Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker and ceramicist who spent most of his adult life in France and became the most famous artist of the twentieth century. With Georges Braque he invented Cubism, which broke with the idea that a painting should show the world from a single fixed viewpoint, and he went on to change style again and again over a career of more than seventy years. His Guernica of 1937 became the best-known image of modern war.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on 25 October 1881 in Málaga, in Andalusia, the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art teacher, and María Picasso López. He later chose his mother's less common surname. His father taught him from an early age, and he drew with exceptional skill as a child. The family moved to A Coruña in 1891 and to Barcelona in 1895, where Pablo entered the art school of La Llotja, at which his father taught. In 1897 he went to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, but disliked its formal teaching and spent his time in the Prado studying Velázquez and Goya.

Back in Barcelona he joined the bohemian circle of the café Els Quatre Gats, a meeting place of Catalan modernists. In 1900 he visited Paris for the first time, for the Universal Exhibition, and over the next four years he went back and forth between the two cities before settling in Paris in 1904.

The suicide of his close friend Carlos Casagemas in 1901 helped bring on his Blue Period, in which he painted beggars, blind men, mothers and prostitutes in cold blue tones, works such as La Vie and The Old Guitarist. In 1904 he took a studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, a ramshackle building in Montmartre, and began living with Fernande Olivier. His palette warmed into the Rose Period, full of circus performers and harlequins, such as the Family of Saltimbanques. The American writer Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo became early collectors, and his portrait of her of 1906 already showed a mask-like face influenced by ancient Iberian sculpture.

In 1907 he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a large canvas of five nude women in a Barcelona brothel. Their bodies are broken into sharp, flat planes, and the faces of two of them, repainted after he saw African masks in the ethnographic museum at the Trocadéro, look like masks. Even his friends were shocked, and he did not exhibit it publicly until 1916, but it is now seen as a turning point in modern art.

That year he met Georges Braque, and for the next seven years the two worked so closely, as Braque put it like two mountaineers roped together, that their paintings can be hard to tell apart. In what came to be called Analytic Cubism, from about 1909 to 1912, they broke objects and figures into many small facets seen from different angles at once, in muted browns and greys. From 1912, in Synthetic Cubism, they built pictures from simpler, flatter shapes and began to stick real materials onto the canvas: Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912, with a piece of printed oilcloth glued to it, is often called the first collage. He also made constructed sculptures from cardboard and sheet metal, assembling forms rather than carving or modelling them, a method that changed sculpture.

When World War I began, Braque and their friend the poet Guillaume Apollinaire joined the French army, while Picasso, a Spanish citizen, stayed in Paris. In 1917 he travelled to Rome with Jean Cocteau to design the sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes production of Parade, and there he met the dancer Olga Khokhlova, whom he married in 1918; their son Paulo was born in 1921. In the early 1920s he painted in a monumental neoclassical style, heavy-limbed figures recalling Ingres and ancient sculpture, alongside continued Cubist work.

From the mid-1920s he was close to the Surrealists, and his art grew more violent and distorted. In 1927 he began a secret relationship with the seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter, who became the subject of many sensuous paintings and sculptures and the mother of his daughter Maya in 1935. The Minotaur, half man and half bull, became one of his recurring personal symbols.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Picasso supported the Republic, which named him honorary director of the Prado. On 26 April 1937 aircraft of the German Condor Legion, sent by Nazi Germany, and the Italian air force bombed the Basque town of Guernica on behalf of Francisco Franco's Nationalists. Picasso, already commissioned to make a mural for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, painted Guernica in about five weeks, photographed in progress by his then partner, the photographer Dora Maar.

The huge canvas, in black, white and grey, shows a screaming mother with a dead child, a dismembered soldier, a horse in agony, a bull and a woman thrusting a lamp into the scene. It contains no aircraft or specific details of the raid, which helped make it a universal image of the suffering of civilians in war. Picasso refused to let it go to Spain while Franco ruled; it was kept at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was sent to Madrid only in 1981, after the restoration of democracy.

During World War II Picasso stayed in occupied Paris, forbidden to exhibit by the Germans but left largely alone, working in his studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. After the Liberation in 1944 he joined the French Communist Party, and his dove, chosen as the poster image for the Communist-backed Peace Congress in 1949, became a symbol of the peace movement in the Cold War. His relations with the party were uneasy, especially after his loose portrait of Joseph Stalin published on Stalin's death in 1953 offended party officials.

He lived from 1944 with the young painter Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two children, Claude and Paloma, and in Vallauris on the Riviera he threw himself into ceramics. From the 1950s, with his last wife, Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961, he made series of variations on earlier masterpieces, including Velázquez's Las Meninas, Delacroix's Women of Algiers and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe. He worked until the end and died at his house near Mougins on 8 April 1973, aged 91. He was buried at the Château of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence.

Picasso's output was enormous: at his death his estate held some 45,000 works, including about 1,885 paintings and 1,228 sculptures, along with ceramics, drawings and prints. No single style defines him, and his willingness to reinvent himself became a model for artists who followed. Cubism, by abandoning a single viewpoint, influenced not only painting but sculpture, architecture and design, and collage and assemblage became basic tools of modern art. He admired earlier painters, among them Vincent van Gogh, whose retrospective he saw in Paris in 1905.

His reputation has also been questioned in recent decades, especially for his treatment of the women in his life, several of whom wrote accounts of his domineering behaviour. Museums devoted to him opened in Barcelona in 1963, in Paris in 1985 from works given to the French state by his heirs, and in Málaga in 2003. He remains a central figure in the cultural history of both Spain and France.