Picasso’s art career spanned many decades and included a variety of styles and influences. Create a portrait collage inspired by his Cubist era.

• 1.

  Discuss Picasso’s art career and life. Focus on his Cubist era portrait paintings. What shapes do you see in these paintings? How are the faces portrayed?

• 2.

  On two different pieces of construction paper, use markers to draw the faces of two different people. Use different types of lines when making the drawings. Make thick lines by drawing with the side of the marker and thin lines by drawing with the tip. Create different effects by drawing squiggly, jagged, wavy or bumpy lines with the side of the marker.

• 3.

  Use scissors to cut out the facial features from each of the portraits. On a separate piece of construction paper, arrange some facial features from each of the portraits to make a new, combined face.

• 4.

  Glue the features into place to create a collage. Add additional details with markers to complete the Cubist-inspired design.

Standards

• LA: Read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grade level text complexity band independently and proficiently.
• LA: Conduct short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources and refocusing the inquiry when appropriate.
• LA: Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience with appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details, speaking clearly at an understandable pace.
• MATH: Classify two-dimensional figures into categories based on their properties.
• SS: Describe ways in which language, stories, folktales, music, and artistic creations serve as expressions of culture and influence behavior of people living in a particular culture.
• SS: Show how learning and physical development affect behavior.
• SS: Explore factors that contribute to one's personal identity such as interests, capabilities, and perceptions.
• VA: Generalize about the effects of visual structures and functions and reflect upon these effects in personal work.
• VA: Integrate visual, spatial, and temporal concepts with content to communicate intended meaning in artworks.
• VA: Analyze contemporary and historic meanings in specific artworks through cultural and aesthetic inquiry.
• VA: Know and compare the characteristics of artworks in various eras and cultures.
• VA: Describe ways in which the principles and subject matter of other disciplines taught in the school are interrelated with the visual arts.

Adaptations

• Possible classroom resources include: Who Was Pablo Picasso? by True Kelley; Pablo Picasso: Breaking All the Rules by True Kelley; A Day with Picasso (Adventures in Art) by Suzanne Pfleger; Cubism (Art Revolutions) by Linda Bolton; Cubists (Artists in Profile) by Jeremy Wallis
• Encourage students to investigate the Cubist movement begun in the early 1900s. What contributions does this art movement add to the art world? How did Picasso participate in this movement? What other artists are known in connection with Cubism?
• Students use their mathematical knowledge of the coordinate grid to graph their Two-Faced Art prior to committing their talents to art paper. Discuss with classmates how this process connects math and artistic knowledge.
• Students investigate Picasso's Blue Period. Organize research into an electronic format for presentation to classmates.