Picasso and His Most Famous Works of Art

When Pablo Picasso, on October 25th, 1881, was born to an artistic father, it was an obvious expectation that he would take up his father’s trade tools. Still, arguably, no one would ever expect that this very dreamy-eyed boy would turn out to be one of the most renowned artists of all time (Doss 56). With his modern approaches to drawing, sculptures, collages, and painting, Picasso single-handedly emerged from obscurity and helped change the art world forever. Picasso’s influence on art can be gauged through the scales of his enduring fame. Apparently, Picasso was a legend of his own time whose posthumous repute was constructed upon the strong foundation of innovative art that was tied with the radical expressionism that can be said to have constituted the very genesis of modern art besides carrying the art into the twentieth century.

To begin with, Picasso experimented with caricature and realism from the outset of his life in Spain and Paris. The early phase of his art has been labelled by scholars as the ‘Blue Period’ (Léal 32). This period spanned the years 1901 to 1904 (Léal 32). During these years, it is evident that Picasso’s art pieces heavily relied on a blue palette whereby he overly centred on society’s customary outsiders to tell his stories. In particular, vagrants, prostitutes, and beggars make up a bulk of his pieces of art during this phase of his life. One of Picasso’s most famous art during this period was ‘The Old Guitarist’, which depicts a gaunt, elderly man in rags seemingly seated on the ground while playing the guitar. According to Casadioet al. Picasso attributed his choice of paint during these years to the depression he felt after losing one of his friends by the name Carlos Casagemas, who shot himself at a Paris café in the head (184).

This was followed by the ‘Rose Period’, which occurred for the duration of the years 1904 and 1905 and focused on the less wretched members of society. However, he still gave prominence to the preposterous trapeze artists, clowns, as well as other revel personnel that had a tendency to constitute most of his work in this epoch. The period marked his transition from grief to romance, with the most famous painting being the ‘Boy with a Pipe’ of 1905. This period showed Picasso’s capability of transcending a number of artistic genres without necessarily losing any acumen or credibility, thereby showcasing his unwillingness to be pigeonholed as one type of art exponent.

With Spain’s geographical closeness to Africa, Picasso adopted African art with ease in his modern art styles. Evident from this African period between 1907 to 1909, Picasso significantly reduced the visual language of his paintings and leaned more towards abstraction. This marked a huge development towards Cubism, a style that has since remained to be the most noted internationally today (Doss 68). The proto-Cubist art of this epoch is the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon art.

The artistic style that is to date closely associated with and attributed to Picasso is Cubism, which spanned between the years 1908 and 1912. Essentially, this artistic style manipulated the three-dimensional human figure concept, altering the contours, lines, and paint’s shapes such that both the back and front were visible at the same time (Lemoine 24). Besides inventing cubism, Picasso, together with his contemporary counterpart Georges Braques, concurrently began experimenting with adding detritus like fabric, string, and shredded paper to their works, constituting the invention of Collage with the most famous piece of art representing both being the ‘Still Life with Chair Caning.’

Towards the end of his artistic life, Picasso shifted to the realm of Surrealism, which was also a subject of classical art influence. This period was characterized by the Spanish Civil War, which deeply moved Picasso, pushing him to create a monumental record of this war’s barbarousness. The most celebrated painting of this time was the 1937 Guernica. This painting appears as a carnage that inflicts upon the Basque city, documenting the horrors that characterized modern warfare, precisely the air raids’ devastation.

In conclusion, it is evident that Picasso progressively saw the development of art through to the 20th century. Arguably, Picasso emerges as the catalyst of the horror’s artistic expression that the post-industrial beings could inflict upon the civilization that would be revealed by the Second World War. Moreover, his breathtaking skills in depicting all forms of artistic endeavour throughout his career justify the remarks that Picasso shaped the course of 20th-century art more than any other individual artist.

Works Cited

Casadio, Francesca, et al. "Scientific investigation of an important corpus of Picasso paintings in Antibes: new insights into technique, condition, and chronological sequence." Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 52.3 (2013): 184-204.

Doss, Erika Lee. Twentieth-century American art. Oxford History of Art, 2002. Print.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso. Harry N. Abrams, 2000. Print.

Lemoine, Serge, ed. Toward Modern Art: From Puvis de Chavannes to Matisse and Picasso. Rizzoli International Publications, 2002. Print.