Pablo Picasso: the artist who broke the picture

By the Magna Bureau Encyclopedia Desk

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is the most famous artist of the twentieth century, and the most restless. In a working life of nearly eighty years he produced an estimated fifty thousand works: paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints, stage designs and poems. He began as a child prodigy trained by his father, passed through the melancholy Blue Period and the warm Rose Period, and in 1907, with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, broke the picture plane open and launched Cubism, the movement that changed how the world saw. He painted Guernica, the century's most famous protest painting, and he kept reinventing himself until his death at ninety-one. To study Picasso is to study modern art itself.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga, on the southern coast of Spain, on 25 October 1881, the son of José Ruiz y Blasco, a painter and drawing teacher, and Maria Picasso y Lopez. His first word, family legend says, was pencil, and his father, recognizing that the boy would outstrip him, is said to have handed over his own brushes and palette and never painted again. Whether or not the story is exact, the talent was real: by fourteen Picasso was admitted to the advanced class at Barcelona's art school, the Llotja, after completing in a single day an entrance drawing that normally took a month. He later signed his work with his mother's surname, Picasso, a name more distinctive than Ruiz.

Barcelona in the 1890s was a city of anarchists, modernists and cafes, and the young Picasso, living mostly on his own from sixteen, absorbed it all. He painted the poor, the beggars and the prostitutes of the old city, visited brothels with friends, and formed his first circle of bohemian companions at the cafe Els Quatre Gats. In 1900 he made his first trip to Paris, the capital of art, and by 1904 he had settled there, in a leaking, unheated studio building in Montmartre called the Bateau-Lavoir. He was twenty-three, poor, foreign, and about to change painting forever. His companions in those years were poets as much as painters: Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, men who wrote the first manifestos of the new art while Picasso made it.

The training Picasso received was academic, and he never forgot it. He could draw like an old master when he chose to, and his early portraits show a hand of classical discipline. What he rejected was not skill but the idea that a painting must imitate the world as the eye sees it. That rejection took time. The Blue Period, from about 1901 to 1904, painted beggars, blind men, mothers and prisoners in cold blues, in the wake of the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. The Rose Period, from 1904 to 1906, warmed into pinks and ochres, with harlequins, acrobats and circus families from the Cirque Medrano. Both periods still look like the world, only coloured by feeling. The break came next, and it was total.

In the summer of 1907 Picasso unveiled, in his studio, a painting he had worked on for months: five nude women, two of them wearing African masks, staring out at the viewer with flat, fractured bodies. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, named for a brothel street in Barcelona, shocked even his friends. Matisse thought it a joke, Braque thought it was as if Picasso wanted to make people drink petrol, and Picasso himself rolled the canvas up and did not show it publicly for years. Today it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is treated as the founding painting of modern art. Its importance is simple: it refused the rules of perspective that had governed European painting since the Renaissance, and showed that a picture could show several views of a body at once.

Picasso did not make that break alone. He had been struck by African sculpture, which he saw at the Trocadéro museum in Paris, by the flatness of Iberian stone heads, and by the late work of Paul Cézanne, who had reduced nature to cones, spheres and cylinders. From 1908 he worked in close partnership with Georges Braque, a French painter who had come to similar conclusions, and the two men developed what became known as Cubism. They painted still lifes, guitars, bottles and portraits in broken facets of brown and grey, so fragmented that the subject is barely visible. They pasted real materials, newspaper, wallpaper, rope, onto the canvas, inventing collage. For years they worked so closely that their paintings were almost indistinguishable, and they later said they were like two mountaineers roped together on the same climb.

Cubism had two phases. Analytical Cubism, from about 1908 to 1912, broke objects into facets and muted the colour, as if to prove that form alone could carry a painting. Synthetic Cubism, from 1912 onward, rebuilt the picture from flat shapes, bright colour and pasted paper, as if to show that painting could also be construction. The movement spread fast: Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and dozens of others took it up, and it reached sculpture, architecture, typography and design. By the First World War, Cubism was the most influential art movement in Europe, and Picasso, still in his thirties, was its acknowledged centre. He never stayed a Cubist in any narrow sense. He kept its freedom and moved on.

