Pablo Ruiz Picasso (Málaga, October 25, 1881 – Mougins, April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor, creator, along with Georges Braque, of Cubism.
An exceptional figure as an artist and as a man, Picasso was the protagonist and inimitable creator of the various currents that revolutionized the plastic arts of the 20th century, from cubism to neo-figurative sculpture, from engraving or etching to handmade ceramics or stage sets for ballets.
Pablo Diego José Ruiz Picasso, later known by his second surname, was born on October 25, 1881, at 36 Plaza de la Merced in Malaga, as the eldest son of the couple formed by the Basque painter José Ruiz Blasco and the Andalusian Maria Picasso Lopez.
In 1891 the family moved to La Coruña, where the Instituto da Guarda required the services of the father as a teacher.
Two years later he obtained an honorable mention in the great exhibition in Madrid for his work Ciencia y caridad, still of academic realism, in which the father has served as a model for the figure of a doctor.
In 1898 he held his first individual exhibition at Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona.
Picasso settled in the famous Bateau-Lavoir, at number 13 Rue Ravignan (today Place Hodeau), lodging variously shared by penniless artists, including Juan Gris, also a Spaniard.
Astonishment and scandal soon ensue in the face of a deformed style that breaks all the canons and is gaining new followers, while its daring inventor exhibits in Munich (1909) and New York (1911).
In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, tragedies strike: Braque and Apollinaire are mobilized, and Marcelle dies suddenly that autumn.
An old portrait of his mother, painted in 1918, will earn him the millionaire Carnegie Prize in 1930, which allows him to purchase a sumptuous country villa in Boisgelup, and spend more than a year traveling through Spain.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Picasso firmly supported the Republican side, and symbolically accepted the direction of the Prado Museum, while in 1937 he painted Guernica in Paris.
In 1944 he joined the French Communist Party and unveiled 77 new works at the Salon d'Automne.
In 1954, the indefatigable old man is fascinated by a mysterious teenager with a delicate profile and long blonde hair named Sylvette David, who agrees to pose for him in exchange for one of the portraits, of his choice.
If his fascination with the ethereal Sylvette had been platonic, his attraction to Jacqueline Roqué, a young woman of extraordinary beauty whom he took as a companion in 1957, a year before painting the gigantic mural for UNESCO, did not have the same aspect.