Picasso Portraits : Portrait Paintings and Art by Pablo Picasso |
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Hi all, are you looking for Picasso Portraits? Well, if you are, then you have come to the right website and you will soon find out all you need to know about the incredible art portraits by that amazing artist Pablo Picasso. On this website we have all the relevant information to help you find the best or most popular or just those portraits that you really like. They are all here just waiting for you to find them! |
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| | | Pablo Picasso is famous for his portraits. As one of the leaders of the modern art movement, his techniques in portraiture were especially innovative. He painted in various styles, and Picasso portraits can be examined according to the period in which he painted them. |
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| Picasso Portraits From His Blue Period Picasso has several noted masterpieces from this period. The early paintings of Picasso, painted between 1900 and 1904 when the artist was struggling to become established in Paris, are generally referred to as his blue period. The portraits he created in this period tend to be dour and almost depressing, with a palette of subdued greys and blues juxtaposed with white, El Greco-style faces. He used friends as subjects as well as street people he encountered while strolling through Paris. He also painted many portraits of his friend Casagemas after his death (most notably La Vie in 1903) and self portraits. His most famous self portrait from this period is 1901′s Self-Portrait, where the artist portrays himself as pale and gaunt. Other master works from the blue period are Femme aux Bras Croisés (1902), Portrait of Celestina (1903), The Old Guitarist (1903), and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch (1904). Picasso Portraits From His Rose Period Picasso’s rose period was between 1904 and 1906. During this time, he was becoming more widely regarded as a fine artist. This upswing in his career is marked by a lighter, more cheerful palette including a lot of pink and orange hues. some examples of this include Woman in a Chemise (1905), Garçon à la Pipe or Boy with a Pipe (1905). Up until 1907, Picasso painted in response to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. He began to reject this sort of representational art and portraiture, and started to explore ways in which to express reality in a different way, concentrating on structure and form. Cubist Picasso Portraits Picasso invented Cubism in 1907 along with Georges Braque. This changed everything in the art world, as it was a completely new way of representing reality on canvas. Rather than painting people as they appeared, Picasso cut the reality he saw before him into small pieces and then put it back together to offer an altogether different view… much like turning reality into a jigsaw puzzle. Some of his mater works in this period are Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1909) and Le guitariste (1910). He also included several African motifs in his work, especially figure drawing. His Les Demoiselles d’Avignon showed female figures with faces that reflected many different tribal and anarchic forms. From the 1920′s onward, Picasso portraits contained a wide range of experimentation and he continued to dig deeper into portraying the human form and understanding it in new and innovative ways. Truly, Picasso’s unique vision changed the art world dramatically – his influence is still felt today! | | |
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| | | Picasso portraits are among the most easily, instantly recognizable paintings. Most people associate his portraits with the Cubist movement, where he disassembled the human form and then put it back together like a jigsaw puzzle into something completely new. However, some of his most popular and successful portraits are from what is called his blue period. |
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| Picasso portraits from his blue period are characterized by a limited palette of somber greys, blues and blue-greens, with occasional inclusion of warmer tones. They tend to be somewhat depressing and down-beat in feeling. He painted in this style in Paris between 1901 and 1904, and had a very hard time selling any of them then. Now, collectors and art lovers love them. In this time, Picasso was trying to establish himself as an artist in Paris. Picasso was born in Spain, and considered a child prodigy. As a child, he astounded adults by painting and drawing realistically, and his father trained him in both oil painting and figure drawing. When he was 19 he left Madrid, where he had been studying art on his own, and went to Paris. From 1900 to 1905 or so, Picasso lived in poverty with a friend of his, painting and trying to become known as an artist. These hungry, lean times were a huge influence on his works at that time. Another influence on Picasso portraits from this period was the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas in February 1901. He began painting in blues towards the end of the year, choosing his departed friend as his subject frequently. The most famous of these posthumous portraits is La Vie (1903). He also painted portraits of various Parisian street people, such as drunks, prostitutes and beggars. Blindness was a common theme during this period, which is best known in the paintings The Blindman’s Meal (1903) and Celestina (1903). He also created a now famous etching, The Frugal Repast (1904), which portrayed an emaciated blind man and sighted woman sitting at an almost bare table. He also painted numerous self-portraits, generally representing himself as a pale, lean and hungry looking young man. The most famous Picasso portrait of this time is The Old Guitarist (1903). He painted this back in Madrid in a distorted style that reflected the influence of the El Greco style that he so loved. The image of a woman can be seen underneath the painting, implying that Picasso has initially begin a portrait of a seated woman. This painting inspired Paul McCartney to write his 2 Finger Song, and poet Wallace Stevens to write The Man With The Blue Guitar. New technology has revealed that there are actually two paintings beneath The Old Guitarist. One is of an older woman with her head bent forward, and the other is a young mother with a nursing child at her side. | |
