Who was Picasso?

PABLO PICASSO

One of the most-recognized figures in 20th century art, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and stage designer. His early success, through the Blue Period (1901-1904) and Rose Period (1904-1906) led to the establishment of Cubism (1909-1912) – one of his major contributions to the art world. Picasso's personal life was as controversial as his work – he was known for his love affairs, often with studio models that became his muses. In addition to his many affairs, he had two wives and four children.

Much of the story of modern sculpture is bound up with welding and assembling images from sheet metal, rather than modeling in clay, casting in bronze or carving in wood; and this tradition of the open constructed form rather than solid mass arose from one small guitar that Picasso snipped and joined out of tin in 1912. If collage--the gluing of previously unrelated things and images on a flat surface--became a basic mode of modern art, that too was due to Picasso's Cubist collaboration with Braque. He was never a member of the Surrealist group, but in the 1920s and '30s he produced some of the scariest distortions of the human body and the most violently irrational, erotic images of Eros and Thanatos ever committed to canvas. He was not a realist painter/reporter, still less anyone's official muralist, and yet Guernica remains the most powerful political image in modern art, rivaled only by some of the Mexican work of Diego Rivera.

Picasso was regarded as a boy genius, but if he had died before 1906, his 25th year, his mark on 20th century art would have been slight. The so-called Blue and Rose periods, with their wistful etiolated figures of beggars and circus folk, are not, despite their great popularity, much more than pendants to late 19th century Symbolism. It was the experience of modernity that created his modernism, and that happened in Paris. There, mass production and reproduction had come to the forefront of ordinary life: newspapers, printed labels, the overlay of posters on walls--the dizzily intense public life of signs, simultaneous, high-speed and layered. This was the cityscape of Cubism.

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