Pablo picasso
Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Vacane Napomusino Maria di Los Remedios del Remedio di Sancima Santo Luis Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor and member of the French Communist Party. He is the founder of modern art and the main representative of Western modernist painting. Picasso was one of the most creative and influential artists of the contemporary West, one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the 20th century. Representative works: "Guernica", "Peace Dove", "The Maiden of Avignon", "Life". Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881. In 1897, Picasso went to madrid to study at the Prado Art Museum. In 1900, Picasso went to Paris to work and live. In 1903, he completed the painting "Life". In 1907, the completion of the painting "The Maiden of Avignon" became a milestone in his creation of the Cubist style. In 1937, Picasso created a large-scale painting , Guernica , to commemorate the Nazi bombing of Grenica. In 1949 his work "Peace Dove" was selected as the poster for the International Peace Conference. Picasso died in Mougins, France, in 1973 at the age of 91. [27] Picasso was a prolific painter who, according to statistics, has a total of nearly 37,000 works, including 1,885 oil paintings, 7,089 drawings, 20,000 prints, and 6,121 lithographs.
In a December 1999 poll conducted by a French newspaper, he was voted one of the ten greatest painters of the 20th century with a 40% vote.
Picasso's "abstract works, distorted faces, very strange lines" should be works of Picasso's Cubism period.
Picasso's style was varied throughout his life, and he painted many different types of works, such as: 1900 to 1903, which was the low point of Picasso's life. In 1900, Picasso came to Paris and settled there in 1904. During this period his work is known as the "Blue Period", which was the first time he formed his own style.
The background of the works of this period is blue, the characters are blue, the hair, eyebrows, and eyes are blue, and the blue dominates all his works, and the background is simplified (such as "The Man Who Ironed the Clothes"),
Eschewing the sensations of light and depth, the characters are combined into a simple pattern in which heavy, intense and flowing lines give the impression of an unreal, virtual world (as in Two Sisters).
This line has an emotional weight. Most of the painter's later works have the characteristics of this expressive line. These characteristics are obtained from observing the movements and postures of people.
In the spring of 1904, Picasso settled permanently in the Montmartre district of Paris, and his blue style period came to an end as he moved to Paris and cohabited with Fernand Oriwell. The soft pink hue began to penetrate into the single blue on his canvas to "Fan Woman", which soon became the main color on his canvas, "Flower Basket Woman". That warm, delicate rose red replaced the empty abstract, heavy and depressing blue. [13] Thus began the "Rose Red Period", and Picasso's paintings entered a completely new world, a world of wandering entertainers and acrobats, which was also called the "circus style" "The Girl on the Horse". At this time, Picasso's prestige gave him the opportunity to come into contact with many women, and in this age of desire and sissy, he ruled over his women with a bull-like will, The Rose-Colored. (The style is greatly influenced by black carving, mainly gray-brown pigments)
Black Period & Hypercienistic Period Works
After entering the 20th century, Western painting was like a wild horse that was out of control, running at full speed in a direction that was "increasingly incomprehensible" at a rampage.
Classical aesthetics based on realism have been popular for more than a thousand years, while the threshold for art appreciation in the last 100 years has suddenly risen a lot.
Although Picasso is at the top of the art world, it is not easy to understand his works.
In 1907, Picasso worked on a monumental work, and Picasso founded Cubism. The view of this period is not to depict the appearance and form of objective objects, but to introduce objective objects into painting, so as to integrate the expression of the figurative object itself and the structural form of the expression of abstraction. According to the traditional perspective method, there is only a fixed feeling, and the multi-perspective drawing method is not allowed. The Cubist modeling method pioneered by Picasso is to express all parts of the person (with a face and a back) at the same time through the picture, rather than expressing the image with a fixed point of view like the traditional painting method.
To appreciate Picasso's paintings, the first thing we must understand is that modern painting and classical painting, which is mainly based on realism, are completely two conceptual things.
The standard of beauty pursued by classical aesthetics is to restore as much as possible in the two-dimensional plane of what is seen in front of the eyes.