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| | | When you ask most people what they know about Picasso, chances are they will answer that he was the inventor of Cubism. They are correct, of course, but it’s important to note that artist Georges Braque co-founded the movement along with him. Picasso portraits from his Cubist period were painted right alongside Braques Cubist works. |
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| In 1907 Braque had been studying Cezanne, and his technique of representing things from all three dimensions, seen from several different angles. This same year Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, where he painted several human figures using a form of this technique. The two artists soon became good friends due to their shared interest in this form, and developed Cubism together. Although early Picasso portraits, notably Demoiselles, are thought to be Cubist, (Demoiselles is often referred to as the first Cubist painting), they were not. They were precedents to Cubism. In this portrait, several female figures are portrayed in a very distorted, expressionist way. Many of them have faces that are representations of African motifs. This work marked the birth of a new way of painting, because it completely destroyed established artistic conventions. It is fair to say that this is where what became Cubism began, but it did not mark the beginning of the style. One of the most well known Picasso portraits that illustrates his Cubist style is The Guitarist (1910). This work exemplifies Analytical Cubism. Here, natural forms are reduced into simple geometric bits. Color is sacrificed instead for form, with monochromatic palettes of greys, blues and ochres. Another example of a different type of Cubism is Picasso’s Still Life with Chair-caning. In this work, an oil cloth was printed to look like chair caning, and then pasted on an oval-shaped canvas, with text also. The whole painting was then framed with rope. This style is called Synthetic Cubism, which includes various textures and surfaces, elements of collage, pasted paper, and different subject matters merged into one work. While Analytic Cubism pulled things apart, this style pushed things together. Cubism is not the only style that Picasso painted in, of course, but it is often thought to be his main style. In reality it marked the start of abstract art. However, Picasso stopped painting in the Cubist style around 1915. Many people consider Picasso portraits such as Femme en Pleurs as Cubist, but in reality it is not. There are elements of Cubism in it, but there are other styles evident as well… this painting actually captures a true Picasso style, one that can’t be simply crammed into an easy ‘ism’. Picasso portraits and paintings after 1915 are best characterized as a patchwork of various ideas and styles from other artists, both contemporary and historic. He was influenced by and experimented with the styles of El Greco, Modigliani, Gaugin, Matisse and Toulouse-Latrec. But all of his works generally contain that geometric, Cubist element as well. | | |
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| | | Picasso portraits are not only very popular among collectors and art lovers alike, they completely changed the face of art. But while Picasso was an innovator whose influence is still felt today, he was also inspired and influenced by the artists and styles of his time. A major influence on Picasso was the art and style of El Greco. |
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| El Greco (1541 to 1614) was a Greek-born painter, sculptor and architect who lived and painted in Italy and Spain. El Greco actually means ‘The Greek’, which was his nickname. His actual name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, and that is how he generally signed his paintings. El Greco valued color over form, and rejected the classical ideas of measure and proportion. He thought that intuition and imagination were more important than a realistic representation. He generally portrayed figures as elongated, being very tall and slim, and interweaved form and space to create a perfectly unified painting surface. Although he achieved success in his later years in Spain, his expressionistic, dramatic style was not fully understood during his time. It was not until the 20th century that his work began to be understood and truly appreciated for what it achieved. In fact, modern art historians believe that what El Greco created was so ahead of its time and so individual that it cannot be characterized into any one particular school. He is considered to be the harbinger of the styles of Expressionism and Cubism. During Picasso’s blue period, he drew heavily from El Greco’s style. One of the most famous Picasso portraits of this period is The Old Guitarist, featuring an old man with a guitar with a distorted body style… his upper body is in recline, while his lower body is cross-legged. Also, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was influenced by El Greco’s Opening Of The Fifth Seal. He studied this work in Paris at a friend’s studio. In the early 1980′s, art historians examined both works and were able to connect the two in terms of both the motifs of both paintings, and the similarities in their style and execution. Early cubist Picasso portraits attempted to dig deeper into other aspects of El Greco’s work. In fact, Picasso regarded El Greco’s work as cubist. Picasso analyzed the structure of El Greco’s compositions, and delved deeper into how the artist refracted form, intertwined form and space, and used highlights to create special effects. In the 1950′s, Picasso began to work on a series of ‘paraphrases’ of the work of other artists, the first one being The Portrait of a Painter after El Greco. This painting was Picasso’ version of the Portrait of Jorge Manuel Theotocopoulos (1600-1605), El Greco’s son, done in the style that Picasso is famous for and that he attributed to El Greco for its influence. Picasso portraits are definitely one of a kind, but they were influenced heavily by viewing and studying El Greco’s works. In fact, if it hadn’t been for El Greco, Picasso may not have invented Cubism at all. | | |
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