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Picasso’s Shocking Paintings
By peace | October 3, 2010
Portrait of Fernande Olivier (1909)
Picasso painted Portrait of Fernande Olivier in 1909. Between the spring and fall of 1909, he painted more than 60 pictures of Olivier. In Cubism, he used geometric shapes to show empty and filled space in pictures.
In 1907, Picasso painted the biggest painting he had ever done: eight feet tall and eight feet wide. It showed five women, one whose head looked like it was on backward. The painting was called Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (The Girls of Avignon).
The painting was really wild by the standards of the day. The 5 women in the painting look very angular and distorted. They are ugly. They seem to be breaking into pieces. People thought the painting should look more real. This was upsetting and shocking. No one had ever done a painting like it. Creating it changed Picasso’s understanding of painting. Picasso had taken many months to paint this picture. He had done many, many sketches for it (809). He knew he was breaking all the rules, but he was trying to paint the women from more than one angel at a time as if the viewer was seeing from many different sides all at once. Everyone hated it. One critic said it was ‘the work of a madman.’ Picasso put it away and did not show it again for 9 years.
Today, it has been called the first modern 20th century painting. Picasso had found a new way of seeing.
In 1907, Picasso met Georges Braque, a French artist. Braque and Picasso did still life paintings, landscapes, and portraits. Both men were interested in painting a subject from more than one angle in the same picture. They tried breaking up images into geometric shapes. They both used only a few colours and broke up objects in the paintings into cubes and geometric shapes. The 2 men became friends and decided to work together. Picasso said,”I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” Critic Louis Vauxcelles saw Braque’s work in 1908 and described it by using the word “Cubist“. Soon the art style that Braque and Picasso started became known as Cubism.
Picasso and Braque were the first modern artists to use the art form of collage. The word comes from the French word coller, which means ‘to glue”. To make a collage, an artist pastes objects onto paper or canvas. Still Life with Chair Caning is an early collage by Picasso.
Of all the important artwork that Picasso created in his life, it was cubism that made him famous. At first people were shocked by cubism. They had never seen anything like it. But soon people realized they liked it. Picasso said,”I knew we were painting strange things, but the world seemed a strange place to us.”
By 1911, Picasso and Fernande Olivier were no longer together. That year, Picasso met Eva Gouel Humbert, who became his girlfriend. He began adding nicknames for Humbert into paintings. By 1912, he was adding more than words. He glued other items, such as cuttings from newspapers, strings, labels, sand and nails to his work.
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Topics: All Posts, Arts, Famous People, Gallery | 6 Comments »
October 6th, 2010 at 10:29 pm
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October 7th, 2010 at 5:51 am
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October 7th, 2010 at 6:26 am
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October 8th, 2010 at 9:48 am
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October 8th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
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December 2nd, 2010 at 7:47 am
[...] The first time I taught him this word,”Owl” was when we were watching Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as shown below at YouTube. The next time, whenever there are opportunity, I would tell him about this word again in poster or book. But to show him photographs of owls are so rare. In Youtube, what we see is just drawing of the owl, and I am so surprise that he can figure out real owls (photographs from books) based on shapes! [...]