Founder of the Cubist avant-garde, exponent of the pictorial revolution that took place at the turn of the century, Pablo Picasso was an artist whose long and fruitful career provided successive generations with an extensive and varied iconographic baggage.
Picasso's early artistic education was encouraged by his father, a painter and drawing teacher. In 1900, Picasso decided to leave Spain temporarily for Paris; throughout his life, he would travel often between the two countries. His prolific and diverse career can be divided into several distinct periods.
Between 1901 and 1904 can be described as Picasso's 'Blue Period', characterised by his use of this specific colour. Blue was revealed as a colour with strong psychological significance - predominantly relating to profound melancholy - and was suited to the artist's subjects, mostly poor, isolated figures. This output reflected Picasso's own life events, mourning the loss of his close friend Carlos Casegemas. Between 1904 and 1906, Picasso abandoned his blue palette in favour of warmer and hopeful pink tones, his 'Rose Period', and also began depicting new subjects, including figures from the circus.
From 1906, Picasso began a groundbreaking development in the history of modern art, defining a new way of representation in the form of Cubism, along with Georges Braque. Cubism complicated the relationship between point of observation and representation, instead depicting objects from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. This new movement provoked a violent reaction, but its inception is hailed as one of the pivotal moments of modern art. Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), was the seminal work that brought Cubism to public attention.
In the 1930s, political turmoil in Spain forced Picasso to return to France, where in 1937 he produced a monumental work, Guernica, denouncing the barbarities that raged during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso left Paris in 1945 to take refuge in Antibes, a small French tourist resort, during which he rediscovered a serenity after the atrocities of war. This marked the start of a fruitful period for the artist who, in addition to painting, began to experiment with ceramics and graphic art.
After the Second World War, Picasso created a several works that revisited great Old Masters, including Velazquez, Goya, Poussin and Delacroix. By the 1960s, Picasso was a world-renowned artist and even appeared as cameos in film appearances. His creative energies were undiminished even in his last years, producing hundreds of etchings between 1968 and 1971. He died in 1973.
