Overall size of this print is 22 1/2 x 28 1/2

CLASSICAL HEAD by Pablo Picasso (Spanish 1881-1973) National Gallery of Art,Washington,D.C..

1881-1973 Major Works: Portrait of Gertrude Stein; Les Demoiselles a' Avignon; Ma Joile; Parade; Three Musicians; The Three Dancers; Guernica; Head of a Bull; Metamorphosis.

The influence between the Catalan painters in Spain and his eventual home in Paris helped shape Pablo Picasso into the greatest painter of the twentieth-century.

Picasso was born October 25, 1881 to the artist don Jose Ruiz Blasco and his wife dona Maria Picasso Lopez. He was named Pablo after his uncle, but his full name, given at baptism as was customary in Malaga, Spain, was Pablo Ruiz Picasso Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Crispin Crispiniano Santisima Trinidad. Pablo eventually adopted his maternal name Picasso, instead of Ruiz, which was quite a sting to his father's family.

Picasso's blue period started in Paris in 1901, but it didn't begin to flourish until he returned to Barcelona that same year. Majority of the blue works are women. Transition between the blue and rose period began in 1904, when Picasso met Fernande Oliver. The rose paintings are filled with harlequins and acrobats. The rose period started to end with The Portrait of Gertrude Stein in 1906. At this time he started to move towards sculpture and printmaking. This started his fascination of simplifying of objects into geometric forms. His paintings became more linear and sharp.

The breakthrough of his work started first from influences from Cezanne, who, in his landscape paintings, used brushstrokes that defined the two-dimentional surface of the canvas. Picasso's intrpretation of Cezanne's work developed into Cubism.

At the turn of the twentieth-century, abstraction was on the rise, but because photographs flooded the public with imagery, they replaced the demand from the public for perfect representation. Not that artists completely stopped taking references from real life, but Picasso was interested in creating new realities.