| Also known as: | Pablo Ruiz y Picasso |
|---|---|
| Nationality: | Spanish |
| Born: | 1881 – Malaga, Spain |
| Died: | 1973 – France |
Picasso was educated at St Raphael’s school in La Coruna and the School of Fine Arts and continued with his studies at the Instituto da Guarda. When the family moved to Barcelona, Picasso studied at the Llotja and from 1897 at the Madrid Academy. Although Picasso’s father taught him to draw and paint and gave him money to continue his studies in Paris, for some reason Picasso turned against him, dropping his father’s surname and retaining his mother’s.
From 1901-4, Picasso painted in blue tones to depict poverty and suffering (his "blue period"), then in 1904 he went to Paris, settling in Montmartre, and began painting in a less austere style (his "rose period"). From 1907, he began to work on the simplification of form and shocked people with his distortion of the human form in ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’. From then on, Picasso developed the Cubist movement, together with Georges Braque (1882-1963). Images of violence and anguish increasingly appeared in his work from 1928, culminating in his masterpiece ‘Guernica’ (1937). The painting expressed his horror of fascist brutality in one incident in the Spanish Civil War. During the Second World War Picasso stayed in France although he had taken a public stance against fascism and was distrusted because of his communist friends so was forbidden to exhibit his work. After the Liberation, he joined the Communist Party and never returned to Spain. He continued to produce work, until his death in 1973.