He was still busy painting like the Impressionist Toulouse-Lautrec. Cubism, the twentieth century’s new revolutionary art formula, which the public was also to hoot at, was almost on its way in, though Picasso, who was to lead Cubism, didn’t know it yet. Impressionism, the great nineteenth century iconoclastic art movement, which the public had greeted with jeers, was then on its highly respectable way out. A few months later he was received at the Madrid Academy for a year then, three years later, in 1900, he went to Paris, centre of European art. Young Pablo’s connection with his father’s institution was that of a passing prodigy who at the age of fifteen completed in one day the competitive art examination which older students were given a month for. His mother’s people were silversmiths, originally from Genoa his father, of Basque origin, became drawing teacher at the estimable Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts, which, had it known what the son was in future to paint, would not have thought it fine or art. Toklas, says a friend of hers said Picasso looks like a handsome bootblack. Miss Gertrude Stein’s friend, Miss Alice B. Even in recent years, when seen sitting prosperous and unoccupied in a Left Bank café, he has retained a look of sombre isolation and of a man devoted to work. When he first came to Paris, as a Spanish youth of nineteen, he dressed as a laboring man because of poverty and a preference for the picturesque. His pictures, like hand-painted gilt-edged stocks, have followed a rising graph of their own he has influenced a generation of painters who copied what they understood of him and he has influenced a public which has bought him without always understanding any part of him. Commercially he has become the costliest painter alive and aesthetically he has remained the most influential. For the past twenty-five years, Pablo Ruiz y Picasso has been the most talked-of and written-about artist on earth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |