Early on, we're all asked the same question: what will you do when you grow up? Let's imagine that you are the child who will grow up to be Pablo Picasso, and that at the age of eight your mother tells you, `If you enlist in the army, you'll become a general. If you enter a monastery, you'll become the Pope'. What if there is more than maternal pride involved in her prediction? What if she is right?
But your father is a painter and painting teacher, and so instead of joining the military or the clergy, you take up art. At the age of 14, you draw as well as your professors. By the age of 15, you produce accomplished paintings that mature artists might en works that patrons will gladly purchase for as long as you choose to make them. But because you know that great art is much more than a marketable commodity, you are unwilling to settle for painting easily saleable pictures that look like other people's work, Ignoring the advice of your father, who is named Ruiz, you strike out on your own, and begin signing your works with your mother's maiden name: Picasso. Initially you experiment with fashionably modern artistic styles, creating your own distinctive versions of symbolist and expressionist paintings.
Then you change the way the world sees itself. Forever.
Pablo Picasso is widely acknowledged to be the most influential artist of the 20th century . To grasp the full impact of his accomplishment, we must first understand that there are many different Picasso's - and not just because he created more than 100,000 disparate works before he died. Picasso experimented with a wide variety of styles and materials; the breadth and quality of his art is just as startling as its quantity. In light of this diversity, we might consider Picasso as many different artists whose multi-faceted work has inspired countless other painters, printmakers and sculptors.
Before the word 'cubism' was coined, Picasso and his colleague Georges Braque invented cubist painting. Picasso revolutionized the art of collage. created groundbreaking sculptures, and made 'assemblages long before the term existed. Enraged over the bombing of a Spanish Basque village in 193?, he spent one month painting a 26-foot-long canvas that stands as the most important work of political art in the century: Guernica. (When the artist lived in German-occupied France during World War Il, a Nazi officer confronted him with a photo of the mural and asked, `So you're Picasso. Did fou do this' 'No', the artist replied, 'You did.')
When it came to his political and artistic principles, Picasso's integrity was beyond reproach. But his dicey personal life can best be described by the words that Helene Weigel applied to a mother protean 20th century artist, her husband Bertolt Brecht: `He was a very faithful man, unfortunately to too many women.' This obsessive side of Picasso's character served as the driving force behind much of his work.
And work he did, unceasingly, and in as many different mediums as he could literally lay his hands on. Late in life, he elevated the humble medium of linoleum cuts to the status of high art, and also produced a array of inventive ceramics. In the course of seven months, at the age of 87, Picasso completed 347 splendid engravings.. An unfinished, still-wet canvas rested orf his easel when the 91-year-old master died of influenza on April 8, 1973.
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