Biography

CHILDHOOD

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga Spain on October 25, 1881. His father Don Jose Ruiz Blasco was an art teacher. His mother’s name was Dona Maria Picasso Lopez. According to Spanish tradition Pablo was given the last name of his father Ruiz and of mother's Picasso. This is how his name was kept. Pablo Ruiz Picasso.
As a child he was more interested in painting than learning. From the beginning Picasso displayed the bohemian personality. He disliked instruction. The school allowed for Picasso to take his pigeons with him if he would pay the attention to study rather than learning, he painted the pigeons.
His father soon recognized his son’s genuine potential for painting. He encouraged him to paint traditional elements such as nature and people. His father tried his best to maintain Picasso’s rebellious nature throughout his childhood but couldn’t succeed After some years the rebellious side of his character became a distinctive feature of his character.
In 1891 at the age of 10 his family moved to La Coruna, he became his father’s pupil and started his first paintings. At the age of 13 his first exhibition was held in La-Coruna with the support of his father.
In 1895 the family moved to Barcelona. At the age of 15 he performed brilliantly the entrance examination of Barcelona’s School of Fine Arts – ‘La Llotia’. Parents hoped that their son would achieve success as an academic painter.
In 1897 his painting ‘Science of charite’ depicting a doctor, a nun and a child at a sick woman’s bedside was awarded honorable mention in Madrid at the Fine Arts Exhibition. Finally he was settled down in the Spanish capital Madrid. He spent his time recording life around him, in the café, on the streets, in brothels. Where he discovered Spanish paintings. In 1898 he fell ill and spent most of the time of the year in Catalan village in the company of his Barcelona friend Manuel Pallares. In early 1899 he was a changed man; he had put on weight and had learned to live on his own in the open countryside. He made up his mind to break with his art school training and to reject his family’s plans for his future. He decided to prefer his mother’s surname and dropped the Ruiz altogether.
In Barcelona Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers whose eyes were turned towards Paris. These were his friends at the Café Ells Quatre Gats where Picasso had his Barcelona exhibition in February 1900 and they were the subject of more than 50 portraits in the show. In addition there was a dark, moody "modernista",
painting, "Last Moments" (later painted over) showing the visit of a priest to the bedside of a dying woman. A work that was accepted for the Spanish section of the Exposition in Paris in that year. He was very eager to see his own work in place and to experience Paris firsthand, he set-off in the company of his studio – mate Carles Casagemas to conquer, if not Paris at least a corner Montmartre.
Picasso returned to Spain with Casagemas about who had become future of his love affair and Picasso tried to amuse him. Casagemas returned to Paris and attempted to shoot the lady he loved then shoot himself and died. The effect of this incident was very deep on Picasso. He had gained the emotional experience and the material that would stimulate the powerful expression of the works of the so called ‘Blue Period’ because various shades of blue dominated his work for the next few years. He made two death portraits of Casagemas in 1901 as well as two funeral scenes (Personnes on deuil and Evocation).
Between 1901 and mid 1904 when blue was the predominant color in his paintings, Picasso moved back between Barcelona and Paris with his work material from one place to another, he moved to Paris just a few days before his 19th birthday. He didn’t know French and having no place to stay. But he didn’t bother about it. He spent most of his time in Streets, at café, in the Louvere at the Universal Exhibition, at the Grand an Petit Palais, in the odd whore house. In Paris he visited to the Woman’s Prison of Saint Lazare (1901-1902) which provided him free models. The subject of maternity also occupied Picasso at a time when he was searching for material that would best express traditional art-historical subjects in 20th Century.
Finally he made the decision to move permanently to Paris in 1904. Shortly after settling in Paris he met Fernande Oliver. His good relationship with Fernande Oliver reflected on his work change of spirit and specially a change of intellectual and artistic currents. He changed his palette to pink and reds, introducing the so called Rose Period (1904-05). Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, which he visited several times a week. He and his friend Gullaume Apollinaire painted some portraits together their performers ‘Acrobate a la boute’ (1905), ‘Lacteur’ (1905) became a kind of evocation of artist’s position in modern society. Picasso peculiarly made his identification in ‘Famille de Salimabanques (1905).
LIFE
Cubism

