Pablo Ruiz Picasso is probably the most famous and prolific artist of the twentieth century: painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and stage designer, he passed through almost every movement of the century and invented some of them. Although he lived most of his life in France, he always remained deeply Spanish.
Youth
He was born on 25 October 1881 in Málaga, on Plaza de la Merced, son of José Ruiz Blasco, a drawing teacher. After a few years in A Coruña, in 1895 the family moved to Barcelona, where the prodigiously gifted boy attended the Llotja fine arts school and the modernista café Els Quatre Gats. From 1901 he began to sign with his mother's surname, Picasso.
The Blue and Rose periods
Between Barcelona and Paris, where he settled in 1904 at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, he went through the Blue Period (1901-1904), with figures of the poor, the blind and beggars in cold, melancholy tones, and the Rose Period (1904-1906), devoted to acrobats and circus performers.
Cubism
In 1907 he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, five female nudes broken into angular planes, inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks: it is considered the birth certificate of modern art. With Georges Braque he developed Cubism, first analytical, breaking objects into facets seen from several viewpoints, then synthetic, with collage and papier collé. In the 1920s he alternated a return to classicism with an approach to Surrealism, and worked for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, marrying the dancer Olga Khokhlova.
Guernica
In 1937 the Republican government commissioned a work for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Fair. After the bombing of Guernica on 26 April (see the civil war) he painted in a few weeks a huge canvas in black, white and grey, almost eight metres long: the wounded horse, the bull, the mother with her dead child, the lamp. Guernica became the universal symbol against war. Picasso wanted it to return to Spain only with the return of democracy: it arrived in Madrid in 1981 and since 1992 has been displayed at the Reina Sofía Museum.
Last years
After the Second World War Picasso, a member of the French Communist Party, lived in the south of France, at Vallauris, where he devoted himself to ceramics, then at Cannes and Mougins, where he died on 8 April 1973. He never returned to Spain while Franco was in power. He painted to the end, reinterpreting the old masters: in 1957 he made 58 variations on Velázquez's Las Meninas, now in Barcelona.
Where to see Picasso in Spain
- Museu Picasso in Barcelona, in five medieval palaces on carrer Montcada, with his early works and the Meninas series.
- Museo Picasso Málaga, in the Buenavista palace, and the Casa Natal on Plaza de la Merced.
- Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, with Guernica and its preparatory studies.
- The Picasso Museum in Buitrago del Lozoya, near Madrid, with works given to his barber and friend Eugenio Arias.
See also modern art in Spain.