Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
Related: cubism - modern art - greatness
Key works: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing. Taste is the enemy of creativity. - Pablo Picasso via Strength to Love, 1963.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) - Pablo Picasso [Image link]
Typically for modern art, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which depicts five prostitutes in a brothel) sacrificed traditional notions of beauty and harmony in favor of dissonance, ugliness and grotesque ambivalence. The work was heavily inspired by African masks.Guernica (1937) - Pablo Picasso
Picasso's Guernica is the world's most famous example of - metaphorically speaking - social realism.
![Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) - Pablo Picasso [Image link]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon.jpg){kind=link}
Biography
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain – April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor. One of the most recognized figures in 20th century art, he is best known as the co-founder, along with Georges Braque, of cubism. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso [Apr 2006]
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) - Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a celebrated painting by Pablo Picasso that depicts five prostitutes in a brothel. Picasso painted it in France, and completed it in the summer of 1907. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon [Jan 2006]Guernica (1937) - Picasso
Picasso, founder of the Cubism movement in art, painted Guernica in commemoration of the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica. The attack took the lives of over 1000 people, one-eighth of the population. The painting is a surrealist's fascination with the grotesque subject matter and was meant by Picasso to be an unforgettable attack on "Brutality and Darkness" (1937-- Heartfield joins the Prague Oskar Kokoschka League. Participates in 50 Years Manes. Some of Heartfield's works are removed due to Germany's threats to break off diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia.) --http://www.towson.edu/heartfield/events/1930.html [May 2004]
On Henri Rousseau
To label Henri Rousseau as a naive painter is a great mistake. Picasso knew better and he did not. .*Picasso thought that Henri Rousseau was a modern painter. Rousseau thought of himself as a modern painter and once said to Picasso. "We are the two greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style and I of the Modern style."--If Picasso's understanding and respect for Henri Rousseau was a gauge of taste,was avant garde thought in action, or was an intuitive understanding for Rousseau's intrinsic value as an artist; then many more people and art historians would believe that Henri Rousseau was a great modern artist and not label him as a naive painter. Picasso trusted his own basic intuition for finding quality in art, and this intuition lead him to the "The Douanier" or "The Customs Officer".To label Henri Rousseau as a naive painter is a great mistake. Picasso knew better and he did not.
Picasso used progress made by Rousseau in his art, to enhance and bring out aspects that he was striving for within his own art. Picasso gave a much written about dinner in Rousseau's honor and owned a number of his paintings. Picasso said of Rousseau, "Rousseau represent the perfection of a certain kind of thought." C.Sutton ** **from page 243 of Pichon book.