Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born on 25 October 1881 on the Plaza de la Merced in Málaga. His father José Ruiz Blasco was a painter of doves and still lifes and a teacher at the local art school; he taught his son drawing and oil painting from the age of seven. According to family tradition 'piz', from 'lápiz' (pencil), was one of his first words.

In 1895 his little sister Conchita died of diphtheria and the family moved to Barcelona, where his father began teaching at La Llotja. The thirteen-year-old passed the entrance examination for the advanced class. Academic works such as 'Science and Charity' (1897) won prizes, but he felt more drawn to Catalan modernism and to Paris, then the centre of the art world. From 1901 he signed with his mother's surname.

In Paris Picasso at first worked in poverty. The Blue and Rose periods showed beggars, the blind and circus performers; collectors such as Gertrude and Leo Stein and the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler then gave him financial room. With 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' and Cubism he abandoned the idea that a painting renders a single viewpoint: objects were broken down into planes and shown from several sides at once.

He kept changing direction all his life: neoclassical figures after the First World War, an affinity with Surrealism, sculpture in iron and found objects, printmaking and ceramics. He worked fast and in series and left an estimated tens of thousands of paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and ceramic pieces. For 'Guernica', more than seven metres wide, he made dozens of preliminary studies in five weeks, while Dora Maar photographed the stages of the canvas.

The Paris of around 1900 attracted artists from all over Europe. Photography had freed painting from the task of imitating reality; in the ethnographic museums artists saw sculptures and masks from the French colonies, which they admired as 'primitive art' without looking into their makers or origin. New physics and technology fed the feeling that art, too, had to be reinvented.

Picasso's life coincided with two world wars and the Spanish Civil War. The Republic appointed him honorary director of the Prado in 1936; after Franco's victory he refused to return to Spain. During the occupation the Nazis regarded his works as 'degenerate'. His membership of the Communist Party from 1944 made him a political figure in East and West during the Cold War.

Within a few years Cubism changed painting, sculpture and design, and carried over into Futurism, Constructivism and abstract art. After the World's Fair 'Guernica' toured Europe and the United States to raise money for Spanish refugees and hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1939 to 1981.

The canvas became a universal image of civilian suffering in war: a tapestry after it was hung outside the chamber of the United Nations Security Council in 1985. Picasso was at the same time the first artist to be a worldwide celebrity and a brand in his own lifetime, with prices that helped to shape the art market. His work is among the most expensive at auction and the most frequently stolen in the world.

Picasso worked until shortly before his death. He died on 8 April 1973 at his house Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins and was buried in the grounds of his château at Vauvenargues. Because he left no will, the division of the estate took years; the French state received a large part of the works in payment of inheritance tax, the core of the Musée Picasso in Paris (1985).

His personal life is now viewed more critically. In 'Life with Picasso' (1964) Françoise Gilot described a domineering man who played his partners off against one another; he tried to stop the book through the courts. Marie-Thérèse Walter and his widow Jacqueline Roque took their own lives after his death. Museums have since more often shown his work together with that of the women around him and with the African art from which he borrowed forms.