Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Five nude women in a Barcelona brothel, two with mask-like faces; the proto-Cubist breakthrough
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Art
Pablo Picasso
1881–1973 · Spanish
Cubism
Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor and printmaker who spent most of his adult life in France and is widely regarded as the most influential artist of the 20th century. He passed through the Blue and Rose Periods, co-founded Cubism with Georges Braque, and painted Guernica, the century's most famous anti-war image.
How to spot them
- ▸Cubist fragmentation: faces and objects broken into angular planes, seen from several viewpoints at once
- ▸Faces showing profile and full-face simultaneously, with displaced eyes and noses (especially portraits of Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter)
- ▸Blue Period: melancholy, gaunt beggars and musicians in monochrome blues; Rose Period: pink-toned harlequins and circus performers
- ▸Quiz clue pattern: Málaga, Barcelona, Paris, Braque, Cubism, Guernica, the Blue or Rose Period
Key works
Guernica (1937)
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Huge black, white and grey protest at the bombing of the Basque town; made for the 1937 Paris Exposition
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
The Old Guitarist (1903–1904)
Art Institute of Chicago
Emaciated blind musician hunched over a guitar: the classic Blue Period image
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
The Weeping Woman (1937)
Tate Modern, London
Dora Maar in anguish, painted as a coda to Guernica
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905–1906)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Mask-like face of the American writer; Picasso said she would come to look like it
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Garçon à la pipe (Boy with a Pipe) (1905)
Private collection
Rose Period boy with a garland of flowers; sold for about $104 million at Sotheby's in 2004
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Quick-fire facts
- •Picasso was born in Málaga, Andalusia, and his father was the painter and art teacher José Ruiz y Blasco
- •He developed Cubism with Georges Braque from about 1907–08, moving from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism
- •Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) is often cited as the first modern collage
- •Guernica was kept at MoMA in New York for decades at Picasso's wish and only went to Spain in 1981, after democracy was restored
- •The Blue Period (1901–04) followed the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas
- •He was briefly questioned in 1911 over the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre
- •Picasso died at Mougins, France, in 1973 and is buried at the Château of Vauvenargues
- •There are Picasso museums in Barcelona, Paris, Málaga and Antibes
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Pablo Picasso
- John Richardson — A Life of Picasso