biography of pablo picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism.

(1881-1973)

Who Was Pablo Picasso?

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881. Picasso's mother was Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father was Don José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art teacher.

His gargantuan full name, which honors a variety of relatives and saints, is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.

A serious and prematurely world-weary child, the young Picasso possessed a pair of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him destined for greatness.

"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope,'" he later recalled. "Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

Though he was a relatively poor student, Picasso displayed a prodigious talent for drawing at a very young age. According to legend, his first words were "piz, piz," his childish attempt at saying "lápiz," the Spanish word for pencil.

Picasso's father began teaching him to draw and paint when he was a child, and by the time he was 13 years old, his skill level had surpassed his father's. Soon, Picasso lost all desire to do any schoolwork, choosing to spend the school days doodling in his notebook instead.

"For being a bad student, I was banished to the 'calaboose,' a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on," he later remembered. "I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly ... I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping."

In 1895, when Picasso was 14 years old, his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, where he quickly applied to the city's prestigious School of Fine Arts. Although the school typically only accepted students several years his senior, Picasso's entrance exam was so extraordinary that he was granted an exception and admitted.

Nevertheless, Picasso chafed at the School of Fine Arts' strict rules and formalities, and began skipping class so that he could roam the streets of Barcelona, sketching the city scenes he observed.

In 1897, a 16-year-old Picasso moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando. However, he again became frustrated with his school's singular focus on classical subjects and techniques.

During this time, he wrote to a friend: "They just go on and on about the same old stuff: Velázquez for painting, Michelangelo for sculpture." Once again, Picasso began skipping class to wander the city and paint what he observed: gypsies, beggars and prostitutes, among other things.

In 1899, Picasso moved back to Barcelona and fell in with a crowd of artists and intellectuals who made their headquarters at a café called El Quatre Gats ("The Four Cats").

Inspired by the anarchists and radicals he met there, Picasso made his decisive break from the classical methods in which he had been trained, and began what would become a lifelong process of experimentation and innovation.

Picasso remains renowned for endlessly reinventing himself, switching between styles so radically different that his life's work seems to be the product of five or six great artists rather than just one.

Of his penchant for style diversity, Picasso insisted that his varied work was not indicative of radical shifts throughout his career, but, rather, of his dedication to objectively evaluating for each piece the form and technique best suited to achieve his desired effect.

"Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should," he explained. "Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it."

Blue Period

Art critics and historians typically break Picasso's adult career into distinct periods, the first of which lasted from 1901 to 1904 and is called his "Blue Period," after the color that dominated nearly all of his paintings over these years.

At the turn of the 20th century, Picasso moved to Paris, France — the center of European art — to open his own studio. Lonely and deeply depressed over the death of his close friend, Carlos Casagemas, he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and anguish, almost exclusively in shades of blue and green.

'Blue Nude’ and ‘The Old Guitarist’

Picasso's most famous paintings from the Blue Period include "Blue Nude," "La Vie" and "The Old Guitarist," all three of which were completed in 1903.

In contemplation of Picasso and his Blue Period, writer and critic Charles Morice once asked, "Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?"

Rose Period: 'Gertrude Stein' and 'Two Nudes'

By 1905, Picasso had largely overcome the depression that had previously debilitated him, and the artistic manifestation of Picasso's improved spirits was the introduction of warmer colors—including beiges, pinks and reds—in what is known as his "Rose Period" (1904-06).

Not only was he madly in love with a beautiful model, Fernande Olivier, he was newly prosperous thanks to the generous patronage of art dealer Ambroise Vollard. His most famous paintings from these years include "Family at Saltimbanques" (1905), "Gertrude Stein" (1905-06) and "Two Nudes" (1906).

Cubism was an artistic style pioneered by Picasso and his friend and fellow painter Georges Braque.

In Cubist paintings, objects are broken apart and reassembled in an abstracted form, highlighting their composite geometric shapes and depicting them from multiple, simultaneous viewpoints in order to create physics-defying, collage-like effects. At once destructive and creative, Cubism shocked, appalled and fascinated the art world.

‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’

In 1907, Picasso produced a painting that today is considered the precursor and inspiration of Cubism: "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

A chilling depiction of five nude prostitutes, abstracted and distorted with sharp geometric features and stark blotches of blues, greens and grays, the work was unlike anything he or anyone else had ever painted before and would profoundly influence the direction of art in the 20th century.

"It made me feel as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire," Braque said, explaining that he was shocked when he first viewed Picasso's "Les Demoiselles." Braque quickly became intrigued with Cubism, seeing the new style as a revolutionary movement.

French writer and critic Max Jacob, a good friend of both Picasso and painter Juan Gris, called Cubism "the 'Harbinger Comet' of the new century," stating, "Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end."

Picasso's early Cubist paintings, known as his "Analytic Cubist" works, include "Three Women" (1907), "Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table" (1909) and "Girl with Mandolin" (1910).

His later Cubist works are distinguished as "Synthetic Cubism" for moving even further away from artistic typicalities of the time, creating vast collages out of a great number of tiny, individual fragments. These paintings include "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912), "Card Player" (1913-14) and "Three Musicians" (1921).

Classical Period: ‘Three Women at the Spring’

Picasso’s works between 1918 and 1927 are categorized as part of his "Classical Period," a brief return to Realism in a career otherwise dominated by experimentation. The outbreak of World War I ushered in the next great change in Picasso's art.

He grew more somber and, once again, preoccupied with the depiction of reality. His most interesting and important works from this period include "Three Women at the Spring" (1921), "Two Women Running on the Beach/The Race" (1922) and "The Pipes of Pan" (1923).

From 1927 onward, Picasso became caught up in a new philosophical and cultural movement known as Surrealism , the artistic manifestation of which was a product of his own Cubism.

Picasso's most well-known Surrealist painting, deemed one of the greatest paintings of all time, was completed in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War: "Guernica." After Nazi German bombers supporting Francisco Franco 's Nationalist forces carried out a devastating aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, Picasso, outraged by the bombing and the inhumanity of war, painted this work of art.

In black, white and grays, the painting is a Surrealist testament to the horrors of war, and features a minotaur and several human-like figures in various states of anguish and terror. "Guernica" remains one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history.

Later Works: 'Self Portrait Facing Death'

In contrast to the dazzling complexity of Synthetic Cubism, Picasso's later paintings display simple, childlike imagery and crude technique. Touching on the artistic validity of these later works, Picasso once remarked upon passing a group of school kids in his old age, "When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael , but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them."

In the aftermath of World War II , Picasso became more overtly political, joining the Communist Party. He was twice honored with the International Lenin Peace Prize, first in 1950 and again in 1961.

By this point in his life, he was also an international celebrity, the world's most famous living artist. While paparazzi chronicled his every move, however, few paid attention to his art during this time. Picasso continued to create art and maintain an ambitious schedule in his later years, superstitiously believing that work would keep him alive.

Picasso created the epitome of his later work, "Self Portrait Facing Death," using pencil and crayon, a year before his death. The autobiographical subject, drawn with crude technique, appears as something between a human and an ape, with a green face and pink hair. Yet the expression in his eyes, capturing a lifetime of wisdom, fear and uncertainty, is the unmistakable work of a master at the height of his powers.

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A lifelong womanizer, Picasso had countless relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, muses and prostitutes, marrying only twice.

He wed a ballerina named Olga Khokhlova in 1918, and they remained together for nine years, parting ways in 1927. They had a son together, Paulo. In 1961, at the age of 79, he married his second wife, Jacqueline Roque.

While married to Khokhlova, he began a long-term relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter. They had a daughter, Maya, together. Walter committed suicide after Picasso died.

Between marriages, in 1935, Picasso met Dora Maar, a fellow artist, on the set of Jean Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (released in 1936). The two soon embarked upon a partnership that was both romantic and professional.

Their relationship lasted more than a decade, during and after which time Maar struggled with depression; they parted ways in 1946, three years after Picasso began having an affair with a woman named Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two children, son Claude and daughter Paloma. They went separate ways in 1953. (Gilot would later marry scientist Jonas Salk , the inventor of the polio vaccine.)

Picasso fathered four children: Paulo (Paul), Maya, Claude and Paloma Picasso. His daughter Paloma - featured in several of her father's paintings - would become a famous designer, crafting jewelry and other items for Tiffany & Co.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 91, in Mougins, France. He died of heart failure, reportedly while he and his wife Jacqueline were entertaining friends for dinner.

Considered radical in his work, Picasso continues to garner reverence for his technical mastery, visionary creativity and profound empathy. Together, these qualities have distinguished the "disquieting" Spaniard with the "piercing" eyes as a revolutionary artist.

For nearly 80 of his 91 years, Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that he superstitiously believed would keep him alive, contributing significantly to — and paralleling the entire development of — modern art in the 20th century.

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Pablo Picasso
• Birth Year: 1881
• Birth date: October 25, 1881
• Birth City: Málaga
• Birth Country: Spain
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, famous for paintings like ‘Guernica’ and for the art movement known as Cubism.
• World War II
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• La Llotja (Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi)
• Royal Academy of San Fernando
• School of Fine Arts (Barcelona, Spain)
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that he superstitiously believed would keep him alive.
• Pablo Picasso's full name was: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso.
• Death Year: 1973
• Death date: April 8, 1973
• Death City: Mougins
• Death Country: France

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Pablo Picasso Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/pablo-picasso
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: August 28, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.
• If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
• When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.
• Everything you can imagine is real.
• Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
• For being a bad student, I was banished to the 'calaboose,' a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly ... I could have stayed there forever, drawing without stopping.
• When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
• Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?
• If you don't know what color to take, take black.
• Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
• God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.
• It's not what the artist does that counts. But what he is.
• Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird?
• Of course, you can paint pictures by matching up different parts of them so that they go nicely together, but they'll lack any kind of drama.
• It has often been said that an artist should work for himself, for the love of art, and scorn success. It's a false idea. An artist needs success. Not only in order to live, but primarily so that he can realize his work.
• Nothing can be done without solitude.
• In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
• I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.
• People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

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Pablo Picasso Biography

As a significant influence on 20th-century art, Pablo Picasso was an innovative artist who experimented and innovated during his 92-plus years on earth. He was not only a master painter but also a sculptor, printmaker, ceramics artist, etching artist and writer. His work matured from the naturalism of his childhood through Cubism, Surrealism and beyond, shaping the direction of modern and contemporary art through the decades. Picasso lived through two World Wars, sired four children, appeared in films and wrote poetry. He died in 1973.

Early Years: 1881-1900

Although he lived the majority of his adult years in France, Picasso was a Spaniard by birth. Hailing from the town of Málaga in Andalusia, Spain, he was the first-born of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. He was raised as a Catholic, but in his later life would declare himself an atheist.

Pablo Picasso's father was an artist in his own right, earning a living painting birds and other game animals. He also taught art classes and curated the local museum. Don José Ruiz y Blasco began schooling his son in drawing and oil painting when the boy was seven, and he found the young Pablo to be an apt pupil.

Picasso attended the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where his father taught, at 13 years of age. In 1897, Picasso began his studies at Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, which was Spain's top art academy at the time. Picasso attended only briefly, preferring to roam the art exhibits at the Prado, studying paintings of Rembrandt , Johannes Vermeer , El Greco , Francisco Goya , and Diego Veláquez .

During this nascent period of Picasso's life, he painted portraits, such as his sister Lola's First Communion . As the 19th century drew to a close, elements of Symbolism and his own interpretation of Modernism began to be apparent in his stylized landscapes.

Middle Years: 1900-1940

In 1900, Picasso first went to Paris, the center of the European art scene. He shared lodgings with Max Jacob, a poet and journalist who took the artist under his wing. The two lived in abject poverty, sometimes reduced to burning the artist's paintings to stay warm.

Before long, Picasso relocated to Madrid and lived there for the first part of 1901. He partnered with his friend Francisco Asis Soler on a literary magazine called "Young Art," illustrating articles and creating cartoons sympathetic to the poor. By the time the first issue came out, the developing artist had begun to sign his artworks "Picasso," rather than his customary "Pablo Ruiz y Picasso."

Blue Period

The Picasso art period known as the Blue Period extended from 1901 to 1904. During this time, the artist painted primarily in shades of blue, with occasional touches of accent color. For example, the famous 1903 artwork, The Old Guitarist , features a guitar in warmer brown tones amid the blue hues. Picasso's Blue Period works are often perceived as somber due to their subdued tones.

Historians attribute Picasso's Blue Period largely to the artist's apparent depression following a friend's suicide. Some of the recurring subjects in the Blue Period are blindness, poverty and the female nude.

Rose Period

The Rose Period lasted from 1904 through 1906. Shades of pink and rose imbued Picasso's art with a warmer, less melancholy air than his Blue Period paintings. Harlequins, clowns and circus folk are among the recurring subjects in these artworks. He painted one of his best-selling works during the Rose Period, Boy with a Pipe . Elements of primitivism in the Rose Period paintings reflect experimentation with the Picasso art style.

