Pablo Ruiz Picasso (Málaga, October 25, 1881 – Mougins, April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, creator, and Georges Braque, of Cubism. A celebrated Spaniard painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer, who spent the majority of his adult life in France, has been recognized as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Picasso co-founded the Cubist movement, invented constructed sculpture, and co-invented collage, while also exploring and developing various styles. He is best known for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a proto-Cubist painting, and Guernica, a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War, which he painted as an anti-war statement.
He has been considered one of the greatest painters since the beginning of the 20th century. They participated in the various artistic movements that spread throughout the world and significantly influenced other great artists of his time. His works are present in museums and collections throughout Europe and the world. In addition, he tackled different genres such as drawing, engraving, book illustration, sculpture, ceramics, and set and costume design for theatrical productions. He also has a short literary work.
Politically, Picasso declared himself a pacifist and a communist. He was a member of the Communist Party of Spain and the French Communist Party until his death, which occurred on April 8, 1973, at the age of ninety-one, in his house called “Notre-Dame-de-Vie” in the French town of Mougins. He is buried in the park of the Château de Vauvenargues (Bouches-du-Rhone).
Picasso’s naturalistic paintings throughout his childhood and adolescence showcased his extraordinary artistic talent. In the first decade of the 20th century, he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas, leading to a change in his style. After 1906, the Fauvist work of Henri Matisse inspired Picasso to explore more radical styles, thus initiating a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who were subsequently regarded as the leaders of modern art by critics.
Picasso’s work is often divided into periods, with the Blue Period (1901-1904), Rose Period (1904-1906), African-influenced Period (1907-1909), Analytic Cubism (1909-1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919), commonly recognized as his most significant periods. His late 1910s and early 1920s works are often neoclassical, while his mid-1920s pieces often exhibit characteristics of Surrealism. His later works typically combine elements of his earlier styles.
Throughout his long life, Picasso produced an immense amount of work, achieving universal acclaim and immense fortune for his groundbreaking artistic accomplishments. Consequently, he became one of the most recognizable figures in 20th-century art.
Picasso’s Early Life
Pablo Ruiz Picasso, the firstborn child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López, was born on 25th October 1881 in Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain. His father, who was a painter, specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game, and was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Despite being from a middle-class background, Ruiz’s ancestors were minor aristocrats, and the family name was a combination of Ruiz and Picasso, per Spanish custom. The surname “Picasso” comes from Liguria, a coastal region of north-western Italy.
Picasso’s maternal great-grandfather, Tommaso Picasso, moved to Spain around 1807, and his direct branch from Sori, Liguria (Genoa), can be traced back to Tommaso Picasso. The young artist showed an early passion and skill for drawing, and his first words were “piz, piz,” a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for “pencil,” according to his mother. From the age of seven, he received formal artistic training from his father, who was a traditional academic artist and instructor.
In 1891, the family moved to A Coruña, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts, and they stayed for almost four years. During this time, the young Picasso painted over his father’s unfinished sketch of a pigeon, causing Ruiz to feel that his son had surpassed him and vowing to give up painting. In 1895, Picasso was traumatized by the death of his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, from diphtheria. After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at the School of Fine Arts, and Picasso thrived in the city.
Picasso lacked discipline as a student, but he made friendships that would affect him later in life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings, and the two often argued. At the age of 16, Picasso set off for Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the country’s foremost art school, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrollment. Madrid held many other attractions, and Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco, which influenced his later work.
Picasso’s Career before 1900
Picasso began his artistic training under his father before 1890, and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona holds a comprehensive record of his early works. By 1894, he had begun his career as a painter, with his academic realism apparent in works such as The First Communion, a large composition depicting his sister, Lola, and Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait.
In 1897, his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, and his Modernist period followed from 1899 to 1900, influenced by the works of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edvard Munch, and El Greco. Picasso made his first trip to Paris in 1900, where he met journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped him learn the language and its literature. The two shared an apartment, and Picasso worked at night while Jacob slept.
During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven, which published five issues. Picasso illustrated the journal, contributing cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. The artist started signing his work Picasso in 1901, with previous works signed as “Pablo Ruiz Picasso” or “Pablo R. Picasso.” The change was initiated by his Catalan friends who habitually called him by his maternal surname, which was less common than the paternal Ruiz.
Blue Period: 1901–1904
Picasso’s Blue Period, lasting from 1901 to 1904, was marked by sombre paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, occasionally warmed by other colours. It began either in Spain in early 1901 or in Paris in the latter half of the year, with many paintings of gaunt mothers with children dating from this period. Picasso split his time between Barcelona and Paris during this time.
The period’s austere use of colour and frequently doleful subject matter, such as prostitutes and beggars, was influenced by a trip through Spain and the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas. Picasso painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, including the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast, depicting a blind man and a sighted woman seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness, a recurrent theme in Picasso’s works of this period, is also represented in The Blindman’s Meal and the portrait of Celestina. Other notable works from the Blue Period include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.
