Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in the sun-drenched Mediterranean port of Málaga in southern Spain, the son of José Ruiz y Blasco, a painter and drawing teacher, and María Picasso y López.According to family legend, his first word was 'piz, piz,' his way of asking for a pencil.

He could draw before he could speak.His father, recognizing genius at a glance, gave his thirteen-year-old son his own brushes and palette and is said to have renounced painting forever.

The first turning point came when the family moved to Barcelona and Pablo entered the city's School of Fine Arts, completing in a day an entrance exam meant to take a month.By sixteen he had already mastered academic technique, and in the bohemian cafés of Barcelona he met the writers and artists who would push him toward modernism.

In 1900 he traveled to Paris and plunged into the life of Montmartre.The suicide of his closest friend Carles Casagemas plunged him into the melancholy 'Blue Period,' followed by a gentler 'Rose Period' of harlequins and acrobats.

The second, decisive turning point came in 1907 with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a brutal, fractured composition of five women influenced by Iberian sculpture and African masks.Working closely with Georges Braque, he developed Cubism, which shattered five centuries of Western perspective and allowed a single object to be viewed from multiple angles at once.

From that revolution his restless innovation never stopped.He moved through a Neoclassical period, collaborated with Surrealists, and designed sets for the Ballets Russes.In 1937, shocked by the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, he painted Guernica, an enormous black-and-white canvas that remains the most powerful anti-war image of the twentieth century.

He continued to paint, sculpt, engrave, and make pottery into his nineties, producing around fifty thousand works in all.He died in 1973 at the age of ninety-one at his home in Mougins, having redrawn the map of twentieth-century art as no other artist has done.

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”