"I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same. "

 More than any other artist, Picasso’s name is synonymous with Modern Art .

During an artistic career spanning an astonishing 75 years, he created thousands of paintings, prints, sculptures and ceramics. For the general public, Picasso is the greatest art genius of the twentieth century. For others he is, at best, a gifted charlatan. Undisputed is the fact that he influenced and dominated the art of the twentieth century like no other.

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain, as the son of an academic art teacher. A brilliant student, Picasso passed the entrance examination for the Barcelona School of Fine Arts at the age of 14 in just one day and was allowed to skip the first two classes. According to one of many legends about the artist's life, his father, recognizing the extraordinary talent of his son, gave him his brushes and palette, vowing never to paint again.

The Blue and Rose Period

During his lifetime, Picasso’s work evolved and shows several characteristic painting styles. The Blue Period, from about 1900 to 1904, is characterized by the use of different shades of blue emphasizing the grim life of his subjects – street people and beggars with thin, half-starved bodies. His painting style during these years is masterly and convinces even those who reject his later modern style. During his Rose Period from about 1905 to 1906, his palette moved to a more optimistic pink tone, in keeping with his subjects, who inhabit the colourful world of the circus.

Cubism

After several trips to Paris, the artist took up permanent residence in the capital of art in 1904. There he met and socialised with the other artists who had moved there, like Henri Matisse, Joan Miro and Georges Braque. He became a great admirer of Henri Matisse and developed a life-long friendship with the master of French Fauvism.
Inspired by the works of Paul Cezanne, Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris developed one of the most revolutionary modern styles, known as Cubism. Inspired by new insights into the nature of reality in Physics, Cubism, re-arranges its subjects according to basic geometric shapes. In a later version of Cubism, called synthetic cubism, different perspectives or several views of an object or a person are shown simultaneously.

Picasso and Guernica

In 1937 Picasso  created the work most identified with his genius, the mural Guernica, a protest against the barbaric air raid against a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Guernica is a huge mural on canvas in black, white and grey which was created for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World's Fair in 1937. In Guernica, Picasso used symbolic forms like a dying horse or a weeping woman; forms he repeatedly used in his subsequent works.

Guernica was exhibited at the museum of Modern Art in New York until 1981. It was transferred to the Prado Museum in Madrid in 1981 and was later moved to the Queen Sofia Center of Art, Madrid in 1992. Picasso had disallowed the return of Guernica to Spain until the end of the rule of Fascism under General Franco.

Pablo Picasso and Women

Picasso changed his companions at least as often as his painting styles and his relationships with women influenced his mood as well as his art style. The shift from the "blue" to the "rose period" was likely the result of meeting Fernande Olivier, his first companion. Throughout his life, Picasso immortalized his wives, companions and children in numerous portraits

During his early years in Paris, he lived with Fernande Olivier for seven years. During World War I, from 1914 to 1918, Picasso worked in Rome where he met his first wife, Olga Koklova, a Russian ballet dancer. In 1927 he met Marie Therese Walther, a seventeen year old girl and began a relationship with her. In 1936 another woman, Dora Maar, a photographer, stepped into his life. In 1943 he became a mentor and than the lover of a young painter, Francoise Gilot. They had two children, Claude, and Paloma, Picasso's third and fourth child. Picasso’s final companion was Jacqueline Roque. He met her in 1953 and finally married her in 1961.

In 1965 Pablo Picasso had to undergo a prostrate operation. After a period of rest, he concentrated on drawings and a series of 347 etchings. In spite of his health problems, he created a number of paintings during his last years. He died at the age of 91 on April 8, 1973.

Picasso as a Printmaker

Picasso was not only a prolific printmaker, but also used a large variety of different techniques. He created lithographs, etchings, drypoints, lino cuts, woodcuts and aquatints. Always on the search for something new, he experimented a lot with these techniques. Indeed, some of Picasso's graphic works use a combination of several techniques.

Picasso created his first prints in 1905 - a series of 15 drypoints and etchings, Les Saltimbanques, published by the art dealer Vollard in 1913. More graphic works were produced in the early 1930's, e.g. The Vollard Suite. But it was in the years after World War II that most of Picasso's prints were created, including his enormous 347 Series of etchings and aquatints. Like Chagall, Picasso worked with the Atelier Mourlot as well, a renowned art publisher and print workshop in Paris. There he created about 200 lithographs between 1945 to 1949, working in close cooperation with Henri Deschamps, a professional printmaker from the Mourlot studio.

Vollard suite

The Vollard Suite, created between 1930-37, was named after it publisher, the French art dealer, Ambroise Vollard.
The 100 Vollard Suite images are generally categorized by themes: The Battle of Love, The Sculptor's Studio, Rembrandt, The Minotaur and The Blind Minotaur, and the Portraits of Vollard. The remaining 27 images deal with various themes such as women dressing and women sleeping, the circus, bullfight, and love. Despite superficial differences, an underlying unity of tone and Picasso’s preoccupation with neo-classical and classical subjects lends homogeneity and consistency to the series that is clearly evident when viewed in its’ entirety. In 1933 Picasso officially lived with his wife, Olga, in Paris. While his marriage deteriorated, his relationship with Marie-Thérèse blossomed. The young muse became a constant theme in his paintings and other art in the 30s. Marie-Thérèse was the lover who inspired Picasso in the classical look of the Vollard Suite, and as Picasso abandoned its subjects and its style, he abandoned her too, as he focused elsewhere in matters both of art and love.

The 347 Series

The “347 Series” was, in printmaking, the undertaking which defined late Picasso. This prodigious outpouring of work, dating from March 16th–October 5th, 1968, deals with all of his old themes and fantasies, adding an obsession newly central in the late 60s, the artist as voyeur. It is in this role, rather than that of a protagonist, that the artist figures in these fantastic narrations. The circus was one of Picasso's first subjects in printmaking. The Saltimbanque series of 1904-5 depicted the strolling acrobats and players who for centuries had drifted around Paris and the French countryside. Here, many years later, the circus is resurrected as a metaphor for life.

Through the end Picasso makes a tour de force - three hundred and forty-seven engravings are produced: complex constructions on varied and interrelated subjects, such as 'circuses', 'bullfights', 'Commedia dell'Arte', and 'Spanish literature'. Series culminates in a group of erotic scenes of lovemaking - explicit but full of humor. In order to be able to work with full freedom and concentration, Picasso had his printers, the brothers Crommelynck, bring the etching plates and hand press to his house to Mougins, near Cannes.