PABLO PICASSO

OCTOBER 25, 1881 - APRIL 8, 1973

Pablo Picasso lived as if every line drawn could reinvent the world. Born in Málaga, Spain, to an art teacher father, he began painting almost as soon as he could hold a brush. By the time he was a teenager, his skills outstripped his formal training, and he abandoned the academy for the living theater of modern life. Restless, he moved to Paris, where poverty and brilliance shaped his early “Blue Period,” followed by the warmer tones of his “Rose Period.” Then came the fracture that changed everything: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a work that shattered perspective and opened the door to Cubism. With Georges Braque, Picasso reimagined objects as if they could be taken apart and seen all at once. For the next six decades he never stopped reinventing—painting, sculpting, etching, designing. Guernica, painted in 1937, gave modern art one of its most searing images of war. Women, friends, lovers, bulls, and guitars passed through his work like a kaleidoscope. Picasso’s life was as turbulent as his art: full of love affairs, political engagement, and relentless creation. When he died in 1973, he left behind over 20,000 works, a lifetime of ceaseless experimentation that refused to settle on a single way of seeing.