Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was an artist who changed a lot over his lifetime, and he's usually a big part of art history classes. To keep it simple, let’s just hit some key points.

If you compare Picasso’s early work to Paul Cézanne’s paintings, you can see how Picasso’s style started to shift. Cézanne had this way of breaking down objects into basic shapes, which influenced later artists. He didn’t use straight realism—he sort of broke things into parts that looked more abstract. This way of simplifying forms had a big effect on how Picasso thought about art.

Many people think Cézanne’s experiments helped open the door for Cubism, which Picasso later helped develop. Cubism uses flat shapes and different angles to show an object all at once. One example of this is Guernica, a painting Picasso made in 1937. It’s large—over 11 feet tall and more than 25 feet wide—and painted in gray, black, and white. It shows people, animals, and buildings in the middle of chaos, based on the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The painting doesn’t follow traditional perspective. Instead, it uses overlapping and broken shapes, which are typical in Cubist work.

Before this, Picasso had already shown a lot of skill at a young age. When he was a teenager, he made drawings and paintings that showed he had a solid understanding of anatomy, shading, and proportion. His early pieces looked more traditional and realistic. Later, he started trying new things—using bolder lines, changing proportions, and playing with different ways of seeing the same object.

Picasso painted Science and Charity in 1897 when he was around 15 or 16 years old. It’s an oil painting on canvas, and it's now in the Museo Picasso in Barcelona. At the time he made it, Picasso had already developed strong technical skills. The painting shows careful attention to anatomy, shading, and composition, which are usually taught much later in an artist's training.

The scene in the painting shows a woman lying in bed. On one side of her is a doctor taking her pulse and recording something. On the other side, there’s a nun holding a child. The figures represent two different kinds of help. The doctor stands for science or medicine, while the nun and child represent charity or faith-based care. The title, Science and Charity, names both of these.

Picasso’s father, José Ruiz Blasco, was an art teacher who taught him to draw and paint. Picasso started learning formal art techniques from a young age. He spent time at the Escola de Belles Arts in Barcelona, where his father also taught. By the time he was a teenager, he had already learned the traditional academic approach to painting, including how to build a composition and how to use light and shadow.

This painting was made during a period when young artists were expected to copy classical models and master academic painting before experimenting with new styles. Science and Charity was exhibited in local art shows in Spain and received awards. The people in the painting were modeled from real life—Picasso used his father as the doctor figure.

The painting’s style follows the realist tradition. The figures are shown with lifelike detail, and the setting includes recognizable objects like the iron bed frame and the glass bottle, which help place the scene in a hospital or home care environment from the late 1800s. There are no symbolic objects beyond the figures themselves and their positions. The nun and the child were often used in art of this time to suggest care or religious support, but Picasso doesn’t include any supernatural imagery.

 

This painting was made around the time Picasso finished his formal training as an art student. The subject he chose connects to an earlier tradition in painting—specifically, he’s referencing a theme that artists like Édouard Manet explored. One example is Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker, painted in the 1850s. That subject—a lone person drinking absinthe, a strong alcoholic drink that was also believed to have mind-altering effects—appears in several 19th-century works. Absinthe was popular among some writers and artists, who thought it helped spark creativity.

Picasso's version of the absinthe drinker shows he’s working with the same idea, but using a very different style. Instead of repeating Manet’s approach, Picasso uses what would have been considered a non-traditional or modern visual language at the time. While Manet’s work focused more on realism and used careful shading and proportion, Picasso distorts the figure. He uses flat shapes, strong outlines, and highly saturated colors that aren’t naturalistic. These choices are similar to what artists like Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh were doing in the late 1800s—Gauguin, for instance, often used flat color fields and heavy outlines, and Van Gogh used thick, energetic brushwork and intense colors.

In this painting, Picasso uses a female figure instead of a male one, and the composition is more stylized. The figure is drawn in a way that ignores strict anatomical accuracy, with simplified shapes and exaggerated features. This kind of distortion hadn’t really appeared in European art before, at least not in a deliberate and structured way. There’s also influence from ukiyo-e, a kind of Japanese printmaking that became widely collected in Europe in the late 1800s. These prints often used flattened space and bold outlines, and they helped European artists rethink how to compose an image.

By the early 1900s, photography had made it easier to capture realistic images, so painters were no longer expected to just copy the world as it looked. This gave artists like Picasso more room to explore personal or symbolic uses of color and form. His use of distortion wasn’t accidental—it was a conscious decision to break from earlier rules and experiment with how figures could be represented. The choice to make the figure look simplified or childlike doesn’t mean it was unskilled; Picasso had already shown he could paint with realism earlier in his life. Instead, this approach reflects a shift in what painting could be used for.

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