Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. The son
of an academic painter, José Ruiz Blanco, he began to draw at an early
age. In 1895, the family moved to Barcelona, and Picasso studied there at La
Lonja, the academy of fine arts. His visit to Horta de Ebro from 1898 to 1899
and his association with the group at the café Els Quatre Gats about
1899 were crucial to his early artistic development. In 1900, Picasso’s
first exhibition took place in Barcelona, and that fall he went to Paris for
the first of several stays during the early years of the century. Picasso settled
in Paris in April 1904, and soon his circle of friends included Guillaume Apollinaire,
Max Jacob, Gertrude and Leo Stein, as well as two dealers, Ambroise Vollard
and Berthe Weill.
His style developed from the Blue Period (1901–04) to the Rose Period (1905)
to the pivotal work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the subsequent
evolution of Cubism [more] from an Analytic phase (ca. 1908–11), through
its Synthetic phase (beginning in 1912–13). Picasso’s collaboration
on ballet and theatrical productions began in 1916. Soon thereafter, his work
was characterized by neoclassicism and a renewed interest in drawing and figural
representation. In the 1920s, the artist and his wife, Olga (whom he had married
in 1918), continued to live in Paris, to travel frequently, and to spend their
summers at the beach. From 1925 into the 1930s, Picasso was involved to a certain
degree with the Surrealists, and from the fall of 1931 he was especially interested
in making sculpture. In 1932, with large exhibitions at the Galeries Georges
Petit, Paris, and the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the publication of the first
volume of Christian Zervos’s catalogue raisonné, Picasso’s
fame increased markedly.
By 1936, the Spanish Civil War had profoundly affected Picasso, the expression
of which culminated in his painting Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid). Picasso’s association with the Communist Party
began in 1944. From the late 1940s, he lived in the South of France. Among the
enormous number of Picasso exhibitions that were held during the artist’s
lifetime, those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1939 and the Musée
des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1955 were most significant. In 1961, the
artist married Jacqueline Roque, and they moved to Mougins. There Picasso continued
his prolific work in painting, drawing, prints, ceramics, and sculpture until
his death April 8, 1973.
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