Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. Pablo was the son of an academic painter. Picasso studied at La Lonja, academy of fine arts. Early artistic developement was heavily influenced by his association with the group at the café Els Quatre Gats. Picasso’s first exhibition took place in Barcelona In 1900. He moved to live in Paris in 1904. In 1916, Picasso’s collaboration on ballet and theatrical productions started. Married Olga in 1918. In 1932, Picasso had exhibitions at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, and the Kunsthaus Zürich. Married Jacqueline Roque in 1961. Pablo Picasso died, April 8, 1973.

Pablo Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito, a series of names honouring various saints and relatives. Added to these were Ruiz and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as was per the Spanish custom at the time. Pablo Picasso was born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain. Picasso was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838-1913) and María Picasso y López. It may be said that his family was considered middle-class. Pablo`s father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. His father was also a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator at the local museum. The ancestors were minor aristocrats.

From early on, Pablo Picasso showed a skill for drawing. Picasso received formal artistic training from age seven from his father. Pablo was taught figure drawing and oil painting. His father was a traditional, academic artist and instructor who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. Pablo soon became so occupied with his art, that his schoolining suffered. The Picasso family moved in 1891 to La Coruña. His father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. The Picasso family lived there almost four years. Picasso's sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria in 1895. The Picasso family then moved to Barcelona. His father gained a job there at the School of Fine Arts. Pablo Picasso liked the city. At only 13 years old, Pable Picasso took the entrance exam for the advanced class at the School of Fine Arts and gained entry. Here, the young Picasso would make friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented Pablo a small room that he could use as his art studio and work alone so he wont be disturbed. Picasso’s father and uncle eventually sent Pablo to Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando. But Pablo did not like the formal instruction and he soon stopped attending class.

After studying art in Madrid, Pablo Picasso went to Paris in 1900. At Paris, Pablo met his first Parisian friend, the journalist and poet Max Jacob. Max helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they both shared an apartment. Pablo was so poor, he had to burn much of his work to keep the room warm. Picasso and friend Francisco de Asís Soler, founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), in Madrid in 1901. Picasso illustrated the journal while Soler solicited articles. He started to sign his work, Picasso. Before he had signed, Pablo Ruiz y Picasso. By the early twentieth century, Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In 1904, Pablo Picasso met Fernande Olivier, and they became lovers. Olivier appears in many of his Rose period paintings. Picasso eventually left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works.


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Pablo was a playboy, he maintained a number of mistress in addition to his wife. Pablo Picasso married twice and had four children by three women. By the summer of 1918, Picasso had married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina. Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society. In 1927 Picasso met 17 year old Marie-Thérèse Walter and started a secret affair. Picasso’s marriage to Khokhlova ended in separation. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova’s death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter, Maia, with her. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso’s death.

During the Second World War, Pablo Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation of the city. But Picasso’s artistic style did not fit in with the Nazi view of art. Picasso stayed mostly in his studio where he continued painting. Pablo started to keep the company with a young art student, Françoise Gilot, and eventually they became lovers. They had two children together, Claude and Paloma. Gilot left Picasso in 1953. Pablo, now in his 70s, belived he was no longer attractive, but rather grotesque to younger women. A number of ink drawings from this period explore this theme of the hideous old dwarf as buffoonish counterpoint to the beautiful young girl. But Picasso soon found another lover in Jacqueline Roque. They married in 1961. Pablo Picasso also had a film career, including a cameo appearance in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus. Picasso always played himself in his film appearances. In 1955 Picasso helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Pablo Picasso died April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France. Picasso was interred at Castle Vauvenargues’ park, in Vauvenargues, Bouches-du-Rhône.

During World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, Picasso remained neutral. He refused to fight for any side or country. Some of his contemporaries felt that his pacifism had more to do with cowardice than principle.

Picasso joined the French Communist Party in 1944. He attennded an international peace conference in Poland. In 1950, Pablo Picasso received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government.

Pablo Picasso’s work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901-1904), the Rose Period (1905-1907), the African-influenced Period (1908-1909), Analytic Cubism (1909-1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912-1919).

Before 1901 Pablo Picasso:
Picasso’s training under his father started before 1890. During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun. The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, Pablo Picasso painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa. In 1897, Pablo Picasso realism became tinged with Symbolist influence, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899-1900) followed. Pablo Picasso`s exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favorite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.

Blue Period Pablo Picasso:
Picasso’s Blue Period (1901-1904) consists of somber paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. This period’s starting point is uncertain; it may have begun in Spain in the spring of 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year. Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from this period. In his austere use of color and sometimes doleful subject matter—prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901 he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904), which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso’s works of this period, also represented in The Blindman’s Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch?.

Rose Period Pablo Picasso:
For more details on this topic, see Picasso's Rose Period. The Rose Period (1904-1906) is characterized by a more cheery style with orange and pink colors, and featuring many acrobats and harlequins. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a model for sculptors and artists, in Paris in 1904, and many of these paintings are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e. just prior to the Blue Period) and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.

African-influenced Period Pablo Picasso:
Picasso’s African-influenced Period (1907-1909) begins with the two figures on the right in his painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which were inspired by African artifacts. Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.

Cubism Pablo Picasso:
Analytic cubism (1909-1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed along with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and “analyzed” them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque’s paintings at this time have many similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre, in which cut paper fragments—often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages—were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

Classicism and surrealism Pablo Picasso:
In the period following the upheaval of World War I, Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. Picasso’s paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Ingres. During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in his work. Pablo Picasso`s use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso’s Guernica. Arguably Picasso’s most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war.

Later works Pablo Picasso:
Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. In the 1950s, Pablo Picasso’s style changed once again. Picasso took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. Picasso’s final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings.

Commemoration and legacy Pablo Picasso:
At the time of Pablo Picasso`s death many of his paintings were in his possession. Pablo had kept off the art market what he didn’t need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain, the Museo Picasso Málaga.


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