African Influence

During his African art and Primitivism period from 1907 to 1909, Picasso created one of his best-known and most controversial artworks, Les Damoiselles d'Avignon . Inspired by the angular African art he viewed in an exhibit at the Palais de Trocadero and by an African mask owned by Henri Matisse , Picasso's art reflected these influences during this period. Ironically, Matisse was among the most vocal denouncers of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" when Picasso first showed it to his inner circle.

Analytic Cubism

From 1907 to 1912, the artist worked with fellow painter Georges Braque in creating the beginnings of the Cubist movement in art. Their paintings utilize a palette of earth tones. The works depict deconstructed objects with complex geometric forms.

His romantic partner of seven years, Fernande Olivier, figured in many of the artist's Cubist works, including Head of a Woman, Fernande (1909). Historians believe she also appeared in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Their relationship was tempestuous, and they separated for good in 1912.

Synthetic Cubism

This era of Picasso's life extended from 1912 to 1919. Picasso's works continued in the Cubist vein, but the artist introduced a new art form, collage, into some of his creations. He also incorporated the human form into many Cubist paintings, such as Girl with a Mandolin (1910) and Ma Jolie (1911-12). Although a number of artists he knew left Paris to fight in World War I, Picasso spent the war years in his studio.

He had already fallen in love with another woman by the time his relationship with Fernande Olivier ended. He and Eva Gouel, the subject of his 1911 painting, "Woman with a Guitar," were together until her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1915. Picasso then moved into a brief relationship with Gaby Depeyre Lespinesse that lasted only a year. In 1916-17, he briefly dated a 20-year-old actress, Paquerette, and Irene Lagut.

Soon thereafter, he met his first wife, Olga Khoklova, a ballet dancer from Russia, whom he married in 1918. They had a son together three years later. Although the artist and the ballerina became estranged soon thereafter, Picasso refused to grant Khoklova a divorce, since that meant he would have to give her half of his wealth. They remained married in name only until she died in 1955.

Neoclassicism and Surrealism

The Picasso art period extending from 1919 to 1929 featured a significant shift in style. In the wake of his first visit to Italy and the conclusion of World War I, the artist's paintings, such as the watercolor Peasants Sleeping (1919) reflected a restoration of order in art, and his neoclassical artworks offer a stark contrast to his Cubist paintings. However, as the French Surrealist Movement gained traction in the mid-1920s, Picasso began to reprise his penchant for Primitivism in such Surrealist-influenced paintings as Three Dancers (1925).

In 1927, the 46-year-old artist met Marie-Therese Walter, a 17-year-old girl from Spain. The two formed a relationship and Marie-Therese gave birth to Picasso's daughter Maya. They remained a couple until 1936, and she inspired the artist's "Vollard Suite," which consists of 100 neoclassical etchings completed in 1937. Picasso took up with artist and photographer Dora Maar in the late '30s.

During the 1930s, Picasso's works such as his well-known Guernica , a unique depiction of the Spanish Civil War, reflected the violence of war time. The menacing minotaur became a central symbol of his art, replacing the harlequin of his earlier years.

Later Years: 1940-1973

During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris under German occupation, enduring Gestapo harassment while he continued to create art. Some of the time, he wrote poetry, completing more than 300 works between 1939 and 1959. He also completed two plays, "Desire Caught by the Tail," and "The Four Little Girls."

After Paris was liberated in 1944, Picasso began a new relationship with the much younger art student Francoise Gilot. Together, they produced a son, Claude, in 1947, and a daughter, Paloma, in 1949. Their relationship was doomed like so many of Picasso's previous ones, however, due to his continual infidelities and abuse.

He focused on sculpture during this era, participating in an international exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1949. He subsequently created a commissioned sculpture known as the Chicago Picasso , which he donated to the U. S. city.

In 1961, at the age of 79, the artist married his second and last wife, 27-year-old Jacqueline Roque. She proved to be one of his career's greatest inspirations. Picasso produced more than 70 portraits of her during the final 17 years he was alive.

As his life neared its end, the artist experienced a flurry of creativity. The resulting artworks were a mixture of his previous styles and included colorful paintings and copper etchings. Art experts later recognized the beginnings of Neo-Expressionism in Picasso's final works.

Picasso's Influence on Art

As one of the greatest influences on the course of 20th-century art, Pablo Picasso often mixed various styles to create wholly new interpretations of what he saw. He was a driving force in the development of Cubism, and he elevated collage to the level of fine art.

With the courage and self-confidence unhindered by convention or fear of ostracism, Picasso followed his vision as it led him to fresh innovations in his craft. Similarly, his continual quest for passion in his many romantic liaisons throughout his life inspired him to create innumerable paintings, sculptures and etchings. Picasso is not just a man and his work. Picasso is always a legend, indeed almost a myth. In the public view he has long since been the personification of genius in modern art. Picasso is an idol, one of those rare creatures who act as crucibles in which the diverse and often chaotic phenomena of culture are focussed, who seem to body forth the artistic life of their age in one person.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

The old guitarist, girl before a mirror, three musicians, the weeping woman, the women of algiers, dora maar au chat, girl with mandolin, portrait of gertrude stein, family of saltimbanques, portrait of ambroise vollard, massacre in korea.

Pablo Picasso

Spanish Draftsman, Painter, Printmaker, and Sculptor

Summary of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was the most dominant and influential artist of the first half of the 20 th century. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism , alongside Georges Braque , he also invented collage and made major contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism . He saw himself above all as a painter, yet his sculpture was greatly influential, and he also explored areas as diverse as printmaking and ceramics. Finally, he was a famously charismatic personality; his many relationships with women not only filtered into his art but also may have directed its course, and his behavior has come to embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination.

Accomplishments

• It was a confluence of influences - from Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau , to archaic and tribal art - that encouraged Picasso to lend his figures more structure and ultimately set him on the path towards Cubism, in which he deconstructed the conventions of perspective that had dominated painting since the Renaissance. These innovations would have far-reaching consequences for practically all of modern art, revolutionizing attitudes to the depiction of form in space.
• Picasso's immersion in Cubism also eventually led him to the invention of collage, in which he abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world, and began to conceive of it merely as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects. This too would prove hugely influential for decades to come.
• Picasso had an eclectic attitude to style, and although, at any one time, his work was usually characterized by a single dominant approach, he often moved interchangeably between different styles - sometimes even in the same artwork.
• His encounter with Surrealism, although never transforming his work entirely, encouraged not only the soft forms and tender eroticism of portraits of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, but also the starkly angular imagery of Guernica (1937), the century's most famous anti-war painting.
• Picasso was always eager to place himself in history, and some of his greatest works, such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), refer to a wealth of past precedents - even while overturning them. As he matured he became only more conscious of assuring his legacy, and his late work is characterized by a frank dialogue with Old Masters such as Ingres , Velazquez , Goya , and Rembrandt .

The Life of Pablo Picasso

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them." Said Picasso, and whether he was partnering with Braque on Cubism or spending time with the poets he admired, or the muses he loved and craved, he was finding new ways to see, and represent what he saw. His life is a virtual progression of modernism.

Important Art by Pablo Picasso

La Soupe is characteristic of the somber melancholy of Picasso's Blue Period, and it was produced at the same time as a series of other pictures devoted to themes of destitution, old age, and blindness. The picture conveys something of Picasso's concern with the miserable conditions he witnessed while coming of age in Spain, and it is no doubt influenced by the religious painting he grew up with, and perhaps specifically by El Greco. But the picture is also typical of the wider Symbolist movement of the period. In later years Picasso dismissed his Blue Period works as "nothing but sentiment"; critics have often agreed with him, even though many of these pictures are iconic, and of course, now unbelievably expensive.

Oil on canvas - The Art Institute of Chicago

Portrait of Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an author, close friend, and even supporter of Picasso, and was integral to his growth as an artist. This portrait, in which Stein is wearing her favorite brown velvet coat, was made just a year before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , and marks an important stage in his evolving style. In contrast to the flat appearance of the figures and objects in some of the Blue and Rose period works, the forms in this portrait seem almost sculpted, and indeed they were influenced by the artist's discovery of archaic Iberian sculpture. One can almost sense Picasso's increased interest in depicting a human face as a series of flat planes. Stein claimed that she sat for the artist some ninety times, and although that may be an exaggeration, Picasso certainly wrestled long and hard with painting her head. After approaching it in various ways, abandoning each attempt, one day he painted it out altogether, declaring "I can't see you any longer when I look," and soon abandoned the picture. It was only some time later, and without the model in front of him, that he completed the head.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

This painting was shocking even to Picasso's closest artist friends both for its content and its execution. The subject matter of nude women was not in itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was novel. Picasso's studies of Iberian and tribal art is most evident in the faces of three of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive. Picasso also went further with his spatial experiments by abandoning the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards, something Picasso borrowed in part from Paul Cézanne's brushwork. For instance, the leg of the woman on the left is painted as if seen from several points of view simultaneously; it is difficult to distinguish the leg from the negative space around it making it appear as if the two are both in the foreground. The painting was widely thought to be immoral when it was finally exhibited in public in 1916. Braque is one of the few artists who studied it intently in 1907, leading directly to his Cubist collaborations with Picasso. Because Les Demoiselles predicted some of the characteristics of Cubism, the work is considered proto or pre Cubism.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Still Life with Chair Caning

Still Life with Chair Caning is celebrated for being modern art's first collage. Picasso had affixed preexisting objects to his canvases before, but this picture marks the first time he did so with such playful and emphatic intent. The chair caning in the picture in fact comes from a piece of printed oilcloth - and not, as the title suggests, an actual piece of chair caning. But the rope around the canvas is very real, and serves to evoke the carved border of a café table. Furthermore, the viewer can imagine that the canvas is a glass table, and the chair caning is the actual seat of the chair that can be seen through the table. Hence the picture not only dramatically contrasts visual space as is typical of Picasso's experiments, it also confuses our sense of what it is that we are looking at.

Oil on canvas - The National Gallery, London

Maquette for Guitar

Picasso's experiments with collaged elements such as those in Still Life with Chair Caning encouraged him to reconsider traditional sculpture as well. Rather than a collage, however, Maquette for Guitar is an assemblage or three-dimensional collage. Picasso took pieces of cardboard, paper, string, and wire that he then folded, threaded, and glued together, making it the first sculpture assembled from disparate parts. The work is also innovative because it is not a solid material surrounded by a void, but instead fluidly integrates mass and its surrounding void. Picasso has translated the Cubist interest in multiple perspectives and geometric form into a three-dimensional medium, using non-traditional art materials that continue to challenge the distinction between high art and popular culture as he did in Ma Jolie (1911-12).

Paperboard, paper, thread, string, twine, and coated wire - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle

Picasso's Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle is typical of his Synthetic Cubism, in which he uses various means - painted dots, silhouettes, grains of sand - to allude to the depicted objects. This combination of painting and mixed media is an example of the way Picasso "synthesized" color and texture - synthesizing new wholes after mentally dissecting the objects at hand. During his Analytic Cubist phase Picasso had suppressed color, so as to concentrate more on the forms and volumes of the objects, and this rationale also no doubt guided his preference for still life throughout this phase. The life of the café certainly summed up modern Parisian life for the artists - it was where he spent a good deal of time talking with other artists - but the simple array of objects also ensured that questions of symbolism and allusion might be kept under control.

In this work, Picasso challenges the distinction between high art and popular culture, pushing his experiments in new directions. Building on the geometric forms of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Picasso moves further towards abstraction by reducing color and by increasing the illusion of low-relief sculpture. Most significantly, however, Picasso included painted words on the canvas. The words, "ma jolie" on the surface not only flatten the space further, but they also liken the painting to a poster because they are painted in a font reminiscent of one used in advertising. This is the first time that an artist so blatantly uses elements of popular culture in a work of high art. Further linking the work to pop culture and to the everyday, "Ma Jolie" was also the name of a popular tune at the time as well as Picasso's nickname for his girlfriend.

The Three Musicians

Picasso painted two version of this picture. The slightly smaller version hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but both are unusually large for Picasso's Cubist period, and he may have chosen to work on this grand scale because they mark the conclusion of his Synthetic Cubism, which had occupied him for nearly a decade. He painted it in the same summer as the very different, classical painting Three Women at the Spring . Some have interpreted the pictures as nostalgic remembrances of the artist's early days: Picasso sits in the center - as ever the Harlequin - and his old friends Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918, and Max Jacob, from whom he had become estranged, sit on either side. However, another argument links the pictures to Picasso's work for the Ballets Russes, and identifies the characters with more recent friends. Either way, the costumes of the figures certainly derive from traditions in Italian popular theatre.

