Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881, the son of a drawing master who taught him to handle a brush before he could read. He was painting like an old master at fourteen and exhibiting in Barcelona at sixteen. From 1900 he made Paris his base, and across the next seventy-three years he reinvented Western painting four times. The Blue Period (1901–04, prompted by the suicide of his friend Casagemas) and the Rose Period (1904–06) painted what loss and tenderness looked like. In 1907, with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — five Barcelona prostitutes whose faces dissolve into African masks — he and Georges Braque opened Cubism, the most consequential single break in the history of European painting since the . He kept moving: Synthetic Cubism, neoclassical figures, surrealist distortions, sculpture in iron and welded steel, ceramics at Vallauris, more than a hundred etchings of bullfights and minotaurs. In April 1937, in response to the Nazi-Italian bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, he painted in five weeks the eleven-by-twenty-five-foot mural that has since become the twentieth century's defining image of war. He stayed in occupied Paris through the Second World War, joined the French Communist Party at the Liberation, and worked on through eight more decades — paintings, prints, sculptures, theatre designs, his own face — at a sustained pace no other modern artist has matched. He died at ninety-one at Mougins on the French Riviera in 1973, leaving an estate of around 50,000 works.

Pablo Picasso is an Epoch+ Episode

Contemporaries

Themes