Picasso co-founded Cubism and never stayed in one style
Pablo Ruiz Picasso, born in Málaga on 25 October 1881 and dead in France on 8 April 1973, helped invent Cubism, constructed sculpture, and collage. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 and Guernica in 1937 bookend a career whose Blue, Rose, African, and Cubist chapters still organize museum walls.
His mother said his first word was piz, short for lápiz, pencil. The son of José Ruiz y Blasco, a painter of birds and game who taught art, Picasso was trained by his father from age seven through copying masters and drawing from casts and models. The family moved to A Coruña in 1891 and to Barcelona after his seven-year-old sister Conchita died of diphtheria in 1895. There he passed the academy's advanced entrance exam in a week, when most students took a month, and was admitted at 13. The Picasso surname came from Liguria in Italy, brought to Spain by a great-grandfather around 1807.
At 16 he went alone to Madrid's Royal Academy of San Fernando but soon stopped attending, preferring the Prado, where El Greco's elongated limbs and mystical faces left a lasting mark. His early academic realism shows in The First Communion of 1896, and by the end of the decade Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen and Munch pushed him toward a personal modernism. On his first stay in Paris in 1900 he shared a room with the poet Max Jacob, who slept by night while Picasso worked, and burned much of his work for warmth.
From there the phases came fast: the Blue Period from 1901, the Rose Period from 1904, an African-influenced phase from 1907, then Analytic and Synthetic Cubism until 1919, followed by neoclassical work and Surrealist touches in the mid-1920s. After 1906, Matisse's Fauvism spurred a rivalry that led critics to treat the pair as modern art's leaders. Picasso co-founded Cubism, invented constructed sculpture and co-invented collage, answered the German and Italian bombing of a Basque town with Guernica, and worked for more than 76 years before dying in France in 1973.
Source: Pablo Picasso
