Is Picasso so revered simply because he was so original? His artwork doesn't look that difficult to produce.

Answer 1

Pablo Picasso's contribution to the history and development of modern art is quite fascinating. He, along with Georges Braque, produced the first collages in modern art. Although collages existed across the world before Picasso and Braque came along, these two artists exploited the medium in ways that had not been done before. Picasso and Braque were cubists and were interested in concepts such as simultaneity, fragmentation, opacity, transparency, and the distinction between them. This is why cubist works appear to present objects in a number of perspectives simultaneously. With the collage, Picasso and Braque could take their visual experiments even further, by incorporating real-life objects. One of the significance of this is that, for the first time in Western art, we have objects that are "real." Rather than paint that is used to make shapes on a flat surface to resemble a newspaper, Picasso used actual newsprint. This challenged a lot of the assumptions that artists had about what art even is. More significantly, the collage was actually taken up by a number of movements after Picasso. The Dada artists in Zürich, Berlin, and New York were notorious for using the collage and the photomontage (a collage of photographs taken from magazines and newspapers). Even the Suprematists in Russia are the result of Kasimir Malevich's experimentation with the collage. So while Picasso's works may appear simple and easy to do, the use of the collage in the early twentieth century was very significant (as they say, some of the best ideas are the most simple ones). The mere act of sticking newsprint or wallpaper onto a canvas changed the game and influenced the trajectory of modern art.