Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881. When he died in 1973, he was ninety-one years old. But he still took up his paints and brushes to start a new picture as if he were seeing things for the first time.
That’s why we have called him the youngest painter. Yong people are always trying new things and new ways of doing things. They don’t hesitate① to attempt one thing after another. Eager to experiment, they welcome new ideas. They are restless and alive and never satisfied. They seek perfection.
When he was over ninety this great painter still lived his life like a young man. He was still restlessly② looking for new ideas and for new ways to use his artistic materials. No one knew what to expect from him next. No one could be sure what kind of picture he would produce. If he had painted a picture of you it might have looked exactly like you. Or it might have been all lines, squares, circles and strange-colored shapes. It might not have looked human at all.
At such times Picasso was trying to paint what he saw with his mind as well as with his eyes. He put in the side of the face as well as the front. He may have painted it flat, as though it had no depth. Sometimes he seemed to paint just as a child paints, simply for his own pleasure. He didn’t imitate others. “If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I have never hesitated to use them,” he said.
Most painters discover a style of painting that suits them and stick to that, especially if people admire③ their pictures. As the artist grows older his pictures may change, but not very much. But Picasso was like a man who had not yet found his own particular style of painting. He was still struggling to find perfect expression for his own uneasy spirit.
The first thing one noticed about him was the look of his large, wide-open eyes. Gertrude Stein, a famous American writer who knew him in his youth, mentioned this hungry look, and one can still see it in pictures of him today.
Picasso painted a picture of Gertrude Stein in 1906. She visited the painter’s studio eighty or ninety times while he painted her picture. While Picasso painted they talked about everything in the world that interested them. Then one day Picasso wiped out the painted head on which he had worked for so long. “When I look at you I can’t see you any more!” he said.
Picasso went away for the summer. When he returned he went at once to the unfinished picture in the corner of his studio. Quickly he finished the face from memory. He could see the woman’s face more clearly in his mind than he could see it when she sat in the studio in front of him.
When people complained④ to him that the painting of Miss Stein didn’t look like her, Picasso would reply, “Too bad. She’ll have to arrange to look like the picture.” But thirty years later Gertrude Stein said that Picasso’s painting of her was the only picture she knew that showed her as she really was.
If ever anyone was born to be a painter, Picasso was. His father was a painter and art teacher who gave his son his first lessons in drawing. Picasso won a prize for his first important painting, “Science and Charity”, when he was only fifteen. He studied art in several cities in Spain. But there was no one to teach him all he wanted to know. When he was nineteen he visited Paris.
Paris was then the canter of the world for artists. Everything that was new and exciting in the world of painting seemed to happen there. When he was twenty-three Picasso returned there to live and lived in France for the rest of his life.
He was already a fine painter. He painted scenes of town life-people in the streets and in restaurants, at horse races, bull fights and circuses. They were painted in bright colors, lovely to look at.
