The famous Spanish artist Pablo Picasso passed away half a century ago, on April 8, 1973. The outstanding painter, graphic artist and sculptor, one of the founders of cubism, lived for 91 years, continuing to work until the end of his life. His legacy includes tens of thousands of works, and he is currently considered one of the “most expensive” artists in the world.
Picasso’s works are stolen, litigated, and having them in a private collection or museum is a matter of status and prestige. We offer a look into the stories of three of his most expensively sold paintings, thereby also sketching the various stages of the artist’s creative work and the course of his life.
“Jauna meitene ar ziedu grozu” (Girl with a flower basket, 1905)
Painting sold: in 2018 for approximately 103 million euros.
Picasso’s first art teacher was his father, a poor painter, José Ruiz Blasco, who noticed his son’s creative skills early and helped develop them. According to Picasso himself, at the age of 12 he could paint like Raphael, one of the greatest Italian artists of the Renaissance. “And when I had learned to paint like a master,” Picasso would later say, “I spent the rest of my life trying to learn to paint like a child.” At the age of 16, he effortlessly passed the entrance exams to art schools in Barcelona and Madrid and won laurels in fashionable salons, living in poverty.
Gloomy moods can be seen in Picasso’s early works, the poet Guillaume Apollinaires called it mournful painting, dark blue like the bottom of the sea. This changes when Picasso is 23 years old and his art begins the “Pink Period”, a creative period that lasts from about 1904 to 1907 and becomes extremely important both for his life and for 20th century Western painting. The works of this stage are characterized by bright colors (orange, red, pink), warm light, focusing on different carnival themes, characters of harlequins and clowns. Picasso experiments with primitivism, looks closely at his models, often paints naked female bodies. Cubism had not yet begun at that time.
