Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer who lived in France for the majority of his adult life. He is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, having co-founded the Cubist movement, invented constructed sculpture, co-invented college, and helped develop and explore a wide range of styles. Despite being well-known, did you know that Picasso was quite odd as well?
Pablo Picasso frequently carried a revolver loaded with blanks to “shoot” people he found boring. He developed the practice after researching the life and works of Alfred Jarry, the controversial French writer best known for his play Ubu Roi.
Who is Pablo Picasso?
Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, at 23:15 in Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain. Don José Ruiz y Blasco and Mara Picasso y López had him as their first child. Picasso grew up in a middle-class family. His father was a naturalistic painter who specialized in depictions of birds and other games. Ruiz spent the majority of his life as an art professor at the School of Crafts and curator of a local museum. Ruiz’s ancestors belonged to a minor aristocracy.
Picasso’s birth certificate and baptismal record contain very long names that combine those of various saints and relatives. According to Spanish custom, his paternal and maternal surnames were Ruiz and Picasso, respectively. The surname Picasso is derived from Liguria, a coastal region of northwestern Italy with Genoa as its capital. Matteo Picasso, born in Recco, was a painter of late neoclassical style portraiture, though investigations have not conclusively determined his kinship with the branch of ancestors related to Pablo Picasso. Tommaso Picasso can be traced directly back to Sori, Liguria.
Pablo’s great-great-grandfather was Giovanni Battista, who was married to Isabella Musante. Tommaso was the result of this union. Tommaso Picasso, Pablo’s maternal great-grandfather, immigrated to Spain around 1807.
From a young age, Picasso demonstrated a strong interest in and talent for drawing. His first words, according to his mother, were piz, piz, a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for pencil. Picasso received formal artistic training in figure drawing and oil painting from his father when he was seven years old. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of masters as well as drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became obsessed with art to the detriment of his studies. (Source: Britannica)
What was Pablo Picasso’s Best Artwork?
The Guernica is not only Picasso’s best-known work; it is also one of the world’s most famous paintings. Its depiction of an aerial bombing raid on the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, was a chilling visual foreshadowing of World War II atrocities.
The muted gray tones accentuate the shapes of humans, their arms outstretched in agony, and lend the painting the documentary-style impact of a black-and-white photograph. It also features animal imagery that is strongly associated with Spain, specifically the bull and the horse. It has become one of history’s most recognizable anti-war paintings. (Source: CNN)