Pablo Picasso Spanish, 1881-1973

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), A School of Paris painter, sculptor, etcher, lithographer, ceramist and designer, who has had enormous influence on 20th Century art and worked in an unprecedented variety of styles.

The Picasso family moved to Barcelona, when their son Pablo (born in Malaga) entered the School of Fine Arts in 1895. He went on the Madrid Academy in 1897. Early on, Picasso showed great precocity. He first visited Paris in Autumn 1900, then returned in 1901 when he had his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Vollard. The body of work known as the ‘Blue Period’ paintings of beggars and sad-faced women was begun around this time. Picasso settled in Paris in 1904. In 1905 he painted some pictures of circus folk and embarked on his ‘Rose Period’. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1906-7 marked the beginning of a more revolutionary manner of style, influenced by Cezanne, and African art. Picasso met Braque in 1907 and, with his collaboration, created Cubism. He designed sets and costumes for Parade and other Diaghilev ballets between 1917-24. He also made some neo-classical figure paintings from 1920-4, running parallel to the later Synthetic Cub-ism. Following this, in 1925 he started to make more violently expressive and metamorphic works, and in the subsequent years frequently exhibited with the Surrealists. Picasso created an important series of wrought-iron constructions and modelled sculptures between 1928-34, and made the il-lustrations for Ovid’s Les Métamorphoses, and Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle amongst others. Picasso was awarded First Prize at the 1930 Pittsburgh International. His painting Guernica, 1937 was inspired by the destruction by bombing of the Spanish town of that name. Picasso was invited in to the building housing this work some years later, when the building was under Nazi occupation. When the senior Gestapo officer pointed to Guernica and asked him, ‘Did you do this’, Picasso famously replied, ‘No, you did’. Picasso continued to live in Paris throughout the Occupation.

From 1946 he lived mainly in the South of France at Antibes, Vallauris - where he met Lydia Corbett (née Sylvette David) who modelled for over 60 of his works, Cannes, and from 1958 near Aix-en-Provence, where he maintained a prolific output of paintings, sculptures, etchings, lithographs and ceramics. Picasso died at Mougins, near Cannes.