After his birth on October 25, 1881, Pablo Picasso went on to become one of the premiere artists of the 20th century and of all time with his reimagining of the artistic form and constant questioning of how an artist interacts with their subject.
While Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, he spent the better part of his life living in Paris, France, studying with French artists such as Georges Braque. Primarily, his life’s work is recognized for the creation of Cubism with Braque, using geometric shapes and planes to represent realistic human and object forms.

He did not only paint though and he did not stop with Cubism. Picasso’s career was filled with numerous periods, notably the Blue and Rose period along with his Cubism period. He spent much of the latter two decades of his life focused on sculpture and a great deal of time experimenting with different painting styles that never fully took shape. In all, it is believed that he produced more than 20,000 works in his life time.

Early Accomplishments

It is the first period of his career, the Blue Period, which first brought acclaim and fame in the artistic community to Picasso. His blue period was marked by the painting of elongated images and lower casts of society in a mostly blue palette. Lasting from 1901 to 1904, his signature rejections of the artistic form had not yet developed.

In 1904 and 1905, Picasso entered what is known as the Rose Period of his career, highlighted by paintings in shades of red and pink. A triumphant painting from this period is his “Family of Saltimbanques”, a collection of circus performers, sharply contrasting with his earlier, Blue Period pieces.

In 1906, Picasso completed his portrait of Gertrude Stein, using a masked conceptual style to portray her, forgoing traditional portrait means. This was the first hint of his soon to be extraordinary departure from the standard forms of art in the day.

Early Cubism

Cubism was first developed in his 1907 shocker, Les demoiselles d’Avignon. The painting was the first of many to represent a static image in geometric, planed forms. From this point on, art began only to expand, taking on new concepts and ideas for expression of images and shapes.

Between 1908 and 1911, Picasso would work closely with George Braques, pushing his mastery and development of cubism to new levels. For years he would create the paintings that he became most famous for, unfolding and cross-sectioning the human body, common objects, and portraits in his masterpieces.

He would continue to paint almost constantly, straight into World War I, when he worked in Rome as a stage designer for the Ballets Russes.
Later life

During World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris, Picasso’s work was not fully accepted or allowed, as it went against the traditional definitions of art laid down by the occupying German government. He would continue to paint however, having products smuggled in to him.

He was forever changed by the facism he witnessed during World War II though, and joined the French Communist Party a few years after the war had ended, in 1947. He went on to win the Lenin Peace Prize and was even able to keep his paintings from being displayed in Spain until after the end of facist rule there, almost 8 years after his death.

The final years of Picasso’s life, leading up to his death in 1973 of natural causes, were spent crafting sculptures in his wife, Jacqueline Roque, who owned a pottery studio in France. The two lived together for 12 years until his death.

Pablo Picasso Famous Works

Born in Spain in 1881, Picasso first learned to paint under the tutelage of his father, Jose Ruiz y Blasco, a professor of art known for his realistic depictions of birds. By 1894, when he was only thirteen, critics consider that Picasso’s adult career as a painter had begun. In 1896, at fourteen, Picasso painted two of his most well known works, The First Communion, depicting his sister, Lola, and Portrait of Aunt Pepa, which has been described as “one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.” Both paintings are on display at the Museum Picasso in Barcelona, along with an extensive collection of Picasso’s early work.

In 1901, Picasso had moved to Paris and embarked on his Blue Period, portraying somber subjects in strong shades of blue and green, depicting an overall negativity that is attributed to several factors, including a trip back to Spain and the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Picasso painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in La Vie, currently displayed at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Other noted works from Picasso’s Blue Period include Evocation and The Blindman’s Meal.

Next Picasso embarked on his Rose Period, a direct turnaround from the Blue Period, featuring warm colors and happier subjects. The inspiration for this period is generally attributed to Picasso’s meeting Fernande Olivier, an artist’s model. While it is not considered one of his greatest works, the most expensive Picasso painting, Garçon a la pipe (Boy with a Pipe), comes from this era. It sold at auction for more than 104 million dollars, prompting critics to say the purchaser was buying the name Picasso, and not a specific painting.

In 1907 Picasso began a brief period influenced by African tribal art, beginning with the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which portrays two African figurines. The African influence in Picasso’s work led directly to his developing Cubism with Georges Braque.

Cubism started with the school described as Analytical Cubism, inspired by the work of Paul Cezanne, who was known for breaking subjects down into their component figures. Picasso and Braque took this further, symbolizing the duality of human binocular vision by portraying all sides of a shape on one plane, and then breaking it down into simple round shapes. Picasso’s painting Ma Jolie most exemplifies the first movement of Cubism.

