Who was Pablo Picasso?

Picasso made his first trip to Paris in 1900, then the undisputed capital of European art. He arrived with little money and spent early periods in genuine hardship, reportedly burning drawings for warmth. He met journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped him navigate the language and the city. The two shared an apartment, keeping opposite hours — Jacob slept at night while Picasso worked through the dark and slept during the day.

The Blue Period, lasting from roughly 1901 to 1904, grew partly from the suicide of Picasso's close friend Carles Casagemas and from a journey through Spain. Working almost exclusively in shades of blue and blue-green, occasionally warmed by other colors, Picasso painted gaunt figures — beggars, blind men, prostitutes — with a spare, melancholy clarity. The period produced works like The Frugal Repast, an etching of a blind man and an emaciated woman at a near-empty table, and the allegorical painting La Vie.

The Rose Period followed from 1904 to 1906, marked by a warmer palette of orange and pink and by subject matter drawn from circus life — acrobats, harlequins, and saltimbanques. The shift in mood coincided with Picasso meeting Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his companion and appeared in many paintings of the period. By 1905, American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein had begun acquiring his work, and Gertrude in particular became his principal patron, exhibiting his pieces in her Paris salon.

In 1907, Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a painting that would later be recognized as the launching point of Cubism. The figures on the left were shaped by Iberian sculpture, while the faces on the right were repainted after Picasso encountered African artifacts at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris. When he showed the work to friends in his studio, reactions ranged from shock to outright hostility — Henri Matisse reportedly dismissed it as a hoax. Picasso did not exhibit it publicly until 1916.

Working alongside the French painter Georges Braque, Picasso developed Analytic Cubism between 1909 and 1912, using muted browns and neutral tones to disassemble objects and reconstruct them from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Synthetic Cubism followed from 1912 to 1919, introducing cut paper, newspaper fragments, and wallpaper into compositions. The seminal work of this phase was Still Life with Chair Caning from 1912, which is widely regarded as the first Cubist collage and among the earliest assemblages in art history.

In 1911, in the middle of this extraordinarily creative period, Picasso was arrested and questioned in connection with the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. His friend Guillaume Apollinaire had been implicated first, and Apollinaire named Picasso, who had previously purchased stolen artworks from a mutual acquaintance. Facing potential deportation to Spain, Picasso denied ever having met Apollinaire. Both men were ultimately cleared. The episode illustrates the tangled personal loyalties and precarious legal standing that Picasso navigated as a foreign national in France.

For most of his career, Picasso kept his art apart from explicit political statements. That changed in 1937 when German and Italian air forces bombed the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The large canvas Picasso produced in response remains among the most recognizable anti-war images ever made. He said that its symbolism was for viewers to interpret themselves, refusing to offer a fixed reading.

Guernica was displayed at the Spanish Pavilion during the 1937 Paris International Exposition and then toured Scandinavia and England. After Francisco Franco's forces won the civil war, the painting was sent to the United States to raise funds for Spanish refugees. Picasso stipulated it should not return to Spain until democracy was restored there. It remained at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 1981.

The anti-fascist photographer and painter Dora Maar, Picasso's companion during this period, documented the creation of the painting in photographs and was allowed exclusive access to his studio throughout the process. Her black-and-white photography is thought to have influenced the painting's stark monochrome scheme. At Picasso's request, Maar painted parts of the dying horse at the center of the composition.

Picasso's career stretched more than 76 years, from his late teens until his death on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, from a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema. He died without leaving a will. At the time of his death, his estate held more than 45,000 unsold works, including nearly 1,900 paintings, over 1,200 sculptures, more than 3,200 ceramics, and thousands of drawings, prints, and sketchbooks.

The catalogue of his paintings and drawings compiled by Christian Zervos across 33 volumes lists more than 16,000 works — and is not considered exhaustive. His output spanned identifiable periods — the Blue Period, the Rose Period, the African-influenced Period, Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Neoclassicism, and Surrealist-inflected work in the 1920s — though Picasso himself rejected the idea that these represented an evolution toward any single goal. He stated plainly that different subjects had simply demanded different means of expression.

Because he died intestate, the French state received part of his estate as payment of death duties in the form of artworks, which became the core collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. Museums dedicated to his work also exist in Barcelona and in his birthplace of Málaga. Several of his paintings rank among the highest prices ever paid at auction, with Women of Algiers selling for over 179 million dollars at Christie's in New York in 2015.