Art History

Picasso’s most famous paintings

Guernica, Pablo Picasso

Early Life and Artistic Influences of Picasso.

Picasso was born to painting professor José Ruiz Blasco and Maria Picasso López. In 1891, the family relocated to A Coruña, where his father taught him to sketch. Picasso’s knack for experimenting and inventing new expressive techniques soon enabled him to exceed his father’s talents. In the fall of 1895, Pablo attended La Llotja, a Barcelona art institution where his dad taught drawing.

Other painters inspired Picasso for much of his career. He replicated Goya’s Pepe Illo picture and Bien tirada está, a sketch of a Celestina examining a young Maja’s stockings, in the Prado in 1898. Picasso spent much of 1898 convalescing at Horta de Ebro with his friend from Barcelona, Manuel Pallarès. He then made a trip back to Barcelona in 1899 and claimed he was a changed man: he had gained weight, learned to live on his own in the countryside, spoke Catalan, and most importantly, decided to leave art school and reject his family’s plans.

Le Petit Picador Jaune

Picasso created his first painting, Le Petit Picador Jaune, at the age of eight. The picture portrays a bullfight with a little picador wearing a yellow suit (a lance-wielding bullfighter) in the middle. The little boy also wears a red cap and wields a lance as he leans forward to fight a bull that gallops his way. In the background, you see blue skies and some white, wispy clouds.

Le Petit Picador Jaune, Pablo Picasso, 1890

Critics of the painting have always given mixed reviews. Some say the picture exemplifies Picasso’s skill at conveying motion via the use of emotive brushwork. The piece’s disorganized structure and lack of cohesion are common complaints from critics.

Exploration of Picasso’s Famous Blue Period Paintings

Although melancholic and beautiful, the Picasso’s Blue Period paintings are very poetic descriptions of poverty, fragility, intense misery and helplessness. Themes center on society’s broken and poor, grace and compassion.

According to Picasso’s various phases of evolution, the Blue Period is the only time in his vast and fascinating career when he displayed such great emotional depth in his work. The precise time and place of the beginning of Picasso’s Blue Period are unknown. One thing is clear, though: it began around the time Picasso suffered the personal calamity that plunged him into a deep and lengthy depression. The Blue Period might have started in the spring of 1901 in Spain or late that year in Paris.

In February of 1901, Picasso was in the midst of a tour of Spain when he ran across the writer and art enthusiast Carlos Casagemas at the L’Hippodrome Café in Paris. Casagemas had been traveling with another young guy, but they parted ways when he realized his love for a certain woman, Germaine Gargallo Florentin, who was already married. 

Casagemas was drunk while out to dinner with Germaine and several pals at L’Hippodrome in Paris. Around nine o’clock that night, he pulled a revolver from his pocket, shot Germaine, and then turned the gun around and shot himself. Thankfully, Germaine only had minor injuries and survived. Not Carlos Casagemas.

“When I discovered Casagemas was gone, I decided to paint in blue,” Picasso quoted. He produced a number of monochromatic blue works, some of which have other colors added to warm them up. These blue-hued pieces of art not only offered a striking visual representation of emotional anguish but also a glimpse into something deeper.

Picasso’s paintings often include prostitutes, beggars and homeless children that he saw in the jails, streets and ditches of Paris. His visit to a women’s jail during his Blue Period was one experience that profoundly influenced his art.

Picasso’s Blue Period artworks include:

Celestina, Pablo Picasso, 1904
The Old Guitarist – Pablo Picasso, 1903
The Death of Casagemas, Pablo Picasso, 1901
La Vie, Pablo Picasso, 1903
The Tragedy, Pablo Picasso, 1903
Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto, Pablo Picasso, 1903
Portrait of Suzanne Bloch, Pablo Picasso, 1904
Self-Portrait, Pablo Picasso, 1901
Femme aux Bras Croisés, Pablo Picasso, 1902

The Blue Room

Picasso’s Blue Period Blue Room, created in 1901, shows his apartment’s furnishings and view. He used inspiration from Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, with an 1895 May Milton poster hanging in the background, to create the piece.

The blue room, Pablo Picasso, 1901

In 2008, infrared scanning of Picasso’s Blue Period piece, the Blue Room, revealed an underlying image in the form of a bearded man. Picasso did not employ a ground layer between the two works, as the underlying tones show. He painted with vibrant colors and used Prussian blue mixed with white to produce a variety of blue tones.

