An Evolutionary View of the Style of Pablo Picasso Research Paper

An Evolutionary View of the Style of Pablo Picasso - Research Paper Example The essay "An Evolutionary View of the Style of Pablo Picasso" investigates the influential artist Pablo Picasso. Unlike many artists both before and after his time, Picasso differentiated his works into a series of periods which exhibited a number of unique thematic elements and worked to exploit common beliefs and motives. One such period was what art critiques have categorized Picasso’s â€Å"Blue Period†. As the name implies, during this time, Picasso painted a host of paintings which relied almost exclusively on varying monochromatic tones and shades of blue and blue-green. Although more than just a reliance on a particular type of paint, this period was also defined by the thematic sterility and coldness that it portrayed. In this way, Picasso used the medium of the paint to transform images that might typically be understood another way into images that bore a somber, cold, and realistically touching reality. Accordingly, this brief analysis will seek to apprecia te and understand Picasso’s â€Å"Blue Period† for the thematic elements, personal influences, and times in which this particular artwork was created. Picassso’s â€Å"Blue Period† is interesting beyond merely the thematic elements or the type of paints used to express these due to the fact that the â€Å"Blue Period† began when Picasso himself sank into what many scholars term a â€Å"deep depression". As a result of many of the life experiences that Picasso shared during the turn of the century to include his more complete grasp of his own mortality. ... Picasso struggled to sell them to an audience that was put off by their innately melancholy and cheerless subject matter. Many art critics have inferred incorrectly that Picasso’s incorporation of the underprivileged in society during this period was due to the fact that he himself was poor during this time and sought a way to reflect on the plight and situations associated with his fellow man. This however is not the case as it was the subject matter and the means in which Picasso approached it that sealed his fate with regards to the demand for his paintings and the subject matter with which he dealt during the â€Å"Blue Period†. Although many paintings of this period focus on the melancholy and sadness that Picasso felt as a result of his lost friend, Casagemas, another recurring theme throughout these paintings is in regards to the blindness and loss of sight that many of the characters exhibit within his works. It is the understanding of this author as well as a h ost of more talented art critics that this fixation with loss of sight and blindness helps to depict the depression and lack of vision that Picasso was experiencing during this time. Additionally, rather than choosing to focus his energies on typifying the plight of the extraordinary man/woman, Picasso chose for his subject matter the drunk, the prostitute, the nobody, and the everyman. In this way, the resounding emptiness that afflicts a faceless humanity is aptly expressed to the viewer in a way that a focus on a recognizable societal group or individual would not be. As the years progressed, Picasso, himself somewhat famous within the art community in Paris prior to 1901 began to fade into a type of