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Three Women at the Spring

Picasso made careful studies in preparation for this, his most ambitious treatment of what is an old classical subject. It makes reference to earlier pictures by Poussin and Ingres - titans of classical painting - but it also draws inspiration from Greek sculpture, and indeed the massive gravity of the figures is very sculptural. Critics have speculated that the subject appealed to him because of the recent birth of his first son, Paulo; the somber attitude of the figures may be explained by the contemporary preoccupation in France with mourning the dead of the First World War.

Large Nude in a Red Armchair

When Picasso's work came under the influence of the Surrealists in the late 1920s, his forms often took on melting, organic contours. This work was completed in May 1929, around the same time the Surrealists were preoccupied with the way in which ugly and disgusting imagery might provide a route into the unconscious. It was clearly intended to shock, and it may have been influenced by Salvador Dalí - and Joan Miro. It is thought that the picture represents the former dancer Olga Koklova, whose relationship with Picasso was failing around this time.

Oil on canvas - Musée National Picasso, Paris

This painting was Picasso's response to the bombing of the Basque town named Guernica on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Painted in one month - from May to June 1937 - it became the centerpiece of the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair later that year. While it was a sensation at the fair, it was consequently banned from exhibition in Spain until military dictator Francisco Franco fell from power in 1975. Much time has been spent trying to decode the symbolism of the picture, and some believe that the dying horse in the center of the painting alludes to the people of Spain. The minotaur may allude to bull fighting, a favorite national past-time in Spain, though it also had complex personal significance for the artist. Although Guernica is undoubtedly modern art's most famous response to war, critics have been divided on its success as a painting.

Oil on canvas - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

Biography of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born into a creative family. His father was a painter, and he quickly showed signs of following the same path: his mother claimed that his first word was "piz," a shortened version of lapiz , or pencil, and his father was his first teacher. Picasso began formally studying art at the age of 11. Several paintings from his teenage years still exist, such as First Communion (1895), which is typical in its conventional, if accomplished, academic style. His father groomed the young prodigy to be a great artist by getting Picasso the best education the family could afford and visiting Madrid to see works by Spanish Old Masters. And when the family moved to Barcelona so his father could take up a new post, Picasso continued his art education.

Early Training

It was in Barcelona that Picasso first matured as a painter. He frequented the Els Quatre Gats, a café popular with bohemians, anarchists, and modernists. And he came to be familiar with Art Nouveau and Symbolism , and artists such as Edvard Munch and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec . It was here that he met Jaime Sabartes, who would go on to be his fiercely loyal secretary in later years. This was his introduction to a cultural avant-garde , in which young artists were encouraged to express themselves.

During the years from 1900 to 1904, Picasso traveled frequently, spending time in Madrid and Paris, in addition to spells in Barcelona. Although he began making sculpture during this time, critics characterize this time as his Blue Period, after the blue/grey palette that dominated his paintings. The mood of the work was also insistently melancholic. One might see the beginnings of this in the artist's sadness over the suicide of Carlos Casegemas, a friend he had met in Barcelona, though the subjects of much of the Blue Period work were drawn from the beggars and prostitutes he encountered in city streets. The Old Guitarist (1903) is a typical example of both the subject matter and the style of this phase.

In 1904, Picasso's palette began to brighten, and for a year or more he painted in a style that has been characterized as his Rose Period. He focused on performers and circus figures, switching his palette to various shades of more uplifting reds and pinks. And around 1906, soon after he had met artist Georges Braque , his palette darkened, his forms became heavier and more solid in aspect, and he began to find his way towards Cubism .

Mature Period

In the past critics dated the beginnings of Cubism to his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Although that work is now seen as transitional (lacking the radical distortions of his later experiments), it was clearly crucial in his development since it was heavily influenced by African sculpture and ancient Iberian art. It is said to have inspired Braque to paint his own first series of Cubist paintings, and in subsequent years the two would mount one of the most remarkable collaborations in modern painting, sometimes eagerly learning from each other, at other times trying to outdo one another in their fast-paced and competitive race to innovate. They visited each other daily during their formulation of this radical technique, and Picasso described himself and Braque as "two mountaineers, roped together." In their shared vision, multiple perspectives on an object are depicted simultaneously by being fragmented and rearranged in splintered configurations. Form and space became the most crucial elements, and so both artists restricted their palettes to earth tones, in stark contrast with the bright colors used by the Fauves that had preceded them. Picasso would always have an artist or a group he collaborated with, but as Braque biographer Alex Danchev wrote: Picasso's "Braque period" was "the most concentrated and fruitful of his whole career."

Picasso rejected the label "Cubism," especially when critics began to differentiate between the two key approaches he was said to pursue - Analytic and Synthetic . He saw his body of work as a continuum. But it is beyond doubt that there was a change in his work around 1912. He became less concerned with representing the placement of objects in space than in using shapes and motifs as signs to playfully allude to their presence. He developed the technique of collage , and from Braque he learned the related method of papiers colles , which used cutout pieces of paper in addition to fragments of existing materials. This phase has since come to be known as the "Synthetic" phase of Cubism, due to its reliance on various allusions to an object in order to create the description of it. This approach opened up the possibilities of more decorative and playful compositions, and its versatility encouraged Picasso to continue to utilize it well in the 1920s.

But the artist's dawning interest in ballet also sent his work in new directions around 1916. This was in part prompted by meeting the poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau . Through him he met Sergei Diaghilev , and went on to produce numerous set designs for the Ballets Russes.

For some years Picasso had occasionally toyed with classical imagery, and he began to give this free rein in the early 1920s. His figures became heavier and more massive, and he often imagined them against backgrounds of a Mediterranean Golden Age. They have long been associated with the wider conservative trends of Europe's so-called rappel a l'ordre , (return to order), a period of art now known as Interwar Classicism .

His encounter with Surrealism in the mid 1920s again prompted a change of direction. His work became more expressive, and often violent or erotic. This phase in his work can also be correlated with the period in his personal life when his marriage to dancer Olga Khokhlova began to break down and he began a new relationship with Marie-Therese Walter. Indeed, critics have often noted how changes in style in Picasso's work often go hand in hand with changes in his romantic relationships; his partnership with Khokhlova spanned the years of his interest in dance and, later, his time with Jacqueline Roque is associated with his late phase in which he became preoccupied with his legacy alongside the Old Masters. Picasso frequently painted the women he was in love with, and, as a result, his tumultuous personal life is well represented on canvas. He was known to have kept many mistresses, most famously Eva Gouel, Dora Maar , and Françoise Gilot. He married twice, and had four children, Claude, Paloma, Maia, and Paulo.

In the late 1920s he began a collaboration with the sculptor Julio González . This was his most significant creative partnership since he had worked alongside Braque, and it culminated in welded metal sculptures, which were subsequently highly influential.

As the 1930s wore on, political concerns began to cloud Picasso's view, and these would continue to preoccupy him for some time. His disgust at the bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War prompted him to create the painting Guernica , in 1937. During World War II he stayed in Paris, and the German authorities left him sufficiently unmolested to allow him to continue his work. However, the war did have a huge impact on Picasso, with his Paris painting collection confiscated by Nazis and some of his closest Jewish friends killed. Picasso made works commemorating them - sculptures employing hard, cold materials such as metal, and a particularly violent follow up to Guernica , entitled The Charnel House (1945). Following the war he was also closely involved with the Communist Party, and several major pictures from this period, such as War in Korea (1951), make that new allegiance clear.

Late Years and Death

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Picasso worked on his own versions of canonical masterpieces by artists such as Nicolas Poussin , Diego Velázquez , and El Greco . In the later years of his life, Picasso sought solace from his celebrity, marrying Jacqueline Rogue in 1961. His later paintings were heavily portrait-based and their palettes nearly garish in hue. Critics have generally considered them inferior to his earlier work, though in recent years they have been more enthusiastically received. He also created many ceramic and bronze sculptures during this later period. He died of a heart attack in the South of France in 1973.

The Legacy of Pablo Picasso

Picasso's influence was profound and far-reaching, and remarkably, many periods of his life were influential in their own right. His early Symbolist pieces remain iconic, while innovations in pioneering Cubism established a set of pictorial problems, devices, and approaches, which remained important well into the 1950s. Even after the war, even though the energy in avant-garde art shifted to New York, Picasso remained a titanic figure, and one who could never be ignored. Indeed, even though the Abstract Expressionists could be said to have superseded aspects of Cubism (even while being strongly influenced by him), The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been called "the house that Pablo built," because it has so widely exhibited the artist's work. MoMA's opening exhibition in 1930 included fifteen paintings by Picasso. He was also a part of Alfred Barr's highly influential survey shows Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936-37). Although his influence undoubtedly waned in the 1960s, he had by that time become a pop icon, and the public's fascination with his life story continue to fuel interest in his work.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Pablo Picasso

• Pablo Picasso: Lives and Loves The Art Story Blog: The many women and muses of Picasso
• Picasso: Works Entering the Public Domain in 2019 Copyrights expire in the United States for a number of Picasso artworks
• Defining Modern Art Take a look at the big picture of modern art, and Picasso's role in it
• Timeline of Most Important Modern Art Picasso's 3 important works are a part of the overall history of Modern Art
• A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906 By John Richardson
• A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 By John Richardson
• A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 By John Richardson
• Picasso (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) By Gertrude Stein
• Life with Picasso Our Pick By Françoise Gilot
• Picasso & Lump: A Dachshund's Odyssey By David Douglas Duncan, Paloma Picasso Thevenet
• Picasso: 200 Masterpieces from 1898 to 1972 Our Pick By Pablo Picasso, Bernard Picasso, Bernice Rose
• Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973: Genius of the Century By Walther F. Ingo
• Picasso and the war years, 1937-1945 (1999) Guggenheim Exhibition Catalogue / By Steven A. Nash, Robert Rosenblum, Brigitte Baer
• Picasso and American Art By Michael FitzGerald, Julia May Boddewyn
• Picasso Line Drawings and Prints By Pablo Picasso
• Picasso Administration Official Website
• Picasso Museum Our Pick Museum in Madrid, Spain
• Page about the painting Guernica (1937)
• Page about the painting The Tragedy (1903) Analysis of painting beneath this painting. By National Gallery of Art
• The Artist Pablo Picasso By Robert Hughes / Time Magazine / June 8, 1998
• Artists on Picasso: Then and Now July 19, 2007
• Simon Schama's Power of Art series, on Picasso's Guernica
• Picasso: a documentary by Luciano Emmer
• Le Mystere Picasso: a documentary by Henri-Georges Clouzot
• Visit to Picasso: A Documentary by Paul Haesaert Our Pick
• Surviving Picasso (1996) Story of Picasso's lover Françoise Gilot
• Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies 2008 Documentary about the beginnings of Cubism
• David Bowie Music Video

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In the studio, modern art and st ives, artist biography, wikipedia entry.

School of Paris painter, sculptor , etcher , lithographer , ceramist and designer, who has had enormous influence on 20th century art and worked in an unprecedented variety of styles. Born at Malaga, Spain, son of an art teacher. His family moved to Barcelona, where he entered the School of Fine Arts 1895; then entered Madrid Academy 1897. Early showed great precocity. First visited Paris in autumn 1900, returned in 1901 when he had his first Paris one-man exhibition at the Galerie Vollard. Blue Period paintings of beggars and sad-faced women. Settled in Paris 1904. In 1905 painted some pictures of circus folk and embarked on his Rose Period. 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' 1906-7 marked the beginning of a more revolutionary manner, influenced by Cezanne and Negro art. Met Braque in 1907 and with his collaboration created Cubism . Designed sets and costumes for Parade and other Diaghilev ballets 1917-24. Made some neo-classic figure paintings 1920-4, parallel to later Cubism. Started to make more violently expressive and metamorphic works in 1925, and in the following years frequently exhibited with the Surrealists . Important series of wrought- iron constructions and modelled sculptures 1928-34, illustrations for Ovid's Les Métamorphoses , Buffon's Histoire Naturelle etc. Awarded First Prize at the 1930 Pittsburgh International. His painting 'Guernica' 1937 was inspired by the destruction by bombing of the Spanish town of that name. Continued to live in Paris throughout the Occupation. From 1946 lived mainly in the South of France at Antibes, Vallauris, Cannes, and from 1958 near Aix-en-Provence, where he maintained a prolific output of paintings, sculptures, etchings, lithographs and ceramics. Died at Mougins, near Cannes.

Published in: Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists , Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.591-2

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.

Picasso's output, especially in his early career, is often periodized. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License . Spotted a problem? Let us know .

Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle

Bust of a woman, seated woman in a chemise, girl in a chemise, horse with a youth in blue, seated nude, artist as subject, thanx picasso, the defects of its qualities, picasso’s meninas, faun revealing a sleeping woman (jupiter and antiope, after rembrandt), head of a young boy, etching: 11, 28 february 1970 3, 16, 30 march 1970 (l.13), etching: 19 february 1970 (l.16), i could lend you something, but i would not be doing you any favours, film and audio.