That is to say, in the two-dimensional painting, through specific techniques, to create an illusion to achieve the restoration of three-dimensional objects.
With the development of science and technology and industrialization, this creative appeal has long been unsuitable for the pace of social development.
Therefore, there are many artists who want to break this shackle and seek a variety of different methods and angles to retransmit the beauty of art.
Their language, grammar, vocabulary, and even cultural background are all different, so they can no longer appreciate modern painting with the aesthetic standard of "painting realistically".
By the time you understand this, you've already crossed the threshold of appreciating Picasso's paintings with one foot!
A woman with arms around her chest
In the works of the rose red period, although the expressions of the characters are still indifferent, they have paid attention to the beauty of harmony and the attention of subtle humanity. The whole, in addition to the richness of color, has been withdrawn from the hopeless abyss of the previous blue period. Abandoning the sadness and lack of vitality of the previous poverty and illness, instead of being full of interest, attention and confidence in the variety of life.
So what is Cubism?
Strictly speaking, Cubism cannot be classified as abstract. Abstraction refers to some non-figurative works after Kandinsky, such as sporadic, autonomous, and dripping colors.
Kandinsky works
Cubism, on the other hand, is simply the artist's method of painting on canvas by representing and disassembling the different faces of the observed object with the closest geometric shape and disassembling it.
For example, it's like taking a three-dimensional cardboard box, disassembling it into a tiled state, tearing it open and re-placing it in a disorderly form. Of course, the method of placement is not necessarily in line with the logic of disassembly.
It doesn't even need to follow the laws of physics, it can be recombined in any way that an artist wants to show it, in order to convey the emotions and thoughts that the artist wants to show.
Cubist artists rejected realism, breaking down the continuous illusion phenomena of everyday life into one part after another, and then recombining them into unified aesthetic objects according to new logic.
The Avignon Maiden, Picasso, 1907, 243.9*233.7CM ,
It is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York
The first painting to contain Cubist elements, this one is the Avignon Girl, for example.
Cubism is particularly evident in the body of the sitting woman in the lower right corner of the painting.
Here Picasso seems to offer the viewer three perspectives at the same time – a three-quarter view from the left, a view of the past from the right, and a front view.
The three perspectives merge to form a unique image of this woman.
Finally, when admiring Picasso's paintings, it is also necessary to note the different decorative needs of painting in different eras.
After the Beginning of the Middle Ages, Western paintings were mostly used to decorate church frescoes and altarpieces (that is, paintings that were erected in front of church altars like screens).
After the Renaissance, paintings began to move more into the ornate castle palaces of the nobility, which were full of curves and decorative patterns.
In the 20th century of industrialized society, people's living places became functional buildings of reinforced concrete.
The traditional paintings, which are full of curves and complex changes of light and shadow, are no longer suitable for decorating in modern spaces that are almost straight walls. On the contrary, modern paintings full of geometric elements are more attractive.
Therefore, the development trend of modern art is also closely related to the change of the identity of the customizer and the display environment.
Picasso's masterpiece "Dream"
In addition, the more abstract way of artistic expression shifts the focus of the picture from the "shape" of the depicted object to the painter himself behind the painting.
From 1915 to 1920, the painting style once turned to realism. In 1930 there was a clear tilt towards Surrealism.
Another well-known work by Picasso is Guernica.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Guernica, 1937, 7.76m*3.49m
It is now in the collection of the National Musée d'Artes de Princess Sofia in Madrid
"Guernica", as a huge oil painting with obvious symbolic significance and commemorative significance of the times, is indeed very eye-catching.
Among modern works of art, only a few works can be compared with the heavyweight works in Western classical oil paintings like "Guernica".
In early 1937, Picasso was commissioned by a man from his native Republic of Spain to create a giant painting for the upcoming Paris World's Fair that year.
Picasso, who received the commission, although he wanted to win glory for the country, he has always suffered from lack of artistic inspiration.
In addition, most of his paintings were small paintings before, and he was actually a bit bottomless about giant paintings in his heart, so he had not written for a few months.
It wasn't until 26 April that the tranquility of the small town of Guernica in the Basque Country in northern Spain was shattered, and Picasso's inner creative inspiration was also inspired.
