Pablo Picasso

The Spanish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prodigious and revolutionarys artists in the history of Western painting. As the central figure in developing cubism, he established the basis for abstract art.

Pablo Picasso was born Pablo Blasco on Oct. 25, 1881, in Malaga, Spain, where his father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a professor in the School of Arts and Crafts. Pablo's mother was Maria Picasso and the artist used her surname from about 1901 on. In 1891 the family moved to La Coruña, where, at the age of 14, 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 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; he demonstrated his remarkable ability by completing in one day an entrance examination for which an entire month was permitted.

But Picasso found the atmosphere at the academy stifling, and he soon 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 Quatre Gats.

In 1900 Picasso made his first visit to Paris, staying for three months. In 1901 he made a second trip to Paris, and Ambroise Vollard gave him his first one-man exhibition. Although the show was not financially successful, it did arouse the interest of the writer Max Jacob, who subsequently became one of Picasso's closest friends and supporters. For the next three years Picasso stayed alternately in Paris and Barcelona.

First Works

At the turn of the century Paris was the center of the international art world. In painting it had spawned such masters as Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Each of these artists practiced advanced, radical styles. In spite of obvious stylistic differences, their common denominator lay in testing the limits of traditional representation. While their works retained certain links with the visible world, they exhibited a decided tendency toward flatness and abstraction. In effect, they implied that painting need not be predicated upon the values of Renaissance illusionism.

Picasso emerged within this complicated and uncertain artistic situation in 1904 when he set up a permanent studio in an old building called the Bateau Lavoir. There he produced some of his most revolutionary works, and the studio soon became a gathering place for the city's vanguard artists, writers, and patrons. This group included the painter Juan Gris, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, and the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein.

Picasso's early work reveals a creative pattern which persisted throughout his long career. Between 1900 and 1906 he worked through nearly every major style of contemporary painting, from impressionism to Art Nouveau. In doing so, his own work changed with unprecedented quickness, revealing a spectrum of feelings that would seem to lie beyond the limits of one human being. In itself this accomplishment was a mark of Picasso's genius.

The Moulin de la Galette (1900), the first painting Picasso executed in Paris, presents a scene of urban café society. With its acrid colors and sharp, angular figures, the work exudes a sinister, discomforting aura. The rawness of its sensibility, although not its superficial style, is characteristic of many of his earliest works.

Blue and Pink Periods

The years between 1901 and 1904 were known as Picasso's Blue Period, during which nearly all of his works were executed in somber shades of blue and contained lean, dejected, and introspective figures. The pervasive tone of the pictures is one of depression; their color is symbolic of the artist's personal hardship during the first years of the century—years when he occasionally burned his own drawings to keep warm—and also of the suffering which he witnessed in his society. Two outstanding examples of this period are the Old Guitarist (1903) and Life (1903).

In the second half of 1904 Picasso's style exhibited a new direction. For about a year he worked on a series of pictures featuring harlequins, acrobats, and other circus performers. The most celebrated example is the Family of Saltimbanques (1905). Feeling, as well as subject matter, has shifted here. The brooding depression of the Blue Period has given way to a quiet and unoppressive melancholy, and the color has become more natural, delicate, and tender in its range, with a prevalence of reddish and pink tones. Thus this period was called his Pink Period.

In terms of space, 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 stimulated by the late paintings of Cézanne, ten of which were shown in the 1905 Salon d'Automne. In Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse (1905) and Woman with Loaves (1906) the figures are vigorously modeled, giving a strong impression of their weight and three-dimensionality. The same interest pervades the famous Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906), particularly in the massive body of the figure. But the face of the sitter 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 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. Under the influence of Cézanne, Iberian sculpture, and African sculpture (which Picasso first saw in Paris in 1907) the artist launched a pictorial style more radical than anything he had produced up to that date. The human figures and their surrounding space are reduced to a series of broad, intersecting planes which align themselves with the picture surface and imply a multiple, dissected view of the visible world. The faces of the figures are seen simultaneously from frontal and profile positions, and their bodies are likewise forced to submit to Picasso's new and radically abstract pictorial language.

Paradoxically, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was not exhibited in public until 1937. Very possibly the picture was as problematic for Picasso as it was for his circle of friends and fellow artists, who were shocked when they viewed it in his Bateau Lavoir studio. Even Georges Braque, who by 1908 had become Picasso's closest colleague in the cubist enterprise, at first said that "to paint in such a way was as bad as drinking petrol in the hope of spitting fire." Nevertheless, Picasso relentlessly pursued the implications of his own revolutionary invention. Between 1907 and 1911 he continued to dissect the visible world into increasingly small facets of monochromatic planes of space. In doing so, his works became more and more abstract; that is, representation gradually vanished from the painting medium, which correspondingly became an end in itself—for the first time in the history of Western art.

The evolution 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, 1911-1912).