One of the hardest things about Picasso is that there is no single Picasso style. After the First World War he turned, startlingly, to a neoclassical manner: heavy, monumental figures in the manner of Ingres, mothers with children, bathers on beaches, as if to prove he could paint like the old masters whenever he wished. At the same time he continued to make Cubist pictures, and in the 1920s he flirted with Surrealism, painting distorted, biomorphic bodies that looked like dreams and nightmares. When critics accused him of inconsistency, he answered that he did not paint what he saw, he painted what he thought, and that variety was honesty.

His personal life in these years was as restless as his art. In 1918 he married Olga Khokhlova, a Russian dancer with the Ballets Russes, for whom he designed costumes and sets. The marriage gave him a son, Paulo, and entry into fashionable society, but it curdled, and from 1927 he lived with Marie-Thérèse Walter, a seventeen-year-old he met outside a Paris department store, who became the model for a radiant series of paintings and the mother of his daughter Maya. In the 1930s he made the Vollard Suite, a hundred etchings commissioned by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, in which the sculptor's studio, the minotaur and the sleeping woman recur as myths of desire and power. He also made sculpture: iron, bronze, plaster and found objects, including a bull's head made from a bicycle saddle and handlebars, a joke that is also a masterpiece.

Picasso's work in the 1920s and 1930s is full of violence as well as beauty. The Three Dancers of 1925, painted after a night of dancing, turns a ballet scene into a screaming, distorted trio. The paintings of Marie-Thérèse are often tender, but the paintings of his later companion Dora Maar, the photographer who documented Guernica, are sharp, weeping and angular. Picasso's women have been the subject of fierce debate: he loved women, painted them obsessively, and treated several of them badly. The biographies do not hide it, and the paintings do not excuse it. What they do is record, with uncomfortable honesty, a man whose art and whose life were both driven by the same hunger for intensity.

On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian bombers acting for General Franco's Nationalists destroyed the Basque town of Guernica, killing hundreds of civilians in a market-day raid that lasted hours. Picasso, living in Paris and already commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, turned the commission into a memorial. Guernica, painted in black, white and grey over about five weeks in May and June 1937, is eleven feet tall and twenty-five feet wide, and it shows a mother screaming over her dead child, a bull, a horse shrieking in pain, a fallen soldier, a woman with a lamp and a figure trapped in a burning building. It contains no bombs, no planes and no soldiers. It shows what bombing does to the people underneath it.

Guernica became the most famous painting of the century almost at once. It toured Europe and America to raise money for Spanish refugees, it was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Picasso refused to let it return to Spain until democracy was restored, a condition finally met in 1981, six years after Franco's death. The painting has been attacked as well as admired: in 1974 a protester sprayed it with red paint in New York to protest an American pardon, and in 2003 a tapestry copy at the United Nations was covered during a speech about the Iraq War. Each attack proved the painting's power. Guernica is the work people reach for when they want art to say that killing civilians is a crime, and it has never stopped saying it.

Picasso's politics were public. He joined the French Communist Party in 1944, after the liberation of Paris, and stayed a member, though an unruly one, for the rest of his life. He painted the dove of peace for the 1949 World Peace Congress in Paris, an image that became the emblem of the peace movement worldwide. He painted the Massacre in Korea in 1951, a protest against the Korean War, and a series of paintings against the French war in Algeria. His politics were sometimes naive, and his party loyalty embarrassed friends, but his commitment to the victims of war was consistent, and Guernica remains its monument.

After the Second World War Picasso settled in the south of France, first in Vallauris, where he discovered pottery and made thousands of ceramic pieces, and then at the Château de Vauvenargues and at Mougins, where he lived with Jacqueline Roque, his second wife, from 1961. The late years were astonishingly productive. In his eighties he painted hundreds of canvases a year, made prints, drawings and sculptures, and revisited the old masters, painting variations on Velázquez's Las Meninas, Delacroix's Women of Algiers and Manet's Luncheon on the Grass. Critics who had dismissed him as spent were forced to admit that the old man was painting as fiercely as ever.

