Great Artists

Pablo Picasso

EARLY LIFE

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881. He was highly gifted and could draw beautifully by the time he was 14. He went to Paris in 1900 and began his career painting scenes in sidewalk cafés. He also painted landscapes, still lifes (everyday objects), and portraits of friends and performers. Living on the edge of poverty in Paris, he met Fernande Olivier. She was the first of several women who shared his life and provided inspiration for his art.

THE BLUE PERIOD, CUBISM, AND AFTER

For two years, from 1901 to 1903, Picasso painted only in shades of blue. Many of the people in his blue paintings look sad. A rose period followed the blue period. During the rose period, he painted people from the circus in shades of red and pink. Then he became interested in African art and simplified the shapes in his paintings.

In 1907, Picasso shocked the world with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Ladies of Avignon). In this painting, he broke up the women’s figures into ovals, almonds, and other shapes. He carried the distortion of objects even further with cubism. Lines, angles, and planes collided in his cubist paintings. During his cubist period, Picasso invented collage by pasting newspaper, pieces of cloth, and other materials onto his paintings.

Cubism influenced many 20th-century artists, but Picasso didn’t stop here. He was restless, always experimenting. Yet he returned to certain subjects over and over—the bullfight, the painter and his model, portraits, and landscapes. In the 1930s, he reacted to political events. The painting Guernica was Picasso's response to the bombing of a Spanish town during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

Picasso continued to create paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and prints after Guernica. But many people consider this painting to be his masterpiece. He died in 1973.

PICASSO’S INFLUENCE

Artists everywhere, of all types, give Picasso credit for anticipating just about everything the 20th century had to say in art. He freed painting from reproducing objects as they look. He freed sculpture from using only traditional materials, such as wood and metal. Picasso made sculptures from many materials, much as he made collages.

You can see Picasso’s art in museums all over the world. A Picasso sculpture that stands outdoors in downtown Chicago has become a city landmark.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci excelled as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. He had endless curiosity. Leonardo wanted to understand how things worked. He wanted to put down on paper what he saw. He left thousands of pages of drawings and notes that recorded his thoughts.

GOOD AT EVERYTHING

Leonardo was born in 1452 in the small town of Vinci, near Florence, Italy. He had little schooling and was largely self-taught.

Leonardo seemed to be good at everything he tried. He was handsome, a good speaker, and a fine musician. He trained as a painter with Andrea del Verrocchio, a leading artist in Florence. Leonardo later worked for dukes and kings.

HIS MOST FAMOUS PAINTINGS

Leonardo produced a relatively small number of paintings, and he left some of them unfinished. But he had original ideas that influenced Italian artists long after his death. Leonardo believed painting was a science. He applied scientific thinking in his art so that his paintings looked more like the real world. One of his most important painting techniques was sfumato, a blending of one area of color into another so there are no sharp outlines.

Leonardo used sfumato in one of his most famous paintings, the Mona Lisa. When you look at this portrait, notice how colors shade into each other on her face and hands. See how Leonardo has blurred the edges of her mouth to give her the hint of a smile. This mysterious smile has fascinated people for centuries. It looks as if Mona Lisa’s expression might change at any moment because of the way Leonardo has softened the edges of the mouth, eyes, and cheeks. She seems almost alive.

Many people consider a mural by Leonardo known as The Last Supper to be his masterpiece. Christ, seated in the middle of The Last Supper, has just announced that one of his 12 apostles will betray him. Leonardo places the figures in this painting in a way that increases the drama of the announcement. Christ is the calm center. His body, which is set slightly apart from the others, forms a stable triangle. The apostles are arranged in four groups, some leaning toward Christ and some leaning away. Their gestures and the expressions on their faces reveal their reactions to Christ’s words.

HIS DRAWINGS AND NOTEBOOKS

Drawing was Leonardo’s favorite tool. He said that drawing was a better way of communicating ideas than words were. He drew catapults and war machines. He drew the muscles and skeletons of human beings and other animals. He drew clouds, swirling water, and storms. He designed churches that were never built.