Cubist Collages

About 1911 Picasso and Braque began to introduce letters and scraps of newspapers into their cubist paintings, thus giving birth to an entirely new medium, the cubist collage. Picasso's first, and probably his most celebrated, collage is Still Life with Chair Caning (1911-1912). The oval composition combines a cubist analysis of a lemon and a wineglass, letters from the world of literature, and a piece of oilcloth that imitates a section of chair caning; finally, it is framed with a piece of actual rope. As Alfred Barr wrote (1946): "Here then, in one picture, Picasso juggles reality and abstraction in two media and at four different levels or ratios. If we stop to think which is the most 'real' we find ourselves moving from esthetic to metaphysical speculation. For here what seems most real is most false and what seems remote from everyday reality is perhaps the most real since it is least an imitation."

Synthetic Cubist Phase

After his experiments in the new medium of collage, Picasso returned more intensively to painting. His work between 1912 and 1921 is generally regarded as the synthetic phase of the cubist development. The masterpiece of this style is the Three Musicians (1921). In this painting Picasso used the flat planes of his earlier style in order to reconstruct an impression of the visible world. The planes themselves had become broader and more simplified, and they exploited color to a far greater extent than did the work of 1907-1911. In its richness of feeling and balance of formal elements, the Three Musicians represents a classical expression of cubism.

Additional Achievements

The invention of cubism represents Picasso's most important achievement in the history of 20th-century art. Nevertheless, his activities as an artist were not limited to this alone. As early as the first decade of the century, he involved himself with both sculpture and printmaking, two media which he continued to practice throughout his long career and to which he made numerous important contributions. Moreover, he periodically worked in ceramics and in the environment of the theater: in 1917 he designed sets for the Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau ballet Parade; in 1920 he sketched a theater interior for Igor Stravinsky's Pulcinella; and in 1924 he designed a curtain for the performance of Le Train Bleu by Jean Cocteau and Darius Milhaud. In short, the range of his activities exceeded that of any artist who worked in the modern period.

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 idiom. 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 elegance of this masterpiece testifies to the ease with which Picasso could express himself in pictorial languages that seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive.

By the late 1920s and the early 1930s surrealism had in many ways eclipsed cubism as the vanguard style of European painting. Launched by André Breton in Paris in 1924, the movement was not one to which Picasso was ever an "official" contributor in terms of group exhibitions or the signing of manifestos. But his work during these years reveals many attitudes in sympathy with the surrealist sensibility. For instance, in his famous Girl before a Mirror (1932), he employed the colorful planes of synthetic cubism to explore the relationship between a young woman's image and self-image as she regards herself before a conventional looking glass. As the configurations shift between the figure and the mirror image, they reveal the complexity of emotional and psychological energies that prevail on the darker side of human experience.

Guernica

Another of Picasso's most celebrated paintings of the 1930s is Guernica (1937). Barr described the situation within which it was conceived: "On April 28, 1937, the Basque town of Guernica was reported destroyed by German bombing planes flying for General Franco. Picasso, already an active partisan of the Spanish Republic, went into action almost immediately. He had been commissioned in January to paint a mural for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair; but he did not begin to work until May 1st, just two days after the news of the catastrophe." The artist's deep feelings about the work, and about the massacre 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 among advanced paintings of the 20th century. No artist except Picasso was able to apply convincingly the pictorial language of cubism to a subject that springs directly from social and political awareness. That he could so overtly challenge the abstractionist trend that he personally began is but another mark of his uniqueness.

After World War II Picasso was established as one of the Old Masters of modern art. But his work never paused. In the 1950s and 1960s he devoted his energies to other Old Masters, producing paintings based on the masterpieces of Nicolas Poussin and Diego Velázquez. To many critics and historians these recent works are not as ambitious as Picasso's earlier productions.

Picasso Politics

Picasso also came out publicly after the war as a communist. When he was asked why he was a communist in 1947, he stated that "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."

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, the then recently deceased Soviet leader, caused a clamor in the Party's leadership. The Soviet government banished his works from their nation after having them locked in the basement of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Picasso appeared amused at this and continued on unaffected.

Although Picasso had been in exile from his native Spain since the 1939 victory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he gave 800 to 900 of his earliest works to the city and people of Barcelona. For his part, Franco's feelings about Picasso were reciprocated. In 1963, Picasso's friend Jaime Sabartés had given 400 of his Picasso works to 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, one from his marriage to Khoklova and three by mistresses. Picasso kept busy all of his life and was planning an exhibit of 201 of his works at the Avignon Arts Festival in France when he died.

Picasso died at his 35-room hilltop villa of Notre Dame de Vie in Mougins, France on April 8, 1973. He was remembered as an artist that, throughout his life, shifted unpredictably from one pictorial mode to another. He exhibited a remarkable genius for sculpture, graphics, and ceramics, as well as painting. The sheer range of his achievement, not to mention its quality and influence, made him one of the most celebrated artists of the modern period.

