Pablo Ruiz Picasso is widely regarded as one of the most influential visual artists of the 20th Century. He participated significantly in the avant-garde culture of Paris at the beginning of the 1900s, and consequently became one of the most famous and successful artists during his career, which spanned seven decades.

Born in Málaga, in the south of Spain in 1881, Picasso was the son of Spanish painter Don José Ruiz y Blasco, who also acted as his first formal teacher, later ushering him into the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona at the age of 13. As a young adult Picasso briefly split his time between Madrid and Paris, eventually settling in the French capital, the centre of the burgeoning modernist art world of the day. It was in Paris where he established the pattern of stylistic periods that now define his oeuvre. Famously, his “Blue” and “Rose” periods informed his Proto-Cubist “African” style, which in turn helped spawn Cubism, which he ostensibly invented alongside fellow artist Georges Braque.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Cubist movement, which quickly attracted many participants and inspired further discourse on the premise of abstraction in painting and sculpture. But Picasso’s work was never wholly abstract, nor was it thoroughly Automatist in the Surrealist sense, despite his close association with many members of that movement after the First World War. His work in the 1920s was marked by a return to a neo-classical figuration influenced in part by a brief stint in Italy. Stylistically, this phase can be seen as a return to pre-Cubist tendencies of his youth as well as a reflection of the post-war mood generally shared in Europe. But the dynamism and experimental themes stemming from the Cubist experiment would invariably return, and shape his stylistic approach in the years to follow. This freedom and inventiveness would prove to be his lasting legacy and unique mode of expression right up until his final days at the age of 91.

Perhaps the best known work by Picasso is the famous painting Guernica, completed in 1937 as a protest against the cruel, Nazi-backed warfare inflicted upon the Spanish town of the same name during the Spanish Civil war in April of that year. A painting of titanic proportions, Guernica depicts human misery and an existential crisis in the age of industrial warfare. The masterpiece was first exhibited at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1937, then toured northern Europe as well as the United States before being housed in MoMA in New York, at the artist’s request. The painting remained in the museum’s care until 1981, six years after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. It now resides in Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Picasso achieved much success early on thanks in large part to the support of major collectors and gallerists who sought out new currents in the modernist movements of the time. By the time the artist was 60 years old, this support culminated in a major retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1939 to 1940, expanding his influence in America and bolstering his fame. It was arguably this fame that protected him during the war, as he managed to maintain his studio practice in Paris, and other towns in Occupied France, despite being regarded by the Nazis as a “degenerate artist.”

Picasso survived the war years and continued to expand his body of work for another 25 years afterwards. He was renowned for his considerable influence in painting, and was a prolific sculptor, a master draughtsman and printmaker, as well as a ceramicist and poet. His innovations in collage and lithography are noteworthy achievements in their own right. The catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s works in 33 volumes lists nearly 16,000 works. There are museums entirely dedicated to his work in Paris, Antibes, Barcelona and Málaga, among others.

Much of Picasso’s work is seen as autobiographical, as the people and places in his life’s story figure regularly as subjects in his works. His personal life, involving several wives, mistresses and affairs involving scandal and controversy has received much attention from art historians over the years. The result has been that a certain notoriety tends to go hand-in-hand with Picasso’s undeniable genius.
Picasso’s importance to the history of modern art is regularly affirmed in the marketplace, where major canvases by the artist have broken records at auction internationally in recent years. Today, Picasso continues to garner considerable attention from serious collectors the world over.