Pablo Picasso — Spanish Painter and Co-Founder of Cubism (1881-1973)

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born at 23:15 on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain. He was the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco, a painter and art professor who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds, and María Picasso y López. The surname Picasso, from his maternal line, originated with his great-grandfather Tommaso Picasso, who had moved to Spain from Liguria, Italy, around 1807. From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting, demonstrating extraordinary talent from a young age.

In 1895, the Picasso family moved to Barcelona, where his father took a position at the city's School of Fine Arts. That same year, Picasso was traumatized by the death of his seven-year-old sister Conchita from diphtheria. The 13-year-old Picasso applied to the advanced class at the school, completing the month-long entrance exam process in a single week. His father rented a small room for him to work alone, though he checked on his son's drawings numerous times daily. Despite frequent arguments with his father, Picasso thrived in Barcelona, considering it his true home throughout his life.

In 1897, Picasso was sent to Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Spain's foremost art school, but disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes. He spent hours in the Prado Museum studying works by Velázquez, Goya, and El Greco, whose elongated limbs and arresting colors would echo in Picasso's later work. In 1900, Picasso made his first trip to Paris, then the art capital of Europe, where he met his first Parisian friend, the journalist and poet Max Jacob. The two shared an apartment, with Max sleeping at night while Picasso worked.

Picasso's Blue Period, characterized by somber paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, began in 1901 and was influenced by the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas and a trip through Spain. The period produced several of his most famous early works, including the posthumous portraits of Casagemas culminating in La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Old Guitarist (1903-1904), now in the Art Institute of Chicago. The melancholy mood and subjects of poverty, blindness, and isolation defined the period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris.

Beginning in 1904, Picasso's palette warmed to orange and pink tones in what became known as the Rose Period, featuring circus people, acrobats, and harlequins. In Paris that year, he met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress and appeared in many Rose Period paintings. By 1905, Picasso had become a favorite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, whose Saturday-evening salon at 27 rue de Fleurus became a gathering place for the avant-garde. At one of these gatherings, Picasso met Henri Matisse, beginning a lifelong rivalry as the two leaders of modern art.

In 1907, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a radical departure from his earlier work that would prove foundational for Cubism. The painting's five female figures feature mask-like faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and, on the two right-hand figures, African tribal art that Picasso had seen in June 1907 at the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro. When Picasso displayed the painting to acquaintances in his studio, the reaction was shock and revulsion; Matisse angrily dismissed the work. Picasso did not exhibit Les Demoiselles d'Avignon publicly until 1916, and the painting is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Between 1909 and 1912, Picasso collaborated closely with French painter Georges Braque to develop Analytic Cubism, a style that broke objects into geometric shapes rendered in monochrome brownish and neutral colors. The two artists worked in such close collaboration that their paintings from this period are often difficult to distinguish. In 1912, Picasso and Braque began developing Synthetic Cubism, working with simpler shapes, brighter colors, and introduced collage elements into their paintings. The Cubist movement, which Picasso co-founded, became one of the most influential developments in 20th-century art, transforming painting, sculpture, and eventually architecture.

On July 12, 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, whom he had met in Rome in 1917 while designing costumes and sets for the ballet Parade. The marriage marked a transition in Picasso's personal life and in his art, as he moved away from Cubism toward a more classical style. The couple had one son, Paulo, in 1921. The marriage became increasingly strained due to Picasso's infidelities and the couple formally separated in 1941, though they never divorced. Khokhlova's social ambitions clashed with Picasso's bohemian lifestyle and his other relationships.

On April 26, 1937, German and Italian warplanes bombed the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying most of the town. In response, the Spanish Republican government commissioned Picasso to create a mural for the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Working in his Paris studio between May and early June 1937, Picasso created Guernica, a 3.5-meter by 7.8-meter (11.5 by 25.6 feet) black-and-white painting depicting the suffering of the bombing's victims. The painting became one of the 20th century's most powerful anti-war statements and an enduring symbol of the horrors of war, traveling internationally to raise awareness of the Spanish Civil War.

On October 5, 1944, Picasso became a member of the French Communist Party, an affiliation he maintained for the rest of his life. The decision reflected both his anti-fascist convictions and his longstanding sympathies with the working class. Picasso contributed to communist causes throughout his life, designing posters and prints for the party and creating the dove imagery adopted by the World Peace Council for its 1949 Paris Peace Congress. His membership was controversial, as the Soviet Union had initially criticized his art as formalist before reversing course in the 1950s. Picasso received the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet government in 1950 and 1961.

In August 1967, Picasso's monumental Cor-Ten steel sculpture Chicago Picasso was unveiled in Daley Plaza in Chicago, Illinois. The 15.2-meter (50-foot) tall abstract sculpture, donated by the artist to the city, was the first major public artwork in downtown Chicago. Its unveiling was marked by a ceremony attended by Picasso himself, and the work became an iconic feature of the Chicago skyline, an unofficial symbol of the city. The sculpture was initially controversial among Chicago residents but has since become one of the most recognizable public artworks in the United States.

On April 8, 1973, Pablo Picasso died at his home Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, France, at the age of 91. He had continued working until the day of his death, reportedly completing a final drawing of a man with a sword and a dove in the hours before he died. Picasso was buried at the Château of Vauvenargues, a property he had purchased in 1958. He was survived by his wife Jacqueline Roque, whom he had married in 1961, and by four children: Paulo, Maya, Claude, and Paloma. Picasso's death marked the end of an era in Western art, and his legacy continued to influence artists in the decades that followed.