Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y

Spanish artist, chiefly active in France. Picasso was one of the most inventive and prolific talents in 20th-century art. His Blue Period 1901–04 and Rose Period 1904–06 preceded the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York), which paved the way for cubism. In the early 1920s he was considered a leader of the surrealist movement. From the 1930s his work included sculpture, ceramics, and graphic works in a wide variety of media; in his life he created over 20,000 works of art. Among his best-known paintings is Guernica (1937; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), a comment on the bombing of civilians in the Spanish Civil War.

Born in Málaga, Picasso was the son of a painter José Ruiz Blasco, but used the birth name of his mother, Maria Picasso. His father gave him early tuition, and he attended Barcelona School of Fine Arts, before visiting Paris in 1900, where he settled permanently in 1904. To begin with his work was concerned with the social scene, after the fashion of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, but between 1901 and 1904 he turned to austere figure studies, blue being the dominant colour (Blue Period). Circus pictures followed, delicate and more varied in colour (Rose Period, 1904–06).

An epoch-making change in his art followed when between 1907 and 1909, together with Georges Braque, he developed cubism, from the study of Cézanne combined with that of Negro sculpture and primitive art. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) marks the birth of the cubist movement, to which Picasso adhered until 1914. Like Braque, he practised successively its ‘analytic’ form (construction in depth) and its ‘synthetic’ form (more decorative and two-dimensional in effect). A feature of his cubist still life of 1912–14 – usually depicting musical instruments, friends, and portraiture – was the use of collage. He also created cubist sculptures, using bronze, construction, and other sculpting materials.

He met the Russian ballet impressario Sergei Diaghilev in Rome in 1914, with whom he designed the décor of a number of ballets 1917–1927. He reverted to a neoclassical style 1920–24, in painting and in outline etchings of classical themes. A new and imaginative phase of his art began in about 1925, and coincided with the development of surrealism. Although claiming he was not a surrealist, Picasso's images were often akin to those of the surrealist group. This quasi-surrealist period called the ‘period of metamorphosis’ lasted for about 10 years. The bull, a traditional Spanish emblem of conflict and tragedy, began to appear in paintings and etchings, and in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he made use of this symbolism in Guernica(Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofoetrya, Madrid), a fierce pictorial comment on a deplorable bombing incident. In later works he moved freely from one style and one medium to another, using all with astonishing freedom and virtuosity.