History's Greatest Artists: The Life and Legacy of Pablo Picasso

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*Includes pictures of more than 25 of Picasso's most famous works, including an explanation of his techniques and influences. *Includes pictures of Picasso and important people in his life. *Explains the artistic influences and legacy of Picasso's life and art. *Includes a Bibliography for further reading. "Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time." – Pablo Picasso, 1934 In their biography of Pablo Picasso, Hans Ludwig and Chris Jaffe note that “for him, art was always adventure: ‘To find is the thing.’” Indeed, there is perhaps no artist who produced more art than Picasso, whose enormous oeuvre (which spanned most of his 91-year life) contained a countless number of paintings and drawings. Picasso also worked in other mediums as well, notably sculpture and lithography, and his constant experimentation with form makes him a useful case study through which to chart the growth of Modernism as an artistic movement and many of the artistic trends that would dominate the 20th century. At the same time, one of the challenges involved in examining Picasso’s body of work is the sheer breadth of it all. In addition to the many different mediums involved, Picasso’s works within each medium also vastly differed. For example, placing the paintings of Picasso’s Blue Period (1901-1904) against his analytic cubist compositions reveals little similarities, and in many ways, he also anticipated artistic movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism. And though he is most famous for his contributions to the Cubist genre, there is a wide disparity between his early analytic cubist works and the later synthetic cubist style. Picasso is one of the world’s most famous artists, which adds to the challenge of examining his career, but it’s necessary to examine his entire career because of the way art was intertwined with his life. Even from an early age, it was clear that he subordinated any external concerns relating to his life in the interest of making art, which may have been the cause of the spirit of melancholy that can be found in his artwork. At the same time, the somber tone of some of his work can be directly contrasted against his playful formal experimentation. History’s Greatest Artists: The Life and Legacy of Pablo Picasso examines Picasso’s life and career, while analyzing his painting style, artistic themes, and his legacy. Along with pictures of some of his most famous work, a bibliography, and a Table of Contents, you will learn about one of history’s greatest painters like you never have before, in no time at all.