Pablo Picasso As A Pioneer Of Cubism

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish sculptor, ceramicist, and painter born in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881. He was considered to be one of the most influential artists of the 20th century (Samuel, 2010) as he carved the path to a new revolutionary style of modern art, the cubism art movement. By challenging conventional art of drawing real-life form, Pablo Picasso took a giant leap in transforming art and the world. Some of Picasso’s artwork such as the “Girl with Mandolin”,” Three Musicians”, and “Three Women” depicts his revolutionary style.

Picasso showed extraordinary talent in his early years, painting in a creative temperament, where the lines are astonishingly solid, and the image undoubtedly bears the “mark of the artist individuality” (Micheli, 1967). Picasso’s early work were so astonishing that Picasso’s parent did not refuse the idea of allowing Picasso to pursue an artistic career (Micheli, 1967). In 1895, he began studying in the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. In 1897, he was enrolled in The Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Spain’s top art academy at that time.

Before the era of cubism, painters paint from their one point of reference, however this is not the case as we interact with the real life object (Croiser, 2002). Life is complex and can only be represented in multiple vantage points. For example “we might see a tree off in the distance, and as we approach it, our perspective of the tree changes” (Croiser, 2002). Pablo Picasso recognised this fact and were searching ways to portray real life fully in 2d planes. He started pushing boundaries, defying what art was at that time by painting the subject from multiple perspectives (Barcio, 2016). Pablo Picasso also used monochromatic colour spaces and simple geometric shapes in his artworks which create flatness to imply that all perspectives are equal. These approaches create “simultaneous depiction of many views on a single picture surface” (Gambardella, 2012). These era of experimenting and innovations are called the ‘analytical cubism’ and are considered to run from 1908 to 1912.

After Pablo Picasso invented the ‘analytic cubism’ in 1912, he continued experimenting with his works, in a phase often identified as ‘synthetic cubism’, attempting to create something even more realistic, something that can portray real life which was in that time “complex and ambiguous” (Miami Dade College, n.d.). Picasso started incorporating everyday scraps such as newspapers or magazines as his materials, which gives a critical sense of reality (Barcio, 2016). He also started reintroducing depth and vibrant colour spaces back into his works which gives a sense of excitement and playfulness that is absent in his early cubism works (Barcio, 2016). These methods create an effect of ‘ambiguity’ in the mind of the viewer, expressing the contradiction between illusion and the reality (Markus, 1996).