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Biography Online

Biography Pablo Picasso

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

– Pablo Picasso

Short bio of Pablo Picasso

“When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

—- Pablo Picasso

His early artistic career went through various states. One of the first stages was known as the ‘Blue Period.’ In his late-teens his paintings were dominated by different shades of dark blue; they were also often melancholic. This included a famous self-portrait where Picasso looked much older than his 20 years.

Pablo_Picasso 1905 – ‘At the Lapin Agile;

During 1904-06, Picasso entered a phase known as ‘The Rose Period’ Losing the glumness of his previous ‘Blue Period’, Picasso painted circus clowns, harlequins and people from the circus. The more cheerful and optimistic tone helped to attract an increasing number of patrons and people interested in his work. In particular, the American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, and the art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.  Kahnweiler was influential in helping to put Picasso on a secure financial footing. Picasso later remarked; “What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had a business sense?”

In 1907, Picasso continued his artistic experiments and took inspiration from African art. This led to an early form of cubism and also one of his most controversial paintings – ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ – it is a picture depicting five prostitutes in a brothel. It is an eye-catching and an original exploration of modernism in art, but when displayed in his studio the reaction from art critics was strongly negative.

‘Nature morte au compotier’ – 1914-15, ‘crystal cubism.’

In the years before the First World War, Picasso – along with artists such as Georges Braque – continued to develop a new form of painting known as ‘cubism.’ Cubism involved capturing the essence of the subject on the canvas but exaggerating certain features. The colours were invariably dull – greys, brown and neutrals.

In 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon with fellow artists. His French artist friends were called up to the army, but he was able to continue painting during the war. However, the German-born Kahnweiler was exiled from France and Picasso was left without a dealer.

In 1918, Picasso married ballerina Olga Khokhlova. Shortly after he began a fruitful relationship with the French art dealer Paul Rosenberg. Rosenberg became good friends with Picasso and helped the couple settle in Paris, giving Picasso a new artistic social circle. Paris was considered an artistic hotspot of the ‘Roaring Twenties,’ attracting many innovative artists. Picasso and his wife Khokholva had a tempestuous relationship. Picasso’s bohemian nature clashed with the social graces of Khokhlova. They remained married until 1955, but Picasso had several affairs and mistresses.

In the 1920s and 30s, Picasso concentrated on more classical works of art. He became interested in depicting the human form in the style of neo-classical. To some extent, he was influenced by artists such as Renoir and Ingres, although he always retained a unique and individual expression.

Picasso had an instinctive and natural compassion for those exposed to suffering, especially if it was as a result of injustice. His natural sympathy and desire for equality led him to join the French Communist party. During the Spanish Civil War, he supported the Republicans and nursed an intense dislike of Franco and what he did to Spain.

Pablo Picasso and Guernica

One of Picasso’s most famous paintings was his mural of the Guernica bombing (1937). The Guernica bombing was carried out by Italian and German planes and involved the carpet bombing of civil areas. The bombing of Guernica was a significant development in modern warfare as it showed a  new capacity for extending the horrors of warfare to the civilian population. The bombing became international news through the English journalist George Steer. Picasso’s painting helped to immortalise the tragedy as a key event in the Twentieth Century. (See: Events that changed the world )

Picasso was so enraged with Franco that he never allowed the painting to go to Spain during Franco’s lifetime. It eventually reached Spain in 1981.

Picasso was well aware of a political dimension to art.

“What do you think an artist is? …he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

— Pablo Picasso

The Dove of Peace by Picasso

Another key painting of Picasso was his simple bird drawing a symbol of peace. Picasso donated it the Soviet-backed World Peace Congress of 1949. It was telling of a new phase in Picasso’s art – the power of simplicity. Picasso was a member of the French Communist Party until his death.

Abundant in artistic inspiration, Picasso was remarkably prolific. His total artistic work numbered close to 50,000. This included 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics, and roughly 12,000. He died at the age of 91.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Pablo Picasso”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net , 2/11/2007. Last updated 17th March 2017.

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ARTISTS (1881–1973); MÁLAGA, SPAIN

Few artists have enjoyed the stature and legacy afforded to Pablo Picasso, the famed painter who ushered in the art style known as Cubism and whose name became synonymous with masterpieces of artistic expression. Keep reading for more on the acclaimed artist’s life and artwork.

1. Pablo Picasso's art included more than just paint.

Over his storied career and through thousands of artworks, Picasso used far more than paint and a brush. Among the tools and styles involved in the creation of his art, including sculptures, were:

• Sea stones.
• Toy cars, used in the Baboon and Young sculpture in 1951.
• A bicycle seat and handlebars, used to create his Bull’s Head sculpture in 1942.
• Linocuts, a type of printmaking using a linoleum block.
• Forks, used for the feet of a bird in his Bird sculpture in 1958.

2. Pablo Picasso preferred artwork to schoolwork.

Born in Málaga, Spain, on October 25, 1881, Picasso’s destiny seemed prewritten. His father was José Ruiz y Blasco, an art instructor, and from an early age, Picasso was weaned on the techniques of the trade. By the time he was 13, he was said to have exceeded his own father’s artistic abilities and began ignoring his formal education so he could sketch in his notebook.

Even the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where Picasso wound up at age 14, was not enough to hold his interest. He took to the streets, sketching landscapes. At the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, he again skipped class to wander around and absorb real life. His experimental urges and dismissal of conventional teachings would come to define his work.

3. Pablo Picasso’s “Blue Period” paintings, including The Old Guitarist , were the result of personal tragedy.

Though he experimented with different art styles throughout his career, it’s Pablo Picasso’s “Blue Period” that stands out. Art historians dubbed this stretch of time from 1901 to 1904 to mark a noticeable shift in Picasso’s artwork to bleak scenes of private struggles, including poverty. The mood of each piece was accentuated by the use of blues and greens, and it's thought that the change in tone was the result of the death of a close friend, Carlos Casagemas. Of these, The Old Guitarist is one of his best-known, though this period also produced Blue Nude and La Vie . This was followed by his "Rose Period" from 1904 to 1906, which seemed to release Picasso from his depression and resulted in more colorful works like Family of Saltimbanques and Acrobat and Young Harlequin .

4. Pablo Picasso’s most famous accomplishment was helping introduce Cubism to the world.

In 1905, Picasso crossed paths with French painter Georges Braque, who had been busy experimenting with polychromatic and stylized landscape paintings. Together, the two explored what came to be known as Cubism, or the practice of applying geometric shapes—not just cubes—to subjects to reinforce the two-dimensional nature of the art. The style has its roots in traditional African sculptures (like tribal masks ) and post-Impressionalists like Cézanne . Picasso’s 1907 portrait of five prostitutes, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , is considered the first Cubist painting.

5. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica might be his most celebrated work.

Picasso was living in Paris in 1937 when he was struck with inspiration, though not one he would ever have welcomed. That spring, German and Italian bombers leveled the city of Guernica in Spain as part of that country’s civil war. Using a massive canvas that was more mural than painting, Picasso was compelled to create Guernica , which used strong imagery like a bull and a grieving mother to depict the consequences of war. Originally on display in the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, the artwork wound up in the United States and was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It’s now able to be viewed in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

6. Pablo Picasso painted self-portraits for over 70 years.

One way of charting Picasso’s interests and skills in his artistic approach is to examine his self-portraits. Composed from the age of 15 to age 90, they reflect his ever-changing styles. He sketched many of them early on before shifting to his Blue Period style of greens and blues. Self-portraits in the styles of Cubism and Neo-Classicism followed.

7. Pablo Picasso had four children, and they inherited his works.

Picasso was not one to settle down. He had four children with three different women. With ballerina Olga Khokhlova, he had a son, Paulo, born in 1917. With model Marie-Thérèse Walter, he had daughter Maya, born in 1935. With painter Françoise Gilot, he had Claude in 1947 and Paloma in 1949. Paulo died in 1975, leaving three remaining children and Paulo’s two offspring as heirs. The Paris-based Picasso Administration manages their interests and helps to authenticate his works and debunk forgeries.

8. Pablo Picasso’s death preceded one of his most creative periods.

It’s believed that Picasso created more works in the last four years of his life than at any other period of time, embracing more ambitious and abstract approaches and even painting The Young Painter in 1971, a rendition of Picasso decades younger. He died on April 8, 1973 at age 91 of heart failure in Mougins, France.

9. Pablo Picasso's Full Name Is 23 Words Long.

Pablo Picasso's full name is actually Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. The flood of names is based on those of various saints and relatives, with the "Picasso" part coming from his mother, María Picasso y López.

Famous Pablo Picasso Quotes:

• “It takes a long time to become young.”
• “The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”
• “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
• “Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.”

Pablo Picasso

Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Engraver and Ceramist

• Art History
• Architecture

Pablo Picasso, also known as Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, was singular in the art world. Not only did he manage to become universally famous in his own lifetime, he was the first artist to successfully use mass media to further his name (and business empire). He also inspired or, in the notable case of Cubism, invented, nearly every art movement in the twentieth century.

Movement, Style, School or Period:

Several, but best known for (co-)inventing Cubism

Date and Place of Birth

October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain

Picasso's father, fortuitously, was an art teacher who quickly realized he had a boy genius on his hands and (almost as quickly) taught his son everything he knew. At the tender age of 14, Picasso passed the entrance exam to the Barcelona School of Fine Arts - in just one day. By the early 1900s, Picasso had moved to Paris, the "capital of the arts." There he found friends in Henri Matisse, Joan Miró and George Braque, and a burgeoning reputation as a painter of note.

Body of Work

Before, and shortly after, moving to Paris, Picasso's painting was in its "Blue Period" (1900-1904), which eventually gave way to his "Rose Period" (1905-1906). It wasn't until 1907, though, that Picasso really raised a commotion in the art world. His painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marked the beginning of Cubism .

Having caused such a stir, Picasso spent the next 15 years seeing what, exactly, could be done with Cubism (such as putting paper and bits of string in a painting, thus inventing the collage ). The Three Musicians (1921), pretty much summed up Cubism for Picasso.

For the rest of his days, no one style could maintain a hold on Picasso. In fact, he was known to use two or more different styles, side by side, within a single painting. One notable exception is his surrealistic painting Guernica (1937), arguably one of the greatest pieces of social protest ever created.

Picasso lived long and, indeed, prospered. He grew fabulously wealthy from his phenomenal output (including erotically themed ceramics), took up with younger and younger women, entertained the world with his outspoken remarks, and painted almost right up until he died at the age of 91.

Date and Place of Death

April 8, 1973, Mougins, France

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

• Biography of Henri Rousseau, Self-Taught Post-Impressionist
• Defining Synthetic Cubism
• Germaine Gargallo, Picasso's Lover
• What Is Analytic Cubism in Art?
• Juan Gris, Spanish Cubist Painter
• Biography of Eva Gouel, Muse and Mistress of Pablo Picasso
• Biography of Georges Braque, Pioneer Cubist Painter
• Picasso's Women: Wives, Lovers, and Muses
• The Definition of "Form" in Art
• Ways of Defining Art
• Biography of Paul Cezanne, French Post-Impressionist
• Surrealism, the Amazing Art of Dreams
• Cubism in Art History
• 7 Major Painting Styles—From Realism to Abstract
• Top 12 Greatest Visual Artists of All Time
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• World Biography

Pablo Picasso Biography

Born: October 25, 1881 Malaga, Spain Died: April 8, 1973 Mougins, France Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist

The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso was one of the most productive and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism (an artistic style where recognizable objects are fragmented to show all sides of an object at the same time), he established the basis for abstract art (art having little or no pictorial representation).

Early years

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain. He was the eldest and only son with two younger sisters, Lola and Concepción. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a professor in the School of Arts and Crafts. Pablo's mother was Maria Ruiz Picasso (the artist used her surname from about 1901 on). It is rumored that Picasso learned to draw before he could speak. As a child, his father frequently took him to bullfights, and one of his earlier paintings was a scene from a bullfight.

In 1891 the family moved to La Coruña, where, at the age of fourteen, Picasso began studying at the School of Fine Art. Under the academic instruction of his father, he developed his artistic talent at an extraordinary rate.

When the family moved to Barcelona, Spain, in 1896, Picasso easily gained entrance to the School of Fine Arts. A year later he was admitted as an advanced student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Spain. He demonstrated his remarkable ability by completing in one day an entrance examination for which an entire month was permitted.

Picasso soon found the atmosphere at the academy stifling, and he returned to Barcelona, where he began to study historical and contemporary art on his own. At that time Barcelona was the most vital cultural center in Spain, and Picasso quickly joined the group of poets, painters, and writers who gathered at the famous café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats). Between 1900 and 1903 Picasso stayed alternately in Paris, France, and Barcelona. He had his first one-man exhibition in Paris in 1901.

