Please enjoy and subscribe too. Thanks! Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) started to paint when he was eight years old. Like many children he would make drawings, but these were very different to today's children's drawings. As Picasso's father was an art teacher, he would take full control of Pablo's education in art. He gave him lessons and sent him to schools where he was working as a teacher himself. Picasso's relationship with his parents became strained when he quit his studies, and neither would they forgive him for walking over the avant-garde camp. Picasso dropped out of school in Madrid not be because he thought he didn't have anything to learn anymore, but because the teachers in Madrid couldn't help him solve the technical problems he had. It was the young Picasso's aim to become a classical painter, like Vélasques or Rembrandt, but no matter how good he was for a sixteen year old, he couldn't match the old masters. Composition was a weak point of his and would always remain so. For a genius, his natural ability to arrange the details of a painting such that they fitted into, and contributed to, the painting as a whole, was fairly limited. In 1896 Picasso's painting The First Communion had been included in a large exhibition in Barcelona, that served to present contemporary Catalan art (Catalan refers to Catalonia, the Spanish provence that has Barcelona as it's capital). This was an honor for the fifteen year old Picasso, even though he didn't win a prize. In 1900 Picasso got his first studio in Montmarte, Paris, together with his friend and artist Carlos Casagemas, whom he had met in Barcelona. What an impact the French metropole had on the impressionable young Picasso is clearly seen in paintings produced in his first two years in Paris. In 1900 Picasso would apply a technique of oil painting that is somewhat blurred and reminds of soft pastels. His fascination with the world of entertainment, and the Paris night life in particular, is obvious in "Dancer in Blue". The blurred technique of painting contributes to the illusion of movement, in this painting. Picasso had already become familiar with the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec while in Barcelona, which can be clearly seen in Picasso's design of Els Quatre Gats' menu (see above-right). The line is "Lautrec-esque" and even the colors are very similar to that of Lautrec's famous poster design "Le Divan Japonais". Like the young Picasso, Lautrec was an avid participant and painter of the Paris nightlife, inspiring Picasso to the painting "Le Moulin Galette", which in style is a homage to Lautrec, who had also painted the Parisian establishment called Le Moulin Galette. In 1901 Picasso dropped his blurred painting technique in favor of a technique which is known as divisionism. Signac had introduced divisionism to the impressionists in the form of pointillism, which resulted in paintings consisting of small dots (brush tips) of pure color. In 1900 and 1901 Picasso began to paint circus artists. The social-political meaning of this is elaborated on, on this site's rose period pages, but for now we note that painting the margins of society was a way for Picasso to break with traditional art, in which the upper-middle classes or high society were expected to be the subject. When, at 16, the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts failed to improve his standards, and continuing his education in Munich wasn't an option, the young Picasso reached a dead end. In modern art he would find a way to use his strengths: his imagination, sense of poetry and his ability to spot artistic innovations and incorporate them into his work. When he spent most of his time in Paris, between 1900 and 1904, he had some difficult years without earning enough from his art, but there was no turning back: Picasso "was the boy-genius who had grown disinterested in classical art".

• published: 25 Nov 2013
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