Pablo Picasso is one of the most important and outstanding artists in the history of art. He was a very prolific painter. With between 1300 and 1900 works of art created throughout his life it is difficult to choose only 10. For this article we have selected 10 of the most popular works of the artist from Malaga
1- Guernica
Guernica is perhaps Picasso’s most famous work and one of the most famous paintings in the world.
Picasso created this cubist-style oil on canvas between May 1 and June 4, 1937 in Paris, in response to a commission from the Republican government of Francisco Largo Caballero for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair.
This monumental canvas is a committed denunciation of the bombing of Guernica, which had just taken place on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish War, ordered by the Spanish Nationalists and executed by German and Italian fascist troops
Picasso’s painting, which was exhibited in many countries between 1937 and 1939, played an important role in the intense propaganda generated by the bombings and the Spanish War, and quickly acquired international fame and political significance, becoming a symbol of the denunciation of Francoist and Fascist violence, and then of the horror of war in general.
Kept throughout the Franco dictatorship in the United States at Picasso’s request, the work was transferred to Spain in 1981, where it has been kept since 1992 in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.
2- Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (originally titled The Avignon Brothel) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by Picasso. The work, which is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art , portrays five nude prostitutes in a brothel on the street of Avinyó, in Barcelona, Spain
Each of the figures is depicted in a disconcerting and confrontational manner, and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear slightly threatening and are depicted with angular, disjointed body shapes
The figure on the left has Egyptian or South Asian-style facial features and clothing. The two adjacent figures are depicted in the Iberian style of Picasso’s native Spain, while the two on the right appear with African mask-like features. The ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to “release a totally original artistic style of compelling, even savage force.”
With this adaptation of primitivism and the abandonment of perspective in favor of a two-dimensional plane, Picasso radically departs from traditional European painting. This proto-Cubist work is considered fundamental to the early development of Cubism and modern art.
This painting was revolutionary and controversial, and provoked widespread anger and disagreement, even among the painter’s closest collaborators and friends. Matisse considered the work a kind of practical joke, but reacted indirectly to it in his 1908 work Bathers with a Turtle. Georges Braque also initially disliked the painting, but perhaps more than anyone else, he studied the work in great detail
His later friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the Cubist revolution. Its resemblance to Cézanne’s The Bathers, Paul Gauguin’s Oviri Statue and El Greco’s The Opening of the Fifth Seal has been widely discussed by later critics.
At the time of its first exhibition, in 1916, the painting was considered immoral. The work, painted in Picasso’s studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, Paris, was first seen publicly at the Salon d’Antin in July 1916, in an exhibition organized by the poet André Salmon. It was at this exhibition that Salmon (who had already titled the painting in 1912 as Le bordel philosophique) renamed the work with its current, less scandalous title, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, instead of the title originally chosen by Picasso, Le Bordel d’Avignon
Picasso, who always referred to the work as mon bordel (“my brothel”), or Le Bordel d’Avignon , never liked Salmon’s title and would have preferred the bowdlerization The Girls of Avignon instead.
3- The Old Guitarist
The Old Guitarist is an oil painting by Picasso, which he created in late 1903 and early 1904. It depicts an elderly musician, an emaciated man in threadbare clothes, who is hunched over his guitar while playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.
At the time of the creation of The Old Guitarist, modernism, impressionism, post-impressionism and symbolism had greatly influenced Picasso’s style. In addition, El Greco, Picasso’s poor standard of living and the suicide of a dear friend influenced Picasso’s style at that time, which became known as his Blue Period.
Several x-rays, infrared images and examinations by conservators revealed three different figures hidden behind The Old Guitarist.
The elements of The Old Guitarist were carefully chosen to generate a reaction in the viewer. For example, the monochromatic color scheme creates flat, two-dimensional forms that disassociate the guitarist from time and place. In addition, the overall palette of muted blues creates an overall tone of melancholy and accentuates the tragic and mournful subject matter
The exclusive use of oil on board provokes a darker, more theatrical mood. The oil tends to blend the colors without diminishing the luminosity, creating an even more cohesive dramatic composition.
In addition, the guitarist, though muscular, shows few signs of life and appears to be near death, implying little comfort in the world and accentuating the misery of his situation. Details are removed and scale is manipulated to create elongated, elegant proportions, while intensifying the guitarist’s quiet contemplation and a sense of spirituality
The large brown guitar is the only significant color change found in the painting; its muted brown color, highlighted against the blue background, becomes the center and focus of attention. The guitar comes to represent the guitarist’s world and his only hope for survival
This blind and poor subject depends on his guitar and the small income he can make from his music to survive. Some art historians believe that this painting expresses the lonely life of an artist and the natural struggles that come with a career. Thus, music, or art, becomes a burden and an alienating force that isolates artists from the world. And yet, despite the isolation, the guitarist (artist) depends on the rest of society for survival
All these emotions reflect Picasso’s situation at the time and his critique of the state of society. The old guitarist becomes an allegory of human existence.
4- The Weeping Woman
The Weeping Woman (French: La Femme qui pleure) is a series of oil paintings on canvas by Pablo Picasso, the last of which was created in late 1937. The paintings depict Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover and muse
The paintings of the weeping woman were made by Picasso in response to the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War and are closely related to the iconography of his painting Guernica. Picasso was intrigued with the theme of the weeping woman, and revisited the subject on numerous occasions that year
The last version, executed on October 26, 1937, was the most elaborate of the series, and has been in the collection of the Tate Modern in London since 1987. Another painting of the weeping woman is in the National Gallery of Victoria and was implicated in a high-profile theft of political art.