Further Reading

Because of his long life and unceasing production, Picasso has inspired numerous books. The classic monograph, which no one interested in the master can afford to overlook, is Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1946). Picasso's early years are discussed in Gertrude Stein, Picasso (1938); Anthony Blunt and Phoebe Pool, Picasso: The Formative Years (1962); Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends (1965); and Pierre Daix and others, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods translated by Phoebe Pool (1967). The later years of Picasso are documented in Roberto Otero Forever Picasso: An Intimate Look At His Last Years (1974). For an overall view see Roland Penrose, Portrait of Picasso (1957) and Picasso: His Life and Work (1958). A thoughtful interpretation of the master's themes and major styles is given in Wilhelm Boeck and Jaimé Sabartes, Picasso (1955). Picasso's obituary can be found in the New York Times (April 8, 1973).

The most complete catalog of Picasso's work, C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso: Oeuvres (21 vols., 1942-1969), is in French. Specialized studies include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Picasso: Sixty Years of Graphic Works (1967), and Roland Penrose, The Sculpture of Picasso (1967). For broad surveys of cubism see Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (1960; rev. ed. 1966), and Edward F. Fry, Cubism (1966). □

Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973). Spanish painter, sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker, ceramicist, and designer, active mainly in France, the most famous, versatile, and prolific artist of the 20th century. He was the dominant personality in the visual arts during much of the first half of the 20th century and he provided the incentive for many of the revolutionary changes during this time. Although it is conventional to divide his work into certain phases, these divisions are to some extent arbitrary, as his energy and imagination were such that he often worked simultaneously on a wealth of themes and in a variety of styles. Picasso himself said: ‘The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or future. I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in painting. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I haven't hesitated to adopt them.’

Picasso was born in Málaga, the son of an undistinguished painter and drawing-master, José Ruiz Blasco (1838–1913), and he was remarkably precocious; his first word as a baby is said to have been ‘lápiz’ (pencil), and although he was not quite the child genius he later liked to suggest, he certainly showed exceptional talent by the time he was in his early teens. In 1895 his family moved to Barcelona, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts, 1896–7, before attending the Academy in Madrid for a few months in 1897. By this time he had his own studio in Barcelona, and he thrived on the city's intellectual and bohemian life, centring on the café Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats). In 1900 he made his first visit to Paris and by this time had already absorbed a wide range of influences. Between 1900 and 1904 he alternated between Barcelona and Paris, and this time coincides with his Blue Period, when he took his subjects from the poor and social outcasts, and the predominant mood of his paintings was one of slightly sentimentalized melancholy expressed through cold ethereal blue tones (La Vie, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1903). He also did a number of powerful etchings in a similar vein (The Frugal Repast, 1904)

In 1904 Picasso settled in Paris and quickly became a member of a circle of avant-garde artists and writers. A brief phase in 1904–5 is known as his Rose (or Circus) Period. The predominant blue tones of his earlier work gave way to pinks and greys and the mood became less austere. His favourite subjects were acrobats and dancers, particularly the figure of the harlequin. In 1906 he met Matisse, but although he seems to have admired the work being done by the Fauves, he did not share their interest in the decorative and expressive use of colour (indeed his work often shows little concern with colour, and it is significant that—unlike most painters—he preferred to work at night by artificial light). Until 1909 he lived with other artists and non-conformists in the ramshackle Bateau-Lavoir, but he rarely suffered real poverty (see JACOB) and his work soon began to attract the attention of important collectors, even though he did not exhibit at any of the usual salons. In 1905–6 the Americans Gertrude and Leo Stein, the German Wilhelm Uhde, and the Russian Sergei Shchukin began buying his paintings, and in 1907 he was taken up by the dealer Kahnweiler.

The period around 1906–7 is sometimes referred to as Picasso's ‘Negro period', because of the influence of African sculpture on his work at this time, but rather than marking a coherent phase, this influence was ‘the leading feature of a period of indecision which lasted more than a year’ ( Timothy Hilton, Picasso, 1975). Cézanne was another major influence on Picasso at this time, as he concentrated on the analysis and simplification of form. This process culminated in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (MOMA, New York, 1907), which in its distortions of form was as violent a revolt against tradition as the paintings of the Fauves in the realm of colour. The painting shows five sinister-looking naked women, and its title was jokingly suggested by André Salmon, who pretended to see a resemblance between them and prostitutes in the Carrer d'Avinyo (Avignon Street) in Barcelona. At the time the picture was incomprehensible even to other avant-garde artists, including Matisse and Derain, and it was not shown publicly until 1916 or reproduced until 1925. It is now seen not only as a pivotal work in Picasso's personal development but as the most important single landmark in the development of 20th-century painting. It was the herald of Cubism, which Picasso developed in close association with Braque and then Gris from 1907 up to the First World War. Towards the end of this period, Picasso made an almost equally revolutionary contribution to sculpture by creating works from pieces of commonplace material, for example Guitar (Musée Picasso, Paris, 1912), which is made of cardboard, paper, and string. His sculptures of this type (which represent a development of Cubist collage into three dimensions) were generally fairly small and jokey, but the idea was soon developed in a more ambitious way, and through Tatlin (who visited Picasso in 1914) it inspired Constructivism.