The late work is erotic, playful and often brutal: musketeers, painters and models, couples in bed, faces that stare straight at the viewer. Picasso painted Jacqueline dozens of times, in every style he had ever used, as if to prove that love and invention were the same force. He also painted death, repeatedly, in the last years, with skulls and darkened palettes. He died at Mougins on 8 April 1973, aged ninety-one, of heart failure, leaving an estate so vast and so complicated that it took years to settle, and that gave the French state hundreds of works in lieu of inheritance tax. Those works became the core of the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Picasso's death closed the longest and most influential career in modern art. He had been famous for seventy years, he had been rich and poor, loved and denounced, and he had changed the way the world sees. The museums that bear his name, in Paris, Barcelona, Malaga and Antibes, hold only a fraction of what he made. The rest is in museums and private collections on every continent, and in the visual language of advertising, design, film and photography, all of which learned from Cubism that a picture does not have to look like the world to tell the truth about it.

Picasso matters because he proved that an artist could keep changing, and that the public would follow. Before him, painters were expected to find a style and refine it. Picasso found a style, mastered it, abandoned it and found another, and he did it half a dozen times. That permission to reinvent is his greatest gift to later artists: from Willem de Kooning to David Hockney to Jean-Michel Basquiat, the painters who came after him took the freedom he won and used it in their own ways. He also proved that painting could be a public act, that a canvas could speak about war, politics and human suffering as directly as a newspaper.

He matters, too, because his work is everywhere. The child who draws a face with both eyes on one side is copying Picasso. The poster that fractures a face into planes is copying Picasso. The word Cubism has entered ordinary language. And Guernica remains, nearly ninety years after it was painted, the image the world uses when it wants to say that bombing a town is a crime. Picasso once said that art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. His life's work is the proof: a lifetime of invented forms, all aimed at telling the truth more sharply than the camera ever could.

• 1881 – Born on 25 October in Malaga, Spain, the son of a drawing teacher.
• 1895 – Admitted to the advanced class at Barcelona's art school after a one-day entrance drawing.
• 1900 – First trip to Paris; settles there in 1904 in the Bateau-Lavoir studios in Montmartre.
• 1901 – Blue Period begins after the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas.
• 1904 – Rose Period begins, with harlequins, acrobats and circus families in pinks and ochres.
• 1907 – Paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the founding work of modern art, after months of work.
• 1908 – Begins the close partnership with Georges Braque that produces Cubism.
• 1912 – Invents collage with pasted paper, newspaper and wallpaper in Synthetic Cubism.
• 1918 – Marries Olga Khokhlova, a dancer with the Ballets Russes, and designs sets and costumes for the company.
• 1932 – Paints the great series of Marie-Thérèse Walter portraits, shown in a Paris retrospective.
• 1937 – Paints Guernica for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair after the bombing of the Basque town.
• 1944 – Joins the French Communist Party after the liberation of Paris.
• 1949 – His dove of peace becomes the emblem of the World Peace Congress in Paris.
• 1961 – Marries Jacqueline Roque and settles at Mougins in the south of France.
• 1973 – Dies at Mougins on 8 April, aged ninety-one. Guernica returns to Spain in 1981.

Picasso's legacy is the art of the twentieth century itself. Cubism changed painting, sculpture, architecture, typography and design, and its influence runs through every movement that followed, from Surrealism to Pop Art. The Musée Picasso in Paris, founded from works given in lieu of inheritance tax, holds the largest single collection of his work, and museums in Barcelona, Malaga and Antibes hold more.

Guernica remains the century's most reproduced protest painting, and the dove of peace remains the emblem of the peace movement. Picasso's example, the artist who kept reinventing himself for eighty years, gave later artists permission to do the same. His work is also a standing argument that art need not imitate the world to tell the truth about it, and that a painting can be a public act.

• John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, four volumes (Knopf, 1991-2021), the most detailed biography, based on decades of research and interviews.
• Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (Gollancz, 1958; revised 1971), the classic life by a friend and biographer.
• Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art (HarperCollins, 1993), a biography strong on the works and their dating.
• The Musée national Picasso in Paris, custodian of the largest collection of Picasso's work and of the artist's archives.
• The Museu Picasso in Barcelona, holding the great collection of the artist's early work and the Las Meninas variations.
• The Museum of Modern Art in New York, home of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and of Guernica during its long American exile.
• William Rubin, editor, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (Museum of Modern Art, 1989), on the invention of Cubism.
• Gertje Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years (Yale University Press, 2000), on the politics and the post-war work.