Picasso's Accomplishments

3016 Words7 Pages

Born October 25, 1881 in Málaga Spain, Pablo Picasso was destined for great achievements and becoming an inspiration for future artists and movements. Beginning in late 1901, Picasso began the so-called Blue period, which ended in 1904. The works within the Blue period provide a view of the creator coming into his own. It was a brilliant expression of poetic subtlety and personal melancholy and contributes to the transition of Picasso's style from classicism to abstract art. While monochromatic, these early paintings by Picasso are far from simple: they are layered and complex, typically rich with symbolic color, exaggerated form, and abstracted spaces. The uniformity of the works created was remarkable because his life during these years was …show more content…

The prison was, in some regards, the product of the social circumstances of turn-of-the-century Paris. Desperate poverty had provoked extensive prostitution, which in turn caused the spread of venereal diseases. This inevitably led to further desperate poverty and many of the inmates at the Saint Lazare prison were ex-prostitutes suffering from such diseases. Picasso's Mother and Child depicts on aspect of such incarceration that particularly disturbed the artist—the presence of children in the prison. The mother, identifiable as a Saint Lazare inmate by her white bonnet, is represented as a humble figure whose reduced form conveys a sense of overall despair. Also, Picasso’s Saint-Lazare Woman by Moonlight (5) is a typical work of this period depicting great loneliness and suffering, enveloped in the gloom of a nocturnal blue. Picasso wanted to paint the way a poet seeks the exact combination of words. Stripping this inmate down to the bare essentials, avoiding all story telling and allowing no unnecessary distractions giving ideological power to the subject. Blue was chosen deliberately — deep and cold, signifying misery and despair — to intensify the hopelessness of the figures depicted, such as beggars, prostitutes, the blind, out-of-work actors and circus folk, as well as Picasso himself and his penniless

Open Document