Pablo Picasso....can't believe I just missed being born in his lifetime!!!

The most well known artist & sculptor of the last quarter of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso (25/10/1881- 08/04/1973} can only be described as a genius!!! 

I think my first exposure to art must have been associated with his name, because even though not knowing who he was, I had heard quite a bit about him & his work.

Picasso was a maverick who embodied many different styles in his work & together with Matisse, co-founded the Cubist form of art. He started off very early, painting realistically in his childhood & gradually evolved into an artist with new techniques & ideas. He rebelled against art as a studied discipline & chose his own path & methods. After finishing his art studies in Madrid, he moved to Paris where he struggled for quite sometime but eventually found wealthy patrons who believed in his work & he also made a lot of friends. He began to acquire a lot of wealth & estates but remained fiercely independent even refusing to cower down to the Germans during the 2nd World war when his art was not accepted.

With his friend & art rival Matisse, he co-founded the Cubist art movement wherein the objects painted were broken up & analysed in terms of their shapes. This was done to depict objects from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. This kind of art became well known in the early 1900's & is used in paintings & sculptures even today.

Although he was very famous as an artist, Picasso was also very well known for his colourful personal life having had a string of wives & mistresses. This often diverted attention from his work but nevertheless, he continued to create & dabble in different mediums & style. He was very prolific in his work, having created 50,000 pieces of artwork in his lifetime which grace homes, museums & public places all over the world today.

This blog, is my personal tribute to a great artist, a man whose work has inspired me enough to take up art seriously & to think differently!!!