Birds & Other Animals: with Pablo Picasso

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These works mostly deal with animals and reflect his enduring love for animals and his pets which were often the subjects of his art, especially featuring in his line drawings. These images are hugely popular most likely due to the energy they exude. They Stand out for being so simple and yet they show a mastery of the Craft of drawing due to how expertly Picasso manages to use so view lines to convey the IDEA of the animal.

Picasso’s line drawings are arguably his simplest artworks, but they're no less powerful. His simple compositions and continuous line work is experimentation in its purest form, and they remain some of his most popular artworks today. Picasso took complex examples of real life figures, animals and objects and reduced it to a single unbroken line. Whilst they might look simple, capturing the true form of an object or person is a challenge.

'Bull' - plate 1

Picasso was surrounded by art from an early age. His father was a painter who started formally training Picasso when he was just 7 years old - it’s even reported that his first word was “pencil”. Picasso’s rigorous training included learning and copying the Masters and drawing the human body from live models. From his earliest works studying under his father, Picasso showed an amazing drawing ability. Over his lifetime, Picasso explored a huge variety of subjects in his drawings including still life, the human form, animals and mythology.

Picasso's painting 'Bullfight', moreover, focuses less on the eponymous bull and more on the horse. This horse, stamping the ground in what could be fury or distress, has unseaed its rider and may be said to be one of the victims of the fight. Though throughout his oeuvre Picasso tends to depict horses in moments of extreme or overwhelming pain or emotion, his calmer studies can often be jauty or jovial. This drawing of a horse is a prime example of this: a skilled artist demonstrating his skill and showing his love of the equine form with a few minimal lines. Pencil sketches feel supremely contemporary and suit that style of home perfectly, with many people today designing interiors that have just a few carefully chosen items, with plenty of space around the room to help everything breathe. They are a serigraph artworks, which means that they are a silk screen print using ink onto a piece of heavy weight paper.

Art History Timelines

Anderson et al. 2020. Pigeon…neural responses during categorization of Monet and Picasso paintings. Rep. 10:15971. Guernica, oil on canvas by Pablo Picasso, 1937; in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. 3.49 × 7.77 m. (more) The owl possibly (with this context in mind) represents wisdom and intelligence. It is worth noting also that in the area where Picasso spent much of his later life the owl had been the traditional symbol of the tribe that had once inhabited the area. He at one point even owned an owl as a pet, in fact, one friend tells a story of how “While Pablo was still working at the Musée d’Antibes in 1946, the photographer Michel Sima had come to us one day with a little owl he had found in a corner of the museum.