ARTSEDGE: Don Quixote: Making Connections to the Arts: The Visual Arts

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The Visual Arts: Picasso

Time Magazine honored Pablo Picasso as one of the top 100 influential artists of the twentieth century. Art Critic, Robert Hughes writes:

"To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso's audience--meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work, at least in reproduction--was in the tens, possibly hundreds, of millions. He and his work were the subjects of unending analysis, gossip, dislike, adoration and rumor. To read more, visit the Time Magazine site directly by clicking here.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907.
Oil on canvas,8' x 7' 8" (243.9 x 223.7 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

"Kirk Varnedoe: Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is one of the most important paintings in the genesis of modern art. Both in style and in subject matter, it represents a radical departure from traditional modes of representation. The painting depicts five female prostitutes in a brothel--figures composed of flat, splintered planes rather than portrayed as rounded volumes in space. Arms raised above their heads, they strike seductive poses, yet their looks violate all standard conventions of beauty. The middle figure and the one to her left gaze out with wide-eyed stares...and the two women at the right confront the viewer with threatening masks." To read more about this painting, click here.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Family of Saltimbanques, 1905.
Oil on canvas, 2.128 x 2.296 m (83 3/4 x 90 3/8 in.) .
Chester Dale Collection
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

"Circus performers were regarded as social outsiders, poor but independent. As such, they provided a telling symbol for the alienation of avant-garde artists such as Picasso. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Family of Saltimbanques serves as an autobiographical statement, a covert group portrait of Picasso and his circle. Picasso reworked the Family of Saltimbanques several times, adding figures and altering the composition. The figures occupy a desolate landscape and although Picasso has knit them together in a carefully balanced composition, each figure is psychologically isolated from the others, and from the viewer. In his rose, or circus period, Picasso moved away from the extreme pathos of his earlier blue period, but in the Family of Saltimbanques, the masterpiece of the circus period, a mood of introspection and sad contemplation prevails. " Visit the National Gallery of Art's site directly for more details on this painting.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Harlequin with Violin, 1918
The Cleveland Museum of Art

During their close association from 1909 to 1914, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque created Cubism, the most influential art movement of the 20th century. On their canvases they presented objects from various points of view, flattened and broken into individual planes. Harlequin with Violin ("Si tu veux") is an example of Synthetic Cubism, which combined, or synthesized, recognizable elements from real life with Cubism's innovative representation of space. The broad nose and round, dark eye in the mask suggest that Picasso cast himself in his favorite role as Harlequin in this painting. The title of the sheet of music that the figure holds derives from a popular song from the period, which begins: "Si tu veux, Marguerite, faire mon bonheur, donne-moi ton coeur" (If you will, Marguerite, make my happiness, give me your heart)." To learn more about this painting, visit the Cleveland Museum of Art's site directly by clicking here.