Passage Three Pablo Picasso was
the most influential and successful artist of the 20th century. Painting,
sculpture, graphic art, and ceramics were all profoundly and irrevocably
affected by his genius. As the son of a professor of art,
Picasso’s talent for drawing was recognized at an early age. An advanced student
at the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts from the age of 14, he experimented in his
youth with nearly all of the avant-garde styles current at the turn of the
century, an early demonstration of his lifelong ability to assimilate aesthetic
ideas and to work in a variety of styles. For Picasso,
the meaning of art was to be derived from other works of art, and not directly
from nature. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s work had a significant impact on his
early paintings, as did the work of Paul Cezanne. Their influence, among others,
can be detected in the paintings of Picasso’s "blue period", which was
stimulated by his exposure to life and thought in Paris, where he made his home
after 1904. In works such as The Old Guitarist, he created evocative portrayals
of blind, impoverished, or despairing people in a predominantly blue palette.
His use of blue as a motif was apparently derived from the symbolic Maeterlinck
and Oscar Wilde, whose work often derived its force from depictions of madness
or illness. Although his palette and subject matter changed when he entered what
is called his "rose period, during which he painted harlequins and circus
performers in a lighter and warmer color scheme, an underlying mood of spiritual
loneliness and lyrical melancholy that marked his "blue" paintings was retained.
These paintings, however, do display a classical calm that contrasts clearly
with the nervous expressionism of the blue period. According to the passage, which of the following statements is not
mentioned
A. Picasso had been interested in drawing since he was a very little
boy.
B. Picasso had been influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste
Rodin.
C. The Old Guitarist was one of Picasso’s works.
D. The blue period with the nervous expressionism.