“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

• Pablo Picasso

The world may recognize no artist as widely, and perhaps, no artist has influenced as many art movements, as Pablo Picasso. The painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet, and playwright, and co-founder of Cubism created many masterpieces, but among the most well-known are Guernica, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and The Old Guitarist. The great Spanish artist was a child prodigy. From the start of his artistic path, Picasso displayed an interest in diverse subject matter as well as a great stylistic versatility. He relied on drawing more than subtleties of color to describe form and space, often using color as an expressive element. He never fully abandoned objects of the real world as his subject matter, although some of his works, especially Cubist pieces, do approach abstraction. The female form was a recurring motif for him. For models, the artist preferred to use “individuals whose lives had both impinged on, and had real significance for, his own,” according to art scholar William Rubin. Art critic Arthur Danto considered Picasso’s body of work to provide at least some basis for the idea that Picasso developed a new style each time he fell in love with a new woman. The artist achieved universal renown as well as an immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments. Australian art critic Robert Hughes wrote of him: "To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the twentieth century is, by now, the merest commonplace. ... No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime.”

Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, in October of 1881, the firstborn to his parents. He was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso, named after various saints and relatives. The “Picasso” part of his name came from his mother, Maria Picasso y Lopez. His father was Jose Ruiz Blasco. As a child his first word was "piz," short for lápiz, the Spanish word for 'pencil'. His father was a traditional, academic artist and art professor, and gave Pablo a formal education in art starting at age seven; the proper training included disciplined copying of the masters, as well as drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. Pablo became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork, but artistically he was a child prodigy. At nine, he completed his first painting, Le Picador, a man riding a horse in a bullfight, and by 13, Pablo’s father felt that his son had surpassed him and gave up painting. Pablo’s first major painting was finished when he was 15. An academic work, First Communion showed his father, mother, and younger sister kneeling before an altar.

His early works, created while he still lived in Spain, reveal his firm grounding in classical techniques. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona now features many of these, as well as many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father's tutelage. Ruiz persuaded officials at the Academy where he worked to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class, a test that often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him at 13. His father rented a small room for him near home so he could work on his own, and checked on him multiple times a day, judging his drawings. Picasso's father and uncle then sent him to Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the country's foremost art school at age 16. The teenager set off for the first time on his own, but disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes not long after starting. He was not a disciplined student but did make friendships and connections. His Catalan friends called him by his maternal surname, Picasso, and from age 17, he began signing his works as "Pablo Ruiz Picasso,” then as "Pablo R. Picasso" until age 20, when he would use “Picasso.” This was to distinguish himself more easily, not because he did not want to be associated with his father.
The adventure reached a whole new level when he started traveling. First to Madrid, where he and a friend published, and Picasso illustrated, a small, short-lived art magazine, then to Paris where he became friends with and then shared an apartment with French poet and journalist Max Jacob, who helped him study French. These early days were desperate and impoverished, and Picasso would burn his work to heat the small room. Still, Paris was the ideal place for Picasso’s artistic exploration.

Picasso chronologically moved through visible artistic phases. His early work showed he trained in Realism. In 1897, his Realism began to exhibit modern influence, for example a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. From there, Picasso's paintings were less realistic. Influenced by modern Expressionist Edvard Munch and modern Post-Impressionist painter Toulouse-Lautrec, he began experimenting with a more freeform, avant-garde style. “The world today doesn't make sense,” Picasso said, “so why should I paint pictures that do?” His Blue Period was from 1901-04, where his work was somber in color and subject matter, possibly linked to a depressive state after a friend’s suicide. Then he had the Rose Period from 1904-06. He still employed blue tones, but now balanced them with warmer ones, which was possibly related to a move to the Bohemian quarter of Montmartre. After that followed the African Influence Period from 1906-09, in which he retained warm colors of the Rose period and was inspired by Oceanic and African art. He famously founded Cubism with George Braque, then worked in the style from 1908-14. Analytical Cubism came first and was monochromatic, abstracted, overlapping geometric forms with views from multiple angles at once. An interesting event occurred in 1911, although innocent, he was accused in court of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre - a degrading and difficult episode for him. After that Synthetic Cubism was the main mode of operation from 1912-14, which was polychromatic, simplified, abstracted, and inspired by collage. He took his first trip to Italy in 1917 and, inspired by the naturalism in the art there, moved into a Neoclassical style from 1917-25, although these pieces are not as realistic as his early work. Surrealism followed from 1925-32, with dreamy depictions of disorganized figures in clashing colors, with skewed perspective and contrast between geometric and organic forms. After his Surrealist Period, the next three decades were largely eclectic, and he incorporated different elements from his past styles as he felt inspired to. Picasso mastered these styles and made major contributions in each of these movements, greatly influencing the further movements that would follow. He was constantly trying to improve upon himself artistically and had the ability to paint in any style that was popular at the time.

The art world celebrates Picasso for his artistic impact, but he was a celebrity figure in general, famous while actively participating in the cultural realm of life as well. He had a more unconventional lifestyle for the time and seemed to take liberties as he chose - very openly voicing his opinions and using his art politically, as well as having several different passionate, romantic relationships and four children with three different women. While some have suggested that the artist simply had machismo, a trait common to his culture and his era, he has been commonly characterized as a narcissistic womanizer and misogynist. In her memoir, his granddaughter Marina Picasso described her grandfather’s treatment of women, saying, "He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them." He was superstitious in multiple ways, for example, he believed that locks of hair if used in the wrong hands could bring harm to the original bearer and had a very difficult time finding trustworthy people to cut his hair. He played several roles in film, where he always portrayed himself. He was an international celebrity, often receiving as much interest in his personal life as in his art.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 91, while entertaining friends for dinner with his wife. The year before, he had been the first living artist to receive a special honor exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris in celebration of his 90 years. He was buried in the grounds of his château in Vauvenargues in the south of France. Small groups of visitors can view his final resting place, where he has lain since his death in 1973. At the time of Picasso's death, many of his own paintings were in his possession as he'd kept much that he hadn’t needed to sell. He also had an extensive collection of the work of other famous artists, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. His estate tax to the French state was paid in the form of his collection, and these works now form the core of the immense collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso dedicated the Museo Picasso Málaga to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona, Spain, has one of the most complete permanent collections of his works with 4,251 works by the painter.

During his 78 years producing artwork, Picasso was exceptionally prolific. He created about 147,800 pieces including 13,500 paintings, 100,000 engravings and prints, 300 sculptural & ceramic works, and 34,000 illustrations. More of his paintings have been stolen than any other artist's, with the Art Loss Register reporting 750 of his pieces stolen or missing in 2019, and he has sold more pieces, and more works with higher values than any other artist of his time. Several paintings by Picasso are among the most expensive paintings in the world. Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O) sold for $179.4 million, the world record at the time, in 2015. Marc Blondeau, a Geneva dealer and former head of Sotheby’s France, said in 2016, "If Picasso were alive today, he would be one of the ten wealthiest men in the world." Some notable achievements include receiving an honorable mention from the Madrid Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1897, a gold medal from the Malaga Provincial Exhibition in 1897, the Carnegie Prize in 1930, being designated honorary curator of the Prado Museum in Madrid in 1936, receiving the Silver Medal of French Gratitude from France in 1948, the Order of Polish Renascence Commander's Cross from Poland in 1948, the Pennell Memorial Medal from Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 1949 and the Lenin Peace Prize from Soviet Union in 1950 and 1962. With masterpieces that millions of people around the world have seen, Pablo Picasso introduced many new approaches to art that helped to shape modern art and still inspire artists today, in turn contributing to the shaping of culture, society, philosophy, and the world as we know it.