Pablo Picasso
The 20th century’s perpetual innovator.
Picasso went through a Blue Period, a Rose Period, Cubism, Neoclassicism and Surrealism. Together with Braque he invented Cubism.
Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in Málaga in Spain. His father was a drawing teacher and artist, and Pablo showed an extraordinary talent even as a child. The family moved to A Coruña and then to Barcelona, where he studied at the La Llotja art school. He spent a short time at the academy in Madrid but was unhappy there.
From 1900 he travelled to Paris several times and settled there in 1904. After the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas the Blue Period began, with pictures of the poor, the blind and the lonely in blue tones. It was followed by the Rose Period, with harlequins and acrobats. In 1907 he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in which the bodies are broken up into angular planes and the faces resemble masks. The picture is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is usually seen as the starting point of Cubism.
Together with Georges Braque he developed Cubism from 1908. They showed objects from several angles at once and in 1912 began pasting newspaper and other materials into their pictures, known as collage. In the 1920s Picasso painted in a Neoclassical style and later drew close to Surrealism. He also designed sets for the Ballets Russes and in 1918 married the dancer Olga Khokhlova.
In 1937 the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by German planes supporting Franco. In response Picasso painted the huge black-and-white Guernica for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. Today it is in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and has become one of the world’s best-known protests against war.
Picasso was astonishingly productive and worked in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics for more than seventy years. He had many relationships, and the women in his life, among them Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, recur in his pictures. In Sweden there is a gigantic concrete sculpture after his model in Kristinehamn. He died in 1973 in Mougins in the south of France and is regarded as the most influential artist of the 20th century.