During the First World War Picasso continued working in Paris, but in 1917 he went to Rome with his friend Jean Cocteau to design costumes and scenery for the ballet Parade, which was being produced by Diaghilev. Picasso fell in love with one of the dancers, Olga Koklova, and they married in 1918, moving into a grand apartment in a fashionable part of Paris, as the bohemian days of his youth were left behind. The visit to Italy was also an important factor in introducing the strain of monumental Neoclassicism that was one of the most prominent features of Picasso's work in the early 1920s (Mother and Child, Art Institute of Chicago, 1921), but at this time he also became involved with Surrealism—indeed André Breton hailed him as one of the initiators of the movement. However his predominant interest in the analysis and synthesis of form was at bottom opposed to the irrational elements of Surrealism, its exaltation of chance, or fascination with material drawn from dreams or the unconscious.

Following his serene Neoclassical paintings, Picasso began to make violently expres sive works, fraught with emotional tension, anguish, and despair. This phase begins with The Three Dancers (Tate Gallery, London, 1925), painted at a time when his marriage was becoming a source of increasing unhappiness and frustration (Picasso could not obtain a divorce, so he remained officially married to Olga until her death in 1955; he remarried in 1961). The life-size figures in The Three Dancers are aggressively distorted in a savage parody of classical ballet; Alfred H. Barr calls the picture ‘a turning point in Picasso's art almost as radical as the proto-cubist Demoiselles d'Avignon'. Following this he became concerned with the mythological image of the Minotaur and images of the Dying Horse and the Weeping Woman. The period culminated in his most famous work, Guernica (Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1937), produced for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1937 to express horror and revulsion at the bombing of the Basque capital Guernica by General Franco's German allies during the Spanish Civil War. It was followed by a number of other paintings attacking the cruelty and destructiveness of war, including The Charnel House (MOMA, New York, 1945). ‘Painting is not done to decorate apartments', he said: ‘it is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.’

Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation, but from 1946 he lived mainly in the South of France, where he added pottery to his other activities (from 1948 to 1955 he lived in Vallauris, a town renowned for its ceramics); he settled at his final home, the Villa Notre-Dame-de-Vie at Mougins, in 1961. In 1944 he had joined the Communist Party, and in the post-war years he attended several International Peace Congresses organized by the Party, including one in Sheffield in 1950. His later output as a painter does not compare in momentousness with his pre-war work, but it remained prodigious in terms of sheer quantity. It included a number of variations on paintings by other artists, including 44 on Velázquez's Las Meninas (the theme of the artist and his almost magical powers is one that exercised him greatly throughout his career). Some critics think that Picasso remained a great master to the end of his long life, but others see a sad falling off in his post-war work. Douglas Cooper, for example, described the paintings of his old age as ‘incoherent doodles done by a frenetic dotard in the anteroom of death', whereas to John Richardson they constitute ‘a phenomenal finale to a phenomenal œuvre'. These pictures are often aggressively sexual in subject and almost frenzied in brushwork (Reclining Nude with Necklace, Tate Gallery, London, 1968); they have been seen as sources for Neo-Expressionism.

Picasso's interest in sculpture was fairly sporadic, much of his three-dimensional work being executed in short bursts of activity, but in this field too he ranks as one of the outstanding figures in 20th-century art. In Modern Sculpture (1965) Alan Bowness writes that ‘Picasso's sculpture sparkles with bright ideas—enough to keep many a lesser man occupied for the whole of a working lifetime … it is not inconceivable that the time will come when his activities as a sculptor in the second part of his life are regarded as of more consequence than his later paintings'. His best-known sculptures include some slight but amusing works in which he demonstrated his remarkable sharpness of eye in transforming found objects (see OBJET TROUVÉ); the most celebrated example is Head of A Bull, Metamorphosis (Musée Picasso, Paris, 1943), made of the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle. However, he also made much more ambitious and considered pieces, the largest being the over-lifesize bronze Man with a Sheep (1943), one cast of which stands in the main square in Vallauris.

As a graphic artist (draughtsman, etcher, lithographer, linocutter), Picasso ranks with the greatest of the century, one of his outstanding achievements being the set of etchings known as the Vollard Suite (see VOLLARD). He was a prolific book illustrator, and as few other artists had the power to concentrate the impress of his genius in even the smallest and slightest of his works. Picasso's emotional range is as wide as his varied technical mastery. By turns playful and tragic, his work is suffused with a passionate love of life, and no artist has more devastatingly exposed the cruelty and folly of his fellow men or more rapturously celebrated the physical pleasures of love. There are several museums devoted to Picasso's work in France and Spain, the largest being in Paris and Barcelona; other examples of his huge output (which has been estimated at over 20,000 works) are in collections throughout the world.