Paris at the turn of the twentieth century

At the turn of the twentieth century Paris was the center of the international art world. In painting it was the birthplace of the impressionists—painters who depicted the appearance of objects by means of dabs or strokes of unmixed colors in order to create the look of actual reflected light. While their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction.

Picasso set up a permanent studio in Paris in 1904. His studio soon became a gathering place for the city's most modern artists, writers, and patrons.

Picasso's early work reveals a creative pattern which continued throughout his long career. Between 1900 and 1906 he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary (modern) painting. In doing so, his own work changed with extraordinary quickness.

Blue and pink periods

The years between 1901 and 1904 were known as Picasso's Blue Period. Nearly all of his works were executed in somber shades of blue and contained lean, melancholy, and introspective (concentrating on their own thoughts) figures. Two outstanding examples of this period are the Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).

In the second half of 1904 Picasso's style took a new direction. In these paintings the color became more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with reddish and pink tones dominating the works. Thus this period was called his Pink Period. The most celebrated example of this phase is the Family of Saltimbanques (1905). Picasso's work between 1900 and 1905 was generally flat, emphasizing the two-dimensional character of the painting surface. Late in 1905, however, he became increasingly interested in pictorial volume. This interest seems to have been influenced by the late paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).

The face in Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) reveals still another new interest: its mask-like abstraction was inspired by Iberian sculpture, an exhibition of which Picasso had seen at the Louvre, in Paris, in the spring of 1906. This influence reached its fullest expression a year later in one of the most revolutionary pictures of Picasso's entire career, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).

Picasso and cubism

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is generally regarded as the first cubist painting. The faces of the figures are seen from both front and profile positions at the same time. Between 1907 and 1911 Picasso continued to break apart the visible world into increasingly small facets of monochromatic (using one color) planes of space. In doing so, his works became more and more abstract. Representation gradually vanished from his painting, until it became an end in itself—for the first time in the history of Western art.

The growth of this process is evident in all of Picasso's work between 1907 and 1911. Some of the most outstanding pictorial examples of the development are Fruit Dish (1909), Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), and Ma Jolie, also known as Woman with a Guitar (1911–12).

Collages and further development

About 1911 Picasso and Georges Braque (1882–1963) began to introduce letters and scraps of newspapers into their cubist paintings, thus creating an entirely new medium, the cubist collage. Picasso's first, and probably his most celebrated, collage is Still Life with Chair Caning (1911–1912).

After Picasso experimented with the new medium of collage, he returned more intensively to painting. In his Three Musicians (1921), the planes became broader, more simplified, and more colorful. In its richness of feeling and balance of formal elements, the Three Musicians represents a classical expression of cubism.

Additional achievements

Picasso also created sculpture and prints throughout his long career, and made numerous important contributions to both media. He periodically worked in ceramics, and designed sets, curtains, and interiors for the theater.

In painting, even the development of cubism fails to define Picasso's genius. About 1915, and again in the early 1920s, he turned away from abstraction and produced drawings and paintings in a realistic and serenely beautiful classical style. One of the most famous of these works is the Woman in White (1923). Painted just two years after the Three Musicians, the quiet and unobtrusive (not calling attention to itself) elegance of this masterpiece testifies to the ease with which Picasso could express himself pictorially.

One of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the 1930s is Guernica (1937). This work had been commissioned for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair. It depicts the destruction by bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39; the military revolt against the Spanish government). The artist's deep feelings about the work, and about the massacre (a mass killing) which inspired it, are reflected in the fact that he completed the work, that is more than 25 feet wide and 11 feet high, within six or seven weeks.

Guernica is an extraordinary monument within the history of modern art. Executed entirely in black, white, and gray, it projects an image of pain, suffering, and brutality that has few parallels. Picasso applied the pictorial language of cubism to a subject that springs directly from social and political awareness.

Picasso's politics

Picasso also declared publicly in 1947 that he was a Communist (someone who believes the national government should control all businesses and the distribution of goods). When he was asked why he was a Communist, he stated, "When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and aware of how poor people had to live. I learned that the Communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the Communists." But sometimes the Communist cause was not as keen on Picasso as Picasso was about being a Communist. A 1953 portrait he painted of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) caused an uproar in the Communist Party's leadership. The Soviet government banished his works.

Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the 1939 victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892–1975), he gave eight hundred to nine hundred of his earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona. To display these works, the Palacio Aguilar was renamed the Picasso Museum and the works were moved inside. But because of Franco's dislike for Picasso, Picasso's name never appeared on the museum.

Picasso was married twice, first to dancer Olga Khoklova and then to Jacqueline Roque. He had four children. He was planning an exhibit of over two hundred of his works at the Avignon Arts Festival in France when he died at his thirty-five-room hilltop villa of Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins, France, on April 8, 1973.

The discovery of cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of twentieth-century art. Throughout his life he exhibited a remarkable genius for sculpture, graphics, and ceramics, as well as painting. His is one of the most celebrated artists of the modern period.

For More Information

Cowling, Elizabeth. Interpreting Matisse, Picasso. Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Léal, Brigitte, Christine Piot, and Marie-Laure Bernadac. The Ultimate Picasso. Edited by Molly Stevens and Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.

Olivier, Fernande. Picasso and His Friends. New York: Appleton-Century, 1965.

Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso. New York: Random House, 1991.

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Pablo Picasso

Spanish, 1881 - 1973

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After shattering representational tradition through cubism, which he developed with Georges Braque , Picasso became the artistic visionary against whom most others measured their creativity throughout the twentieth century.

Born in Malaga in 1881, the son of an artist, Picasso attended art schools in his native Spain and in his late teens aligned his sensibilities with bohemian writers and artists in Barcelona and Madrid who opposed Spain’s stalled social hierarchies and conservative culture.

After early work inspired by international models—the anguished, attenuated figures of El Greco , the dark, moody outlines of symbolism, and the sinuous curvatures of Art nouveau to name a few—Picasso began to find his own vision. The art he made in the decade between 1905 - 1915 unleashed a torrent of originality—Rose and Blue Period pieces that probe the emotional depths of his personal experiences and identity; mask-like portraits and heavily faceted nudes that translate classical and primal aspects of ancient, Iberian, and African cultures, culminating in  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon  of 1907; and the cubist and collage works which, in their fragmentation of illusionism, delivered Picasso’s breakthrough. Over a long lifetime Picasso was famously productive. In the decades following 1915, he incorporated decorativeness into cubism and explored wide-ranging concepts—especially the erotic abandon espoused by the surrealists—in an astounding array of mediums: costume and theatre design, sculpture, ceramics, prints, watercolors, paintings, and public commissions. In his works on paper Picasso created a trove of prints and drawings in which mythology and the sexy beast Minotaur (his alter ego) figure prominently. He also worked on suites of images exploring the elements of creative practice: the artist’s studio and the relationship of artist and model.

In his last decades Picasso took on the great masters—pitting his print, watercolor, and painted works against signature images by Poussin , Le Nain , Velázquez , Rembrandt , Manet , and others—just as artists who followed Picasso would test themselves against his example. Pablo Ruiz Picasso died in 1972 at age ninety-one.

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World History Edu

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso: Biography, Famous Paintings, Contributions, & Quotes

by World History Edu · February 20, 2021

Pablo Picasso biography: Want to know why the Spanish artist and genius Pablo Picasso remains famous even to this day? Worldhistoryedu.com will explain lots of interesting facts about Picasso, as well as his contribution to the world of art.

Fast Facts about Pablo Picasso

Birthday: October 25, 1881

Place of birth: Málaga, Spain

Died: April 8, 1973

Place of Death : Mougins, France

Cause of death:  Pulmonary edema and heart failure

Burial place: Château of Vauvenargues

Parents: Don Luis and Maria Picasso

Siblings: Conchita, Lola

Education: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

Spouse: Olga Khokhlova (married in 1918); Jacqueline Roque (married in 1961)

Children: Paulo, Maya, Claude, Paloma

Inspired by: El Greco, Velázquez, Henri Matisse

Art style: Cubism, Surrealism, Collage

Most Famous for:  Inventing Cubism art

Most notable work: La Vie (1903), Les Demoiselle d’Avignon (1907), Guernica (1937),

Achievement: Co-invented the art style Cubism, inventing the constructed sculpture,

Pablo Picasso – the greatest artist of the 20th century

Birth and Early Life

Born on October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain, Pablo Picasso was the son of Don José Ruiz Y Blasco and Maria Picasso Y López.

Pablo opted to use his mother’s surname as his surname instead of his father’s. Therefore he came to be called Pablo Picasso.

His father was a painter and art teacher at Barcelona School of Art. Pablo loved drawing right from a very young age. A prodigious talent, it’s been stated that the first words that he uttered as a baby was “piz”, which is Spanish for “pencil”. By age 13, Picasso’s skill and talent surpassed his father’s.

Growing up, he was not enthusiastic about school and the strict rules, as he wanted to become an artist. At the age of fourteen, he gained admission to a very prestigious art school in Barcelona. Normally, one had to be at least 18 before gaining admission to the school; however Picasso was so talented that he gained admission to the school even before 18. Picasso was very uninterested in classical art and history. He sought to create his own style rather than emulate the style of artists that lived several hundreds of years ago.

Picasso, then 16 years old, therefore proceeded to Madrid, where he attended another prestigious art school called San Fernando Royal College of Art. Again frustrated by the school’s strict rules, Picasso only stayed in the school until he was 18 before leaving for Paris.

Did you know : Pablo Picasso sold his first painting when he was just eight years old?

Picasso’s Blue Period (1901- 1904)

Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (1904) is considered by many as one of his early masterpieces

The start of the 20 th century came with bad news for Pablo Picasso. One of his closest friends, Carlos Casagemas, took his life in 1901 over a sad love affair. The death of Casagemas sent Picasso into a deep depression. To counter his sadness, he delved deep into his paintings and began producing artworks at his art studio in Montmarte, Paris, France.

Perhaps due to the death of Casagemas, Picasso used quite a lot of the color blue in his paintings. Additionally, the subjects in those paintings of his were bereft of any form of happiness; he painted them with long and sad faces. He painted emotionally and physically troubled people, as well as people who were lonely and depressed. Picasso later revealed that he painted those painting in blue because he had a lot of blue paint at the time.

Arguably, the most famous paintings of Pablo Picasso during that period, a time art historians like to call the “Blue Period of Pablo Picasso”, are Blue Nude , La Vie , The Old Guitarist and Poor People on the Seashore.

Pablo Picasso’s Rose Period (1904-1906)

It took Picasso about 3 years or so to finally get over his depression. It was around this time that he met and fell in love with a French model and bohemian artist called Fernande Olivier. Inspired by this love affair, Pablo Picasso starts using brighter colors such as red, orange, and pink in his paintings.

This period000, which historian like to term as Pablo Picasso’s Rose Period, also saw a change in the subjects that he painted. The scenes and the subjects looked more alive and happier. In some of his paintings during this time, he painted circuses, acrobats and harlequins.  Other famous paintings of Picasso during this time include Mother and Child and The Peasants.

Pablo Picasso was prolific when it came to producing paintings and other artworks. Historians estimate that he produced more than 1,800 paintings and 1,000 sculptures in his lifetime.

Cubism Art (1907-1921)

Beginning around 1907, Pablo Picasso had a change of mind, and with this came a change in his art style. Right from his early years as a painter, he always wanted to set himself apart from the crowd. Therefore it came as no surprise that while working with fellow artist Georges Braque, the Spaniard developed an entirely new style of painting, calling it Cubism.

Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

What is Cubism?

The style involves the breaking up of the subjects or scene into sections. Cubism allows the artist to properly analyze and then tackle the sections one by one. Once that is done, the artist can go ahead and put back the sections into a cohesive whole. The advantage with this painting style developed by Pablo Picasso is that it enables the artist approach the painting from multiple perspectives and angles.

The most famous painting of Pablo Picasso’s Cubism certainly has to be Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910). Other Cubism artworks of Picasso are the Portrait of Ambroise Vollard , Three Women , Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table , and Three Musicians .

Picasso’s blend of Cubism and Collage styles

Beginning around 1912, Picasso took to merging his Cubism painting style with that of collage. The outcome of those two styles was nothing short of breathtaking. In Cubism-collage Picasso added sand or plaster in his paint in order to make it have more texture. Another creative technique that he deployed was the application of newspapers or even wallpaper in his paintings in order to produce a varied dimension.

Neoclassical Style

Between 1907 and 1921, Pablo Picasso dazzled the art world with several variations of his Cubism art form. In hopes of making Cubism a force to be reckoned with, he was not shy of experimenting with this style. However, starting around the early 1920s, Picasso reverted to a more traditional art style – i.e. classical style of painting. He took a lot of inspiration from famous Renaissance Italian artists such as Raphael. All of that culminated in Picasso producing amazing paintings that looked as if they were three-dimensional, most notably Woman in White and The Pipes of Pan.

