Description
Small children are drawn to soft shapes and bright colors. Perhaps that is why Pablo Picasso was one the most famous artists in the twentieth century. His imaginative portraits and inviting subject matter reach the inner child in all of us. Picasso's exploration of color, style, and subject matter includes the popular form of Cubism, in which he experiments with geometric shapes, overlapping forms, and an indefinite sense of space.
Margaret Hyde has chosen ten of the artist's twenty thousand works and presented them in a format accessible to small children. Portraits of the artist's son as a child, as well as Mother and Child, The Acrobat's Family with a Monkey, and Curtain for a Parade, stand next to cubist works, demonstrating the spectrum of the artist's capabilities. An assortment of colors and mediums are used to produce desired range, from inspiring curiosity through unlikely images to producing a calming effect with color choice.
An indispensable guide included in the back of the book prompts parents to introduce questions and projects to children. Recognizing emotion in art, differentiating between mediums, and being able to name the affect used to draw the eye's attention to a particular section of a painting are a few of the skills that children are encouraged to develop.
Born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881, Pablo Ruiz was a child prodigy. At the age of fourteen, he was admitted to the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts after completing the exam in one day (a task that usually took one month to complete). Adopting his mother's maiden name, Picasso was the first living artist to have an exhibition at the Louvre. He was chosen as one of Time magazine's one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century.