Just as Picasso's work has been more discussed than that of any other modern artist, so his personal life has inspired a flood of writing, particularly regarding his relationships with women. He once described women as either ‘goddesses or doormats’ and he has been criticized for allegedly demeaning them in his work (especially his later erotic paintings) as well as mistreating them in person. Several of the women in his life came out of their relationships with him badly. His first wife became almost deranged, screaming abuse at him in public, and his second wife committed suicide some years after his death, as did Marie-Thérèse Walter, who became his mistress in 1927, when she was 17 and he was 45. Picasso tried unsuccessfully to prevent two of his long-term lovers from publishing their memoirs of life with him: Fernande Olivier's Picasso et ses amis (1933, translated as Picasso and His Friends, 1965), and Françoise Gilot's Life with Picasso (1964). ( Olivier, an artists' model whom he met in 1904, was his first great love; Gilot, a painter, was the mother of two of his children including Paloma Picasso (1949– ), a jewellery designer.) John Richardson describes Gilot's book as telling the story of a ‘young girl seduced, manipulated and betrayed by a sadistic old Bluebeard’ and writes that it outraged Picasso so much (he maintained he was the one who had been betrayed) that it ‘cast a shadow over the rest of his life'. David Sylvester, however, regards it as ‘one of the most illuminating and entertaining books ever written about an artist'.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Guernica

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.

Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973). Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman, ceramicist, and designer, active mainly in France, the most famous, versatile, prolific, and influential artist of the 20th century. Although it is conventional to divide his work into certain phases, all such divisions are to some extent arbitrary, as his energy and imagination were such that he often worked simultaneously on a wealth of themes and in a variety of styles. He himself said: ‘The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or future. I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in painting. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I haven't hesitated to adopt them.’

Picasso was the son of a painter and drawing master and was absorbed in art from childhood (his first word is said to have been ‘piz’, baby talk for lapiz, ‘pencil’). In 1900 he made his first visit to Paris and by this time had already absorbed a wide range of influences. Between 1900 and 1904 he alternated between Paris and Barcelona, and these years coincide with his Blue Period, when he took his subjects from social outcasts and the poor, and the predominant mood of his paintings was one of slightly sentimentalized melancholy expressed through cold and ethereal blue tones (La Vie, 1903, Cleveland Mus. of Art). He also made a number of powerful etchings in a similar vein (The Frugal Repast, 1904). In 1904 he settled in Paris and quickly became part of a circle of avant-garde artists and writers. A brief phase in 1904–5 is known as his Rose Period. The predominant blue tones of his earlier work gave way to pinks and greys and the mood became less austere. His favourite subjects were acrobats and dancers, particularly the figure of the harlequin. In 1906 he met Matisse, but although he seems to have admired the work being done by the Fauves, he did not share their interest in the decorative and expressive use of colour (indeed his work often shows little concern with colour, and it is significant that—unlike most painters —he liked to work at night by artificial light). The period around 1906–7 is sometimes called Picasso's Negro Period, because of the impact that African sculpture made on his work, but Cézanne was an equally powerful influence at this time, when he was engrossed in the analysis of form. His explorations climaxed in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906–7, MoMA, New York), which in its distortions of form and disregard of any conventional idea of beauty was as violent a revolt against tradition as the paintings of the Fauves in the realm of colour. At the time, the picture was incomprehensible even to other avant-garde artists, including Matisse and Derain, and it was not publicly exhibited until 1916 or reproduced until 1925. It is now seen not only as a pivotal work in Picasso's personal development but also as the most important single landmark in the development of 20th-century painting. It was the herald of Cubism, which he developed in close association with Braque and then Gris from 1907 up to the First World War.

During the war Picasso continued working in Paris, but in 1917 he went to Rome with his friend Jean Cocteau to design costumes and scenery for the ballet Parade, which was being produced by Diaghilev. Picasso fell in love with one of the dancers, Olga Koklova, and married her in 1918; they moved into a grand apartment in a fashionable part of Paris, as the bohemian days of his youth were left behind. The visit to Italy was an important factor in introducing the strain of monumental classicism that was one of the features of his work in the early 1920s (Mother and Child, 1921, Art Inst. of Chicago), but at this time he was also involved with Surrealism—indeed André Breton hailed him as one of the initiators of the movement. However his predominant interest in the analysis and synthesis of form was at bottom opposed to the irrational elements of Surrealism, its exaltation of chance, or its fascination with material drawn from dreams or the unconscious. Following his serene classical paintings, Picasso entered on a period when his work was characterized by violent emotions and expressionist distortion, the elements of the human face often being rearranged to convey intensity of feeling. This phase began with The Three Dancers (1925, Tate, London), a savage parody of classical ballet, painted at a time when his marriage was becoming a source of increasing unhappiness and frustration (he could not obtain a divorce, so he remained officially married to Olga until her death in 1955; he remarried in 1961). The period culminated in his most famous work, Guernica (1937, Centro Cultural Reina Sofía, Madrid), produced for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1937 to express horror and revulsion at the destruction by bombing of the Basque capital Guernica during the civil war (1936–9). It was followed by a number of other paintings attacking the cruelty and destructiveness of war, including The Charnel House (1945, MoMA, New York): ‘Painting is not done to decorate apartments’, he said; ‘it is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.’ Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation, but from 1946 he lived mainly in the south of France, where he added pottery to his many other activities. His later output as a painter does not compare in momentousness with his pre-war work (indeed some critics think there was a sad decline in his powers), but it remained prodigious in terms of sheer quantity. It included a number of variations on paintings by other artists, including 44 on Las Meninas of Velázquez (the theme of the artist and his almost magical powers is one that exercised him greatly throughout his long career). In his old age he was haunted by the idea of death, and images of physical decay and the contrast between youth and age occur frequently in his work, as if he hoped to ward off his own end through the potency of his art. Some of his late paintings are aggressively sexual in subject and almost frenzied in brushwork (Reclining Nude with Necklace, 1968, Tate); they have been seen as sources for Neo-Expressionism.