Pablo Picasso and his experimentation with Surrealism Art

Pablo Picasso was the kind of artist that consistently experimented, trying to actualize mastery in different art styles. One such example of this was when he took interest in Surrealism in the mid-1920s. Surrealist artists sought to discover the meaning and truth from the realms of their subconscious minds and within dreams or nightmares. As a result of this, a surrealist painting or artwork appeared to defy logical thought, making very little sense. Most famous examples of this art form, a form which began in France in the mid-1920s, include The Son of Man by Rene Magritte and The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali.

Appreciative of the philosophies of the Surrealism movement, Picasso borrowed some of their ideas and infused them into some of his paintings. Picasso’s experimentation with Surrealism art produced works such as The Red Armchair and Guernica .

Guernica, 1937, Museo Reina Sofia

Legacy of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso is generally regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time. His influence on the art world makes many historians and art enthusiasts consider him to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, 20 th -century artist. His innovations and important contributions to art in general are evident in the numerous masterpieces that he produced. His self-portraits are also greatly admired even to this day, fetching astronomical value in the world of art.

12 interesting facts about Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso biography and facts | Image: from top left to right corner: Pablo Picasso (1962), Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Still Life with a Bottle of Rum  (1911),  Massacre in Korea  (1951), Pierrot  (1918),   Nu assis s’essuyant le pied  ( Seated Nude Drying her Foot ) (1921)

• Picasso’s self-portrait called Self-Portrait Facing Death was one of the last artworks that he produced before died in 1973.
• At around the age of 3, his father took him to a bull fighting event. This explains why his first drawings were bull fighting scenes.

Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers ( Les Femmes d’Alger ) was the artist’s way of paying homage to French Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix and his 1834 painting The Women of Algiers in their Apartment ( Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement ) | Image: Les Femmes d’Alger (1955)

• Pablo Picasso is believed to have had a strong curiosity about the mythical creature known as the Minotaur from ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks depicted the Minotaur as a fearsome creature with the head of bull and the body of man. Pablo’s interest in this creature explains why a good number of his paintings featured images of the Minotaur. It was his favorite alter ego.
• The entrance exam to San Fernando Royal College of Art usually lasts a month; however, Picasso took his in a week.
• Perhaps no other world renowned artist can claim to have a longer full name than Pablo Picasso. At the time of his birth, Picasso’s full name read as Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
• His parents had so much fate in him becoming a very prominent person in future. For example, it has been stated that his mother told the young Picasso that he was destined to succeed at whatever profession that he set his mind at.
• In 1889, Picasso joined a group of avant-garde artists at the popular Barcelona café El Quatre Gats. The artists, like Picasso, painted in a style that abandoned classical methods.
• Pablo Picasso tied the knot twice and fathered four children. He first married Russian ballerina Olga Khoklova in 1918 and separated in 1927. At the age of 69, he married Jacqueline Roque in 1961. He fathered two children with Jacqueline.
• Two of Pablo Picasso’s lovers – Marie-Thérèse and Jacqueline Roque – committed suicide after his death. On 20 October 1977, four years after Pablo Picasso’s death, Marie-Thérèse committed suicide in France. Similarly, Jacqueline Roque, who was depressed and lonely after Picasso’s death, killed herself by gunshot in 1986. Jacqueline was 59 years old.
• At the end of WWII , he joined the French Communist Party. He was also an attendee at the Peace Conference in Poland.

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Pablo Picasso Biography

Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest Spanish artists of the 20th century who was famous for being one of the leading artists in the formation of the cubist movement.

He was also a famous sculptor, ceramist, print-maker and stage designer. He was a significant influencer due to his innovative style.

His work matured from the naturalism of his childhood and through his famous movement known as Cubism . His artwork shaped the direction of contemporary and modern art through the decades. 

He is considered the most famous of all the cubist artists and also as the most famous Spanish artist of the 20th century.

Picasso spent 90% of his years devoting himself to arts and contributed vastly and paralleled modern art’s real growth and development in the 20th century.

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25 in 1881 in Malaga, Spain, to Jose Ruiz Blasco and Dona Maria Picasso Lopez. His father was a painter and art teacher.

His Gigantic full name that honors saints and some of his relatives in full is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso.

Young and world-weary Picasso had a good pair of piercing, watchful and keen black eyes that seemed to mark some greatness in him.

Picasso wasn’t the brightest of the students in his class but displayed a prodigious interest and talent for drawing from a very young age. His first word, ‘piz, piz,’ meaning ‘lapiz’ is a Spanish word that means a pencil.  

Picasso’s unusual adeptness for drawing continued manifesting until he was ten when he became his father’s pupil in A Coruna, where his family had moved in 1891.

From there, he began experimenting with what he learned to full passion, and this allowed him to get better quickly and surpassed his father’s abilities.

When they moved to A Coruna, Picasso’s father shelved his own ambitions and focused on his son’s talent, offering him the support and models for his first exhibition when he was only 13.

In 1895, his family moved to Barcelona, Spain and Pablo applied to the city’s prestigious school of Fine arts.

Although the school initially accepted older students, Picasso’s performance in his entry exam was so extraordinary that he was granted an exception and admitted to study there.

Picasso’s young, ambitious mind sent him to skip school on several occasions to roam the streets of Barcelona and sketch a few city scenes.

In 1897, the 16-year-old moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando, but he quickly realized that the school did not offer what he wanted as it focused on classical techniques and subjects.

Picasso wanted more. Again, he started skipping classes to wander around the city and paint what he saw. He would visit cafes, streets, brothels and even the museums to look for something to paint. 

He fell ill in 1898 and spent most of the remaining year convalescing in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro in the company of a friend.

When he later returned to Barcelona in 1899, Picasso was a changed person–he had packed weight, and had learned to be independent.

He even spoke Catalan and had developed a preference for his mother’s surname Picasso. He would sign his works as P.R. Picasso. By 1901, he had dropped Ruiz altogether.

It is also during this transition that Pablo took a different route and what would become a lifelong process of innovation and experimentation.

Works and the journey to fame

Picasso had a unique desire for endless experimentation. He also embraced friendship with different modern painters such as Juan Gris who had different paths of painting. Picasso would combine or twist what he learned from them to come up with something extraordinarily unique.

He would switch between styles, reinvent himself and repeat such that his life seemed to be a product of about six great artists.

He didn’t see his style as diverse but insisted that his work was a dedication that involved evaluating every piece and coming up with a technique to achieve the desired effect.

One of the distinct principles in his artistic discoveries was color. His first Barcelona exhibition was in February 1900, and he discovered Paris the same year.

He recorded life in the French capital, such as  Lovers in the street.   He paid tributes to Swiss Theophile Alexandre Steinlen and Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec as well as his Catalan companion Ramon Casas.

Between 1901 and 1904, blue was the predominant color in Picasso’s most famous paintings . He would move back and forth between Paris and Barcelona to get material for his work.

One of his visits to the women’s prison in Paris between 1901 and d1903 offered him free models and compelling subjects, authentic depictions of Barcelona’s blind street people and lonely beggars.

In the spring of 1904, Picasso finally moved to Paris permanently. His mistress, Fernande Olivier, inspired many of his works during the years that led to Cubism, particularly on their trip to Gasol in 1906.

He is credited with being an influential name in both Analytical Cubism and Synthetic Cubism with his ‘guitar’ series of paintings seen as a transition between the two styles.

For Picasso, color wasn’t easy, and he reverted to a general Spanish palette. The blue period was replaced with a rose period. From there, Picasso’s works were categorized as the classical period, a short return to realism and a career that was dominated by experimentation. 

As he grew older, he grew more somber and was preoccupied with the deprivation reality. By the end of World war II, Picasso had already shifted his eyes to politics.

He was honored with the international Lenin peace Prize twice, one in 1950 and another in 1961. By this time, he was an international celebrity and one of the world’s most famous living artist. 

His paintings received criticism and ridicule until the late 1980s after his death, when his last paintings began being appreciated for their profound influence on the upcoming generation of young painters.

Late years and death

Like any other passionate artist, Picasso  continued to ambitiously work on his art with the belief that work would keep him alive.

He enjoyed creating art in different mediums throughout his life and would always become a master in each medium in due time.

From Picasso ceramics to etchings, pastel paintings , lithographs and linocuts, all his artwork was a testament to his artistic skills. He was married twice and had four children.

He died in April 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife were entertaining a couple of friends for dinner.

Pablo Picasso – The Life and Works of This Famous Cubism Artist

Pablo Picasso is perhaps the most influential figure in the history of 20th-century art. The varied range of Pablo Picasso’s artworks were not the result of drastic transformations in his style over his career but were instead based on his commitment to objectively evaluate the form and method best suited to accomplish his desired impact for each art piece. Picasso’s artworks were unquestionably destined to be interwoven into the tapestry of mankind as some of the finest artworks of all time.

Table of Contents

• 1 The Life and Art of Pablo Picasso
• 2.1 Early Life
• 2.2 Early Training
• 2.3 Mature Period
• 2.4 Late Years and Death
• 3.1 The Blue Period (1901-1904)
• 3.2 The Rose Period (1904-1906)
• 3.3 African Influences (1907-1909)
• 3.4 Cubism (1909-1912)
• 3.5 Neoclassicism (late 1910s-early 1920s) and Surrealism (mid-1920s)
• 4.1 The Soup (1903)
• 4.2 Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905)
• 4.3 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
• 4.4 Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)
• 4.5 Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle (1914)
• 4.6 Ma Jolie (1912)
• 4.7 The Three Musicians (1921)
• 4.8 Three Women at the Spring (1921)
• 4.9 Guernica (1937)
• 5.1 Life with Picasso (2019) by Francois Gilot
• 5.2 Picasso: Painting the Blue Period (2021) by Kenneth Brummel
• 6.1 When Was Picasso Born and When Did Picasso Die?
• 6.2 Who Was Pablo Picasso?

The Life and Art of Pablo Picasso

Before reaching the age of 50, this famous artist had established himself as the most renowned figure in contemporary art , with the most distinctive aesthetic and sense for artistic production. Before Picasso, no other creator had made such an influence on the art community or had such a significant reputation among admirers as well as critics.

During his lengthy career, Picasso’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures amounted to around 20,000 pieces, including other objects such as costuming and theatrical sets.

He is globally considered to be one of the 20th century’s most important and acclaimed painters . As an artistic pioneer, he is credited with being a founding member of the Cubist movement with Georges Braque. Cubism was a cultural movement that forever altered the landscape of European sculpture and painting, as well as architectural styles, music, and writing.

Cubist themes and artifacts are disassembled and reassembled in an abstract fashion.

When Picasso and Braque were creating the groundwork for Cubism in France between 1910 and 1920, its influence was so far-reaching that it inspired offshoots such as Dada, Futurism , and Constructivism in other nations. Picasso is also recognized for the invention of built sculpture and the co-invention of the collage art form. He is also considered among three 20th-century painters who are acknowledged for developing the principles of Plastic arts.

By actively manipulating substances that had not before been cut or sculpted, this innovative art form drove civilization toward social improvements in paintings, sculpting, printing, and pottery. These substances were not simply plastic; they could be shaped in some fashion, generally in three dimensions. Plaster, metals, and wood were employed by artists to produce groundbreaking sculptural artworks that the public had never experienced before.

But when was Picasso born and when did Picasso die? Let us first take a look at Pablo Picasso’s biography before we go any further into his style and examples of famous Picasso paintings .

Pablo Picasso’s Biography

Picasso’s propensity to create works in a wide range of genres earned him a high level of recognition throughout his lifetime. His importance as an artist and an influence on other painters has only risen since his death in 1973. To understand how he rose to fame, let us take a look at his childhood, education, and art periods .

Picasso was born to Don and Maria Picasso in Malaga, Spain. His father, an artist and art instructor, was awestruck by the young boy’s painting talent from a very early age. Picasso began academic training from his father at the age of seven.

Ruiz felt that instruction consisted of reproducing masterpieces and sketching the human figure from live subjects as well as plaster casts due to his conventional academic schooling.

When Picasso was ten years of age, his family relocated to A Coruna, where the School of Fine Arts employed his father as a lecturer. They stayed for four years, during which time Ruiz thought his son had overtaken him as a painter at the age of 13 and resolved to stop painting. Though Ruiz’s still created paintings for many years to follow, he was undoubtedly awed by his son’s inherent talent and skill. Pablo Picasso’s family was shocked when his little sister passed away in 1895 from diphtheria.

Early Training

They relocate to Barcelona, where Pablo Picasso’s father started working at the School of Fine Arts. He convinced administrators to allow his son to take an admission test for an expert class, and Picasso was enrolled at the age of 13 years old. When he was 16 years of age, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Spain’s most prestigious art school. Picasso despised the formal lessons and dropped out of his lessons soon after arriving. He spent his days within Madrid’s Prado, which had works by El Greco and Goya.

Picasso’s corpus of work is extensive and extends from his early childhood years until his death, offering a more thorough record of his progress than possibly any other artist.

