Доклад: Пабло Пикассо
PABLO PICASSO
On the 25th of October in 1881 a little boy was born in Malaga, Spain.
It was a difficult birth. And to help him breathe, cigar smoke was blown
into his nose! But despite being the youngest ever smoker, this baby
grew up to be one of the 20th century greatest painters – Pablo Picasso.
Picasso showed his truly exceptional talent from a very young age. His
first word was “lapiz” (Spanish for “pencil”) and he learned to draw
before he could talk. He was the only son in the family and very
good-looking, so he was thoroughly spoilt. He hated school and often
refused to go unless his doting parents allowed him to take one of his
father’s pet pigeons with him!
Besides the pigeons, his great love was art, and when in 1891 his
father, who was an amateur artist, got job as a drawing teacher at a
college, Pablo went painting and sometimes was allowed to help. One
evening his father was painting a picture of their pigeons when he had
to leave the room. He returned to find that Pablo had completed the
picture, and it was so amazingly beautiful and lifelike that he gave his
son his own palette and brushes and never painted again. Pablo was just
13.
Since that time nothing could stop him. Many people realized that he was
a genius but he disappointed those of them who wanted him to become a
traditional painter. He was always breaking the rules of artistic
tradition and shocked the public with his strange and powerful pictures.
He is probably best known for his “Cubist” pictures, which used only
simple geometric shapes. His paintings of people were often made up of
triangles and squares with their features in the wrong place. His work
changed our ideas about art, and to millions of people modern art means
the work of Picasso.
“Guernica”, which he painted in 1937, records the bombing of that little
Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. The town called Guernica was
totally ruined and over 2000 women, children and old people died. This
crime of the fascists had shocked Picasso so strongly, that he created
“Guernica”. It was a very big canvas, its size was 28 squared meters.
The tragic feeling of death, distuction and despair was passed by the
artist using some image-symbols and figures of people as if they had
been torn into a hundred of pieces. Once during the occupation a
fascist’s officer entered Picasso’s workshop and as he noticed the
reproduction of this picture he asked, “Did you do this?” The artist
answered, “No, you did this!” “Guernica” has become the symbol of horror
and death brought by the fascists and the symbol of the humanistic
protest against inhumanity. Undisputedly, “Guernica” is one of the
masterpieces of the modern art. Nowadays it is housed in the Modern Art
Museum , New-York.
But not all the pictures painted by Picasso were so strange. He also
painted pictures, which could be understood by an ordinary person. One
of those was the sketch “The Mother and the Baby” (1904). The tenderness
of the mother and the touching helplessness of the baby are just
splendid! In the mother’s feeling there was anxiety and sadness, fear of
losing happiness, fear because of the baby’s fate. That is why her face
was so mournful and the touch of her hands so careful. Even the lines of
the drawing were making the mood of love and anxiety.
“The Mother and the Baby” is now saved in the Fogg Museum, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in the USA.
So, why is Picasso so different in his pictures, so that sometimes it’s
hard to believe that these paintings were made by the same artist? Why
do some of his pictures touch the spectator at once, and the others seem
to be strange, incomprehensible, difficult? Why do the images of
Picasso’s pictures are sometimes poetic, garmonic and sometimes
frightening, ugly? Pablo Picasso said, “I want to represent the world in
the way I think of it”.
Picasso created over 6000 paintings, drawings and sculptures. Today a
“Picasso” costs several million pounds. Once, when the French Minister
of Culture was visiting Picasso, the artist accidentally split some
paint on the Minister’s trousers. Picasso apologized and wanted to pay
for them to be cleaned, but the Minister said, “Non! Please just sign my
trousers!”
Picasso died of a heart failure during an attack of influenza in 1973.
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