October 25, 1881 is the birth date of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the man whom many consider to be the greatest painter of the 20 century.  It’s not uncommon to hear him referred to as the “founder of abstraction” or the “father of modern art” based on the extent of his artistic influence. Any of these titles would be preferable to actually spelling out his full name, which is Pablo Diego Jose Fransisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso. Possibly the first sign of the artist’s genius was his decision to simply sign the condensed “Picasso” on his paintings.  

What is remarkable about Picasso is his artistic success both as a cubist and as a realist. Before venturing into abstraction, Picasso went through what are known as his “blue” and “red” periods, and those paintings were usually moody portraits of clowns, prostitutes, beggars, and outcasts. Soon after, he became fascinated with ancient sculpture, and saw in it the potential for modernization – despite the fractured dimensionality of his cubist works, they managed to maintain the austere nobility of Greek anatomical sculptors. Cubism was, in a sense, the next logical step from impressionism in that it was painting from the mind’s eye rather than the objective eye, but rather than restricting itself to blurring objects and shifting the colors of a scene, as Monet did, it fractured the entire form of the objects in a scene – for example, a human figure in a cubist piece might be visible from the front and back at the same time, because the artist would break that figure into several pieces and view them from several angles, but still maintain the basic shape of a human body.  Never comfortable for long working in one mode, Picasso moved beyond cubism to sculpture, printing, and other art movements, leaving an indelible mark on all of them.  

Guernica, generally thought to be Picasso’s greatest work, and undoubtedly one of his largest, is truly a sight to behold. In stark black and white, Picasso depicts a scene of grotesque horror, animals and people alike twisted into bizarre shapes by the acuteness of their suffering. It was a depiction of a bombing perpetrated by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, meant to condemn both the savagery of the bombing itself as well as Franco’s militaristic government control of Spain, and rather than showing us a “scene,” with an obvious storyline, Picasso shows us only an abstract palette of chaos and suffering. “In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death,” Picasso said of the work. The richly symbolic painting has religious and mythological overtones, as do many other of Picasso’s great works.  

 While on the one hand we can thank Picasso for what he gave to the world of art after all, he helped to lay down the aesthetic foundations for one of the most remarkable centuries art has ever seen - there is the simultaneous consideration of what he took away from it. In fostering a completely distinct outlook on art, he inspired countless artists who were far less talented to pursue their own distinct visions, and today the backlash against the “meaninglessness” of modern art is stronger than it has ever been. Outside of the academic circle, few have any interest in the purpose of a sink glued to a wall, a black dot on a white canvas, or a pile of garbage bags, because they appear to be nothing more than pretentious nonsense. Picasso’s works set themselves apart from this sort of thing by the fact that even though he was a modernist, he was an extremely gifted painter in the technical sense. He was a master of detail, form, and color, seeing just as much importance in the beauty of his paintings as in their meaning, and he drew from a diverse pool of influences, from Greek artists to Iberian Sculptors to French Impressionists, trying to find a way to accurately depict the horror, strangeness, and remarkable progressions of the 20th century. I would say that any artist who claims to follow his example should share the same considerations of both beauty and meaning – maybe abstract painting, at that point, would find a warmer reception amongst those who are not “art patrons.”

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