The year 1937 was very close to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
Almost the whole world is caught up in the struggle between left-wing democracy and right-wing fascism.
Spain also broke out into civil war in 1936.
1937 was the year when the Spanish left-wing republican government was in full swing with franco's right-wing Nationalist army.
On April 26, the Luftwaffe suddenly used 5,000 shells to bomb Guernica, an unsuspecting town, for more than three hours.
Guernica in ruins 丨 1937 German Archives
First of all, Guernica is a small town with no military significance. Not to mention that the entire basque province did not join the Spanish Civil War, the townspeople did not have any precautions (there were no suspected weapons of mass destruction), and even the population of the town was dominated by the elderly, women and children who remained in the town (because most of the young men were on the front lines).
Second, the day of the bombing was Monday, when people went out to the market. The location of the bombing is also the most densely populated place.
80 percent of the town was razed to the ground, more than 2,000 of the 7,000 people were killed, and countless people were injured.
This is the first carpet bombing of an undefended city in human history, and it is a proper anti-human act.
As a national of Spain, there was no reason why Picasso's heart was not full of anger.
So he picked up the paintbrush and spent 35 days creating this giant anti-fascist oil painting named after the bombed town, "Guernica.".
Guernica is now in the collection of the National Gallery of The Princess Sofia in Madrid, Spain.
If you want to visit Guernica, you need to go through a small aisle, the aisle is not long, at one end of the aisle, you can see the "Guernica" on the wall at a glance.
Crossing this aisle is like traveling back in time, back to Guernica, which was bombed in 1937.
As the visitors continue to approach, the painting is also in the view of the visitors from far and near, getting bigger and bigger, and finally appears in front of the visitors' eyes.
At this moment, the emotional impact of this painting is also more intense.
Overhead incandescent lights, emitting a jagged glow, are reminiscent of the shells that bombed the town.
At the same time, it is also like an eye, and some people think that this means that God is observing all this, that Man is doing it, and that The Heavens are watching.
On the far left of the painting is a mother who has lost her child.
Her face was extremely distorted, her eyes and nose were fluid teardrops, as if to tell great sorrow, and her tongue was spiked, as if it were making a silent cry and howl, evoking the most primitive call of the human heart.
The figure on the right side of the painting kneels on both knees and the figure walking with a limp leg vividly restores the suffering of human beings under the bombardment.
The symbolism of the cow and horse in the painting is varied, ranging from representation to the suffering of the Spanish people to fascism.
The sword-wielding soldier with a broken arm may symbolize Spain or the Republican Party fighting for a new Spain.
Although this ideal has fallen, the soldier still holds a looming flower in his hand, as if there is still a glimmer of hope.
The whole painting is only roughly black, white and gray, and the composition seems random and messy, but it echoes the chaotic atmosphere of fleeing and panic and grief under the bombardment.
Whenever I see this painting, I feel as if I can empathize with the people in the small town of Guernica.
Therefore, "Guernica" is not only a remarkable work of art, it is also a microcosm of a period of history.
Picasso was a constantly changing approach to art, and the artistic techniques of Impressionism, Late Impressionism, and Beasts were all absorbed and adapted to his own style. His talent lies in the fact that in his various mutated styles, he maintains his rough and strong personality, and in the use of various techniques, he can achieve internal unity and harmony. He has reached the pinnacle of perfection, and his works, whether it is ceramics, prints, or sculptures, are like childish games. In his lifetime, there was never a specific teacher, nor a specific disciple, but none of the painters who were active in the twentieth century could completely detour the path of progress opened by Picasso.
In 1973, he quietly left, completed a long career at the age of 92, and spent his life as he wished. Picasso devoted his life to the innovation of painting, using the achievements of modern Western philosophy, psychology, and natural science, and absorbing the nutrition of national folk art, creating a very expressive artistic language; his extreme deformation and exaggerated artistic techniques have a unique power in expressing deformed capitalist society and distorted human relations. His private collection, including works by himself and his friends, has been donated to the French government. Paris houses the Picasso Museum.