Pablo Picasso Essay, Research Paper

No artist has dominated the 20th century in the way Pablo Picasso has. This extraordinarily gifted Spanish artist, working most of his life in France, produced a voluminous body of work in a variety of styles that influenced nearly every major trend of the first half of this century. When Picasso painted The Old Guitarist 1903, the young and struggling artist was following in the footsteps of Toulouse Lautrec and other modern artists. His subjects were society’s outcasts, lonely figures whom he rendered in an all-pervasive blue

that creates a melancholy mood. During the first two years of Picasso s blue period he was preoccupied with pathetic women. Picasso later went on to paint more depressing male figures during his blue period. These men were not only indigent, but blind, psychotic, mentally defective, or elderly (The Old Guitarist is a famous example.) It was in these figures that Picasso returned more empathetically to the extremely mannered, angular style which he had abandoned temporarily in his portrait work.