Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. This ridiculously long name of twenty-three words would become one of the most famous signatures in art history, though he would eventually drop most of it in favor of his mother's surname. His entrance into the world was nothing short of dramatic. The midwife thought the baby was stillborn after such a difficult birth that she left the apparently lifeless infant on a table to attend to his mother. It was only when his uncle Salvador, a doctor who was smoking a cigar in the room, blew smoke directly into the baby's face that Pablo grimaced and launched his first cry. Some biographers claim this early encounter with tobacco smoke explains why Picasso never stopped smoking cigars and cigarettes throughout his long life, though it certainly didn't prevent him from living eighty-one remarkably productive years.

Even before he could properly speak, Pablo's artistic genius was evident. His first word was allegedly piz, which was his attempt at saying lápiz, the Spanish word for pencil. This wasn't mere coincidence – the boy seemed born to create. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a painter and art professor at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, which meant young Pablo was exposed to art from his earliest memories. By age seven, he was already sitting in on his father's ornamental drawing classes, absorbing the traditions of academic art with an intensity that unsettled adults who witnessed it.

The family moved to A Coruña when Pablo was ten, where his father took a teaching position and began formally instructing his son. The boy's progress was so rapid and his talent so extraordinary that his father, himself a competent artist, began to feel overshadowed. According to Roland Penrose, Picasso's biographer, the young artist claimed he could draw like Raphael by his early teens, but it has taken me my whole life to learn to draw like a child. This precocious confidence would become a defining characteristic throughout his life.

At nine years old, Pablo completed his first painting, Le Picador, depicting a man on horseback in a bullfight. The theme of bullfighting would resurface throughout his career, reflecting his deep connection to Spanish culture despite spending most of his adult life in France. When the family moved to Barcelona in 1895, thirteen-year-old Pablo gained admission to the prestigious La Llotja art academy, where his father had secured a position. The entrance exam normally took students a month to complete, but Pablo finished it in a week.

However, academic success meant nothing to the young rebel. Despite his artistic brilliance, Picasso was a terrible student who chafed against authority and rules. He was frequently thrown into detention, which he called the calaboose. But rather than seeing this as punishment, he viewed it as an opportunity. For being a bad student I was banished to the calaboose – a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly. I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping. This attitude – turning punishment into creative opportunity – would characterize his entire approach to life.

Pablo's family life was marked by tragedy that would profoundly shape his art. In 1895, his seven-year-old sister Conchita died of diphtheria. The thirteen-year-old Pablo watched helplessly as she deteriorated from a smiling girl with blonde curls to a ghost of herself. In his anguish, he made a desperate bargain with God, promising to sacrifice his artistic gift and never pick up a brush again if his sister's life could be saved. When she died, he was torn between grief and a terrible relief that his artistic calling remained intact. He decided that God was evil and destiny an enemy, while simultaneously believing that his own ambivalence had somehow contributed to Conchita's death. This guilt was compounded by his conviction that his sister's death had liberated him to pursue his artistic destiny, whatever the consequences.

Following this trauma, Pablo created some of his most psychologically complex early works, including Christ Blessing the Devil, which depicted Christ with a shining aura blessing an overwhelmed Devil with his left hand. This drawing revealed the deep spiritual conflict raging within the teenage artist. He produced numerous religious paintings between 1895 and 1896, including Christ appearing to a nun, the Annunciation, the Last Supper, and the Resurrection. Yet he also painted Christ with no face – impersonal, unreal, and offering no answers to life's fundamental questions.

In 1897, Pablo moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando, but he found the teaching stupid and increasingly spent his time in cafés, on the streets, in brothels, and at the Prado Museum. There he discovered Spanish masters like Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo, and especially Goya, whose works would influence him throughout his career. He wrote enthusiastically about his museum visits: The Museum of paintings is beautiful. Velázquez first class; from El Greco some magnificent heads, Murillo does not convince me in every one of his pictures.

