Pablo Picasso

(Spanish, 1881–1973)

Pablo Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. His use of form, color, and perspective profoundly impacted later generations of painters, including Willem de Kooning and David Hockney. “There are artists who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun,” he once said. Born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano María de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso on October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain, his talent was cultivated early on by his father the painter Jose Ruíz Blasco. Picasso went on to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, he lived for a time in Barcelona before settling in Paris in 1904. Immersed in the Parisian avant-garde circles of Gertrude Stein, Picasso rapidly transitioned styles from Neo-Impressionism through his Blue Period and Rose Period. He reached a unique style with the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Constantly in search of pictorial solutions and in dialogue with his friend Georges Braque, Picasso melded the forms he saw in African sculpture with the fractured compositions he admired in Paul Cézanne to produce the style of Cubism. Not limited to painting, the artist also produced collage, sculpture, and ceramics. After being deeply affected by the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso created what is arguably his most political work Guernica (1937), a mural-sized painting depicting war-torn carnage with jagged shapes in contrasting grayscale. The artist was prolific up until his death on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, as well as institutions devoted solely to his work, including the Museo Picasso Málaga, the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and the Musée National Picasso in Paris.