Picasso, Pablo

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter famed for co-founding the Cubist movement, inventing constructed sculpture, and co-inventing collage. His well-known painting, The Old Guitarist, was the inspiration for Stevens’s poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar .”
==Stevens's views on Picasso==
Stevens considered Picasso to be “intelligent” and a “leader,” a dominant voice in his field. Stevens once said that Picasso, to the extent that Picasso practiced the science of painting, he was a realist—but in the effect of his paintings, that effect belonged to “the imagination, just as the effect of abstract painting is so often that of the imagination” (Collected Poetry and Prose 651). Still, occasionally Stevens to lament the fact that Picasso so completely dominated the field of art that new artists could not avoid imitating him. Picasso had the sort of artistic spirit that demanded to free, and his less talented heirs took that freedom to mean that “as in painting, so in poetry, you can do as you please” (CPP 789). In a similar vein, there “is no painting [anymore] because the only painting permitted is painting derived from Picasso or Matisse” (Letters 622).