Picassoesque

Artworks, generally painting, that resemble or emulate the work of Pablo Picasso, arguably one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Incredibly prolific, Picasso adapted his aesthetic over time. His most characteristic style, however, and the one most often adopted by others, is Cubism, a technique that depicts people or objects by breaking them into various planes. Picasso later drew on these principles while employing bright colors and curvilinear forms, flattening his figures to create striking portraits with seemingly distorted facial features. It is nearly impossible to catalogue the myriad ways that artists have created stylistically similar works: in the 1910s, artists like Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger adapted Picasso’s mature Cubist style. When Picasso joined the French Communist Party in 1944, many leftist artists of the time, such as Renato Guttuso and André Fougeron adopted his classical style of the 1920s to address the devastation of World War II or to create politicized images. Contemporary artists frequently draw on Picasso’s legacy in order to critically engage with it. George Condo, for example, refers to his fantastical and grotesque portraits as “psychological cubism,” while Anton Henning self-consciously adopts the modern master’s style to travesty it.