PICASSO, EXPONENT OF THE GEOMETRY

Born in Málaga in 1881, Pablo Ruiz Picasso continues being considered by the majority of art historians as the most influential and representative artist of the modern art. For eighty five years he did not stop creating and rebranding oneself constantly and in this time the geometric shapes did not leave him.

Between his many contribu- tions to the art of the 20th century, we find the Cubism, an authentic revolution in all the areas of the Art: perspective, fragmentation of the objects, use of the color… After this artistic current, the contemporaneity started. This forefront began in 1907 when Picasso, who painted in the same year his Autorretrato (Self-portrait), dares to defy to the artistic world with Las señoritas de Aviñón (The young ladies of Avignon). The realism, finally, jumped over the airs. 

The geometry appeared in the world of the painting and the sculpture: parallel, perpendicular and oblique lines that delimit plans; bodies as cylinders, cones and spheres, three-dimensional in sculptural works reduces to the two-dimensionality in the Picasso's painting; basic geometric figures appear like the squares, rectangles, trapezes and trapezoids, triangles... that, combined with the colors, creates hieratic figures.

As a great example we can remember "El estudio" (The workshop, 1927-28), a work that presents the human anatomy and the objects with very simple plane figures: an isosceles triangle combined with another reversed rectangle, which shape the body of the painter; two parallel vertical lines, that represent the legs; other two horizontal ones to draw his arms; an isolated white circle that suggests the thumb that holds a non-existent palette; and an ellipse as head from which a trapezoidal face with three eyes arises. The painter is placed in front of the rectangular canvas on which he is going to paint a still life in which quadrilateral persist as decoration on the walls; on a table composed of trapezoids, rhomboids and triangles, a fruit bowl drawn by means of two triangles joined by two of its vertexes, and a circle inserted in the top triangle suggesting a piece of fruit, to end with an irregular hexagon representing a face. 

Picasso is one of the biggest artists in the history, and he used geometry to revolutionize the painting. Analyzing in a geometrical way Picasso's works would be an interesting activity to learn geometric figures and forms through a transversal topic, the art. Children could observe and point the geometric elements that they see and they could interprete the meaning of the figures.