Les Noces de Pierrette

Several years later, Picasso created a piece that chronologically fits in with his Rose Period, however, it characteristically aligns with his Blue Period. In Les Noces de Pierrette, you see wealthy socialites in dresses and top hats, but there is an obvious lack of any real emotion coming from the people. Picasso’s numerous blues convey the painting’s melancholy.

Les Noces de Pierrette, Pablo Picasso, 1905

The image showcases a bride who married a rich guy while abandoning her Harlequin lover. A guy with his arm around a lady sits at another table with white, emotionless features and black eyes. Picasso painted this after Carlos Casagemas committed suicide.

Analyzing Picasso’s Masterpieces from the Rose Period

Picasso’s Rose Period lasted from 1904 to 1906. Unlike the dark blues and greens of the preceding Blue Period, the paintings of Pablo Picasso’s Rose Period included bright oranges and pinks.

Picasso’s connection with Fernande Olivier, whom he met in 1904, is often cited as a motivating factor for the shift in his artistic approach during these years. Throughout Picasso’s lengthy career, harlequins, circus performers and clowns populated his artwork, beginning in the Rose Period.

It was also during Picasso’s Rose Period that he first began to experiment with the formal techniques that would come to define his style and establish him as the century’s preeminent visual artist. In 1904, a sequence of paintings that displayed warmer hues, particularly pink, restored the romantic element to Picasso’s work.

Picasso’s Rose Period style takes on a life of its own, reflecting the artistic ethos of the time in which he created it: the painting, rather than the subject or its content, is paramount. His breakthrough during this period was the ease with which he used lines.

Picasso’s Rose Period provided the groundwork for the rest of his career, during which he would experiment with fusing expressionism with classicism. He painted Boy with a Pipe in 1905, shortly after he moved to Montmartre, France, at the age of 24. This oil on canvas piece portrays a young Montmartre native who often visited Picasso’s workshop, smoking a pipe and adorning himself with a floral crown.

Some of the other pieces from Picasso’s Rose Period include:

Family of Saltimbanques, Pablo Picasso, 1905
Garçon à la pipe, Pablo Picasso, 1905
Two Nudes, Pablo Picasso, 1906
The Actor, Pablo Picasso, 1905
Boy Leading a Horse, Pablo Picasso 1906
Autoportrait à la palette, Pablo Picasso, 1906
Nude with a Pitcher, Pablo Picasso, 1906
Half-length Female Nude, Pablo Picasso, 1906
Woman Plaiting Her Hair, Pablo Picasso, 1906
Nude with Joined Hands, Pablo Picasso, 1906
Famille d’acrobates avec singe, Pablo Picasso 1905
Woman with Loaves, Pablo Picasso 1906

Family of Saltimbanques

Picasso’s most significant early work is Family of Saltimbanques. The figures in the piece are alone and motionless. The Family of Saltimbanques is an autobiographical art piece that honors circus stock performers. Harlequin, far left, represents the passionate young artist himself, Picasso.

This painting’s original color scheme consisted of cool blues. The final version of this graphic conceals three extra states. Picasso changed his canvas, enabling the deeper color to come through and, in doing so, changing the figures and the arrangement from blue to rose. This also gave his waif-like figures depth and a mysterious, cloaked quality befitting their delicate nature.

Famille d’acrobates avec singe

Picasso’s Famille d’acrobates avec singe depicted acrobats with a monkey and a traveling circus family having a poignant moment. The cardboard piece utilizes gouache, watercolor, pastel, and Indian ink.

Famille des acrobates avec singe, Pablo Picasso, 1905

Picasso painted this in 1905, while he was transitioning from struggling artist to stardom. Picasso’s cardboard work has been the focus of a long-term conservation attempt to better understand his method and materials.

Cubism: A Revolutionary Artistic Movement by Picasso

Picasso experimented with many styles and mediums until his last decade. Cubism transformed people’s views of art by rejecting the Renaissance’s realism. It inspired 20th-century abstract art and continues to affect 21st-century art.

Picasso and Braque both incorporated Cubist-inspired aspects into their work even before the movement was officially started. Two of their masterpieces particularly showcase this intriguing shift towards Cubism:

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – Pablo Picasso, 1907
Viaduct at L’Estaque, 1908 – Georges Braque

Picasso’s best-known work during his African Period is often regarded as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The mask-like features of the characters and the shattered presentation of the subject matter suggest that he created it around 1907, at the intersection of Primitivism and Cubism. He also used Analytic Cubism in his sculptures, producing a number of pieces that highlight the period’s novel take on perspective.

