Yesterday, I woke up my six-year-old nephew and his grandmother of sixty in the middle of the night, and randomly asked them both to name an artist.
Their answer was the same – “Picasso!” (although with much less enthusiasm, considering the hour)
This great artist has become an undying name for, of course art enthusiasts, but also regular people. So is the impact of the mark of brilliance that his works cast upon the world.
From the heart-wrenchingly melancholic depiction of a blind man holding an instrument in the Old Guitarist which he painted during his Blue Period, to the outstandingly realistic isolation of street performers in his Family of Saltimbanques during the Pink Period – Picasso was relentless in his creation of art, having committed almost 80 out of his 91 year long life to artistic production.
Especially renowned for pioneering the technique of Cubism, Picasso was a rebel in the art community who did not care to adhere to the traditional artistic techniques. This liberated attitude led him to come up with an entirely new and different way of envisioning the world.
Traditional art used to imitate the existence of everything in its natural form through textures, shapes, shadows etc., therefore adamantly imitating nature itself, but the genius of Picasso created almost a completely new vision of the world, showcasing reality in fragments of two-dimension. For clearer understanding, here’s what Picasso did :
And boy, did he do it with absolute magnificence.
His revolutionary technique of Cubism can be best witnessed in his most famous painting, Guernica which presented one of the most chilling depictions of post-war horror. The painting is based on the 1937 Nazi bombing of the town of Guernica in northern Spain, ordered by General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. The town was also allegedly free of any eligible fighters and was only occupied by unarmed civilians, an approximate 1600 of whom were killed during the bombing. The painting consists of a fragmented two-dimensional agonising display of running, screaming and dying adults, children and animals.
The more you delve into Picasso’s works, the more they dive into the endless spectrum of your emotions, causing ripples in each and every corner and crevice of your being.
And if all that is not enough to make you lose your breath, try saying Monsieur Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso’s full name in one go without running out of breath. We weren’t lying when we said unending.
Written by Ravgun Kaur