Pablo fell ill in spring 1898 and spent the remaining year convalescing in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro with his Barcelona friend Manuel Pallarès. When he returned to Barcelona in early 1899, he was a changed man – heavier, more independent, and fluent in Catalan. Most importantly, he had decided to break with his art-school training and reject his family's conventional plans for his future. He began signing his works P.R. Picasso, and by late 1901 had dropped his father's surname entirely, choosing to be known by his mother's more distinctive name.

In Barcelona, Pablo moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers at the café Els Quatre Gats, styled after the Chat Noir in Paris. This became his social and artistic headquarters, where he held his first Barcelona exhibition in February 1900. The show featured more than fifty portraits of his café companions, establishing him as a portraitist of the city's bohemian community. His painting Last Moments, showing a priest visiting a dying woman, was accepted for the Spanish section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris that year.

Eager to experience Paris firsthand, Pablo set off with his studio mate Carles Casagemas to conquer Montmartre in 1900. This friendship would end tragically and mark the beginning of Picasso's famous Blue Period. Casagemas shot himself in the middle of a Parisian dinner party in 1901 after being spurned by a lover. The suicide devastated twenty-year-old Pablo, who later told his biographer Pierre Daix: It was thinking about Casagemas that got me started painting in blue. The death of his dear friend served as a catalyst for a series of canvases characterized by cold colors – melancholy blues, dusky grays, and sickly greens.

One of the first works he produced, The Death of Casagemas, showed the poet's bluish-green face swaddled in white blankets, looking almost peaceful except for the bullet hole in his temple. This direct response to his friend's suicide marked the beginning of Picasso's evolution from a skilled academic painter to a revolutionary modern artist who used color and form to express profound emotional states rather than merely represent visual reality.

Pablo's early years in Paris were marked by poverty and struggle. He signed his first contract with art dealer Père Mènach, who agreed to pay him 150 francs per month for his work. However, the young artist was already showing the mercurial personality that would characterize his entire life. He was driven by what Diana Widmaier Picasso, his granddaughter and an art historian, describes as an almost neurological obsession, something that forced him to be very active all the time.

The transformation from Pablo to Picasso involved not just a name change but a complete reimagining of what art could be. Moving beyond his Blue Period into the Rose Period around 1904, he began experimenting with forms and techniques that would revolutionize modern art. His encounter with African art around 1906 marked another crucial turning point. This so-called primitive art fascinated him not because of any cultural appreciation, but because of its bold simplification of form and emotional directness.

In 1907, Picasso created Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a painting so radical that even his early dealer Ambroise Vollard exclaimed: It's the work of a madman. The work depicted five prostitutes with primal, mask-like faces, their nudity more geometric than erotic. This painting, which art historians now consider the first great work of Modernism, incorporated stolen Iberian statue heads that Picasso had acquired through his friend Guillaume Apollinaire's secretary, Géry Pieret, who had stolen them from the Louvre in 1907.

This brings us to one of the most bizarre episodes in Picasso's life – his brief stint as a suspect in the theft of the Mona Lisa. When Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece was stolen from the Louvre in August 1911, the Paris police, searching for suspects within the city's radical art circles, focused on Picasso and Apollinaire. They were innocent of stealing the Mona Lisa, but they were in fact guilty of possessing stolen art. In Picasso's dresser lay hidden several ancient Iberian statue heads that had been stolen from the Louvre.

The night the investigation began focusing on them, Picasso and Apollinaire panicked. They stuffed the stolen sculptures into a suitcase and set out at midnight to throw them into the Seine. However, whether through artistic conscience or fear of police surveillance, they never completed their desperate mission. They returned in the early hours with the suitcase and its incriminating contents, eventually returning the sculptures through a newspaper intermediary. Both men were brought in for questioning, and when Picasso was asked to confirm his relationship with Apollinaire, he claimed he had never seen him before, effectively betraying his friend to save himself. The case eventually fell apart due to procedural incompetence and media pressure, but the episode revealed Picasso's willingness to sacrifice others for his own survival.

