Pablo Picasso

• 1. Introduction

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  Pablo Picasso once stood in his occupied-Paris apartment as a German officer noticed a photograph of his painting Guernica. "Did you do that?" the officer asked. "No," Picasso replied. "You did." The exchange captures a man who turned art into accusation. He was born in Malaga in 1881 and died in Mougins, France, in 1973, a Spaniard who spent most of his adult life abroad. His career ran more than 76 years, from his late teens until the night before his death. How does one artist co-found Cubism, invent constructed sculpture, help create collage, and still keep reinventing himself into his nineties? Why did he change styles each time he changed lovers? And why, at his death, did more than 45,000 unsold works remain in his estate? The answers wind through poverty, rivalry, war, and a private life as turbulent as any canvas.

• 2. The Father's Pupil

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  From the age of seven, Picasso received formal training in figure drawing and oil painting from his father, Jose Ruiz y Blasco, a painter who specialised in birds and game and taught at a school of crafts. According to his mother, his first words were "piz, piz," a shortening of lapiz, the Spanish word for pencil. Ruiz believed proper training meant disciplined copying of the masters and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son grew so preoccupied with art that his classwork suffered.

  The family moved to A Coruna in 1891, where the father taught at the School of Fine Arts. An apocryphal story holds that Ruiz once found his thirteen-year-old son painting over an unfinished sketch of a pigeon, and the precision so impressed him that he vowed to give up painting. In 1895, Picasso was traumatised when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria. The family then moved to Barcelona, a city Picasso would regard in times of sadness as his true home.

  At just 13, Picasso completed an entrance exam for the advanced class at Barcelona's academy in a week, a process that often took students a month. His father rented him a small room nearby but checked his drawings numerous times a day, and the two argued frequently. Sent at 16 to Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolling. He preferred the Prado, where he studied Velazquez, Goya, and Zurbaran, and admired El Greco above all. El Greco's elongated limbs and mystical faces would echo through his later work.

• 3. Hunger In Paris

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  In 1900, Picasso made his first trip to Paris, then the art capital of Europe. There he met his first Parisian friend, the journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped him learn the language and its literature. They shared an apartment in conditions of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Max slept at night while Picasso worked, and much of his early output was burned simply to keep the small room warm.

  During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asis Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven, or Young Art. It published five issues, with Soler soliciting articles and Picasso supplying illustrations, mostly grim cartoons sympathising with the poor. The first issue appeared on the 31st of March 1901. By then the artist had begun signing his work simply Picasso, his less common maternal surname, a change initiated by Catalan friends who habitually called him by it.

  His Blue Period, lasting from 1901 to 1904, filled his canvases with sombre shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colours. Prostitutes, beggars, and gaunt mothers with children recur throughout. The mood drew partly from the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas, whom he painted in several posthumous portraits culminating in the gloomy allegory La Vie of 1903, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Blindness was another recurrent theme, seen in The Frugal Repast and The Blindman's Meal.

• 4. Rivals And Patrons

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  By 1905, Picasso had become a favourite of the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, whose brother Michael and his wife Sarah also acquired his work. Gertrude Stein became his principal patron, exhibiting his drawings and paintings in the informal salon at her Paris home. At one of her gatherings in 1905, Picasso met Henri Matisse, who would become a lifelong friend and rival. After 1906, Matisse's Fauvist work pushed Picasso toward more radical styles, and critics soon paired the two as the leaders of modern art.

  The lighter Rose Period, running from 1904 to 1906, used orange and pink tones and featured circus people, acrobats, and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic figure in chequered clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. In 1904 he met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress and appears in many works of this warmer period.

  In 1907, Picasso joined a gallery newly opened by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German art historian who became one of the premier French dealers of the century. Kahnweiler championed Picasso, Georges Braque, and the Cubism they developed together, alongside artists such as Andre Derain, Fernand Leger, and Juan Gris, drawn from across the globe to work in Montparnasse.

• 5. Breaking The Figure Apart

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  Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, completed in 1907, opened his African-influenced period. The three figures on the left were inspired by Iberian sculpture, but he repainted the two faces on the right after seeing African artefacts that June in the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadero. When he showed the work in his studio, the reaction was nearly universal shock and revulsion. Matisse angrily dismissed it as a hoax, and Picasso did not exhibit it publicly until 1916.