Studying the archives of his initial studies, there is reported to be a transition when the childlike aspect of his drawings faded, indicating the formal start of his profession. That year is claimed to be 1894 when young Pablo Picasso Would have been just 13 years of age. He produced the Portrait of Aunt Pepa at the age of 14, a remarkable picture that has been considered to be one of the greatest portraits in the history of Spain. Picasso also produced his award-winning Science and Charity at the age of 16. His realism method, which had been instilled in him by his father and early education, expanded with his exposure to symbolist ideas.

This inspired Picasso to create his own interpretation of modernity and to undertake his first journey to Paris.

Picasso learned French from a Parisian acquaintance, poet Max Jacob. They lived in an apartment where they learned what it was like to be a “struggling artist.” They were chilly and poor, and they had to burn their own works to keep the flat warm. Despite the fact that he started developing sculpture throughout this phase, critics refer to it as his Blue Period, named after the blue color palette that characterized his canvases.

The work’s tone was likewise unmistakably melancholy.

The artist’s anguish at the suicide of Carlos Casegemas, a friend he met in Barcelona, may be seen as the origins of this, while the themes of most of the Blue Period works were derived from the homeless and hookers he met on city streets . The Old Guitarist (1903) is an excellent illustration of this period’s subject material and aesthetic. Pablo Picasso’s colors started to lighten in 1904, and he worked in a manner known as his Rose Period for a year or longer. He concentrated on entertainers and circus people, changing his palette to more cheerful pinks and reds.

And, shortly after meeting artist Georges Braque in 1906, his palette deepened, his figures got denser and more concrete in appearance, and he started to move towards Cubism.

Mature Period

Previously, commentators traced the origins of Cubism to his early work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Although that piece is today regarded as intermediate (it lacks the dramatic aberrations of his later efforts), it was definitely pivotal in his growth due to its heavy influence from African sculptures and old Iberian artwork.

It is said to have motivated Braque to create his own first series of artworks, and in the years that followed, the two would embark on one of the most extraordinary collaborative efforts in contemporary art, occasionally excitedly learning from one another, occasionally attempting to surpass one another in their fast-paced and aggressive contest to advance.

During the development of this radical approach, Braque and Picasso met on a regular basis, and Picasso characterized himself and Braque as “two climbers bound together.” Multiple viewpoints on an item are shown concurrently in their common vision by being split and reorganized in splintered forms. Form and space were the most important aspects, and as a result, both painters limited their palettes to neutral tones, in stark contradiction to the brilliant colors employed by the Fauves before them.

Picasso would always cooperate with an individual or a collective, but as Braque historian Alex Danchev put it, Picasso’s “Braque phase” was “the most intense and productive of his entire career.”

Picasso hated the title “Cubism”, particularly as critics began to distinguish between the two main methods he was claimed to follow – Synthetic and Analytical. He considered his oeuvre as a whole. However, there is little question that his work changed after 1912. He became less preoccupied with depicting the arrangement of items in space and more interested in employing forms and motifs as cues to hint at their existence in a whimsical manner.

He invented the collage method, and from Braque, he learned the related papiers colles method, which included cutout sheets of paper in combination with parts of preexisting source materials. Due to its dependence on different references to an item in order to build the description of it, this phase has later come to be regarded as the “Synthetic” phase of Cubism.

Picasso used this approach to produce more decorative and humorous arrangements, and its versatility inspired him to continue using it far into the 1920s.

However, the artist’s growing interest in dance shifted his works to new areas about 1916. Meeting the writer, painter, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau motivated this in part. Through Cocteau, he managed to meet Sergei Diaghilev and went on to design several sets for the Ballets Russes. Picasso had been experimenting with classical themes for some years before allowing its full run in the early 1920s. His characters got a lot bigger and more imposing, and he often depicted them against the context of a Mediterranean Golden Age.

They have long been connected with the broader conservative tendencies of Europe’s so-called rappel a l’ordre , a period of art now defined as Interwar Classicism. In the mid-1920s, he was influenced by Surrealism, which caused him to rethink his career path. His art evolved into something more expressive, frequently aggressive or provocative. This moment in his career corresponds to the time in his private affairs when his relationship with ballerina Olga Khokhlova began to fall apart and he started a new affair with Marie-Therese Walter.

Undoubtedly, critics have frequently noted how modifications in Pablo Picasso’s paintings style often coincide with shifts in his intimate relationships; his relationship with Khokhlova stretched the years of his involvement in dance, and his subsequent moment with Jacqueline Roque is affiliated with his late stage, in which he had become fixated with his place in history alongside the Old Masters. In the late 1920s, he started working with Julio González, the sculptor.

This was his most major creative collaboration since working with Braque, and it resulted in welded metal artworks that were afterward immensely influential.

Political issues started to distort Picasso’s vision as the 1930s progressed, and continued to do so for some time. In 1937, he was inspired by the bombardment of people in the Basque village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War to produce the picture Guernica. During World War II, he resided in Paris, and the German officials left him alone long enough for him to resume his work.

Nevertheless, the war had a significant influence on Picasso, since the Nazis took his Paris art collection and murdered some of his dearest Jewish friends.

Picasso created works in their honor, including sculptures made of harsh, rigid materials like metal in The Charnel House , a particularly horrific successor to Guernica (1945). Following the war, he became deeply active with the Communist Party, and numerous big films from this era, such as War in Korea (1951), demonstrate his newfound dedication.

Late Years and Death

During the 1950s and 1960s, Pablo Picasso concentrated on his own replicas of great works by artists such as Diego Velázquez, Nicolas Poussin, and El Greco. Picasso sought shelter from his stardom in his final years, marrying Jacqueline Rogue in 1961.

His later works were mainly portrait-based, with almost garish color palettes.

Critics have typically regarded them as inferior to his previous work, however, they have gained a more positive reception in recent decades. During this later phase, he also produced a large number of ceramic and metal sculptures. In 1973, he died of a heart attack in the south of France.

The Various Periods of Picasso’s Artworks

Picasso would spend most of his professional adult life in France. His work has been loosely split into periods of time during which he would completely develop complicated topics and sentiments in order to build a unified body of work. The first period was known as the Blue Period.

The Blue Period (1901-1904)

Picasso’s melancholy phase, during which he directly experienced hardship as well as the effects of deprivation on people around him, is marked by basically monochrome works in tones of blue and blue-green, only sometimes brightened by other colors. Picasso’s paintings from this time period portray starvation, prostitution, and portraits of friend Carlos Casagemas following his death, culminating in the dismal allegorical picture La Vie (1903). La Vie depicted his friend’s inner anguish in the face of a girlfriend he attempted to murder.

In considering Picasso and his Blue Period, journalist and writer Charles Morice famously remarked, “Is this alarmingly precocious youngster not destined to confer the sanctity of a masterwork on the unpleasant sensation of existence, the disease from which he appears to be suffering more than anybody else?”

The Rose Period (1904-1906)

According to the term, Picasso had a more cheerful era incorporating pink and orange colors and the lively worlds of circus performers and harlequins after achieving some level of progress and overcoming some of his despair. The artist then encountered Fernande Olivier, a bohemian painter who would also become his lover. She later appears in a few of these more positive works. Pablo Picasso was extremely well received by the art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein. They were not only his main sponsors but Gertrude was also included in one of his most renowned paintings, Portrait of Gertrude Stein .

African Influences (1907-1909)

The Paul Cezanne exhibition staged at the Salon d’Automne one year after the creator’s death in 1906 was a watershed moment for Picasso. Though Picasso was acquainted with Cezanne before the retrospective, it was not until the exhibition that Picasso realized the full extent of his creative brilliance. Picasso discovered a model for distilling the fundamentals from reality in order to generate a coherent surface that conveyed the artist’s distinct perspective in Cezanne’s works.

Around the same period, the qualities of indigenous African sculpture began to have a strong effect on European painters.

Picasso’s first masterwork was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon . Five nude ladies are depicted in the picture, with bodies composed of flat, fractured surfaces and faces influenced by African masks. A viciously angled cut of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the picture hovers on an unnaturally raised tabletop; the confined space the characters inhabit appears to thrust forward in sharp fragments.

Picasso deviates from conventional European art in this work by incorporating Primitivism and abandoning perspective in lieu of a flat, two-dimensional image plane. It seemed as though the art world had fallen when Les Demoiselles d’Avignon first debuted. Form and presentation as we knew them were utterly discarded. As a result, it was dubbed “the most inventive painting in modern art history.”

Picasso discovered the freedom of expression apart from contemporary and traditional French influences with the new painting tactics he used, and he was able to pave his own path. Formal principles produced during this time paved the way for the Cubist period that followed.

Cubism (1909-1912)

Around 1907, Picasso was driven to give his figures more gravity and form by a convergence of influence ranging from Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne to ancient and tribal artwork. And they eventually led him to Cubism, in which he demolished the perspective standards that had characterized Renaissance painting. During this time period, the style established by Picasso and Braques employed mostly neutral tones and was centered on “breaking apart” items and “evaluating them” in terms of their forms.

Cubism, particularly the second variant known as Synthetic Cubism, had a significant impact on the evolution of the Western art world.

This phase’s works stress the integration, or synthesis, of shapes in the image. Color becomes increasingly significant in the forms of items as they get larger and more beautiful. Non-painted things, such as newspapers or cigarette wrappers, are regularly glued on the canvas alongside painted regions – the inclusion of a wide range of superfluous materials is especially linked with Picasso’s revolutionary collage method. This collage approach highlights texture contrasts and raises the question of what constitutes truth and illusion in painting.

Picasso impacted the course of art for future generations through his use of color, form, and mathematical figures, as well as his unique method of depicting subjects.

Neoclassicism (late 1910s-early 1920s) and Surrealism (mid-1920s)

Picasso made his first journey to Italy in 1917, with an unrivaled command of technique and talent, and immediately began a phase of homage to neoclassical style. Breaking away from severe modernism, he created drawings and paintings evocative of Ingres and Raphael. This was only a prologue to Picasso appearing seamlessly combining his modernist thoughts with his abilities into surrealist masterpieces like Guernica (1937), a frenetic and powerful blend of style that depicts war’s desolation.

“Guernica” is often regarded as modern art’s most devastating anti-war message.

It was done to demonstrate Picasso’s support for the conclusion of the war and his overall denunciation of Nazism. Picasso chose not to depict the tragedy of Guernica in realism or romantic terms from the start. Key characters, such as a lady with extended arms, a bull, and an agonizing horse, are polished in drawing after sketch before being transferred to the expansive painting, which he also remodels multiple times. The somber color scheme and monochromatic theme were utilized to portray the difficult times and the sorrow that was being felt. Guernica questions the heroic nature of the battle and shows it as a horrific act of self-destruction.

The work was not only a functional report or painting, but it also remains a potent political image in modern art, surpassed only by a few frescos by Mexican artist Diego Rivera.

Famous Picasso Paintings

Pablo Picasso’s involvement in Cubism resulted in the growth of collage, in which he rejected the concept of the image as a window on items in the world and started to think of it just as an assemblage of signals that employed various, often metaphorical, techniques to relate to those things. This, too, would have far-reaching consequences for future decades.

Picasso had a diverse attitude to form, and while his work was typically defined by a single dominating approach at any one moment, he frequently moved alternately between multiple styles – occasionally even within the same piece.

His experience with Surrealism influenced not just the delicate shapes and gentle sensuality of pictures of his girlfriend Marie-Therese Walter, but also the sharply jagged iconography of Guernica (1937), the century’s most recognized anti-war artwork. Picasso was always keen to establish himself in history, and some of his most famous pieces, such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), allude to a plethora of previous antecedents – even while subverting them.

As he grew older, he became increasingly concerned with ensuring his legacy, and his later work is distinguished by a candid discussion with Old Masters.

The Soup (1903)

The Soup exemplifies Picasso’s Blue Period’s dark sadness, and it was created at the same time as a succession of other paintings devoted to themes of deprivation, aging, and disability. The artwork expresses Picasso’s worry about the deplorable situations he experienced while growing up in Spain, and it was undoubtedly inspired by the religious artwork he grew up with, particularly El Greco. Yet, the artwork represents the broader Symbolist trend of that time.

Picasso eventually regarded his Blue Period works as “nothing except feeling”; reviewers typically sided with him, despite the fact that many of these images are classic and, of course, quite expensive.

https://youtu.be/pQYJqqoR59c?t=95

Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905)

Gertrude Stein was Picasso’s author, personal friend, and even patron, and she was essential in his development as an artist. This picture, in which Stein is dressed in her beloved brown velvet coat, was completed barely a year before Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , and it represents a significant step in his maturing style.

In comparison to the flat look of several of the Blue and Rose period paintings, the shapes in this portrait appear nearly carved, and they were inspired by the creator’s study of antique Iberian sculpture.

