Picasso first showed signs of artistic talent at an early age. His first drawings which survive today were done when he was nine. By his early teens, it was clear that he was exceptionally gifted in the art of painting. In 1895, he and his family moved to Barcelona. From 1896 to 1897 he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. His large academic canvas painting, 'Science and Charity' , depicting a doctor, a nun, and a child at a sick woman's bedside, won a gold medal when it was exhibited in Málaga at an art exhibition. He then spent a few months at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, but by this time—aged 16, he already had his own studio in Barcelona and was experimenting with a variety of painting styles.

In 1909 Picasso moved out of the Bateau-Lavoir and into an apartment with a maid. By this time he had attracted influential patrons (friends), such as the American writer Gertrude Stein, whose portrait he painted, and had gained the support of the art dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, whom he met in 1907. Kahnweiler introduced Picasso to Georges Braque, another young artist whose work he handled.

After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Picasso continued to work in Paris. In 1917 he visited Rome with the writer Jean Cocteau and met the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, whose company was preparing for a production of ‘Parade’ (the storyline of which was by Cocteau and the music by Erik Satie). Picasso designed the costumes and drop curtain. One of Diaghilev’s dancers, Olga Koklova, became Picasso’s first wife. In a realist style, Picasso painted several portraits of her around 1917, of their son (for example, Paulo as Harlequin; 1924, Musée Picasso, Paris), and of numerous friends. The couple moved into a large apartment in Paris and Picasso became part of the fashionable world, losing touch with his bohemian (wild) youth.

In the immediate post-war period, Picasso painted for a time in a style that has been called "classical" and that marked a reaction against the experimental fervour (passion) of the pre-war years. Several of Picasso’s most imposing works of this time feature powerful figures that have something of the solidity and grandeur (majesty, nobility) of ancient sculptures, for example ‘Three Women’. Others, such as ‘The Pipes of Pan’ were inspired by mythology.

This serenity (tranquillity) was short-lived though. In the mid-1920s Picasso became interested in Surrealism and then started painting violently expressive pictures that reflected his despair at his increasingly unhappy marriage. ‘The Three Dancers’ is a key work in this unhappy phase (part) of his career.

Several Cubist paintings of the early 1930s, stressing harmonious, curvilinear (consisting of curved lines) and expressing an underlying erotic character, reflect Picasso’s pleasure with his newest love, Marie Thérèse Walter, who gave birth to their daughter Maïa in 1935. Marie Thérèse, frequently (often) portrayed sleeping, was also the model for the famous ‘Girl Before a Mirror’. In 1935 Picasso made the etching ‘Minotauromachy’, a major work combining his minotaur and bullfight themes; in it the disembowelled horse, as well as the bull, prefigure the imagery of ‘Guernica’, a painting often called the most important single work of the 20th century.

Picasso was moved (inclined) to paint ‘Guernica’ shortly after German planes, acting in support of General Franco, bombarded the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Completed in less than two months, Guernica was hung in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition of 1937. The painting doesn’t portray the event; however, Picasso expressed his outrage by using disturbed imagery. Such as; a bull, a dying horse, a fallen warrior, a mother and dead child, a woman trapped in a burning building, another rushing into the scene, and a figure leaning from a window and holding out a lamp. Despite the complexity of its symbolism, and the impossibility of definitive interpretation (ie. It was impossible to make sense of at first site), Guernica makes an overwhelming impact in its portrayal of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso remained defiantly in Paris during the German occupation of the city in World War II, but after the war he lived mainly in the South of France, in Vallauris from 1948 and at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, a villa in Mougins, from 1961 until his death. He continued to be extremely productive until the end of his long life, but it is generally agreed that his post-war output is of lesser importance and interest than his earlier work (is less important and interesting). He died on April 10, 1973, aged 91.

Guernica (Pablo Ruiz Picasso)

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Picasso painted ‘Guernica’ after German planes bombed the Basque town called ‘Guernica, hence the name. Although this particular painting does NOT show what happens, it does depict the events during the bombing. Some of those shown are the man in the window of the house on fire (far left), and the woman screaming in pain (far right). These images show how horrific the events of that day were for the people of the town.