Pablo Picasso Changed The Way We Look At Art Essays - Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso Changed The Way We Look At Art Muldoon 1 Picasso Changed the Way We Look at Art There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. -Pablo Picasso Picasso had not always been so enlightened with the fact that there was more to art than the eye could see. During the course of his ninety-one year life, Picasso encountered many ideas and people that helped form the wonderfully talented and brilliant artist in history. Picasso was born Pablo Ruiz on October 25th 1881, in Malaga, Spain. His father was a inspiring artist while his mother took care of the house. Picasso had shown a great artistic talent in his early childhood years. At 14 years old, Picasso adopted his mother's less common name. Changing Ruiz to Picasso. Shortly after this event, Picasso had finished his one month qualification exam into the Acadamy of the Arts in Barcelona. The only exceptional thing about this was that Picasso had done this in one day. Picasso stayed with the acadamy for three years, before deciding to move to San Fernando where he would then attend the Acadamy of San Fernando until the turn of the century. Picasso then joined up with the group of aspiring artists. Pablo Picasso was probably the most famous artist of the twentieth century. During his artistic career, which lasted more than 75 years, he created thousands of works, not only paintings but also sculptures, prints, and ceramics, using all kinds of materials. He almost single-handedly created modern art. He changed art more profoundly than any other artist of this century. First famous for his pioneering role in Cubism, Picasso continued to develop his art with a pace and vitality comparable to the accelerated technological and cultural changes of the twentieth century. Each change embodied a radical new idea, and it might be said that Picasso lived several artistic lifetimes. Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain, son of an artist, Jose Ruiz, and Maria Picasso. Rather than adopt the common name Ruiz, the young Picasso took the rarer name of his mother. An artistic prodigy, Picasso, at the age of 14, completed the one-month qualifying examination of the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona in one day. From there he went to the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, returning in 1900 to Barcelona, where he frequented the city's famous cabaret of intellectuals and artists, Els Quatre Gats. The years of 1901 to 1904, known as the blue period because of the blue tonality of Picasso's paintings were a time of frequent changes of residence between Barcelona and Paris. During this period, he would spend his days in Paris studying the masterworks at the Louvre and his nights enjoying the company of fellow artists at cabarets like the Lapin Agile. 1905 and 1906 marked a radical change in color and mood for Picasso. He became fascinated with the acrobats, clowns and wandering families of the circus world. He started to paint in subtle pinks and grays, often highlighted with brighter tones. This was known as his rose period. In 1907, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, considered the watershed picture of the twentieth century, and met Georges Braque, the other leading figure of the Cubist movement. Cubism was equally the creation of Picasso and Braque and from 1911 to 1913, the two men were in frequent contact. In 1917, Picasso did the set and costume design for Serge Diaghilev's ballet Parade. For Picasso the 1920's were years of rich artistic exploration and great productivity. Picasso continued to design theater sets and painted in Cubist, Classical and Surreal modes. From 1929 to 1931, he pioneered wrought iron sculpture with his old friend Julio Gonzalez. In the early 1930's, Picasso did a large quantity of graphic illustrations. In late April of 1937, the world learned the shocking news of the saturation bombing of the civilian target of Guernica, Spain by the Nazi Luftwaffe. Picasso responded with his great anti-war painting, Guernica. During World War II, Picasso lived in Paris, where he turned his energy to the art of ceramics. From 1947 to 1950, he pursued new methods of lithography. The l950's saw the beginning

Stegners View of the True Hero of the West essays

Stegners View of the True Hero of the West essays The West -" home on the range where the deer and the antelope play; where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the sky is not cloudy all day."" The romantic idea of the land west of the hundredth meridian has often inspired songs and poetry, like this one, about idyllic conditions in this dry "paradise."" Often these ideas did not prove to be completely accurate, and a very few people attempted to present the facts to the public to dispel the romantic ideas of an effortless existence in these western lands. John Wesley Powell was one of these people. Wallace Stegner viewed Powell as a champion for science and one of the true heroes of this time because he did not follow the romantic ideas that so many of his contemporaries held about settlement in the West. One of the men Stegner presented as the epitome of Western romanticism was the Honorable William Gilpin, who eventually became the first territorial governor of Colorado. Throughout Stegner's book, he used Gilpin as a contrast to Powell, who represented science. Gilpin was the example of the people that Stegner believed to be enamored with the idea of the West as a huge frontier, able to support millions, without looking at the facts and examining the situation from a scientist's point of view. He pointed out several differences in Powell and Gilpin that illustrate how he believed Powell to be the hero, even though he was never recognized as one, and Gilpin to be a dreamer. Stegner gave several examples to prove that the loudest promoters of settlement were often ignorant of the lands in which they lived, which proved that they were in fact, unable to determine whether the West was ready to be settled. One of the examples Stegner used was the fact that Gilpin believed all Indian tribes to be the same. In his zeal to promote Western settlement, he made the statement that with settlement in these lands came a unity of the people of the United States. Native Americ...