireplace), 1914.
• 54. The Bathers, 1918.
• 55. Women Running on the Beach, 1922.
• 56. Paul as Harlequin, 1924.
• 57. The Sculptor, 1931.
• 58. Figures on a Beach, 1931.
• 59. The Lecture, 1932.
• 60. Weeping Woman, 1937.
• BIOGRAPHY
• 61. Guernica, 1937.
• 62. Portrait of Dora Maar, 1939.
• 63. Women of Algiers (After Delacroix), 1955.
• 64. The Painter and his Model, 1963.
• 65. Self-Portrait (Head), 1972.
• NOTES