Picasso’s heightened interest in representing a human face as a sequence of flat planes is practically palpable. Stein said that she sat for Picasso 90 times, and while this may be a hyperbole, Picasso undoubtedly struggled for a long time with portraying her head. After attempting it in numerous ways and failing, he painted it out completely one day, claiming, “I can’t perceive you anymore when I look,” and eventually abandoned the image.

He didn’t finish the head until much later, but without the subject in front of him.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

This artwork astounded even Picasso’s dearest artist colleagues, both in terms of content and technique. The theme of naked females was not uncommon, but Picasso’s portrayal of the girls as prostitutes in blatantly sexual attitudes was novel. Picasso’s fascination with Iberian and indigenous artwork is especially obvious in the mask-like faces of three of the females, hinting that their sexuality is not just violent but also primal.

Pablo Picasso also took his spatial explorations a step further by discarding the Renaissance impression of three-dimensionality in favor of presenting a dramatically flattened image plane split up into geometric fragments, a technique Picasso adopted partially from Paul Cézanne’s brushwork.

For example, the leg of the lady on the left is painted as though seen from many perspectives at the same time; it is difficult to discern the leg from the negative space surrounding it, giving the impression that the two are both in the forefront.

When the picture was ultimately shown in public in 1916, it was largely regarded as immoral.

Braque was one of the few painters who studied it thoroughly in 1907, which led straight to his Cubist partnerships with Picasso. Because Les Demoiselles foresaw several of Cubism’s traits, the work is regarded as proto- or pre-Cubism.

Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)

This famous artwork is regarded as the earliest collage in modern art. Picasso had previously attached pre-existing items to his paintings, but this is the first occasion he did so with such a humorous and dramatic aim. The chair caning in the image is made of printed oilcloth, not genuine chair caning, as the title implies.

The rope wrapped around the canvas, on the other hand, is extremely genuine and helps to mimic the carved border of a café table.

Moreover, the spectator can think of the canvas as a glass table, and the chair caning as the actual seat of the chair as perceived through the table. As a result, the image not only contrasts visual space significantly, as is characteristic of Picasso’s experimentation, but it also distorts our perception of what we are looking at.

Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle (1914)

This piece is representative of his Synthetic Cubism, in which he employs numerous techniques to allude to the portrayed things, such as painted dots, shadows, and grains of sand. This paint and mixed media combo is an instance of how Picasso “synthesized” texture and color – inventing wholes after cognitively dissecting the items at hand.

Picasso repressed color during his Analytic Cubist period in order to focus more on the shapes and dimensions of the objects, and this logic certainly informed his predilection for still life all through this period.

The café life undoubtedly summarized modern Parisian life for the painters – he spent a lot of time there conversing with other painters – but the basic array of things also guaranteed that concerns of metaphor and reference could be kept in check.

Ma Jolie (1912)

Picasso explores the boundary between high art and common culture in this painting, pushing his experimentation in new areas. Picasso progresses towards abstraction by diminishing color and heightening the illusion of low-relief sculpture, expanding on the geometric outlines of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon .

Picasso, on the other hand, incorporated painted text on the canvas.

The phrase “ma Jolie” on the cover not only condenses the space more but also links the artwork to a billboard due to their use of an advertisement font. It’s the first instance a painter has publicly utilized elements of popular culture in the creation of high art.

“Ma Jolie” was also the title of a popular tune at the time, as well as Picasso’s nickname for his girlfriend, further tying the painting to popular culture.

The Three Musicians (1921)

There were two versions of Pablo Picasso’s paintings of the musicians. The somewhat smaller version is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, although both are exceptionally enormous for Picasso’s Cubist phase, and he may have decided to create on such a huge scale to commemorate the end of his Synthetic Cubism, which had preoccupied him for over a decade.

He created it during the same summer that he created the extremely dissimilar, classical picture Three Women in the Spring. Some have regarded the images as nostalgic reminiscences of Picasso’s early days; Picasso sits in the middle, as always, the Harlequin, with old acquaintances Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, from whom he had been alienated, on each side.

Three Women at the Spring (1921)

Picasso performed extensive research in preparation for painting this, his most elaborate depiction of an old classical theme. It pays homage to older works by Poussin and Ingres, two titans of classical painting, but it also borrows cues from Greek sculpture , and the figures’ tremendous weight is quite sculptural.

Critics say that the topic attracted him due to the birth of his first son, the figures’ solemn demeanor may be understood by France’s current obsession with remembering the First World War’s deceased.

Guernica (1937)

Picasso painted this painting in response to the shelling of Guernica, a Basque village, on the 26th of April, 1937, amid the Spanish Civil War. It was finished in one month and functioned as the focal point of the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.

While it made quite a commotion during the exhibition, it was subsequently barred from being shown in Spain until the deposition of militaristic tyrant Francisco Franco in 1975.

Much work has been spent deciphering the artwork’s significance, and some feel that the suffering horse in the middle of the canvas relates to the citizens of Spain. The minotaur may refer to bullfighting, a popular national pastime in Spain, but it also has a profound personal meaning for the artist.

Although “Guernica” is without a question Modern art’s most iconic reaction to conflict, critics have been split on the painting’s impact.

Recommended Reading

Pablo Picasso’s biography is a detailed and long journey. It is not always possible to fit every bit of information into an article. Perhaps you are keen to explore Picasso’s drawings and paintings even more in your own time. Here you can find more info on Pablo Picasso’s paintings and life.

Life with Picasso (2019) by Francois Gilot

Françoise Gilot’s honest book is the most comprehensive picture of Picasso ever published, providing an intriguing insight into the emotional and creative lives of two modern artists. In 1943, Françoise Gilot was in her early 20 when she met Pablo Picasso, who was 61 at the time. Born from an upper-middle-class household who had the expectation that she would become a lawyer, the young woman disregarded her parents’ desires and pursued a career as an artist. She was one of Picasso’s muses, but she was rather much her own person, driven to become the extraordinary painter she eventually became.

• The most revealing portrait of Pablo Picasso ever written
• Get fascinating insight into the two artist's intense and creative lives
•  A brilliant self-portrait of a young woman of enormous talent

Picasso: Painting the Blue Period (2021) by Kenneth Brummel

Advanced technology exposes hidden compositions, themes, and modifications, as well as previously undisclosed information on the creator’s materials and method, providing new insights into Picasso’s Blue Period. This multidisciplinary book integrates art history and advanced preservation science to demonstrate how the young Picasso crafted a unique look and a distinguishable artistic identification as he evolved the artistic instruction of fin-de-siècle Paris to the political situation of a troubled Barcelona.

• Get new insights into Picasso's famous Blue Period
• A lavishly illustrated volume that re-examines Picasso's Blue Period
• A combination of art history and advanced conservation science

Picasso’s proclivity to create works in a variety of genres gained him widespread acclaim throughout his career. Let us conclude this article with a few more famous Picasso quotes to get a glimpse inside this quirky and creative artist’s mind: “Every youngster has the potential to be an artist. The issue is how to stay an artist as he grows older.” and “I’m always doing what I can’t do so that I can discover how to do it.”

Frequently Asked Questions

When was picasso born and when did picasso die.

Pablo Picasso was born into a creative family on the 25th of October 1881. He was born in Spain, in the city of Malaga. In 1973, he died of a heart attack in the south of France.

Who Was Pablo Picasso?

Picasso spent most of his professional adult life in France. His work has been roughly divided into time periods in which he would totally develop complex ideas and feelings in order to create a coherent body of work. The first phase was referred to as the Blue Period. The diverse spectrum of Pablo Picasso’s artworks was not the product of significant changes in his style during his career, but rather of his devotion to objectively evaluating the form and approach best suited to achieve his intended effect for each art piece. 

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Pablo Picasso – The Life and Works of This Famous Cubism Artist.” Art in Context. March 2, 2022. URL: https://artincontext.org/pablo-picasso/

Meyer, I. (2022, 2 March). Pablo Picasso – The Life and Works of This Famous Cubism Artist. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/pablo-picasso/

Meyer, Isabella. “Pablo Picasso – The Life and Works of This Famous Cubism Artist.” Art in Context , March 2, 2022. https://artincontext.org/pablo-picasso/ .

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The Most Famous Artists and Artworks

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors…in all of history! 

MOST FAMOUS ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors!

Pablo Picasso Biography

Birthday: October 25 , 1881 ( Scorpio )

Born In: Málaga, Spain

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Also Known As: Pablo Ruiz Picasso

Died At Age: 91

Spouse/Ex-: Jacqueline Roque (m. 1961– 1973), Olga Khokhlova (m. 1918; d. 1955)

father: Don José Ruiz y Blasco

mother: María Picasso y López

children: Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso, Maya Widmaier-Picasso, Paloma Picasso, Paul Joseph Picasso

Partner: Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Marie-Thérèse Walter

Born Country: Spain

Sculptors Cubist Painters

Died on: April 8 , 1973

place of death: Mougins, France

Cause of Death: Pulmonary Edema

Notable Alumni: Real Academia De Bellas Artes De San Fernando

Ancestry: Italian Spanish

City: Málaga, Spain

education: Real Academia De Bellas Artes De San Fernando

awards: 1950 - Stalin Peace Prize 1962 - Lenin Peace Prize

You wanted to know

What was pablo picasso known for, what is the significance of picasso's painting guernica.

Picasso's painting "Guernica" is a powerful anti-war piece that depicts the horrors of the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It has become a symbol of the devastating impact of war on civilians.

How did Picasso's art evolve over his career?

What inspired picasso's famous painting les demoiselles d'avignon.

Picasso's painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" was inspired by African tribal masks and Iberian sculpture. It marked a significant departure from traditional Western art and laid the foundation for the Cubist movement.

How did Picasso's artwork influence the art world?

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After World War II an aura of myth grew up around the name of Picasso, and in the last decades of his life his work had, in a sense, moved beyond criticism . Although there were few critics able to keep pace with his latest work, there were few who attacked him. One exception was the British critic John Berger ( The Success and Failure of Picasso [1965]), who raised questions about Picasso’s economic motives and speculated about his inflated public reputation. Picasso’s enormous output (especially in printing and drawing) kept his name before the public, even though his work seemed at the time to be far-from-mainstream nonfigurative imagery. For example, in the series that characterized the working methods of his late years, he used figurative imagery to weave a kind of narrative within each series’ numerous variations.

In 1953 Françoise Gilot with their two children left Picasso, and he spent several years as a bachelor, dividing his time between Paris and his home at La Californie, near Cannes (from 1955). In 1953 he met Jacqueline Roque, who worked in the pottery shop in Vallauris, and from 1954 (they married in 1961) she not only became his steadfast companion, but also, as his muse, she became the principal image and source of inspiration for practically all of the late work. They are both buried in the castle at Vauvenargues, which Picasso purchased in 1958. But the years from their marriage to Picasso’s death they spent in the villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie at Mougins.

In his late work Picasso repeatedly turned toward the history of art for his themes. He seemed at times obsessed with the need to create variations on the works of earlier artists; thus, in his many prints, drawings, and paintings of that period, reference is made to artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer , Édouard Manet , Rembrandt , Eugène Delacroix , and Gustave Courbet . Repeatedly Picasso did a complete series of variations on one particular work, the most famous being perhaps the series on Las Meninas of Velázquez consisting of 58 discrete pictures. At times Picasso reworked a specific work because he identified personally with it. For example, he was attracted to Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger because the figure on the right bore resemblance to Jacqueline. More often he seemed moved by the challenge to rework in his own way the complex pictorial and narrative problems the older artists had originally posed for themselves. In a sense Picasso was writing himself into the history of art by virtue of such an association with a number of his predecessors.

There is a renewed sense of play in the work of Picasso’s later years. He transformed paper cutouts into monumental sculptures, and in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film Le Mystère Picasso (1956), the artist, the sole star, behaves like a conjurer, performing tricks with his brush. And finally, just as he turned to the paintings of earlier masters, redoing their works in many variations, so he turned to his own earlier oeuvre , prompted by the same impulse. The circus and the artist’s studio became once again the stage for his characters, among whom he often placed himself portrayed as an old acrobat or king.

Because Picasso’s art from the time of the Demoiselles was radical in nature, virtually no 20th-century artist could escape his influence. Moreover, whereas other masters such as Henri Matisse or Braque tended to keep within certain stylistic boundaries, Picasso continued to be an innovator into the last decade of his life. That led to misunderstanding and criticism both in his lifetime and since, and it was only in the 1980s that his last paintings began to be appreciated both in themselves and for their profound influence on the rising generation of young painters. Since Picasso was able from the 1920s to sell works at very high prices, he could keep most of his oeuvre in his own collection. At the time of his death he owned some 50,000 works in various media from every period of his career, a selection of which passed into possession of the French state and the rest to his heirs . Their exhibition and publication served to reinforce the highest estimates of Picasso’s astonishing powers of invention and execution over a span of more than 80 years.