  Analytic Cubism, developed with Braque between 1909 and 1912, used monochrome browns and neutral tones as the two artists took objects apart and analysed them through their shapes. Their paintings of this time share many similarities. In 1911, Picasso was arrested and questioned about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, after suspicion first fell on his friend Guillaume Apollinaire. Afraid of deportation to Spain, Picasso denied ever having met Apollinaire, though both were later cleared.

  Synthetic Cubism, spanning 1912 to 1919, pasted cut paper such as wallpaper and newspaper into compositions. His Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912, made with oil and printed oilcloth edged with rope, marks both the first Cubist collage and what is often called the first assemblage. Later, geometric works built from a pipe, a guitar, or a glass earned the name Crystal Cubism. "We need a new name to designate them," Picasso wrote to Gertrude Stein.

• 6. Society And Surrealism

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  At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon while Braque, Derain, and Apollinaire were mobilised. Able to keep painting uninterrupted, he saw his canvases grow more sombre as his life shifted. He had left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, known as Eva Gouel, and was devastated by her death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915.

  In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for whom he was designing Erik Satie's ballet Parade in Rome. They honeymooned near Biarritz in the villa of the Chilean art patron Eugenia Errazuriz. Khokhlova introduced him to formal dinner parties and the high society of 1920s Paris, a world that clashed with his bohemian habits and left the two in constant conflict. Their son, Paulo, would grow up to be a motorcycle racer and his father's chauffeur. At a villa in Fontainebleau in 1921, using the garage as a studio, Picasso painted Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians.

  In 1925, the Surrealist writer Andre Breton declared Picasso "one of ours" in an article published in Revolution surrealiste, the same issue that first reproduced Les Demoiselles in Europe. Yet Picasso never fully embraced the movement's idea of psychic automatism. Surrealism instead revived his attraction to primitivism and eroticism. In 1927 he met the 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walter, who became his "Golden muse" and the mother of his daughter Maya.

• 7. The Painting That Accused

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  Picasso's most famous work depicts the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, carried out by German and Italian air forces. The large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity and hopelessness of war. Asked to explain its symbolism, Picasso refused: "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols... The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them." Before Guernica, he had never addressed political themes in his art.

  The politicised turn is largely attributed to his relationship with Dora Maar, a French anti-fascist activist and surrealist photographer. Her black and white photographs likely shaped the painting's stark monochrome scheme, a contrast to his usual colour. Maar had exclusive access to his studio to photograph Guernica's creation, and at his request she painted parts of the dying horse. "She pushed him to do something new and to be more creative politically," said the Dora Maar expert Antoine Romand.

  Guernica was exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition, then toured Scandinavia and England as the centrepiece of an exhibition of 118 works. After Franco's victory, it was sent to the United States to raise funds for Spanish refugees and entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso insisted it not return to Spain until liberty and democracy were established there. In 1939 and 1940, MoMA's director Alfred Barr mounted a major retrospective, though critics proved oddly ambivalent. One reviewer concluded Picasso was both charlatan and genius.

• 8. Goddesses And Doormats

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  "For me there are only two kinds of women," Picasso once told Francoise Gilot, "goddesses and doormats." He has been characterised as a womaniser and a misogynist, and his biographer John Richardson named work, sex, and tobacco as his addictions. He married twice and had four children with three women, and his granddaughter Marina Picasso wrote in her memoir that he ingested the women in his life and "crushed them onto his canvas."

  The consequences ran through the family for years. His lover Marie-Therese Walter and his second wife Jacqueline Roque both took their own lives, four and thirteen years after his death. His grandson Pablito died after being barred by Jacqueline from the artist's funeral in 1973, and his son Paulo died of alcoholism in 1975. In 1944, at 63, Picasso had begun a relationship with the art student Francoise Gilot, 40 years younger than he was. Her 1964 book Life with Picasso described his cruelty, and he severed ties with their children, Claude and Paloma. "Pablo thought he was God, but he was not God," Gilot later said, "and that annoyed him."

  Picasso died on the 8th of April 1973 in Mougins, from a heart attack brought on by pulmonary edema. The evening before, he and Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner, and he painted until 3 a.m. He left no will, and judges granted his three illegitimate children a share of his estate over the objections of Jacqueline and Paulo. In December 1976 his heirs settled on how to divide his estate, valued at 240 million dollars. His painting Women of Algiers would later sell for 179.3 million dollars, setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a painting.