Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) We've sampled many great painters and while all were creative genius' in their own right and deserve their own page, Pablo was one of a handful to confidently make the cut. I've been stunned with how many poets and painters seem to possess the keys to enlightenment and human understanding and if this if your third or fourth page on 'past teachers' you'll start to notice the repetition. In short higher-souled beings think the same. Chief message? Imagination is everything.

 

So, Picasso. Got to write out his whole name it's epic: He was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso - a series of names honouring various saints and relatives. Anyway, Pacasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces during the Spanish Civil War.

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Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.

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Picasso's work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles. What a legend, like the earth, he has time periods accredited to him!

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

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Privately, he was what we call in the modern world, "a player". Throughout his life Picasso maintained several mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women. At 45 he took a 17 year old French lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was the mother of his second child.

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If you're gunna be a genius... you might as well Tony Stark it.