Portraits by Picasso & de Kooning

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was prolific both in terms of absolute numbers of works - having created more than 20,000 pieces - and in terms of creativity, as an innovator of styles and techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history.

Picasso's genius manifested itself early: at the age of 10 he made his first paintings, and at 15 he performed brilliantly on the entrance examinations to Barcelona's School of Fine Arts. His large academic canvas Science and Charity (1897, Museo Picasso, Barcelona), depicting a doctor, a nun, and a child at a sick woman's bedside, won a gold medal.

Between 1900 and 1902, Picasso made three trips to Paris, finally settling there in 1904. He found the city's bohemian street life fascinating, and his pictures of people in dance halls and cafTs show how he assimilated the postimpressionism of the French painter Paul Gauguin and the symbolist painters called the Nabis. Expressing human misery, the paintings portray blind figures, beggars, alcoholics, and prostitutes, their somewhat elongated bodies reminiscent of works by the Spanish artist El G

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rait of Louis-Francoisö, another person of letters and so perhaps in the minds of both painter and model a good proxy for Stein. There is no attempt on the painter's part to feminize Stein, no frilly lace at the cuffs or negligently held nosegay. One senses in this portrait a depiction of an equal, another artist, and one senses also that this equality was based in Picasso's stripping Stein both in his mind and on his canvas of her femininity. Stein presents herself to us in the painting (and therefore we can guess to Picasso himself) as a concentrated artistic force almost accidentally embodied in a woman rather than a female artist, using her time during the dozen of sessions in which she sat for Picasso to think about her writing, to create even as he was creating. De Kooning, although not considered to be in the same echelon as Picasso still one of the great 20th century artists, was also a prodigy of sorts. He left school at the age of 12 to be apprenticed to a firm of commercial artists and decorators. He also received formal art training at the Rotterdam Academy. In 1926 he went to the United States and worked for a time as a house painter and later as a commercial artist. During the 1930s he painted murals for the F
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1284
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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