Pablo Picasso

October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (also known as Pablo Picasso) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet, and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the Twentieth Century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist Movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the Proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian air forces at the behest of the Spanish nationalist government during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp are regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the Twentieh Century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the Twentieth Century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His 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 (1904–1906), the African-Influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal Period.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, becoming one of the best-known figures in Twentieth Century art.

The Old Guitarist ; 1903

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ; 1907

Mediterranean Landscape ; 1953