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Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 and died in 1973. During his life, he was a painter, sculptor, ceramics artist, printmaker, etching artist, and writer. During this time there were also two world wars happening whilst he was raising his four children. Although he lived the majority of his life in France, Picasso was Spanish by birth. Growing up in the town of Málaga in Andalusia, Spain, he was the first-born of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His family raised him as a Catholic, but later in his life, he declared himself an atheist. Pablo Picasso's painting genes stemmed from his father, who painted birds and other game animals. Picasso attended the School of Fine Arts only briefly, and during this period of Picasso's life, he painted portraits, such as his sister Lola's First Communion. During the late stage of the 19th century, elements of Symbolism and his interpretation of Modernism began to appear in his landscapes. A three-year period in Picasso's life, known as the blue period, was a time when he would mainly paint in shades of blue, with only accents of bright colors in the paintings he did. Historians connect this period largely to the depression that he was battling with after his friend's suicide. This period is evident in his artwork 'The Old Guitarist', which is the artwork I have chosen to recreate for my portfolio.
'The Old Guitarist' was painted in 1903 after the suicide of Picasso's close friend Casagemas, being part of Picasso's blue period. During this time he was sympathetic to those more misfortunate than him and painted many canvases depicting the miseries of the poor, the ill, and those cast out of society. He was poor during all of 1902 and, therefore knew the struggle of poverty. This painting was created in Madrid, and the distorted style demonstrates the works of 16th-century artist El Greco. This bent man holds close to him a large, round guitar. Its brown body is the painting's only change in color. The thin, skeleton-like figure of the musician has elements of art from Picasso's origin country, Spain. Elements of El Greco's style are evident in the man's elongated limbs and cramped posture. The Old Guitarist is probably the most iconic painting of Picasso's Blue Period and is now located at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. I have chosen to recreate this artwork as it is symbolic of the theme I have chosen to explore for my portfolio. To appropriate this artwork effectively I first analyzed the piece, noticing blue tones in the work with the only major color difference in the guitar. I inspected the body position and shape of the salient image (the man) and portrayed these elements in my photo. I then used the VSCO editing app to tone my photo into a blue shade to replicate the blue tones in the original piece. I also inspected the background shapes and staged them into the background of my photo.
During the time that Picasso was alive, the art that he painted wasn't around. The initial audience's reaction was horror as they had never seen what he was producing before. However, they eventually came to like his pieces, primarily after his death, becoming very famous artworks and sculptures. Often Picasso attempted to portray messages in his artworks, e.g. Guernica (painted in 1937) became his most famous work. It involves a very powerful political statement, painted as a reaction to the Spanish Civil War after the Nazi's casual bombing practice on the town of Guernica. Picasso wanted the world to know what happened at Guernica and he wanted this piece to shock people to do so. Much like his modernist artworks, Picasso misjudged the first audience of Guernica. In the year that this piece was painted, Europe was in the middle of the World War, and the people during this time preferred to ignore the fact that the war was imminent. This was the audience that first viewed Guernica, an audience in which the last thing they wanted to see was a mural about war. Years later this piece became one of the most critically acclaimed artworks in history.
During Picasso's 92+ years on earth, he was an experimental artist who had a significant impact on 20th-century art. He shaped modern and contemporary art during the years that he was alive, and often mixed styles to create new interpretations of what he viewed. He was instrumental in the development of cubism, and shaped collage to what we see today. Many critics have personified him to be a genius in the art sense. Picasso was able to reincarnate art from others that he had seen, therefore is an idol to many. A large number of artists have been inspired by Picasso's works, including Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollocks, Willem de Kooning, Ben Nicholson, and even pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Picasso's fascination with cubism caused him to no longer view pictures as a window on objects in the world and began to conceive of them merely as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects. This too would prove hugely influential for decades to come.
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