Picasso's personal relationships were as complex and often destructive as his art was revolutionary. His romantic life was marked by a series of relationships with much younger women who served as both muses and victims of his domineering personality. His approach to women was summed up in his own words: There are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats. This stark binary reflected his tendency to either idealize or degrade the women in his life, with little room for them to exist as independent individuals.

One of the most notorious incidents involved his relationships with Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar. He had met the seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse on the street when he was forty-five, following her before stopping her and announcing: I am Picasso! She had no idea who he was, but he soon seduced her anyway. They maintained a secret relationship for years, with Picasso even sneaking into her tent at youth sports camps and later installing her in an apartment across the street from where he lived with his wife Olga Khokhlova.

Meanwhile, he began a relationship with Dora Maar, a talented surrealist photographer. When the two women accidentally met in his studio, they demanded that he choose between them. Picasso's response was characteristically manipulative: he told them they would have to fight it out themselves. The two women actually began to wrestle while Picasso watched, and he later described this as one of his choicest memories. He even dedicated the painting Birds in a Cage to commemorate the incident, finding artistic inspiration in the emotional suffering he had orchestrated.

The relationship with Dora Maar became increasingly destructive. Under Picasso's influence, she gradually abandoned her successful photography career because he convinced her that photography wasn't a worthy artistic medium. His portraits of her, including the famous Weeping Woman, depicted her in tears and apparent anguish. As British art historian John Richardson noted, the source of Dora's tears was not Franco, but the artist's traumatic manipulation of her. The relationship destroyed Maar incrementally, leading to her psychological breakdown when Picasso left her for Françoise Gilot in 1945.

Picasso's friendship with Henri Matisse provided one of the most fascinating dynamics in art history. When they met at Gertrude Stein's salon in 1906, Matisse was already established as a leader of the Fauvist movement, while Picasso was still emerging from his Blue and Rose periods. Despite their different approaches – Matisse drawn to balance, harmony, and beauty, Picasso to abstraction and experimentation – they recognized each other's power to challenge and stimulate.

Their relationship was complex, combining genuine friendship with intense rivalry. Matisse compared it to a boxing match, while others described it as a chess game or dialogue. They exchanged paintings, with each choosing what Gertrude Stein mischievously claimed was the worst example of the other's new work. In reality, both were studying each other's techniques. Picasso admired how Matisse channeled children's drawings into flat, simple portraits, while Matisse observed how Picasso was pushing still life toward cubism.

However, their friendship was not without conflict. When Matisse decided to decorate the Vence Chapel, the atheist and Communist Party supporter Picasso was outraged. You're crazy to make a chapel for those people, he told Matisse. Do you believe in that stuff or not? If not, do you think you ought to do something for an idea that you don't believe in? The debate was fierce, but their friendship survived Picasso's sarcastic attacks.

The creation of Guernica in 1937 represents perhaps Picasso's greatest artistic achievement and provides insight into his working methods. When the German Condor Legion and Italian forces bombed the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create a work for their pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Learning of the bombing through international press coverage, he began work on May 1 and completed the enormous painting – 11.5 by 25.5 feet – by June 4.

Picasso worked with extraordinary intensity, making numerous changes as he progressed. The agonizing horse that appears centrally in the final composition changed form and position several times. Other elements, like a raised fist initially intended to hold flowers, evolved into the light that illuminates the scene's horror. His partner Dora Maar photographed the various stages of the painting's development, providing a fascinating glimpse into his creative process.

The influence of Dora Maar on Guernica cannot be overstated. Unlike Picasso, she was deeply involved in left-wing political activism, and it was likely her influence that led him to address this particular atrocity. Her background in black-and-white photography influenced his decision to render the work in stark monochrome rather than his characteristic colors. She even painted a small section of one of the horse's flanks, making it partly her creation as well.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Picasso's behavior became increasingly eccentric and controlling. He viewed himself as having godlike powers over his artistic domain. As he told one lover: Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my painting, and everything is sacrificed to it – you and everyone else, myself included. This philosophy led him to treat people as expendable resources for his art.

