Pablo Picasso: Influential Artist of the 20th Century and Co-Creator of Cubism

Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973

Fun Facts About Pablo Picasso

Born on October 25 1881 in Málaga Spain, Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, Pablo Picasso was without question one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century. Together with Georges Braque, he also created Cubism.

• Picasso’s full name has 23 words. Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. He was named after various saints and relatives. The “Picasso” is actually from his mother, Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father is named Jose Ruiz Blasco.
• When he was born, the midwife thought he was stillborn. Picasso had such a difficult birth and was such a weak baby that when he was born, the midwife thought that he was stillborn so she left him on a table to attend his mother. It was his uncle, a doctor named Don Salvador, that saved him: ‘Doctors at that time,’ he told Antonina Vallentin, ‘used to smoke big cigars, and my uncle was no exception. When he saw me lying there he blew smoke into my face. To this I immediately reacted with a grimace and a bellow of fury’”
• Picasso’s father was also a painter, as well an art professor. This would influence Picasso as he grew up.
• In 1895, when Picasso was a teenager, his seven-year-old sister died from diphtheria. It was a traumatic event that would also influence his later work.

• The family moved to Barcelona after the death of Pablo’s sister.
• In Barcelona, Pablo’s father worked at the School of Fine Arts. He persuaded the officials there to let young Pablo (then only 13 years old) to take an entrance exam. To their surprise, he did very well on the exam and was soon admitted into the school.
• Pablo Picasso was later sent by his father to study at the Royal Academy of San Fernando (in Madrid, Spain).

• Picasso was a rebel even in his school days. He wore long dresses and long hair, going against current fashions.
• 

  "The Old Guitarist" from Picasso's Blue Period

  Picasso was an excellent art student, but he resisted other studies and was often disruptive. He was thrown into detention often, but he didn’t mind because he was allowed a sketchpad, which he delighted in using.

• Pablo had his first exhibit at age 13, when he showed his paintings in the back room of an umbrella store.
• At 16, Picasso was sent to the Royal Academy of Madrid, where students drew from plaster casts and copied works of the old masters. Picasso’s father soon became angry with his son’s rebellious behavior, long hair, and strange clothes. He believed that Pablo was wasting his talent and scolded him: “why don’t you cut your hair and paint sensibly?” In 1900, Picasso left for Paris—then the center of the art world. He lived in a cold, rundown building painting constantly, sometimes surviving for days on only a piece of bread.
• While living in Paris (1900) Pablo had lots of financial problems and he burned many of his paintings to stay warm.

• His Blue Period lasted from around 1900 – 1904. This period was named for both the colors he favored and the subject matter of his paintings, which often depicted people with sad expressions.
• His aptly named Rose Period took place between 1905 and 1906, during which the artist used many pink tones and often created circus scenes.

• While in Paris, Pablo Picasso had a propensity for entertaining and had among his friends people such as Andre Breton and Gertrude Stein.

• When the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre in 1911, a friend of Picasso’s was arrested first. The friend pointed the finger at Picasso. Both men were questioned, and both men were found innocent.

• 

  “Girl Before a Mirror” in an example of Picasso’s Rose Period

  Picasso also had an active love life and usually had several mistresses along with a wife or a primary partner.

• In fact, he liked women who were much, much younger than he was. Picasso had many lovers and three wives. Most of the women he was involved with were significantly younger than he was. His second wife was 52 years younger.
• His real work and career as a painter is said to have begun around 1894 with a painting called ‘The First Communion’ which showed his sister Lola, and the more famous painting by Pablo Picasso called ‘Portrait of Aunt Pepa’.
• No artist has ever been as famous in his own lifetime
• Picasso painted his own variations of other artists work
• He had no appreciation for women artists.

 

Special thanks to artmarketingsecrets.com, www.life123.com and www.21facts.com

The Giant Panda: China’s Endangered and Solitary Creatures

The Giant Panda

Fun Facts About the Giant Panda

Order: Carnivora

Family: Ursidae

Genus and species: Ailuropoda melanoleuca

Geographic distribution

Giant pandas live in a few mountain ranges in central China, in Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces. They once lived in lowland areas, but farming, forest clearing, and other development now restrict giant pandas to the mountains.

Habitat

Giant pandas live in broadleaf and coniferous forests with a dense understory of bamboo, at elevations between 5,000 and 10,000 feet. Torrential rains or dense mist throughout the year characterizes these forests, often shrouded in heavy clouds.

