Spanish artist Pablo Picasso is one of the most well-known modern sculptors, painters and print makers. He is considered to be one of the most influential artists of the last century.
But his unique style sure has drawn his share of criticism, with many stating that his work is childlike and immature. So just how did Pablo Picasso become so popular?
Loved By An American
While Pablo’s journey into the art world began at a young age, due to his father being an art teacher, Picasso struggled to cut it in the real world. Although he mastered the arts at a very young age and was actually a very skilled craftsman, he dropped out of art school as a teenager and continued to hone his craft, but without making much money along the way.
That is until his work was recognised by wealthy American art collector Gertrude Stein. Stein collected many of Picasso’s pieces, helping to launch his career.
Featured In A Paris Gallery
Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler was the man responsible for launching the career of Picasso and many other radical artists of the time. He started a gallery in Paris featuring a variety of Pablo’s works and Kahnweiler became one of the leading art dealers of the time.
The Person Picasso
Part of Picasso’s rise to fame has to do with his charming personality. Pablo Picasso was a well-known ladies man with a particularly charismatic nature. In fact many of Picasso’s romantic interests also served as muses for his work.
He used his abstract and emotional view of the world to disrupt the way people viewed art and beauty, creating a new way of looking at things in a time when the world was ready to move away from the classic, stilted ways of old into a new, innovative era of creation. He wasn’t afraid to mix different styles, effortlessly switching his style from one work to the next, or even within the same piece.
Creating Cubism
By this time Pablo Picasso was a well-established force in the art world and began to play around with his style, which would lead to the creation of what we know today as the Cubism era. His art became a melting pot of various influences that eventually sent him on his own path to creating something completely new.
He also credited with inventing the art of the collage, mixing metaphors and parts of a whole in a unique arrangement that was a sum of these parts, rather than creating a perfect whole. His new look on perspective would eventually influence most of modern art and create a revolution in the industry for all future generations to come.
He is one of only a handful of well-known historical artists to actually accumulate an immense fortune within his own lifetime. According to Vanity Fair, if Picasso was alive today he would be one of the ten wealthiest men in the world, and would have amassed a wealth that placing successful sports bet AFL wagers could see you get close to. Now that’s an impressive feat for an artist!
