Birthdate: 25. October 1881
Date of death: 8. April 1973
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , and Guernica , a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.Picasso's work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period , the Rose Period , the African-influenced Period , Analytic Cubism , and Synthetic Cubism , also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.
Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.
Quote attributed to Picasso in TIME, October 4, 1976, Modern Living: Ozmosis in Central Park http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/07/child-art/ http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,918412,00.html
Disputed
Quote, attributed to Picasso in: Jean Cocteau (1932), Opium: The Diary of an Addict. p. 63
Quotes, 1930's
Quoted in: Ingo F. Walther (1996), Picasso, p. 67.
Attributed from posthumous publications
Yo no busco, yo encuentro. Quoted in Graham Sutherland, "A Trend in English Draughtsmanship", Signature, III (1936), pp. 7-13.
Disputed
Variant: I do not seek. I find.
Compare: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." T. S. Eliot, in Philip Massinger, in The Sacred Wood (1920)
Disputed
Variant: Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Quoted in: Peter Erskine, Rick Mattingly (1998), Drum Perspective, p. 73.
Alternative forms:
"At eight, I was Raphael", he used to say. "It took me a whole lifetime to paint like a child"
From Picasso, my grandfather, Marina Picasso (2001).
Attributed from posthumous publications
La peinture n'est pas faite pour décorer des appartements. C'est un instrument de guerre offensive et défensive contre l'ennemi.
La pintura no se ha inventado para adornar las habitaciones. La pintura es un arma ofensiva, en la defensa contra el enemigo.
Les lettres françaises (1943-03-24).
Quotes, 1940's
L'art n'est pas chaste [...], on devrait l’interdire aux ignorants innocents, ne jamais mettre en contact avec lui ceux qui y sont insuffisamment préparés. Oui, l'art est dangereux. Ou s'il est chaste, ce n'est pas de l'art.
Quote by Antonina Vallentin (1963 [1957]), Picasso, p. 168.
1960s
Attributed in Civilization's Quotations : Life's Ideal (2002) by Richard Alan Krieger, p. 132, and many places on the internet, this was actually stated by Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Anthon van Rappard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthon_van_Rappard (18 August 1885) http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let528/letter.html, also rendered "I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it."
Misattributed
Variant: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 258 (translation Daphne Woodward)
1960s
