Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramicist, and printmaker whose seven-decade career produced approximately 50,000 individual artworks and made him one of the most-influential artists of the 20th century — the co-creator (with Georges Braque) of Cubism and the foundational figure of multiple subsequent modernist movements. He was born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Andalusia, Spain. His father José Ruiz y Blasco was a painter and art teacher, and Pablo was painting from a very young age — his mother claimed his first word was "piz, piz" (a child's effort to say "pencil").

His early career moved through several distinct stylistic periods. The Blue Period (1901–1904) — in which he painted melancholy, monochromatic blue-toned paintings of beggars, mothers, and the 1903 The Old Guitarist — was followed by the warmer Rose Period (1904–1906) of harlequins, circus performers, and acrobats. The 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — depicting five fragmented, angular nude female figures from a Barcelona brothel — has been continuously cited as one of the foundational paintings of 20th-century modern art and the proto-Cubist work that anticipated his subsequent collaboration with Georges Braque.

The Cubist movement (1907–1914) — co-developed with Braque across thousands of paintings, drawings, and collages — fundamentally restructured how Western painting represented three-dimensional space, fragmenting subjects into multiple simultaneous viewpoints. Picasso continued through Cubism into Neoclassicism (1918–1925), Surrealism (1925–1936), and his political-statement period (1937), which produced Guernica — the 11-by-25-foot black-and-white anti-war painting depicting the April 1937 German Luftwaffe bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

He continued working at extraordinary pace until his death on April 8, 1973, at age 91, in Mougins, France. His estate at the time of his death was valued at over $250 million (his work has subsequently been valued in the multi-billions). His paintings have set repeated auction records — Les Femmes d'Alger (Version 'O') sold at Christie's in May 2015 for $179.4 million, then a record for any artwork sold at auction.

His name Pablo is the Spanish form of Paul, from the Latin Paulus meaning "small" or "humble." Pablo has been continuously among the most-popular Spanish-American boys' names for over a century.