By 1912, Cubism had evolved, thanks to the influx of a new group of artists, including Juan Gris. The end result of this evolution was Synthetic Cubism, first exemplified by Picasso’s Still Life with Chair-caning. Synthetic Cubism represented a bringing together of more disparate elements after dividing them as in Analytic Cubism. Picasso also pioneered the use of text in these paintings, as a way of flattening the space in the paintings, as well as the incorporation of other mediums, producing mixed media works during this period.

After World War One, Picasso began to expand his frame of reference, starting with classical works referred to as neoclassical paintings, which represented a return to order for Picasso. This was represented in the works of many European artists following the First World War. This led to Picasso’s experimenting with Surrealism, which led to his most famous work, Guernica, an inspired and moving composition depicting the German bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Guernica is currently on display at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.

Picasso experimented with a series of different styles in the later part of his career, following World War Two. He became known for his portrayals of works by Grand Master painters, and his sculpture. He was commissioned to make a model for a huge 50-foot public sculpture in Chicago, known simply as the Chicago Picasso or just The Picasso. It stands on Daley Plaza in the Chicago Loop. The statue was erected in 1967, just a few years before Picasso’s death in France in 1973.

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain on October 25, 1881, the first child of Maria Picasso y Lopez and Jose Ruiz y Blasco. He was born into a family that appreciated art from the beginning, with his father also a painter and professor of art. He spent a great deal of time in his childhood learning to draw and attending formal academic training in the arts. He attended numerous art schools as a child and studied occasionally with his father; however, he never finished his college education in art, dropping out after only one year.

After leaving his art studies in Madrid, Picasso lived for a short while in Paris with Max Jacob, a poet and journalist of the time. Jacob taught Picasso to speak French and the two shared an apartment in the cold of the Paris winter. He eventually ended up burning much of his earliest work merely to stay warm.

In 1901, Picasso founded Arte Joven with his friend Soler in Madrid, a magazine which he fully illustrated. For the next three years, Picasso would spend his time split between both Barcelona and Paris. In 1904 Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the subject of so many of his Rose period paintings. After the successive fame and fortune that found Picasso in these early years, he left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, known to many and Picasso as Eva – the subject of many Cubist paintings.
Picasso became well known for his group of friends in Paris, including the likes of Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein. In 1911, Apollonaire and Picasso were both questioned in regards to the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, an event they were famously cleared of in short order.

Picasso was notorious for his love life. He would often have multiple mistresses, as well as a wife or partner with whom he lived. In the course of his life, he married twice and had four children with three different women.
Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, his first wife, in 1918, a ballerina in Diaghilev’s troupe and purveyor of high society. She introduced Picasso to the tendencies of high society and eventually bore his son, Paulo. The two would clash though, disagreeing on the nature of their relationship, and Picasso’s bohemian lifestyle. In 1927, Picasso started an affair with Maria-Therese Walter, in effect ending his marriage to Khokhlova. The two never divorced, as Picasso did not want to be forced to give half of his wealth to his wife, remaining married until she died in 1955.

During World War Two, Picasso was not permitted to share his work in public as the Nazi government ruling Paris did not believe it was considered artistic. He continued to paint in his studio though the whole while, having bronze smuggled into his studio for use in his art.

After Paris was liberated in 1944, Picasso was able to publicly paint again and soon became involved with Francoise Gilot, a young art student and eventually the mother of his two youngest children, Claude and Paloma. She, however, left Picasso in 1953, claiming his abuse and infidelity as the cause – something none of his other lovers did.

Picasso underwent a long period of self reflection after Gilot left him, both coming to term with the fact that he was rapidly aging, now in his 70s, and that his philandering ways were no longer appreciated by younger women. He penned many drawings that explored his own feelings of physical inadequacy, pitting himself as a dwarf against a beautiful young girl. Some of these drawings were famously sold by Genevieve Laporte, a woman who Picasso engaged in a six week long affair with and penned many of these images of.

After his tryst with Laporte, Picasso took up with Jacqueline Roque, who worked at Madoura Pottery in Vallauris. The two would eventually marry in 1961 and spend the rest of Picasso’s life together. Picasso used the marriage to Roque to exact a small degree of revenge upon Gilot for leaving him as well, keeping her children from gaining the legitimacy she desired for them along with the financial dependence that their marriage could provide.

The end of his life was spent living in luxury as a celebrity. His life had been celebrated in equal measure to his art work and thus his appearances in films such as Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus or Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso were chances for him to play himself and satiate the public’s interest in his life.

Picasso died in Mougins, France on April 8, 1973 while entertaining friends at dinner. He was interred in Vauvenargues in a famously tense funeral, at which Roque did not permit Claude or Paloma, the two children Picasso had blocked from legitimacy, from attending.