Rose Period: 1904–1906
Picasso’s Rose Period (1904-1906) was characterized by a lighter tone and style, using orange and pink colors and featuring circus performers, acrobats, and harlequins. Harlequins, in particular, became a personal symbol for Picasso. During this period, Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress, and many of his Rose Period paintings were influenced by his warm relationship with her and his increased exposure to French painting. By 1905, Picasso had become a favorite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, who introduced him to Henri Matisse, with whom he became a lifelong friend and rival. Gertrude Stein became Picasso’s principal patron, exhibiting his work at her home in Paris. In 1907, Picasso joined an art gallery opened by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century and promoted emerging artists such as Picasso and Georges Braque, and the Cubism movement they jointly developed.
African art and primitivism: 1907–1909
Picasso’s period influenced by African art (1907-1909) started with his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The faces of the two figures on the right were repainted after Picasso was impressed by African artifacts he saw at Palais du Trocadéro’s ethnographic museum in June 1907. Although the three figures on the left were inspired by Iberian sculpture, when he showed the painting to acquaintances in his studio later that year, the response was mostly shock and revulsion. Matisse even dismissed it as a hoax. Picasso did not display Les Demoiselles publicly until 1916. Other notable works from this period include Nude with Raised Arms (1907) and Three Women (1908). The formal ideas developed in this period directly influenced the following Cubist period.
Picasso and Georges Braque developed the style of Analytic Cubism (1909-1912), using monochrome brownish and neutral colors, in which they deconstructed objects and analyzed them in terms of their shapes. The paintings of both artists from this period have many similarities.
Analytic cubism: 1909–1912
In Paris, Picasso had a circle of distinguished friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse neighborhoods, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry, and Gertrude Stein. In 1911, Picasso was arrested and questioned about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Initially, suspicion fell on Apollinaire due to his links to Géry Pieret, an artist with a history of stealing from the gallery. Apollinaire, in turn, implicated his close friend Picasso, who had also bought stolen artworks from Pieret in the past. Worried about being convicted and deported to Spain, Picasso denied ever meeting Apollinaire. Both were eventually cleared of any involvement in the painting’s disappearance.
Synthetic cubism: 1912–1919
Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919) was a continuation of the Cubist movement, in which cut paper fragments were used in compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.
Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso created a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, such as a pipe, a guitar, or a glass, with occasional elements of collage. These “little gems” may have been produced by Picasso in response to critics who had claimed his defection from the movement.
After achieving fame and fortune, Picasso left Fernande Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva Gouel. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915.
At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon. During the war, his paintings became more sombre and his life changed with dramatic consequences. After the loss of Eva Gouel, Picasso had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse. During the spring of 1916, Apollinaire returned from the front wounded, and they renewed their friendship, but Picasso began to frequent new social circles.
Towards the end of the First World War, Picasso became involved in the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev. He had several friends during this period, including Jean Cocteau, Juan Gris, and Jean Hugo. In 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with whom he had been designing a ballet for Diaghilev’s troupe. After returning from their honeymoon, Picasso and Khokhlova were lent an apartment in Paris by the French-Jewish art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, who later became a close friend.
Khokhlova introduced Picasso to the social scene of 1920s Paris, but their marriage was plagued with conflict due to their different lifestyles. During this time, Picasso also collaborated with Igor Stravinsky on the ballet Pulcinella and began a secret affair with 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927. Rather than divorcing Khokhlova and dividing his wealth in half, Picasso and his wife separated, but remained legally married until Khokhlova’s death in 1955. Picasso fathered a daughter with Walter, named Maya, but she lived in the hope that Picasso would marry her and committed suicide four years after his death.
Neoclassicism and surrealism: 1919–1929
In February of 1917, Picasso made his initial trip to Italy. After the turmoil of World War I, he began producing artwork in a neoclassical style. This trend is visible in the creations of numerous European artists during the 1920s, including Giorgio de Chirico, André Derain, Jean Metzinger, and the members of the New Objectivity and Novecento Italiano movements. Picasso’s pieces from this period often evoke the styles of Raphael and Ingres.
In 1925, André Breton, a Surrealist writer and poet, declared Picasso to be “one of ours” in his article Le Surréalisme et la peinture, which was published in Révolution surréaliste. The same issue featured the first European reproduction of Les Demoiselles. However, despite the fact that the Manifeste du surréalisme defined the concept of “psychic automatism in its pure state,” Picasso exhibited Cubist pieces at the first Surrealist group exhibition in 1925. This idea did not entirely appeal to him. Nonetheless, he did develop new imagery and formal syntax for expressing himself emotionally, as art historian Melissa McQuillan notes, “releasing the violence, the psychic fears and the eroticism that had been largely contained or sublimated since 1909.” Although this transition in Picasso’s work was informed by Cubism’s spatial relationships, the fusion of ritual and abandon in the imagery recalls the primitivism of the Demoiselles and the elusive psychological resonances of his Symbolist work. Surrealism revived Picasso’s fascination with primitivism and eroticism.
