First Communion by Pablo Picasso, 1895-96.
Picasso's father was a painter who taught his son the skills of an artist at a young age. That allowed him to complete this work at the age of 15.
Coming Up Roses
Acrobat and Young Harlequin 1905 by Pablo Picasso, The Barnes Foundation.
Painted in 1905 this work is part of Picasso's Rose Period that The Barnes Foundation .came after his Blue Period. His subjects during this time often included acrobats dancers and harlequins.
Hankie
Weeping Woman, 1937 by Pablo Picasso, Tate Gallery, London.
Picasso did a series of "Weeping Women" where their faces and emotions are broken-up by grief and the cubist style of creating an image out of a series of planes.
Breaking it Down
Composition 8, 1914 by Piet Mondrian, The Guggenheim Museum, NYC.
This is Mondrian's interpretation of a tree after seeing the cubist work of Braque and Picasso. He eventually took it to an even more abstract level.
Piet Mondrian Composition C (No.III) with Red, Yellow and Blue © 2007 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International, Warrenton, VA
Understanding Symbols
The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) by Joan Miro, 1923-24, MoMA, NYC.
Miro began his work as a painter doing portraits but soon found the work of artists like Picasso and the Surrealists with whom he socialized in Paris, to influence him to try other directions in his paintings. The Spanish Civil War drew his work into a political realm as his countrymen suffered at home. His career lasted well into the later part of the twentieth century, in fact a large tapestry he did for the World Trade Center was one of the most valuable pieces of art work that was destroyed on September 11, 2001.
Figure 6 by Joan Miro, 1974, The World Trade Center (destroyed 9/11/01).