Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain. Trained in drawing and painting from an early age, he quickly demonstrated a technical mastery nurtured by the academic education he had received in Barcelona and then Madrid. His move to Paris in the early 1900s was an essential step. There he discovered the intensity of the modern artistic milieu, the formal research of the avant-gardes and a cultural scene in full transformation.
In the years leading up to 1910, Picasso went through what is traditionally known as the blue period, then the pink period, these were distinct phases in which colours, themes and atmospheres responded to each other. These years bear witness to an already personal orientation in representation, between melancholic sensitivity, observation of reality and initial formal experimentation.
From 1907, in the mid-19th century, Picasso began to radically question the classical models of figuration. Research into the decomposition of volumes, the interlocking of planes and a new conception of space led to the emergence of the cubism, this is a fundamental movement that he is developing with other artists. This approach breaks with traditional perspective and proposes a new plastic language, in which the object is represented simultaneously from several points of view.
Picasso's work was then characterised by a succession of periods, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in opposition, but always linked to a desire to explore new avenues. He tackled sculpture, ceramics, engraving and the construction of objects, demonstrating an ability to reinvent techniques as much as forms. Throughout his career, he has paid constant attention to drawing, which he sees as a daily exercise and the foundation of his creative work.
His twentieth-century career intersected with historical events to which he reacted through his images. Having settled permanently in France, he pursued an intense and continuous artistic activity, punctuated by periods of work in Parisian studios or in the South of France. He also creates monumental ensembles, portraits, variations on Old Masters and series in which he freely reinterprets works from the past. The diversity of his practices makes for an exceptional body of work, both in terms of scope and underlying coherence.
Picasso's late work reveals a constant energy, a taste for transformed repetition and experimentation with materials. Until his death in 1973, he was a prolific painter, sculptor and printmaker. The body of work he left behind is one of the most complete and influential in modern art. Picasso remains a major reference today, whose innovations profoundly altered the way we think about images, volume and artistic creation in the twentieth century.