The Great Depression to MoMA exhibition: 1930–1939
During the 1940s and 1950s, Picasso’s work shifted yet again. He began to create sculptures in addition to paintings, and his work was characterized by a renewed interest in classical themes and mythology. He also began a series of paintings featuring a model named Françoise Gilot, whom he met in 1943. Gilot became Picasso’s lover and muse, and she appeared in many of his works from this period.
In the late 1940s, Picasso joined the Communist Party and became politically active. His artwork from this time reflects his political beliefs, with many pieces featuring socialist and communist themes. In 1953, Picasso received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union.
As he aged, Picasso’s artwork continued to evolve. He experimented with new techniques and materials, such as ceramics and linocut prints. His work remained highly influential and celebrated, and he became one of the most important and recognized artists of the 20th century.
Picasso died in 1973 at the age of 91, leaving behind a legacy of innovative and groundbreaking artwork that continues to inspire and influence artists to this day.
World War II and late 1940s: 1939–1949
During World War II, Picasso remained in Paris even when the Germans occupied the city. Because his artistic style did not align with the Nazi ideology of art, he did not exhibit during this time and was often harassed by the Gestapo. Once, during a search of his apartment, an officer saw a photograph of Picasso’s painting Guernica and asked him if he had painted it. “No,” replied Picasso, “You did.”
Despite the challenges, Picasso continued to paint, producing works such as Still Life with Guitar (1942) and The Charnel House (1944-48), and he even continued to cast bronze sculptures using materials smuggled to him by the French Resistance, despite the fact that bronze casting was outlawed in Paris at the time.
During this period, Picasso also turned to poetry, writing over 300 poems between 1935 and 1959. He also wrote two plays: Desire Caught by the Tail (1941) and The Four Little Girls (1949). The poems and plays were largely untitled, except for a date and sometimes a location.
After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso began a romantic relationship with Françoise Gilot, a young art student who was 40 years his junior. He grew tired of his previous mistress, Dora Maar, and began living with Gilot. They eventually had two children together: Claude Picasso, born in 1947, and Paloma Picasso, born in 1949. However, Gilot’s 1964 book, Life with Picasso, describes his abusive treatment and numerous infidelities, which ultimately led her to leave him and take their children with her.
Picasso’s romantic relationships continued to have significant age disparities. While still with Françoise Gilot, in 1951 he had a brief affair with Geneviève Laporte, who was four years younger than Gilot. As he entered his 70s, many of his paintings, ink drawings, and prints featured an old, grotesque dwarf as the lover of a beautiful young model. Jacqueline Roque (1927–1986) worked at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris on the French Riviera, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. She became his lover and eventually his second wife in 1961, and they stayed together until Picasso’s death.
Picasso’s marriage to Roque was partly motivated by revenge against Gilot. With Picasso’s encouragement, Gilot had divorced her husband, Luc Simon, with the intention of marrying Picasso to secure the rights of her children as his legitimate heirs. However, Picasso had already secretly married Roque after Gilot filed for divorce, and his relationship with his children Claude and Paloma remained strained.
During this period, Picasso had built a large Gothic home and was able to afford large villas in the south of France, such as Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie on the outskirts of Mougins and in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. He was an international celebrity, with as much interest in his personal life as his art.
Later works to final years: 1949–1973
Picasso was one of the 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in mid-1949. In the 1950s, he changed his style once again and started producing reinterpretations of the great masters’ art. He created a series of works based on Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, as well as paintings inspired by works from Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet, and Delacroix.
Apart from his artistic achievements, Picasso also made a few appearances in films, always playing himself, including a cameo in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960). In 1955, he contributed to the making of the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Picasso received a commission to create a maquette for a public sculpture to be built in Chicago, which later became known as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with enthusiasm, designing an ambiguous and somewhat controversial sculpture. He claimed that it represented the head of an Afghan Hound named Kabul. Despite its mixed reception, the sculpture became one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago after its unveiling in 1967. Picasso refused payment of $100,000 for the piece, instead choosing to donate it to the people of the city.
In his final years, Picasso’s works varied in style, with his means of expression constantly evolving. He devoted all his energy to his art, becoming increasingly daring, his works more colourful and expressive. Between 1968 and 1971, he produced a prolific output of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time, many dismissed these works as either the pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist past his prime. It was only after Picasso’s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, that the critical community began to appreciate his late works as prefiguring Neo-Expressionism.
Death
Pablo Picasso passed away on April 8, 1973, in Mougins, France, due to pulmonary edema and a heart attack. He had entertained friends for dinner with his wife Jacqueline the night before. Picasso was buried at the Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had purchased in 1958 and lived in with Jacqueline from 1959 to 1962. Sadly, Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. After Picasso’s death, Jacqueline suffered from loneliness and despair and tragically took her own life in 1986 at the age of 59 by shooting herself.