His superstitions and beliefs bordered on the mystical. He once said: Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us. He saw himself as someone who had earned the right to criticize even God: God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.

Picasso's prolific output was legendary – he created an estimated 50,000 artworks during his lifetime, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and prints. This incredible productivity was driven by his belief that he could permit himself everything with everyone, with no person spared from his demands. His high tolerance for risk extended to both his art and personal life. As he explained: If you jump, you might fall on the wrong side of the rope. But if you're not willing to take the risk of breaking your neck, what good is it? You don't jump at all. You have to wake people up. To revolutionize their way of identifying things.

Even mundane incidents revealed his artistic vision. When he accidentally broke a piece of pottery, instead of discarding it, he transformed the shards into a unique ashtray. This ability to see creative potential in destruction and chaos characterized his entire approach to life and art. He once had a pet Siamese cat named Minou that leaped into the air while he was painting. Rather than being startled, Picasso incorporated the cat's movement into his artwork, capturing what he saw as the essence of a spontaneous moment.

His relationships with other artists were often marked by his need to dominate and control. He discovered the primitive painter Henri Rousseau, claiming to have found one of his paintings in a junk shop and instantly recognizing his genius. However, Picasso's admiration was largely ironic. In 1908, he threw a half-serious, half-mocking party known as Le Banquet Rousseau in Rousseau's honor, inviting luminaries like Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire. Though conceived partly as an elaborate joke on the naive Rousseau, the party ultimately helped launch the older painter's career.

During World War II, Picasso remained in Nazi-occupied Paris while many other artists fled. When German officers entered his studio and saw a photograph of Guernica, they asked: Did you do that? His quick-witted response – No, you did – demonstrated both his courage and his understanding of art's political power. This incident illustrates how Picasso, despite his often selfish personal behavior, could rise to moments of moral clarity and defiance.

His final years were marked by continued productivity but also increasing isolation. His friendship with Marc Chagall ended dramatically in 1964 over a dinner conversation that turned bitter. When Picasso asked Chagall: When are you going back to Russia? Chagall replied: After you. I hear you are greatly loved there but not your work. You try to make it there and I'll wait and see how you do. Picasso's angry response – I guess with you it's a question of business. You won't go unless there's money in it – ended their decades-long friendship permanently.

The incident with his friend's restaurant bill became legendary. Finding himself without cash, Picasso quickly sketched a doodle on a napkin, handed it to the waiter, and said: In a few years, that drawing will be worth more than you think. His prediction proved accurate when the waiter sold the napkin sketch decades later for a substantial sum.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at his home in Mougins, France, having lived ninety-one years of extraordinary creativity and controversy. His legacy extends far beyond his artistic innovations to include four children with three different women: Paulo with his first wife Olga Khokhlova, Maya with Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Claude and Paloma with Françoise Gilot. His daughter Maya appeared in an early series of portraits, while Claude and Paloma now work to maintain their father's legacy. Paloma became a successful jewelry designer for Tiffany & Co., creating her own artistic path.

The man who revolutionized modern art through Cubism, Surrealism, and countless other innovations remains a deeply problematic figure. His treatment of women, his cultural appropriation of African art, and his often cruel personal behavior complicate any simple celebration of his genius. Yet his artistic impact cannot be denied. He transformed how we see and understand visual representation, challenged every convention of traditional art, and created works that continue to influence artists worldwide.

Pablo Picasso lived as if rules had never existed for him – not because he acknowledged rules and broke them, but because in his mind, rules simply didn't apply to his unique position in the world. This amoral approach to life enabled both his greatest artistic achievements and his most destructive personal relationships. He remains one of history's most complex figures: a revolutionary artist whose personal legacy is as troubling as his artistic legacy is transformative.