Picasso's status as a painter has perhaps overshadowed his work as a sculptor, but in this field too (although his interest was sporadic) he ranks as one of the outstanding figures in 20th-century art. He was one of the first artists to make sculpture that was assembled from varied materials rather than modelled or carved (in this way he helped to inspire Constructivism), and he made brilliantly witty use of found objects (see objet trouvé). The most celebrated example is Head of a Bull, Metamorphosis (1943, Mus. Picasso, Paris), made of the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle. Alan Bowness has written (Modern Sculpture, 1965), ‘Picasso's sculpture sparkles with bright ideas—enough to have kept many a lesser man occupied for the whole of a working lifetime…it is not inconceivable that the time will come when his activities as a sculptor in the second part of his life are regarded as of more consequence than his later paintings.’ As a graphic artist (draughtsman, etcher, lithographer, linocutter), too, Picasso ranks with the greatest of the century, showing a remarkable power to concentrate the impress of his genius in even the smallest and slightest of his works. His emotional range is as wide as his varied technical mastery; by turns tragic and playful, his work is suffused with a passionate love of life, and no artist has more devastatingly exposed the cruelty and folly of his fellow men or more rapturously celebrated the physical pleasures of love. There are several museums devoted to him in France and Spain, the largest being in Barcelona and Paris, and other examples of his huge output (which has been estimated at 20,000 works) are in collections throughout the world. Just as this extraordinary oeuvre has been more discussed than the work of any other modern artist, so Picasso's personal life has inspired a flood of writing, particularly regarding his relationships with women. He once characterized them as either ‘goddesses or doormats’ and he has been criticized for allegedly demeaning them in his work (especially his later erotic paintings) as well as mistreating them in person.

Picasso, Pablo (b Málaga, 25 Oct. 1881; d Mougins, nr. Cannes, 8 Apr. 1973). Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman, ceramicist, and designer, the most famous, versatile, prolific, and influential artist of the 20th century. Although it is conventional to divide his work into certain phases, all such divisions are to some extent arbitrary, as his energy and imagination were such that he often worked simultaneously on a wealth of themes and in a variety of styles. He himself said: ‘The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or future. I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in painting. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I haven't hesitated to adopt them.’

Picasso was the son of a painter and drawing master and was absorbed in art from childhood (his first word is said to have been piz, baby talk for lapiz, ‘pencil’). In 1900 he made his first visit to Paris and by this time had already absorbed a wide range of influences. Between 1900 and 1904 he alternated between Paris and Barcelona, and these years coincide with his Blue Period, when he took his subjects from social outcasts and the poor, and the predominant mood of his paintings was one of slightly sentimentalized melancholy expressed through cold and ethereal blue tones (La Vie, 1903, Cleveland Mus. of Art). He also made a number of powerful etchings in a similar vein (The Frugal Repast, 1904). In 1904 he settled in Paris and quickly became part of a circle of avant-garde artists and writers. A brief phase in 1904–5 is known as his Rose Period. The predominant blue tones of his earlier work gave way to pinks and greys and the mood became less austere. His favourite subjects were acrobats and dancers, particularly the figure of the harlequin. In 1906 he met Matisse, but although he seems to have admired the work being done by the Fauves, he did not share their interest in the decorative and expressive use of colour (indeed his work often shows little concern with colour, and it is significant that—unlike most painters—he liked to work at night by artificial light). The period around 1906–7 is sometimes called Picasso's Negro Period, because of the impact that African sculpture made on his work, but Cézanne was an equally powerful influence at this time, when he was engrossed in the analysis of form. His explorations climaxed in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906–7, MoMA, New York), which in its distortions of form and disregard of any conventional idea of beauty was as violent a revolt against tradition as the paintings of the Fauves in the realm of colour. At the time, the picture was incomprehensible even to other avant-garde artists, including Matisse and Derain, and it was not publicly exhibited until 1916 or reproduced until 1925. It is now seen not only as a pivotal work in Picasso's personal development but also as the most important single landmark in the development of 20th-century painting. It was the herald of Cubism, which he developed in close association with Braque and then Gris from 1907 up to the First World War.

