hello my name is Paul Priestley welcome to artists in school the home of art history
for young people and for interested amateurs today I'm going to be telling you ten really
interesting facts about the great artist Pablo Picasso fact number one he was born in Malaga
in Spain in 1881 his father was a man called Don Luis his mother was Maria Picasso but in
Spain they tend to take the mothers at Sur lady not the father's surname so he became known as
Pablo Picasso not Pablo Ruiz fact number two he was a prodigious talent at the age of 82
saw his first painting at the age of nine he had a studio by the time he's 12 13 14 years old it's
producing drawings and paintings like these these paintings and drawings could go into any gallery
in the world and they wouldn't look out of place and he's just 11 12 and 13 years old fact number
three because his father was an art teacher and he got the job at a prestigious Barcelona School
of Art in 1894 Picasso enrolled at the Barcelona School of Art at the age of 13 normally have to
be 18 to enter but he was so talented but he was only there until he was 16 because at the age of
16 he got bored and he wanted to move on so he moved to Madrid and he entered the prestigious
San Fernando Royal College of Art in Madrid at the age of 16 the entrance exam lasted a month
Picasso did it in a week because he's a genius fact number four at the age of eighteen he left
the College in Madrid and he went into Paris with his best friend Carlo Casa Jamis Carlo Casa Jamis
was walking down the street one day when he shot himself claiming that his girlfriend didn't what
see many more his girlfriend was going out with P castle two weeks later but that's another story
surely after this picasso began to paint lots of paintings in bloom he painted people who were
disabled who were blind through a lonely and were depressed some years later someone interviewed him
and asked him why did you paint all these pictures in blue was it because she would depressed at the
death of your friend Casa Jamis - castle Sydenham is it was it because she would in Paris or on your
own and you were lonely Picasso had known some and said why did you paint all the paintings in
bloom from Picasso thorns and he said simply it's because I had lots of blue paint fact number 5 in
1909 1910 Picasso worked with an artist called Shores brach and together they invented a new
style of painting called cubism cubism was based on the idea that paintings are painted on a flat
surface and for centuries artists have tried to make that flat flat surface look three-dimensional
by using perspective Picasso and Braque went about in a totally different way they decided
that a sculpture for example you can walk all the way around it it's three-dimensional you
can't walk around a painting so what they decided to do was to draw an object like a person from
lots of different angles from the back from the sides and put all of those drawings together to
make one image hence this sort of thing people look today couldn't understand what it was but
if you look carefully you can see the clothes and therefore read the painting fact number 6
in 1918 he married a Russian ballerina called olga clover this is his painting at Olga with
his son Paolo she doesn't look like a ballerina does shame but that's because you're looking at
the painting from your point of view with Picasso you've got to be cleverer than that look at the
painting from Paolo's point of view if you are a young child everything revolves around your
mother your mother is big she's the whole world look at the background of the picture there's
nothing there because the world does not exist to a child of six muscles mother is the world then
you understand the painting fact number seven in 1936 there was a civil war going on in Spain
and Franco the leader of the fascist movement was also a friend of Hitler Hitler loaned Franco some
bombers and they tested them out on a little town called Guernica at 10:00 to 3:00 on one particular
afternoon Guernica was just a normal town of around six thousand people by three o'clock on
that same day Guernica looked like this and three thousand people have died during those ten minutes
Picasso was appalled at the carnage that had gone on that afternoon and he painted his most famous
picture Guernica based on that incident I'm not going to talk about whole painting because that
will take too long but just look in the bottom left-hand corner at the hand can you see the
hand is open like this in the original drawings for the painting the hand is clenched in a fist
because the people who were fighting against the fascists would draw fists on buildings as a means
of resistance we could to resist the fascists but Picasso realized that you don't end wars by
doing this you ain't wars by doing that shaking hands and talking fact number 8 when the castle
was in his 60s he's walking down the street with a friend one day any passive group a five year
old children playing if he turned to his friend and he said when I was their age I could talk and
paint like Raphael he's taken me a lifetime to learn how to draw and paint like they do
he didn't mean that he wanted to literally paint like a five-year-old what he meant was he wanted
to use their enthusiasm their lack of inhibition their ability just to do what they want to do when
they want to do it fact number nine in 1959 the painting labelled hollandaise by Picasso painted
in 1905 sold at auction for 55,000 pounds the equivalent of a million pounds today at the time
it was the world record price for a painting by a living artist fact number 10 two quotes the first
one by Picasso Picasso once said I'm always doing the things I can't do because that's how I get to
do them so if you want to be great at something don't ever give up cook number two by his mother
she once said to him if you wanted to be a soldier you work so hard you never give up you'd have
ended up being a general if you don't wanted to be a monk you work so hard you never give up you'd
have ended up becoming the Pope but instead you chose to be an artist and you work so hard you
never gave up you ended up becoming public castle the greatest artist in the world thank you for
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