5-Girl Before a mirror
Girl Before a Mirror (French: Jeune fille devant un miroir) is an oil on canvas painted by Picasso in 1932
The painting is a portrait of Picasso’s lover and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who is shown standing in front of a mirror looking at her reflection. It is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
This painting was made in 1932, an important year in Picasso’s artistic career. At this point in his life, Picasso had already turned 51 and had established himself as an important artist.
In 1932, the Galerie Georges Petit presented a retrospective exhibition of his work, an unusual event for an artist, with Picasso assuming curatorial control. It was also a very productive year for Picasso, in which he focused many of his works on his 22-year-old lover and muse Marie-Thérèse Walter. His 1932 portraits of her were the first public display of his secret relationship during his marriage to Olga Khokhlova.
6- La Vie
La Vie (Life) was painted in Barcelona in May 1903. It measures 196.5 by 129.2 centimeters and portrays two pairs of people, a naked couple facing a mother with a child in her arms.
In the back of the room, apparently a studio, there are two paintings within the painting, the upper one with a nude couple crouching and embracing, and the lower one with a solitary crouching nude very similar to Sorrow from Vincent van Gogh. Next to this, Picasso repainted another motif, a bird-man attacking a reclining nude woman, traces of which are visible to the naked eye
It was painted at a time when Picasso had no financial success. Instead, the new painting was sold only a month after its completion, to a French art dealer, Jean Saint Gaudens. The sale was reported in the Barcelona newspaper Liberal. With La Vie, Picasso repainted the canvas of The derniers Moments of 1899, a painting he had presented at the Paris International Exhibition of 1900.
The painting was donated by the Hanna Fund to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, in 1945 and is part of its permanent collection.
In 2020, the painting was loaned to the Royal Academy of Arts in London as part of the exhibition “Picasso and Paper,” where it was exhibited with preparatory drawings and other works on paper exploring the corresponding themes of poverty, despair and social alienation.
7- The Three Musicians
The Three Musicians is the title of two similar oil paintings and collages by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Both were executed in 1921 in Fontainebleau, near Paris, France, and exemplify the synthetic Cubist style; the flat planes of color and“intricate puzzle-like composition” echo the cut-paper arrangements with which the style originated
Each of these paintings colorfully depicts three musicians wearing masks in the tradition of the Italian popular theater Commedia dell’arte.
Each painting features a Harlequin, a Pierrot and a monk, believed to represent Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, respectively. Apollinaire and Jacob, both poets, had been close friends of Picasso during the 1910s. However, Apollinaire died of Spanish flu in 1918, while Jacob decided to enter a monastery in 1921.
One version is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; the other version is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
8- The Celestina
In this painting, Pablo Picasso depicts an old woman alone on a plain blue background, her head covered by a black veil. Only a few touches of pink try to revive the old woman’s pale cheeks. Her gaze attracts the viewer’s attention, partly because she has a blind eye – an exceptional representation in Picasso’s work, which gives great prominence to this organ – and partly because this gaze moves away from that of the viewer, giving the impression of being lost in infinity.
This painting is an important work of the blue period: by depicting the madam of a Barcelona brothel, Picasso expresses his encounter with social reality and the disenchantment of a generation
The characteristic blue of this period bears witness to melancholy and suffering, and represents the color of social misery. However, if the encounter with social realities runs through his works, the essence of Picasso’s work in this period lies in new experimentations, in new genres of plastic expression.
9- The Soup
The Soup is an oil on canvas painted by Picasso in 1903. It belongs to his famous Blue Period
Despite its initial success at the Vollard exhibition in 1901, Picasso’s funds were soon exhausted. It was not uncommon for the artist to go hungry during this period in Paris, but his own circumstances only heightened his awareness of the desperate poverty that often surrounded him. Returning to Barcelona in 1902, Picasso produced the painting entitled The Soup.
Once again, he drew on his experience of visiting the Saint-Lazare women’s prison. However, he also remembered a visit he had made to the Pantheon to see the murals, completed five years earlier by the French. Symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
One of Pierre Puvis ‘s scenes from“The Life of Saint Geneviève” depicted a starving woman being assisted in the street. Picasso drew this scene, which probably influenced his decision to paint a similar moment
The Soup, however, is intriguingly ambiguous: does the older woman, burdened by her destitution, give the soup to the girl or receive it from her? In either case, Picasso focuses the act of charity on the basic need to feed oneself.
Currently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada
10- Garçon à la pipe
Garçon à la Pipe (Boy with aPipe ) is an oil on canvas by Picasso. It was painted in 1905, when Picasso was 24 years old, during his pink period, shortly after settling in the Montmartre district of Paris.
The painting depicts a Parisian teenager holding a pipe in his left hand and wearing a garland of flowers on his head, surrounded by two floral ornaments. The subject was a local boy named “P’tit Louis” who died at a young age
In 1905, Picasso was still a budding artist and had settled in Montmartre in Paris. He lived in poverty in a dilapidated artists’ building at 13 rue Ravignan, known as Le Bateau-Lavoir. Picasso had overcome his pessimistic blue period and was now in a new, more optimistic phase, known as his pink period.
The painting is listed as one of the most expensive, having sold at Sotheby’s auction for $104 million on May 5, 2004. It is currently Picasso’s fifth most sold painting.
What is your favorite work by Pablo Picasso? Leave us a comment
As we have already mentioned, Picasso painted thousands of paintings in his lifetime, so we have had to limit ourselves to selecting some of our favorites for this article
Tell us in the comments which is your favorite painting of this artist and what it conveys to you