During the war Picasso continued working in Paris, but in 1917 he went to Rome with his friend Jean Cocteau to design costumes and scenery for the ballet Parade, which was being produced by Diaghilev. Picasso fell in love with one of the dancers, Olga Koklova, and married her in 1918; they moved into a grand apartment in a fashionable part of Paris, as the bohemian days of his youth were left behind. The visit to Italy was an important factor in introducing the strain of monumental classicism that was one of the features of his work in the early 1920s (Mother and Child, 1921, Art Inst. of Chicago), but at this time he was also involved with Surrealism—indeed André Breton hailed him as one of the initiators of the movement. However, his predominant interest in the analysis and synthesis of form was at bottom opposed to the irrational elements of Surrealism, its exaltation of chance, or its fascination with material drawn from dreams or the unconscious.

Following his serene classical paintings, Picasso entered on a period when his work was characterized by violent emotions and expressionist distortion, the elements of the human face often being rearranged to convey intensity of feeling. This phase began with The Three Dancers (1925, Tate, London), a savage parody of classical ballet, painted at a time when his marriage was becoming a source of increasing unhappiness and frustration (he could not obtain a divorce, so he remained officially married to Olga until her death in 1955; he remarried in 1961). The period culminated in his most famous work, Guernica (1937, Centro Cultural Reina Sofía, Madrid), produced for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1937 to express horror and revulsion at the destruction by bombing of the Basque capital Guernica during the Civil War. It was followed by a number of other paintings attacking the cruelty and destructiveness of war, including The Charnel House (1945, MoMA, New York): ‘Painting is not done to decorate apartments’, he said: ‘it is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.’

Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation, but from 1946 he lived mainly in the south of France, where he added pottery to his many other activities. His later output as a painter does not compare in momentousness with his pre-war work (indeed some critics think there was a sad decline in his powers), but it remained prodigious in terms of sheer quantity. It included a number of variations on paintings by other artists, including 44 on Las meninas of Velázquez (the theme of the artist and his almost magical powers is one that exercised him greatly throughout his long career). In his old age he was haunted by the idea of death, and images of physical decay and the contrast between youth and age occur frequently in his work, as if he hoped to ward off his own end through the potency of his art. Some of his late paintings are aggressively sexual in subject and almost frenzied in brushwork (Reclining Nude with Necklace, 1968, Tate); they have been seen as sources for Neo-Expressionism.

Picasso's status as a painter has perhaps overshadowed his work as a sculptor, but in this field too (although his interest was sporadic) he ranks as one of the outstanding figures in 20th-century art. He was one of the first artists to make sculpture that was assembled from varied materials rather than modelled or carved (in this way he helped to inspire Constructivism), and he made brilliantly witty use of found objects (see objet trouvé). The most celebrated example is Head of a Bull, Metamorphosis (1943, Mus. Picasso, Paris), made of the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle. Alan Bowness has written (Modern Sculpture, 1965): ‘Picasso's sculpture sparkles with bright ideas—enough to have kept many a lesser man occupied for the whole of a working lifetime…it is not inconceivable that the time will come when his activities as a sculptor in the second part of his life are regarded as of more consequence than his later paintings.’

As a graphic artist (draughtsman, etcher, lithographer, linocutter), too, Picasso ranks with the greatest of the century, showing a remarkable power to concentrate the impress of his genius in even the smallest and slightest of his works. His emotional range is as wide as his varied technical mastery; by turns tragic and playful, his work is suffused with a passionate love of life, and no artist has more devastatingly exposed the cruelty and folly of his fellow men or more rapturously celebrated the physical pleasures of love. There are several museums devoted to him in France and Spain, the largest being in Barcelona and Paris, and other examples of his huge output are in collections throughout the world. Just as this extraordinary oeuvre has been more discussed than the work of any other modern artist, so Picasso's personal life has inspired a flood of writing, particularly regarding his relationships with women. He once characterized them as either ‘goddesses or doormats’ and he has been criticized for allegedly demeaning them in his work (especially his later erotic paintings) as well as mistreating them in person.

Pablo Picasso (Pablo Ruiz y Picasso) , 1881–1973, Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and ceramist, who worked in France. He is generally considered in his technical virtuosity, enormous versatility, and incredible originality and prolificity to have been the foremost figure in 20th-century art.

Early Life and Work

A precocious draftsman, Picasso was admitted to the advanced classes at the Royal Academy of Art in Barcelona at 15. After 1900 he spent much time in Paris, remaining there from 1904 to 1947, when he moved to the South of France. His power is revealed in his very early works, some of which were influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec (such as Old Woman, 1901; Philadelphia Mus. of Art).

