Spanish artists
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding 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 the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces during the Spanish Civil War.
Pablo Picasso, in full Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso, also called (before 1901) Pablo Ruiz or Pablo Ruiz Picasso, (born October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain—died April 8, 1973, Mougins, France), Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque) of Cubism.
Guernica
Las señoritas de Aviñón
La mujer llorando
WHY IS HE IMPORTANT?
For nearly 80 of his 91 years, Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to the whole development of modern art in the 20th century, notably through the invention of Cubism (with the artist Georges Braque) about 1907. Building on the work of 19th-century art movements, Cubism radically changed the course of representation by acknowledging the illusionistic tricks required to depict three-dimensional objects on a flat canvas. In rejecting the naturalism that Western artists had favoured since the Renaissance, Cubism consequently changed the ways in which people think about the role of art. It ushered in the abstract movements of the 20th century and continues to influence the art of the 21st. Picasso never kept within stylistic boundaries, and he continued to experiment with different approaches and media into the last decade of his life.
MOST FAMOUS PIECES
Picasso is thought to have made about 50,000 artworks during his lifetime, including paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and ceramics. From his extensive production there are many celebrated pieces. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was one of the first Cubist works, and, by rejecting illusionism, which art practice had favoured since the Renaissance, it changed the ways in which people considered the role of art and representation. Guernica (1937), Picasso’s response to the German bombing of Guernica, a city in Spain’s Basque region, was met with mixed criticism when it was first exhibited at the world’s fair in 1937, but it grew in popularity as it toured the world in subsequent decades. A few other famous pieces include a portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905–06), Picasso’s friend and patron; The Old Guitarist (1903–04), a piece from his Blue Period (1901–04); and an untitled sculpture, popularly known as “The Picasso” (1967), located in Chicago, a city which Picasso never visited.
Portrait of Dora Maar
La familia de Saltimbanquis
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí, in full Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech, (born May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain—died January 23, 1989, Figueras), Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker, influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery.
As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. It was not until the late 1920s, however, that two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style: his discovery of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery and his affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to establish the “greater reality” of the human subconscious over reason. To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “paranoiac critical.”
Cisnes que se reflejan como elefantes
In the late 1930s Dalí switched to painting in a more-academic style under the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael. His ambivalent political views during the rise of fascism alienated his Surrealist colleagues, and he was eventually expelled from the group. Thereafter, he spent much of his time designing theatre sets, interiors of fashionable shops, and jewelry as well as exhibiting his genius for flamboyant self-promotional stunts in the United States, where he lived from 1940 to 1955. In the period from 1950 to 1970, Dalí painted many works with religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent childhood memories, and to use themes centring on his wife, Gala. Notwithstanding their technical accomplishments, those later paintings are not as highly regarded as the artist’s earlier works. The most interesting and revealing of Dalí’s books is The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942).
La persistencia de la memoria
Once Dalí hit on that method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings which made him the world’s best-known Surrealist artist. He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed those objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland. Perhaps the most famous of those enigmatic images is The Persistence of Memory (1931), in which limp melting watches rest in an eerily calm landscape. With the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, Dalí made two Surrealistic films—Un Chien andalou (1929; An Andalusian Dog) and L’Âge d’or (1930; The Golden Age)—that are similarly filled with grotesque but highly suggestive images.
El gran masturbador
Francisco de goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker.He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his long career was a commentator and chronicler of his era. Immensely successful in his lifetime, Goya is often referred to as both the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. He was also one of the great contemporary portraitist.
El dos de mayo de 1808 en Madrid
La maja vestida
Goya became a court painter to the Spanish Crown in 1786 and this early portion of his career is marked by portraits of the Spanish aristocracy and royalty, and Rococo style tapestry cartoons designed for the royal palace.He suffered a severe and undiagnosed illness in 1793 which left him deaf. Sick and disillusioned, after 1793 his work became progressively darker and pessimistic. His later easel and mural paintings, prints and drawings appear to reflect a bleak outlook on personal, social and political levels, and contrast with his social climbing.In 1807 Napoleon led the French army into the Peninsular War against Spain. Goya remained in Madrid during the war which seems to have affected him deeply. Although he did not vocalise his thoughts in public, they can be inferred from his Disasters of War series of prints (although published 35 years after his death) and his 1814 paintings The second of May 1808 and The third of May 1808. His late period culminates with the Black Paintings of 1819–1823, applied on oil on the plaster walls of his house the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man) where, disillusioned by political and social developments in Spain he lived in near isolation.
El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid
Saturno devorando a su hijo
Maruja Mallo
Maruja Mallo (5 January 1902 – 6 February 1995) was a Spanish painter. Ana María Gómez González Mallo was born in Viveiro, Galicia, on 5 January 1902. At the age of 22, she moved to Madrid, Spain and was accepted into the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando where she met other painters and studied arts between 1922 and 1926. In 1928 Mallo's first exhibition was held at the Madrid offices of the journal Revista de Ocidente and the exhibition was praised for its originality and freshness. According to Shirley Mangini 'although historians of Spanish avant-garde art locate the origins of the movement in the activities of [Salvador] Dalí, [Luis] Buñuel, [Frederico] García Lorca, and another student at the Residencia, José Bello, Mallo's artistic vision was an important catalyst in the Spanish avant-garde movement."Her paintings of the 1920s represent urban entertainments and sports, composed in complex overlapping arrangements that express the dynamism of modern life. These works, such as La Verbena of 1927, combine sharply defined, smoothly modeled forms with bright colors. One thing that stood out was her shift in the themes of her paintings, such as the importance Argentina had for her as a woman in the mid-twentieth century. Her work became more surrealistic in the early 1930s, including geometric visual language, and she worked in ceramics during this time as well. These themes ranged from fruits to agricultural structures as well as creating ceramic disks with themes of fish and bulls." Her later works show some influence of magical realism and look ahead to pop art. In 1928 Ortega y Gasset organized her first exhibit, which was a success.
Sorpresa del trigo
La verbena
Mallo lived in several places in Europe and left for Buenos Aires in 1937. She had traveled to the U.S. and felt more complete and inspired to create new material. She returned to Spain in 1964, where she died in 1995 in Madrid.
Mallo won a number of prestigious prizes during her life. In 1922 she was awarded the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. In 1990 Mallo won the Gold Medal of Madrid and in 1991 the Gold Medal of the Xunta de Galicia.