Some of the other pieces included in Picasso’s Cubist artworks include:

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, Pablo Picasso, 1910
The Weeping Woman, Pablo Picasso, 1937
Girl Before a Mirror, Pablo Picasso, 1932
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Pablo Picasso, 1910
Guitar, Pablo Picasso, 1913
Woman’s Head (Fernande), Pablo Picasso, 1909
Violin, Pablo Picasso, 1913

The Weeping Women

Analytic Cubism, an early type of Cubism, is the style in which Picasso painted The Weeping Woman in 1937. In analytic cubism, the picture appears fragmented yet maintains a sense of three-dimensionality.

He uses vivid colors and geometric forms to create many angles of view that emphasize women’s suffering from unique perspectives. A worldwide symbol of unfathomable loss and anguish, The Weeping Woman has become a cultural touchstone representing universal loss and suffering. It belongs to a series of Picasso pieces labeled as anti-war artwork.

Guitar

Picasso’s Cubist artworks didn’t always come in the form of paintings. His donation of two guitars to MoMA bookends a time of intense experimentation with form and material in the artist’s oeuvre.

During the fall or winter of 1912, Picasso crafted a guitar. Picasso’s inaudible instrument was a hodgepodge of materials that he chopped, folded, threaded, and glued together in a way that resulted in a sculpture unlike any other. In 1914, the creator replicated his flimsy paperwork into a permanent and sturdy sheet metal structure.

The Surreal and Symbolic World of Picasso’s Paintings

In order to fully express himself, Picasso worked freely in both painting and sculpture. He demonstrates to us the bright and dark sides of life, as well as its joys, tragedies and pleasures.

Picasso’s work has recurring depictions of bullfighters and bulls, which are often regarded as a nod to the artist’s Spanish heritage. His first known depiction of a bull comes from an art piece that he created when he was eight years old and just starting to master the skill of analyzing shapes under his father’s meticulous tutelage. It’s also common knowledge that Picasso maintained a massive bull’s head mask made of wicker at his workshop. Picasso himself would not address the questions and speculations about the meaning of the bull and other creatures he used in his paintings.

Guernica

Art enthusiasts often investigate Picasso’s art piece Guernica for hidden symbolism. Picasso’s Guernica was long regarded as the canonical masterpiece of protest art. There is a wealth of symbolism and imagery that requires some decoding. After careful analysis, many people believe they see the following symbolism in Guernica:

  • A mangled corpse of a soldier is a symbol of both optimism and hopelessness.
  • Picasso’s use of black and white is a nod to print media, namely newspapers.
  • The sun is like a super-advanced camera.
  • The bull is a symbol of fascism.
  • A horse made of a human skull symbolizes the bombing’s destruction and people’s suffering.
  • Christian iconography comes in the form of a grieving mother holding her deceased child.
  • A metaphor for the Guernican people is a frightened horse.
Guernica – Pablo Picasso, 1937

Later Period: Picasso’s Political and Emotional Expressions

The atrocities committed in Picasso’s native Spain during the Civil War deeply moved him. He cared deeply about his native country and its people’s plight. His masterpiece, Guernica, was a direct reaction to the battle.

Les femmes d’Alger – Pablo Picasso, 1955

Picasso’s anti-fascist stance grew throughout the 1930s and 1940s, when fascism was on the rise across Europe. Believing it would help stop the development of fascism and advance social justice, he decided to join the French Communist Party in 1944; he remained a member until his death. To him, activism was “the logical consequence of my whole life, of my whole work.”

La Guerre et la Paix – Pablo Picasso, 1952

Picasso produced a large body of work during this time, and he used his fame to protest fascism and bring attention to its atrocities. One of these pieces was The Charnel House, which often gets recognized as a partner piece to Guernica.

The Charnel House

War images featured in newspapers inspired Picasso’s creation of The Charnel House, which he conveys through the use of a black-and-white palette. Some believe that the center cluster of figures—a dead family lying under a dining table—might resemble Nazi concentration camp corpses found following liberation. 

The Charnel House, Pablo Picasso, 1944

The Charnel House, which Picasso called the “massacre,” is still debated. Some claim that a video showing Spain’s fascist regime murdering a Republican family served as inspiration, while others point to Nazi concentration camps. In 1946, Picasso donated the piece to the National Association of Veterans of the Resistance despite its exposed canvas and compositional alterations.

Conclusion

In his later years, Picasso often created self-portraits in which he portrayed himself as a hideous old guy in the guise of a musketeer, hilariously attempting to play the part of a ladies’ man. Picasso was never one to exaggerate his achievements or promote himself above his peers. Everything about him is on display: his loves and hates, his worries and hopes, his adoration and envy.