Artist Showdown

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1974) was a spanish artist whose name is almost synonymous with 20th century art. No artist was ever as famous as Picasso was in his own lifetime, or has been since. The controversies over his personality, arrogance, affairs with younger women, and unwillingness to be classified in the art world only added to his fame. And without a doubt Picasso was a true genius - able to create incredibly complex and powerful paintings with a few strokes of the brush, or capture the essence of someone’s face from many different angles all at once. Most of all Picasso was an individualist. He was a founder of art movements,such as Cubism, but paradoxically refused to do what other people did, and whenever the art world caught up with him and thought they knew what to expect, he would change completely and surprise them. A child prodigy, Picasso was as skilled in realist portraits as in expressionist symbolism. He was also incredibly proficient, especially near the end of his life, when he would often complete three paintings in one day. It was as if he believed he could delay his death through painting. At the time many of these works were dismissed, in the words of Douglas Cooper, as “the incoherent scribblings of a frenetic old man”. It wasn’t until long after picasso’s death that critics took a new look at his later works and realized that Picasso had invented neo-expressionism and was, as usual, decades ahead of his time.