Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor, born in Málaga on October 25, 1881, who died at Mougins, in the south of France, on April 8, 1973.
With the French painter Georges Braque he created Cubism, he painted Guernica, and over his lifetime he made some fifty thousand works. He became one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, and the way he treated the women in his life is now part of his name.
His life was long and, for the people closest to him, often brutal. He worked until the end, at ninety-one, and left behind a vast fortune with no will, a family barred from his funeral and two women who would later take their own lives.
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Málaga, where Picasso was born, is a port on the southern coast of Spain. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, painted and taught drawing, and his mother came from the Picasso family. In Spain the father's surname comes first and the mother's second, so the baby was baptized with a long list of names ending in Ruiz y Picasso, Spanish for Ruiz and Picasso.
As a young man he dropped Ruiz and signed with Picasso alone. It was the rarer of the two names, and it stood out. Within a few years that single word was one of the most recognized signatures in art.
His first lessons came in La Coruña, a port in the far northwest of Spain, where his father had taken a teaching post at the school of fine arts. In 1892, at ten, the boy began classes there.
The family moved to Barcelona in 1895, the year his younger sister Conchita died, and he entered the La Lonja school of fine arts. Two years later the royal San Fernando academy in Madrid admitted him.
A family legend says that his father, seeing what the boy could do, handed over his own palette and brushes and never painted seriously again. Nobody can document the scene. What the records do show is a teenager who drew like a master in the academic manner.
Nothing in that training explains what came next. Within a few years, nearly everything he painted would turn a cold blue.
A dead friend and a color
The answer begins in 1899, back in Barcelona, at the Quatre Gats, a café modeled on the Chat Noir cabaret in Paris, where the city's young artists met. There Picasso became close to Carlos Casagemas, a young painter, and the way that friendship ended would turn his work blue.
What You'll Discover
Why his paintings turned blue.
Who he was roped to.
Why police questioned him in 1911.
Where Guernica waited for Spain.
What happened to the women.
What his family fought over after 1973.