Pablo Picasso was born in October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain to Maria Picasso y Lopez and Jose Ruiz Blasco. In 1891, Picasso and his family were forced to move to La Coruña due to financial difficulties. There his father was offered a teaching position in art school where Picasso later joined. There he learned the basic systematic studies of art of which he mastered his Plaster Cast and Nature Drawing Classes (Picasso 5). This developed his distant skills in shading and luminosity in drawings. Under his father’s tutoring he learned how to paint live models in oil. This is around the time his skill flourished. During this time he created the piece the beggar with a cap. (Picasso 6). This shows how early the artist has matured as well as his seriousness …show more content…
He does not attend it for very long. From 1898 to 1899, Picasso takes a keen interest in only drawing scenes of death or ‘final truth’. He draws many pictures of people on their deathbed, in coffins, crippled in agony, etc. He draws a large composition called the Last Moments, which is later repainted over with his painting, Life. (Picasso 12) Picasso travels to Paris in 1900, the heart of the art world at the time, which was holding the World’s Fair. There he frequented bohemian cafés, nightclubs and dance halls. He was fascinated with the immoral and glamorously gaudy ways in these places where patrons and prostitutes would meet. This can be seen in his painting Le Moulin de la Galette (Avgikos). Throughout May and the first half of June 1901, Picasso worked very hard, on some days producing two or even three paintings. He “had begun where he had broken off six months before” He used the Impressionist freedom of sinuous brushstrokes, the Japanese precision of Degas’s compositions and Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, the heightened, exalted vividness of Van Gogh’s colors, heralding the coming of Fauvism, which manifested itself fully only in 1905. An example of his work at this time would be Harlequin and his Companion and The Absinthe Drinker.