“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.”