Erick Olaiz
Professor Barragan
Spanish 1
November 29, 2011
Artistic Innovator “What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” (Picasso, 2010) These are the words of Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973). Picasso was said to be the art innovator of the twentieth century. He was known for being a multi-talented artist in his time, anything from painting to stage design he would do. “His artwork collection has been estimated to be a little over 50,000 pieces of art”. Picasso’s work was categorized in periods like, Blue Period (1901-1904), Rose Period (1905-1907), African-Influenced Period (1908-1909), Analytic Cubism (1909-1912), and his Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919). Those are the accepted periods of his work, unfortunately his later years were not put into periods due to the amount of debate there was in naming them. Picasso had a very successful career, but like any other successful person he had to work his way to the top. Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in the city of Magala October 25, 1898. His parents were Maria Picasso Lopez and Don Jose Ruiz Blasco. His father was an art professor at the School of Crafts and also a part time curator of a museum near them. Around the age of seven, Picasso’s father started giving him personal art lessons in figure drawing and oil painting. In 1985, Picasso’s seven year old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria. This was a devastating blow to the family and led them to move to Barcelona, where his father took a teaching position at its School of Fine Arts. Once they settled in Barcelona, Picasso started to shine in the city. His father then started to persuade the academic officials to let his son take an entrance exam for the advanced class. At the time this process would take students a month to complete, but it only took Picasso a week to complete. The officials were really impressed and admitted Picasso to their school at the age of thirteen. Picasso was sent to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando by his father and uncle three years after his early acceptance to the School of Fine Arts. Picasso dropped out of the school after attending a couple classes because he didn’t like the way they taught. He stayed in Madrid for a while because of all the art it had to offer. One artist that really intrigued Picasso was El Greco. After being inspired he began to travel to different cities to see what they had to offer. “In 1900, Picasso made his first trip to the art capital of the world which was Paris, France”(Picasso, 2010). There he met another young man called Max Jacob which was a poet and journalist. Max taught Picasso understand the language and its literature. During the first five months of 1901 Picasso was forced to burn most of his artwork to keep his room warm at night. Later him and his friend Francisco de Asis founded the magazine Arte Joven (young art), which only got to publish five issues. During the publishing of these magazines Picasso went from signing his artwork as Pablo Ruiz y Picasso to just simply Picasso. By 1905, he got noticed by American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, who became fans of his artwork. Picasso painted portraits of them both and also their nephew Allan Stein. The Steins started to exhibit Picasso’s art in one of their personal salons in Paris. Through that he was able to meet more art collectors that also became instant collectors of Picasso’s work. In 1907, an art gallery was being opened in Paris by Daniel Henry Kanhweiler. Kahnweiler was art historian and collector who would end up becoming the “French premier art dealer of the twentieth century’ (Picasso, 2011). As Picasso’s art work grew in popularity so did his interest in other things that were not art, like Fernande Olivier. Picasso divided his time between