Leonardo’s drawings and theories are contained in numerous notebooks. His ideas were far in advance of what other people were thinking at the time. But the notebooks were not published during his lifetime. Had his notebooks been published, they might have revolutionized scientific thinking in the 1500s. Leonardo’s deep love of research was the key to both his artistic and scientific endeavors. Leonardo died in 1519.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo was an artist of extraordinary ability. He is known primarily as an outstanding painter and sculptor, but he was also an accomplished architect and poet. He had a forceful personality as well.

HE LOVED A CHALLENGE

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in Caprese, a village in Italy, in 1475. He grew up in Florence, the artistic center of Europe during the 1400s. At 13, he began to train as a painter.

Michelangelo believed that the nude (naked) male figure was the most important subject in art, and he loved a challenge. He preferred to create art that required hard work. For example, he carved blocks of marble that other sculptors had rejected, and he created enormous paintings on very high ceilings. In painting, he chose to put his figures in poses that were especially difficult to draw. In carving, he cut away the stone in a way that seemed to release a human figure trapped inside.

HIS BEST WORK

Michelangelo’s early sculptures made him famous. His Pietà shows the dead Christ lying in his mother’s lap. Michelangelo emphasizes Christ’s suffering through the limp, frail body that is cradled by the Virgin Mary. Michelangelo carved a huge statue of the biblical hero David. It shows the strong, young David calmly holding the slingshot he is about to use to slay the giant warrior Goliath. The city of Florence displayed the statue of David as a symbol of its political strength.

Michelangelo’s greatest challenge was to paint the gigantic ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. To paint the Sistine Ceiling, he had to lie on his back on a wooden platform high in the air. It took him nearly four years, but Michelangelo created some of the most memorable images of all time. The Sistine Ceiling tells the biblical story of the Book of Genesis. It begins with the creation of the world and finishes with the story of Noah. It contains almost 350 painted human figures, all of them larger than life-size.

Later, Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, on a wall above the altar. This mural is filled with swirling nude bodies. Some rise from the grave to heaven. Others descend in agony to hell. Michelangelo’s greatest architectural work was a design for the dome of Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome.

Michelangelo died in 1564. He had an enormous influence on European artists of his time and on those who came after him. After Michelangelo, artists competed with each other in painting the human body in difficult poses.

Vincent van Gogh

Was there ever a more tortured genius than the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh? He lived in poverty, sold only one painting during his life, and cut off his ear. He created masterpieces of art, yet his life was miserable.

SUPPORTED BY HIS BROTHER

Vincent van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert, The Netherlands, in 1853. He thought he might become a minister like his father. For a time, he preached to poor miners, and then he began to draw them. He was mostly self-taught as an artist.

Van Gogh’s brother Théo was an art dealer in Paris, France. Théo gave Vincent an allowance and was Vincent’s only source of support. In 1886, Vincent went to live with Théo in Paris. In Paris, Vincent saw the bright colors of paintings by the impressionist artists, and he began to paint with bright colors, too.

PAINTING WHAT HE FELT

Van Gogh created self-portraits and paintings of flowers and scenery. His colors became even more brilliant after he moved to southern France in 1888. He portrayed his own room in Bedroom at Arles in bright yellow, blue, and red. However, no one liked his paintings.

No other artist had painted quite like van Gogh. He used vivid color and thick strokes of paint to express his feelings about what he was painting. He didn’t try to copy his subjects accurately. Often his work seems brooding and threatening. His landscapes are full of twisted shapes.

Always moody and restless, van Gogh began showing signs of mental illness in the late 1880s. After an argument with his friend, painter Paul Gauguin, van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. But he never stopped painting. Some of his most beautiful work was done while he was hospitalized for depression. Examples are Starry Night and Crows in a Wheatfield.

SUCCESS AT LAST

Van Gogh died in 1890, after shooting himself. He left behind 750 paintings and 1,600 drawings. Théo van Gogh made sure they stayed safe, and gradually people began to appreciate these works. They became extremely valuable. In 1990, a van Gogh painting sold for $82.5 million. This was the highest price anyone had ever paid for a painting at an art auction. But in 2004, a painting by Pablo Picasso set a new record of $104 million.