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Pablo Picasso was a person, who influenced artists of 20th century a lot through his amazing painting skills and achievements. He lived from October 1881- April 1973, and during his life he has given many mesmerizing paintings which are showcasing around the world in both museum and private collections. He spent most of his adult life in France and he was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer.
He explored and developed many forms and styles of painting and well known for co-founding the cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage and some other wide variety of styles. In his childhood and adolescence, he showed extra-ordinary talent by paintings inspired with natural objects. In 20th century when he was around 25 years old, he experimented with new and different techniques and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work style of an older artist motivated Picasso and then he explored and developed modern techniques with it.
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. With an exceptional fertile career, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his remarkable artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.
From the beginning of his career, Picasso showed an interest in subject matter of every kind and demonstrated a great stylistic versatility that enabled him to work in different form of arts at once. He was exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime. The total number of art work he produced has been estimated at 50,000, comprising 1,885 painting, 1,228 sculptures, 2,880 ceramics, roughly 12,000 drawings, many thousands of prints, and numerous tapestries and rugs.
1911, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, oil on canvas, 61.3 × 50.5 cm
The medium in which Picasso made his most important contributions was painting. In his paintings, Picasso used colour as an expressive element, but he relied mostly on drawing rather than making the most forms and spaces in colour. He used to add sands and other small particles to add different texture to the painting. Along with that if we will look towards his sculpture making style, earlier sculptures by Picasso were carved from wood or modelled in wax or clay, but from 1909 to 1928 he abandoned those techniques and made sculptural constructions using diverse materials.
1913–14, L'Homme aux cartes (Card Player), oil on canvas, 108 × 89.5 cm
Picasso painted most of his arts from imagination and memories. According to William Rubin, “Picasso could only make great art from subjects that truly involved him”. The art critic Arthur Danto said Picasso's work constitutes a "vast pictorial autobiography" that provides some basis for the popular conception that "Picasso invented a new style each time he fell in love with a new woman". The autobiographical nature of Picasso's art is reinforced by his habit of dating his works, often to the day. He explained: "I want to leave to posterity a documentation that will be as complete as possible. That's why I put a date on everything I do."
Picasso’s influence was and remains immense and widely acknowledged by his admirers and his art devotees. On his dominating period over art his enemies say he has been corrupting influence, with equal violence, his friends say he is the greatest artist alive. On the occasion of his 1939 retrospective at MoMA, Life magazine wrote: "During the 25 years he has dominated modern European art.
1916, L'anis del mono (Bottle of Anis del Mono), oil on canvas, 46 × 54.6 cm
At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his possession as he kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artist, including his competitor Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musee Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Malaga.
Pablo Picasso, 1901, Old Woman (Woman with Gloves), oil on cardboard, 67 × 52.1 cm
The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of his early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal his firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father's tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabartes, his close friend and personal secretary. Guernica was on display in New York's Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981, it was returned to Spain and was on exhibit at the Cason del Buen Retiro of the Museo del Prado. In 1992, the painting was put on display in Madrid's Reina Sofía Museum when it opened. As of 2015, Picasso remained the top-ranked artist in terms of sales of his works at auction, according to Art Market Trends report. More of his paintings has been stolen, report of the Art Loss Register had 1,147 of his works listed as stolen, in the year 2012. Picasso is played by Antonio Banderas in the 2018 season of Genius, which focuses on his life and art.
Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. Garcon a la pipe sold for US$104 million at Sotheby's on 4 May 2004, establishing a new price record. Dora Maar au Chat sold for US$95.2 million at Sotheby's on 3 May 2006. On 4 May 2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust was sold at Christie's for $106.5 million. The 1932 work, which depicts Picasso's mistress Marie-Therese Walter reclining and as a bust, was in the personal collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November 2009. On 11 May 2015 his painting Women of Algiers set the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting when it sold for US$179.3 million at Christie's in New York.
1909, Femme assise (Sitzende Frau), oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm
On 21 June 2016, a painting by Pablo Picasso titled Femme Assise (1909) sold for £43.2 million at Sotheby's London, exceeding the estimate by nearly $20 million, setting a world record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a Cubist work. On 17 May 2017, The Jerusalem Post in an article titled "Picasso Work Stolen By Nazis Sells for $45 Million at Auction" reported the sale of a portrait painted by Picasso, the 1939 Femme assise, robe bleu, which was previously misappropriated during the early years of WWII. The painting has changed hands several times since its recovery, most recently through auction in May 2017 at Christie's in New York City.