Physical description

The giant panda, a black-and-white bear, has a body typical of bears. It has black fur on ears, eye patches, muzzle, legs, and shoulders. The rest of the animal’s coat is white. Although scientists do not know why these unusual bears are black and white, some speculate that the bold coloring provides effective camouflage into their shade-dappled snowy and rocky surroundings. The panda’s thick, wooly coat keeps it warm in the cool forests of its habitat. Giant pandas have large molar teeth and strong jaw muscles for crushing tough bamboo. Many people find these chunky, lumbering animals to be cute, but giant pandas can be as dangerous as any other bear.

Size

About the size of an American black bear, giant pandas stand between two and three feet tall at the shoulder (on all four legs), and reach four to six feet long. Males are larger than females, weighing up to 250 pounds in the wild. Females rarely reach 220 pounds.

Status

The giant panda is listed as endangered in the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN’s) Red List of Threatened Animals. There are about 1,600 left in the wild. Nearly 300 pandas live in zoos and breeding centers around the world, mostly in China.

Life span

Scientists aren’t sure how long giant pandas live in the wild, but they are sure it’s shorter than lifespans in zoos. Chinese scientists have reported zoo pandas as old as 35. The National Zoo’s Hsing-Hsing died at age 28 in 1999.

Diet

A wild giant panda’s diet is almost exclusively (99 percent) bamboo. The balance consists of other grasses and occasional small rodents or musk deer fawns. In zoos, giant pandas eat bamboo, sugar cane, rice gruel, a special high-fiber biscuit, carrots, apples, and sweet potatoes.

Social structure

Adult giant pandas are generally solitary, but they do communicate periodically through scent marks, calls, and occasional meetings. Offspring stay with their mothers from one and a half to three years.

The giant panda has lived in bamboo forests for several million years. It is a highly specialized animal, with unique adaptations.

Feeding adaptations

Millions of Zoo visitors enjoy watching giant pandas eat. A panda usually eats while sitting upright, in a pose that resembles how humans sit on the floor. This posture leaves the front paws free to grasp bamboo stems with the help of a “pseudo thumb,” formed by an elongated and enlarged wrist bone covered with a fleshy pad of skin. The panda also uses its powerful jaws and strong teeth to crush the tough, fibrous bamboo into bits.

A giant panda’s digestive system is more similar to that of a carnivore than an herbivore, and so much of what is eaten is passed as waste. To make up for the inefficient digestion, a panda needs to consume a comparatively large amount of food—from 20 to 40 pounds of bamboo

each day—to get all its nutrients. To obtain this much food means that a panda must spend 10 to 16 hours a day foraging and eating. The rest of its time is spent mostly sleeping and resting.

Water

Wild giant pandas get much of the water they need from bamboo, a grass whose contents are about half water. (New bamboo shoots are about 90 percent water.) But giant pandas need more water than what bamboo alone can provide. So almost every day wild pandas also drink fresh water from rivers and streams that are fed by melting snowfall in high mountain peaks. The temperate forests of central China where giant pandas live receive about 30 to 40 inches of rain and snow a year. Charleston, West Virginia—a city with a similar temperate climate—receives about the same amount of rain and snow: an average of 42.5 inches a year.

Reproduction

Giant pandas reach breeding maturity between four and eight years of age. They may be reproductive until about age 20. Female pandas ovulate only once a year, in the spring. A short period of two to three days around ovulation is the only time she is able to conceive. Calls and scents draw males and females to each other.

Female giant pandas give birth between 95 and 160 days after mating. Although females may give birth to two young, usually only one survives. Giant panda cubs may stay with their mothers for up to three years before striking out on their own. This means a wild female, at best, can produce young only every other year; in her lifetime, she may successfully raise only five to eight cubs. The giant pandas’ naturally slow breeding rate prevents a population from recovering quickly from illegal hunting, habitat loss, and other human-related causes of mortality.

Development

At birth, the cub is helpless, and it takes considerable effort on the mother’s part to raise it. A newborn cub weighs three to five ounces and is about the size of a stick of butter. Pink, hairless, and blind, the cub is 1/900th the size of its mother. Except for a marsupial (such as the kangaroo or opossum), a giant panda baby is the smallest mammal newborn relative to its mother’s size.

Cubs do not open their eyes until they are six to eight weeks of age and are not mobile until three months. A cub may nurse for eight to nine months. A cub is nutritionally weaned at one year, but not socially weaned for up to two years.

Lifestyle

A wild panda spends much of its day resting, feeding, and seeking food. Unlike other bears from temperate climates, giant pandas do not hibernate. Until recently, scientists thought giant pandas spent most of their lives alone, with males and females meeting only during the breeding season. Recent studies paint a different picture, in which small groups of pandas share a large territory and sometimes meet outside the breeding season. Much remains to be learned about the secret lives of these elusive animals, and every new discovery helps scientists in their battle to save this species.

 

Special thanks to nationalzoo.si.edu