Pablo Picasso Research Paper

Cubism and Picasso Paris, the world center of art, is a thriving city full of artistic activities that provide unparalleled conditions for the exchange of creative ideas throughout history. Paris has been the avant-garde in art and culture. This inspiring city witnessed many artistic movements that had a huge impact on world culture. During the 1920s after WWI, a wave of artists of all nationalities gathered in French capital to investigate a way to make their art different. The desperation and danger that many felt after the war caused them to create revolutionary work with lasting value. Those talented artists, including Pablo Picasso, developed Cubism, which is the first abstract style of modern art in this respectfully creative city, revolutionizing
Before this war, western civilization had been enjoying a century of relative peace. Arts and literature followed the certain trusted tradition in the past. However, WWI broke the traditional but peaceful life of western people, as well as the style of arts and literature. Many greatest works of art were created during that period of time because of the desperation and anger that the artist felt following the war. In Gertrude Stein’s famous novel Paris France, she suggests the influence of WWI on art as:
It was a period when there really was a serious effort made by humanity to be civilized, the world was round and there really were not left any unknown on it and so everybody decided to be civilized. France could be civilized without having progress on her mind, she could believe in civilization in and for itself, and so she was the natural back ground for this period. (Stein 37)
Gertrude Stein introduces that people needed a civilization to recover from the culture lost during the war years. They seek for a new way to express their desperation, fears, and anger after WWI. For artists, they needed a more radical approach and a different way to see the world after this big change. That is the reason why so many revolutionary art movements were born during that period of
Pablo Picasso’s relationship with Gertrude Stein, an American writer of Modernist art, was vital to his later success. Gertrude Stein was a pioneer of the “Lost Generation,” a generation of writers that came of age at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was an important figure in the Parisian art world, who helped shape an artistic movement of writing. The salon at her home at 27 rue de Fleurus that she shared with Alice B. Toklas, her secretary and life companion, became a gathering place for the talented ambitious artists. Her support helped those artists, including Picasso, to achieve the revolutionary goal. When no one else wanted to buy Picasso’s paintings, Stein collected almost all of his early work. In the movie “Paris Was a Woman,” directed by Greta Schiller, it suggests that “ had Gertrude Stein not started collecting Picasso’s work in those early years, it is possible that Picasso would have remained a struggling artist, swallowed up in the artistic sea that was Pairs at the time and continuing to barter paintings.” In 1905, Picasso painted a portrait for Stein. However, instead of a traditional portrait with the physical likeness and expressive detail, he painted Gertrude Stein as a big hulking woman who stares blankly past the view, a foreshadowing of his adoption of cubism. Queen’s Quarterly