On October 25, 1881, Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga in the south of Spain. His father was a painter and a teacher of drawing, and he was given lessons from an early age, and the family moved to Barcelona and then to Madrid. He entered the academy in Barcelona as a boy and showed a technical skill in drawing that was already unusual. He was very young.
He left Spain for Paris in 1904 and made his life there, and he moved through a period of blue pictures and then a rose period, both of which sold poorly, before he began the work that made his name. With Georges Braque he developed cubism, in which a form is broken up and shown from several viewpoints at once, and the first cubist paintings appeared in 1907 and 1908, and the new style changed painting across Europe. The style changed. His work was shown by dealers who supported him.
He worked in many forms and never settled into one. He painted large canvases of figures, and he made sculpture in metal and wood, and prints and ceramics, and he designed sets for the theatre, and he used the styles he had helped to invent and then moved past them. The range was wide. He painted Guernica in 1937 after the bombing of the town in the Spanish civil war, and the picture became one of the best known works of the century, and it was kept in New York for years.
He stayed in France through the war and joined the Communist Party in 1944, and he took part in the peace movement, and he was given prizes and honours by many countries. His output was enormous. He died at Mougins in France in 1973 at the age of 91.