In the summer of 1906 during Picasso’s stay in Gosol-Spain his work entered a new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art in the end of 1904. Fernande Oliver became his mistress and her presence inspired him during the years leading him up to Cubism. Especially on the summer trip to Gosol ("Woman with Loaves"), the sculpture ‘Buste de fomme au bouquet" (Fernande) (1909) and several paintings related to it (Femme aux poires) (Fernande) 1909).
He began to work on a large composition that called ‘Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon was so radical in style – its picture surface resembling fractured glass that it was not understood by contemporary painters and critics. The ideal form of the female body and mask like painting of the faces (influenced by African Art) had made this work controversial. Yet the work was firmly based upon art-historical tradition.
Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque painted landscapes in 1908 in a style later described by a critic as being made of ‘little cubes’ thus leading cubism. Some of their paintings are so similar that it is difficult to tell them apart. Both of they worked to-gether during 1902-12. Which is the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in this way. Together they developed the first phase of cubism known as Analytic Cubism. Early Cubist paintings were often misunderstood by critics and viewers because they were thought to be merely geometric art.
Yet the painters themselves believed that they were presenting a new kind of art that broke away from Renaissance tradition, especially from the use of perspective and illusion. They showed multiple views of an object on the same canvas to convey more information than could be contained in a single, limited illusionistic view.
In 1912 Picasso and Braque were gluing real paper and other materials into their canvases, taking a stage further the cubist conception of a work as a self-contained constructed object-pasting paper and a piece of oilcloth to the canvas and combining these with painted areas, Picasso created his first college ‘Nature morte a la chaise cannee’ in 1912. This technique marked a transition to Synthetic Cubism (1912-14). The Synthetic phase of cubism is more decorative, color played a major role although shapes remain fragmented and flat and the actual materials often had an industrial reference (sand or printed wall-paper)
Picasso practiced synthetic cubism throughout his career but not exclusively. Two important works of 1915 demonstrate his simultaneous work in different styles : Arlequin is a synthetic cubist painting, whereas a drawing of his dealer, Vollard is executed in his Ingresque style, so called because of its draftsmanship emulating that of the 19th century French neoclassical artist Jean – August – Dominique Ingres.
Cubist Sculpture
Picasso created cubist sculptures as well as paintings. The bronze bust ‘Tele de femme’ (1909) (Museum of Modern Art) shows his perfect skill in handling three-dimensional form. He constructed ‘Mandoline’ (1914) from odds and ends of wood, metal, paper and non-artistic materials in which he explored the spatial hypotheses of cubist painting. His sculpture ‘La verre d’absinthe’ (1914) combining a silver sugar strainer with a painted bronze sculpture anticipates his much later, "found object" creations such as ‘Baboon and Young’ (1951) as well as pop art objects of the 1960s.
His reputation as a major sculptor of 20th century came only after his death because he had kept much of his sculpture in his own collection. In Julio Gonzalez’s studio in Paris in 1928 he began to work in iron and sheet metal. In 1931 he left his wife Olga and moved with his new mistress Marie Therese Walter to a country home at Boisgelop where he had room for sculpture studios and he began to work with Marie Therese as his muse on large scale plaster heads end until the and of his life Picasso continued working in sculpture in a variety of materials.
SURREALISM

Picasso never became an official member of any art group. But he had intimate connections with the most important art movement during the two world wars. The Surrealist establishment including its main propagandist Andre Breton claimed him as one of their own and Picasso’s art gained a new dimension from contact with his Surrecalist friends, particularly the writers.
The Surrealist movement gave the new subject to Picasso especially erotic ones as well as a reinforcement of disturbing elements already in his work. The many variations on the subject of bathers with their overtly sexual and contorted forms (Dinard series – 1929) clearly show the impact of the Surreaslism. Like many of the Surrealist writers in 1930 Picasso played with the idea of metamorphosis.
Poet- Picasso’s Surrealism found its strongest expression in his poems. He began to write poetry in 1934 and during one year he totally gave up paintings. At the beginning 1937 he wrote a poem full of violent imagery, designed to ridicule France, who was presented as a loathsome, barely human, haury slyg. "Dream and Lie of France" was written in Spenish in his style which avoided any rules of syntax or grammar. He said, "I would prefer to invent a grammar of my own than to bind myself to rules which do not belong to me." The collections of his poems were published in "Cahiers d’ Art" (1935) and in ‘La Gaceta de Arte’ (1936) Some years later he wrote the Surrealist play ‘De Desir attrape par la queue’ (1941).
In 1944 he joined the Communist party, led demonstrations against his political views in his gallery itself. At the same time he opened up his studio.
In 1953 Francois Gilot with their two children left Picasso. In 1954 he met Jacqueline Roque and they married in 1961. She became the principal images and source of inspiration for practically all of his late works.
In 1965 he was admitted in hospital for gall-bladder and prostate surgery. Because of the failure of his eyesight and growing deafness, he avoided to meet the people. He told Brassai, "Whenever I see you my first impulse is to reach in my pocket to offer you a cigarette, eventhough I know very well that neither of us smokes any longer. Age has forced us to give it up, but the desire remains ! It’s the same with making love. We don’t do it anymore, but the desire is still with us !"
On June 30, 1972 Picasso faced the terror that consumed him and drew it. It was his last self portrait. Next day the art history Pierre Daix came to him. He told him that he made drawing last day. He had touch on something there. It was not like anything ever done. He took the portrait and then put it down without any comments. Pierre Daix said that it was a face of frozen anguish and primordial horror held next to the mask that he had worn for so long and that had fooled so many.
On Sunday 8th April 1973 at the age of 91 he died of heart failure in his Villa Notre Dome de Vie near Mougins.
He told his cardiologist Dr. Bernal, "you are wrong not to be married. It’s useful". They were his last coherent words.
On the morning of Picasso’s burial his grand son Pablito excluded himself from his grandfather’s funeral and drank potassium-chloride bleach. He was taken to hospital and died three months later on July 11, 1973. On October 20, 1977 in the year of fiftieth anniversary of their meeting, Marie Therese hanged herself in the garage of her house. She was sixty-eight years old. On October 15, 1986 at three o’clock in the morning Jacqueline Picasso’s wife shot herself on the temple while sleeping on her bed. These events were the part of the dark, tragic legacy Picasso left behind his life. His tragedy was that he longed for the ultimate in painting and died knowing that it had eluded him. He was not a timeless genius, in fact a time-bound genius.
Throughout his life time his work was exhibited on countless occasions. At the Louvere in Paris honoring him on his 90th birthday until then, living artists had not been shown there. In 1980 a major retrospective showing his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.