Pablo+Picasso

=Pablo Picasso=

Introduction
Pablo Picasso is a famous modern artist. He is famous for drawing, painting, sculpture, print-making and ceramics, and his work is very valuable. He was born in Spain on October 25th 1881 and he died on April 8th, 1973.

His full name is very long - it is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso - but everyone just calls him Pablo Picasso.

He loved drawing when he was a child, and his father (who was a professor of art) gave him lessons in figure drawing and oil painting. In 1895 when he was only 13 he passed the exam for getting into the Advanced Class at the School of Art in Barcelona, and when he was 16 he went to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid. He wasn't a very good student and he left soon afterwards to go to Paris.

Picasso was married twice and had four children.

Picasso's style
When Picasso's best friend died Picasso felt alone and sad. At the same time, none of his paintings were selling and he was almost starving to death. Because of his mood Picasso began to paint with alot of blue (blue can be a very sad colour). Many of the people in his paintings at this time looked lonely and sad. Picasso's **Blue Period** ended when he met a girl named Fernande. They fell in love and soon a happier colour began showing up in Picasso's Paintings. This was the beginning of the **Rose Period** - when he painted with a lot of pinks and reds. Not only were Picasso's colors happier during this period, but he started to paint happier things.

In Paris, Picasso was very poor, because he did not sell many pictures. However, American art collectors, liked his work and began to buy them. His early portraits look quite real, but he experimented in doing pictures in different colours and using different shapes. Sometimes he painted things that looked quite flat and sometimes they looked so round that you felt you could pick them up off the painting!

In 1907 he became interested in African art and then in 1909 he started doing paintings in the Cubist style. **Cubism** is a style where artists paint objects that have been taken apart and put them back together in a different way, using their shapes. (of course, Picasso didn't really take his own face apart, he just imagined it!)

In the 1930s he started doing paintings in the **surrealist** style. This style uses fantastic shapes and is not meant to look real.

Picasso was shocked by the violence of the Spanish Civil War and in 1937 painted his most famous painting //Guernica//, to show how people suffered.

He also painted //Weeping Woman// in 1937, and you can see this painting at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

Sources:
[] [] [] [] Venezia, Mike; __Picasso__ - __Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists__, Children's Press, Chicago, 1988.