Pablo Picasso
Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. He is one
of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art. He is best known for
co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles
embodied in his work. Among most famous Pablo Picasso paintings are the
proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), his
portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil
War.
Picasso demonstrated uncanny artistic talent in his early years,
painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence;
during the first decade of the twentieth century his style changed as he
experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. Picasso
creativity manifested itself in numerous mediums, including oil
paintings, sculpture, drawing, and architecture. His revolutionary
artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense
fortunes throughout his life, making him the best-known figure in
twentieth century art.
To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century
is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little
Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist
as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his
own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or
Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people -
though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and
intelligentsia of Europe.
Picasso's audience - meaning people who had heard of him and seen his
work, at least in reproduction - was in the tens, possibly hundreds, of
millions. He and his work were the subjects of unending analysis,
gossip, dislike, adoration and rumour.
He was a superstitious, sarcastic man, sometimes rotten to his
children, often beastly to his women. He had contempt for women artists.
His famous remark about women being "goddesses or doormats" has
rendered him odious to feminists, but women tended to walk into both
roles open-eyed and eagerly, for his charm was legendary. Whole cultural
industries derived from his much mythologized virility. He was the
Minotaur in a canvas-and-paper labyrinth of his own construction.
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