Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, a port city on the southern coast of Spain ^[1]. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, taught drawing and painted in a conventional academic style, specializing in studies of pigeons. His mother was María Picasso López, whose surname the artist later adopted as his own. According to family accounts, the boy could draw before he could speak in full sentences, and his father began instructing him in figure drawing and oil painting while he was still a small child ^[1].

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891 when José took a teaching post there, and then to Barcelona in 1895, where Picasso entered the school of fine arts known as La Llotja at the age of thirteen ^[2]. He completed entrance exercises that normally took students weeks in a matter of days. In 1897 he moved briefly to Madrid to study at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, but he found the formal curriculum stifling and spent more time copying works by Velázquez and El Greco in the Prado than attending classes ^[2].

Back in Barcelona by 1899, the teenager fell in with the writers and painters who gathered at Els Quatre Gats, a café modeled on the cabarets of Montmartre. There he absorbed the ideas of Catalan modernism, held his first exhibition in 1900, and began signing his work simply as Picasso ^[2].

Picasso first traveled to Paris in October 1900, at the age of nineteen, and over the next four years he shuttled between the French capital and Spain before settling in Montmartre in 1904 ^[1]. The suicide of his close friend Carles Casagemas in 1901 marked the start of what critics later called his Blue Period, roughly 1901 to 1904, in which he painted beggars, prisoners, and the poor in cold blue tones. Works from these years include The Old Guitarist, now in the Art Institute of Chicago ^[3].

His palette warmed after he moved into the ramshackle Montmartre studio building known as the Bateau-Lavoir and began a relationship with Fernande Olivier. The Rose Period of 1904 to 1906 brought circus performers, harlequins, and acrobats rendered in pinks and earth tones ^[1]. During these years he attracted early champions, including the American writer Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, who bought his canvases when few others would, and the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who gave him exhibitions ^[4].

In 1907 Picasso finished Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a large canvas depicting five nude figures with fractured bodies and faces influenced by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The painting shocked even his friends, yet it opened the door to the most consequential development of his career. Working closely with Georges Braque between 1908 and 1914, Picasso developed Cubism, a way of representing objects from multiple viewpoints at once that dismantled the single-point perspective European painting had relied on since the Renaissance ^[3]. The two men moved from the fragmented, monochrome canvases of Analytic Cubism to the collages and papiers collés of Synthetic Cubism, in which newspaper clippings, wallpaper, and stenciled letters entered fine art for the first time ^[3].

Any account of Pablo Picasso achievements has to begin with Cubism, but his range extended far beyond it. During the First World War he designed sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, beginning with the 1917 production of Parade, a collaboration with Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie ^[4]. Through the ballet he met the dancer Olga Khokhlova, whom he married in 1918. In the early 1920s he worked simultaneously in a monumental neoclassical style and in a Cubist idiom, refusing to treat his earlier innovations as a fixed doctrine ^[1].

The defining public statement of his career came in 1937. After German and Italian aircraft bombed the Basque town of Guernica on April 26 of that year in support of Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso painted Guernica, a mural more than seven meters wide, for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris International Exposition ^[5]. Executed in black, white, and gray, the painting turned a screaming horse, a fallen soldier, and a mother holding a dead child into a lasting image of civilian suffering in war. Picasso stipulated that the work should not return to Spain until democracy was restored; it entered the Museo Reina Sofía's collection in Madrid after arriving in Spain in 1981 ^[5].

He was also a prolific sculptor and printmaker. His welded metal constructions of the late 1920s, made with the sculptor Julio González, helped invent open-form sculpture, and his 1942 Bull's Head, assembled from a bicycle seat and handlebars, became a famous example of the found-object approach ^[3]. From 1947 onward he worked at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris on the French Riviera, producing thousands of ceramic plates, jugs, and figures ^[6]. Estimates of his total output run to roughly 50,000 works across painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and printmaking, a scale of production with few parallels in the history of art ^[6].

Picasso's private life was turbulent, and the women in it repeatedly shaped his art. He married twice: first Olga Khokhlova in 1918, with whom he had a son, Paulo, in 1921, and then Jacqueline Roque in 1961, when he was seventy-nine ^[1]. In between came long relationships with Marie-Thérèse Walter, mother of his daughter Maya; the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar, who documented the painting of Guernica; and the painter Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two children, Claude and Paloma, and who left him in 1953 and later published a candid memoir of their years together ^[7].

Politically, Picasso joined the French Communist Party in 1944, shortly after the liberation of Paris, and remained a member for the rest of his life ^[1]. His lithograph of a dove, made in 1949, was adopted as the emblem of the World Peace Congress and became one of the most reproduced images of the postwar peace movement. He never returned to Spain after 1934, refusing to set foot in the country while Franco held power ^[5].

Despite living in France for most of his life, he remained a Spanish citizen. He famously kept nearly everything he made or collected, filling a succession of houses and studios with his own work, which later allowed France to accept art in lieu of estate taxes and establish the Musée Picasso in Paris in 1985 ^[8].

After the Second World War, Picasso left Paris for the south of France, living first in Vallauris, then at the villa La Californie above Cannes, at the château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, and finally at the farmhouse Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins ^[1]. The Mediterranean light and his ceramic work at Vallauris gave his postwar output a playful, prolific character that some critics of the time dismissed and later generations reassessed.

In his final decades he conducted extended dialogues with the old masters, painting dozens of variations on Velázquez's Las Meninas in 1957, along with series after Delacroix's Women of Algiers and Manet's Luncheon on the Grass ^[3]. The late paintings, made at speed and often depicting musketeers, artists, and models, struck many contemporaries as careless, but exhibitions since the 1980s have argued that they anticipated the loose, expressive figuration of younger painters ^[3].

Picasso worked almost to the end. He died on April 8, 1973, at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins at the age of ninety-one, and was buried in the grounds of the château of Vauvenargues ^[1]. Newspaper obituaries around the world treated his death as the close of an era in Western art ^[7].

Few artists have changed the direction of art as decisively as Picasso. Cubism altered how painters, sculptors, architects, and designers thought about space and representation, and its influence runs through Futurism, Constructivism, Art Deco, and much of abstraction ^[3]. Guernica gave the twentieth century its most recognizable protest painting, still invoked whenever civilians die in war ^[5].

His work anchors major museums on both sides of the Atlantic. The Musée Picasso in Paris and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona are devoted entirely to him, the Museo Picasso Málaga opened in his birthplace in 2003, and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York ^[8]. At auction his paintings have repeatedly set records; his 1955 canvas Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O) sold at Christie's in New York in May 2015 for 179.4 million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction ^[9].

His reputation has also been reexamined. Biographers and critics, drawing on accounts by Françoise Gilot and others, have scrutinized his treatment of the women in his life, and museums now often present his work alongside that discussion rather than apart from it ^[7]. The debate has not diminished the scale of the achievement. Any Pablo Picasso biography ends at the same place: a boy from Málaga who taught the modern world to see differently, and whose experiments remain the starting point for artists a half century after his death ^[1].