The painter, draftsman, engraver, sculptor, and ceramist Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga on October 25, 1881, and died in Mougins (Provence) on April 8, 1973.

Considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, he participated from the genesis of many artistic movements that spread throughout the world and exerted great influence on other great artists of his time. Together with Georges Braque and Juan Gris, he was the creator of the Cubist movement.

Tireless and prolific, he painted more than two thousand works currently present in museums and collections across Europe and the world. In addition, he tackled other genres such as drawing, engraving, book illustration, sculpture, ceramics, and the design of stage sets and costumes for theatrical productions.

Politically, Picasso declared himself a pacifist and a communist. He was a member of the French Communist Party until his death at the age of 91. He is buried in the park of the Château de Vauvenargues (Bouches-du-Rhône).

His first drawings date from 1891, the year the family moved to A Coruña. In 1895, he returned to Malaga and, in the autumn, settled in Barcelona and enrolled at La Llotja. His work First Communion was featured at the 1896 Fine Arts Exhibition.

He spent the 1897-98 academic year in Madrid. Back in Barcelona, he went to Horta de Sant Joan (Terra Alta) with his friend Manuel Pallarès. An innate genius by definition, emerging at thirteen years old, his aesthetic adventure, up to and including 1907, cannot be fully explained without the Catalan influence.

Later, in Barcelona, he had studios with Josep Cardona, on Carrer d’Escudellers Blancs, and with Carles Casagemas, on Riera de Sant Joan. He frequented Els Quatre Gats, where he exhibited in 1900, and in the autumn, he went to Paris. In Paris, in the spring of 1907, he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which opened the doors to Cubism. The Cubist revolution, Cézanne-rooted, is arguably the most important of his discoveries and looms, in a more or less veiled form, over his subsequent adventures and a large part of modern art.

His figure synthesizes the plastic adventure of modern art: realism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, abstraction, and Surrealism. Not only is he the most diverse artist in the entire history of art—some forty well-defined periods can be traced in his work—but perhaps also the most prolific: provisionally, some thirty-five thousand works can be accounted for.

Of this vast production, dispersed throughout the world, abundant examples can be found at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the Picasso Museum in Antibes, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the Musée Picasso in Paris.

(RG)