Who was Pablo Picasso?
A: Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker,
ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France.
One of the most influential artists of the 20th
century, he is known for co-founding what?
A: The Cubist movement, the
invention of constructed sculpture, the
co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped
develop and explore.
Among his most famous works are what?
A: The Proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and the anti-war
painting Guernica (1937).
Picasso demonstrated extraordinary in his early years?
A: Artistic talent, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood
and adolescence.
During the first decade of the 20th century, his style
changed as he experimented with what?
A: Different theories, techniques, and ideas.
After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older
artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore what?
A: More radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two
artists.
They were subsequently often paired by critics as what?
A: The leaders of modern art.
While the names of many of his later periods are
debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are what?
A: The Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the
African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and
Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the
Crystal period.
Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early
1920s is in what style?
A: A neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has
characteristics of Surrealism.
His later work often combines elements of what?
A: His earlier styles.
When was Picasso born?
A: On 25 October 1881.
Where was he born?
A: In the city of Málaga, Andalusia, in southern
Spain.
He was the first child of whom?
A: Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.
Picasso's family was from what type of background?
A: A middle-class background.
Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from
when?
A: An early age.
According to his mother, his first words were "piz,
piz", a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for what?
A: "pencil".
From the age of seven, Picasso received what?
A: Formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil
painting.
Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor,
who believed what?
A: That proper training required disciplined copying of the masters and
drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models.
His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of
what?
A: His classwork.
The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father
became what?
A: A professor at the School of Fine Arts.
On one occasion, the father found his son painting over
his unfinished sketch of a what?
A: A pigeon.
Observing the precision of his son's technique, an
apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had
surpassed him and vowed what?
A: To give up painting, though paintings by him exist from later years.