Picasso's artistic production is usually described in terms of a series of overlapping periods. In his "blue period" (1901–4) he depicted the world of the poor. Predominantly in tones of blue, these melancholy paintings (such as The Old Guitarist, 1903; Art Inst. of Chicago) are among the most popular art works of the century. Canvases from Picasso's "rose period" (1905–6) are characterized by a lighter palette and greater lyricism, with subject matter often drawn from circus life. Picasso's Parisian studio attracted the major figures of the avant-garde at this time, including Matisse, Braque, Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein. He had already produced numerous engravings of great power and began his work in sculpture during these years.

Cubism

In 1907 Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Mus. of Modern Art, New York City), a radical departure from the artistic ideas of the preceding ages and now considered the most significant work in the development toward cubism and modern abstraction (see modern art ). The influence of Cézanne and of African sculpture is apparent in its fragmented forms and unprecedented distortions. The painting heralded the first phase of cubism, called analytic cubism. This severe, intellectual style was conceived and developed by Picasso, Braque, and Gris c.1909–12. Picasso's Female Nude (1910–11; Philadelphia Mus. of Art) is a representative painting and his Woman's Head (1909; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) a representative sculpture of this style.

In the synthetic phase of cubism (after 1912) his forms became larger and more representational, and flat, bright decorative patterns replaced the earlier, more austere compositions. The Three Musicians (1921; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) exemplifies this style. Picasso's cubist works established firmly that the work of art may exist as a significant object beyond any attempt to represent reality. During both periods of cubism experiments by Picasso and others resulted in several new techniques, including collage and papier collé.

Other Stylistic Innovations

Picasso's enormous energy and fecundity was manifested by another development. In the 1920s he drew heavily on classical themes and produced magnificent monumental nudes and monsters that were reminiscent of antiquity and rendered with a certain anguished irony. These works appeared simultaneously with synthetic cubist paintings. Picasso was for a time saluted as a forerunner of surrealism , but his intellectual approach was basically antithetical to the irrational aesthetic of the surrealist painters.

The artist sought to strengthen the emotional impact of his work and became preoccupied with the delineation of agony. In 1937 the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica impelled him to produce his second landmark painting, Guernica (Queen Sophia Center of Art, Madrid), an impassioned allegorical condemnation of fascism and war. Long held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the work was transferred to Spain's Prado in 1981, and was moved to the Queen Sofia Center of Art, Madrid, in 1992. The profits Picasso earned from a series of etchings and prints on the Guernica theme made in the 1930s went to help the Republican cause.

Later Life and Work

In his later years Picasso turned to creations of fantasy and comic invention. He worked consistently in sculpture, ceramics, and in the graphic arts, producing thousands of superb drawings, illustrations, and stage designs. With unabated vigor he painted brilliant variations on the works of other masters, including Delacroix and Velázquez, and continued to explore new aspects of his personal vision until his death. His notable later works include Rape of the Sabines (1963; Picasso Mus., Paris) and Young Bather with Sand Shovel (1971; private collection, France). By virtue of his vast energies and overwhelming power of invention Picasso remains outstanding among the masters of the ages.

Bibliography

See biography by J. Richardson (Vol. I–III, 1991–2007); catalog of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (1980); biographical studies by G. Stein (1938), R. Penrose (1981), A. S. Huffington (1988), P. Daix (1993), and N. Mailer (1995); personal reminiscences by J. Sabertés (tr. 1948) and F. Oliver (1965, 1988); R. Penrose, The Sculpture of Picasso (1967); P. Daix and G. Boudaille, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Period (tr. 1967); D. Cooper, Picasso Theatre (1968); C. Czwiklitzer, Picasso's Posters (tr. 1971); J. E. Cirlot, Picasso: Birth of a Genius (1972); R. Penrose and J. Golding, ed., Picasso in Retrospect (1973); P. Leighton, Re-ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (1989); W. Rubin, H. Seckel, and J. Cousins, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1995).

Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer, and ceramicist. Art historians often divide his work into separate periods. During his ‘Blue’ and ‘Rose’ periods (1900–07), he turned from portrayals of poor and isolated people to representations of harlequins, acrobats and dancers in warmer colours. In 1904, he settled in Paris and became the centre of a group of progressive artists and writers. In 1906, Picasso began analysing and reducing forms. The result was his spectacular canvas, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (completed 1907), which is now seen as a watershed in the development of contemporary art. The fragmentary forms in the painting also heralded cubism. In the 1920s, he produced solid, classical figures, but at the same time he was exploring surrealism. He started creating more violent and morbid works, which culminated in Guernica (1937). Picasso's sculpture ranks as highly as his painting. He was one of the first to use assembled rather than modelled or carved materials. The most famous example is his Head of a Bull, Metamorphosis (1943), which consists of a bicycle saddle and handlebars. He was also an excellent printmaker and illustrated numerous books.

http://www.spanisharts.com/reinasofia/reinasofia.htm; http://www.moma.org; http://www.ir-tmca.com; http://www.nga.gov